Given the shortage of manpower, it would be insane to try to run the whole thing MSWindows.

There is no reason in the world to go monoculture in schools. If IT wants to play minesweeper all day, get rid of them and go hire people who know what they are doing.

By, not Mac- or Linux-based, do you mean that what is on the Mac or on Linux also tends to be available on MSWindows?

Because there are definitely HS-level science programs out there for both Mac and *nix.

Much of the good stuff for Mac or *nix is easy to miss. The old graphing calculator on the Classic Mac, for instance, that finally was reborn as "Grapher" in Mac OS 10.4 (and I don't have a more recent Mac OS, so I don't know if Apple has kept it in their current product). There are several simular, but different programs, not quite as elegant, not quite as powerful from the simple UI programs for *nix that allow you to graph equations in two and three dimensions. But the stuff I see the math teachers in the jhs where I teach use on their MSWindXXX machines, well, the *nix stuff beats it all hollow.

Personally, if they are trying to get rid of Macs to save money on IT support, well, somebody is trying to sell them a bill of goods.

Going to one system solves nothing. In fact, we can assume that IT wants the answer to be Microsoft, simply because they are asking the question.

All their research will be cherry-picked, in three years IT will have quadrupled in size and students will have less options and less real learning experiences, and IT will declare success when the last non-Microsoft machine is shipped out to the recycling center.

Crowded highway, guy. Even in the hypothetical, you have to think further back, and to the left and right.

If the tailgater's engine just stalls and the tailgater knows how to safely get to the side of the road, fine.

I suppose you're going to blame the people behind the tailgater for not following at a safe distance? Are you always far enough back to safely stop if the car ahead of you suddenly rolls or spins out?

But what about the oncoming traffic? What about beyond the sides of the road?

If his brake system or steering has electronics (pneumatics?) go wonky, or if even if he doesn't know how to get over safely without power, maybe he strays into oncoming traffic the opposite direction. Maybe he spins or rolls. Maybe he shoots off the road into the pedestrian zone. What if the road is elevated over a residential district?

If you're going to think about disabling the tailgater, you've got to think a bit further -- machines that can take over the entire control of the car. And then think that about the implications of that.

By the way, this may seem to be out of the blue, but are you in favor of stricter laws about intellectual property, or stricter enforcement?

They have the same problem as Microsoft. They are great at buying engineers and solutions (and then screwing them up). They have a terrible time designing stuff on their own, or even cultivating the good parts of what they buy.

Just too big.

(And Apple is getting to be too big, too, I think.)

Or, if you find me on facebook, you know one of my other handles.

And, of course, the friends list I gave that handle might not reflect any real person. (Or even list any real people.)

Market share to us is just money.

Market share to Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, et. al. is control.

(And your comment about listening to said show makes me think of a very underhanded attempt at viral marketing.)

So which distro?

"... So try Ubuntu! Or Cent! Or, if you're really adventurous, Fedora!"

It has been a long time (and a lot of ads with "contains forward looking statements" and other idiot disclaimers) since advertising has been expect to have anything to do with reality.

I'm not against taking the moral stance when everyone else is "doing it", but I'm not going to fault another guy for trying to fight fire with fire.

Double bind.

Hard to fault someone for trying to fight fire with fire.

(Skillfully used, backfires can make buffer zones, but, ....)

Anyway, the audience here expects the computer to do strange things at times. If it doesn't, it becomes invisible. That's part of the reason Microsoft got such a big mindshare.

Mod parent informative!

I hate for you to get this news via the internet, too, but your making this kind of a connection seems to indicate, erm, at least an excessive pre-occupation.

I mean, seriously, reverse the arrows in the relationship graph: You have a male, likely a young boy, who has a friend who is a six year old girl, and this male is asking the six year old girl's father, whom we have no reason to assume is in either the medical or psychiatric profession, to make what go away?

(Mod me down. Even this reply shouldn't be visible above zero.)

I don't remember. India comes to mind, but not very clear. Just remember reading in some thread on Monsanto a couple of years back that some country had a lot of farmers ruining their farmland switching from the native crops to the Monsanto sponsored, backed-by-western-"science" soy and corn.

My wife tells me that American grown corn (and, to some extent, peanuts) have a high bar to entry in the Japanese market due to fungus problems derived in part from the climate, but seriously aggravated by the mass farming techniques.

I'll acknowledge that there are a lot people in America who are convinced that the import barriers are just excuses for protecting the local economy, but we don't really have much of local production for the imported corn and peanuts to compete with. So you'd have to argue that their protecting the rice farmers, and that just doesn't hold water for a lot of reasons.

As far as the original issue, I am acquainted with a person who was diagnosed with terminal, as in she was given less than a week to live, cancer, but was brought back with some emergency surgery and a "natural," "organic" food. And maybe some attention and good-old-fashioned TLC. But the organic food was all she could eat, and it was all she could do to eat it.

She couldn't eat the other stuff and keep it down. She claimed it was the processed or petroleum-based fertilizers, the insecticides, the processing.

To you, yeah, anecdote. To me, well, the guy who was taking care of her did experiment a bit, and it was not just a matter of what she thought she was eating.

I saw that happen, I can't argue with it.

You didn't, you can, but I'm telling you, you should not be so sure.

I was going for a funny, but I guess the joke is old.

Better virus scan God, too.

He seems to think we should, really.