Electricity is fine for many things but you will not see an electric airliners or long haul truck anytime soon. I also do not see the US electrifying all of it's railways anytime soon.

I agree that electrifying the railways isn't likely to happen, but it would still be a good idea. I'd go so far as to say it would be a better idea than running long-haul trucks off of natural-gas-derived synthetic diesel. Heck, I'd even rather see the trains running off the synthetic diesel, just because the fuel economy is so much better.

Arrrrr, matey, that be debit port and credit starboard! Get it right or I'll make ye walk the plank!

Mojang actually hired some of the Bukkit developers, so they own at least part of it.

No it doesn't. It means that any future code they contribute while employed might be under Mojang's copyright as a "work for hire," but it doesn't mean the developers' previous contributions magically become Mojang's unless there's a separate copyright assignment agreement.

I'm thinking Black Friday / Cyber Monday might be a good time to get a 4K monitor.

Hey, I know what you are thinking, there isn't any other options.. But that may not be exactly true. Where I live, even if you remove the two wire based options for ISPs, there are multiple wireless ISP's which cover my area.

Oh yes, that's true! I, for example, have a whopping three options at my house (near downtown Atlanta):

1. AT&T DSL (which doesn't work; my phone lines are too old)
2. Clear Wi-Max (which doesn't work; my house is halfway between two towers
3. Comcast cable (which is fast and reliable, but evil and has terrible customer service)

I'm using Comcast, under protest, as my last resort.

You may be right! Maybe it was the TI-92 that wasn't allowed (because of the QWERTY keyboard), and the TI-86 was the next model down at the time.

Paying to renew the domain name, as well as paying for a hosting service to handle your email isn't [free].

Yeah, it makes me sad that gmail isn't free for custom domains (I think it used to be, but I missed out on it).

This is why if you're a freelancer, you should have your own domain.

I'm absolutely certain there was something the TI-89 was not allowed to be used for, because I bought a TI-86 when entering high school and then a TI-89 when entering college for exactly that reason. If a TI-89 were allowed for everything in high school, then I would never have bought the TI-86. Admittedly, it might have been due to a state or local requirement, but nevertheless some requirement existed.

I just checked out Tinfoil. It's still a way to access Facebook, therefore it still fails.

I think you must have missed my point: using Facebook at all is irresponsible.

For college and above there is plenty of improvements to make. The 3D-graph plotting functions that the graphing calculators have are just lacking. Just enter any 2-variable formula into the google calculator, sin(x)/sqrt(x^2+y^2) for example.

This is what TI-89s are for. (My TI-86 might have done 3d graphs too; I don't remember.)

Either way, an 86 or 89 should be cheap too, these days! (Mine are sitting in a storage bin in my office, replaced by the "Graph 89 Free" Android app.)

Because the goal isn't how to teach kids how to pass a test, it is how to solve problems.

Letting the students write the expression instead of the result would accomplish that better, though -- at least on higher-grade exams, where it's assumed that the student has already learned how to do the computation. (Lower-grade exams designed to test the computation itself shouldn't allow calculators at all.)

So unless the competitor could copy the look, functionality, and layout of a TI-84 exactly (and I'm sure that would get them sued)

I wonder if the TI-84 is enough of a standard that an argument could be made that copying is necessary for the sake of interoperability?

I disagree that they are not outdated. Are you seriously going to argue that they couldn't have made any improvements to the interface, power, screen quality, cost, functionality, or performance in the last 20 years? They don't necessarily have to add more functions but there are plenty of improvements that could be made.

Interface and functionality? No, they couldn't improve that. Even if something else is theoretically "better" (like RPN), there's too much inertia behind the status quo. Screen quality? Maybe: color and/or LEDs would be inappropriate, but e-ink might be acceptable if it had the same resolution and refresh rate as the LCD it replaced (ideally, it should also support or emulate the "grayscale mode" accomplished by some TI-8X software by turning the pixels on and off really fast). Cost and performance? Yes, those could be improved -- I said as much in my post! But they don't count as making it outdated IMO.

The TI-8x calculators are not outdated; they do exactly what they need to do -- no more, no less. This is an important fact! If they did much more they wouldn't be allowed to be used; if they did much less they wouldn't be useful.

However, that's not an excuse for them continuing to cost $100+. There should have been an opportunity for some competitor (e.g. Casio or HP) to use 2014 technology to deliver the same capabilities with less manufacturing complexity and thus a cheaper price. Apparently, Casio is trying this, but they're not being aggressive enough: if Casio beat teachers and parents over the head with how cheap calculators should be by selling theirs for $25 or so, then IMO they'd be more successful.

IMO, a worthy "update" to a TI graphing calculator would not be more RAM or a faster CPU, it would be power envelope improvements so it could run on solar (like a 4-function calculator can) and a slimmer, lighter body. (Of course, these days I just use a TI-89 emulator on my Android cellphone instead, so I'm not the target market...)

Incidentally, the other thing I don't understand about this is why anybody picks a TI-84 when they could have a TI-86. TI-89s are prohibited for standardized tests (because they have a Computer Algebra System), but TI-86s aren't and are better than TI-84s in every other way as far as I can tell...