I can't speak for DesCorp, but I'll try anyway :)

The funding problem is centered around the best way to get more funding, not whether the amount of funding is sufficient, or if the government has allocated enough funding to the education sector as a whole.

Going back to your Utah example, Utah would never be _given_ more money, because politics don't work that way. The phenomenon that leads to higher budget schools being lower quality than low budget is the method for receiving more funds; success in this case is often proving to the right bureaucracy that you don't have enough funding by performing poorly. Where funds are distributed like this we see the same problems that the financial sector has: failure to the people isn't failure for the organization, it's an opportunity.

Fixed that for you :)

netbooks benefit from gpus in the video decoding aspects. Especially with google implementing h.264 codecs for some of their youtube videos there's a big performance advantage to having a gpu instead of an additional cpu core.

I have a 4 disk raid5 array that pushes ~260MB/s and can say that the added disk i/o makes a huge difference when using multiple virtual machines. Even using just a single machine having the added disk throughput is a huge boost, I've run server2008r2 inside a vm with only 128mb ram addressed; thanks to the extra fast disk (and thus swap) the system is still responsive.

While it may be simpler to just use dedicated disks instead of RAID for each virtual machine, you can be sure that in the age of virtualization there's more need for multiple and high speed disks than ever.

While it's clear that publishing something like this could raise some flags I have to disagree. If he wants to keep the system as-is then documenting the received condition should serve to protect him.

Lack of a COA is not lack of proper licensing. There's nothing that requires Microsoft to provide a COA with a promotional item, and should there be a case brought against the new owner it's still the copyright holder's responsibility to prove the lack of license and the presence of use.

The anti-Microsoft base here has always been strong. I wonder, what pushes somebody to accept a search engine that promotes virus-bearing browser toolbars?

Ask.com was actually decent back when they were ask jeeves, since then it's just been a race for how horrible and stupid they can become.

Actually no key is required for use of OEM installations. With a certificate and matching bios Microsoft allows the bypass of authenticity all together. Windows Vista/7 pirate releases have been more standard OEM releases with bios masking than anything else. I'd hope that Microsoft is smart enough to allow some leniency on MSDN keys, they're intended to be used for testing purposes across multiple machines, and they're used by microsoft professionals. Still the draconian hardware restrictions really get in the way of VM use should you have to change a virtual network or display adapter.