I don't know why big companies just can't do what they say they're going to do. I just bought an iPhone 6 Plus from AT&T, and they promised a $200 buyback for the iPhone 4 if the purchase was made by Sept. 30. After they sent me the phone, they sent me a follow-up e-mail with a code for the iPhone 4, but the buyback value was only $100 with that code. So I had to call customer service, and they told me I had to go to the nearest AT&T store to get it straightened out. The nearest store is 30 miles from my house. Thankfully it's between my work & home IF I take an alternate, longer route. The guy at the store knew exactly what I was talking about when I got there and they were able to get me squared away without too much problem. I'm guessing they wanted to see how many people would just shrug and take a $100 hit.

I'll weigh in on two different thoughts.

First thought: iPads vs. Chromebooks vs. Microsoft. At a recent technology director's conference, there's nothing but moaning & groaning about managing iPads. It's four year's running now, and Apple just does not get Enterprise management. No central management of Apple IDs, App management is terrible (Apple Configurator is lousy, buggy, and doesn't push apps, and 3rd party management tools keep breaking w/ every new version of iOS), the list keeps going on. And there's nothing but good things being said about Chromebooks. Affordable, simple, easy enterprise management, no more need for file servers...the only criticism is that they eat bandwidth. And Microsoft? Yesterday's news.

Second thought: regarding the criticisms about 1-1 and flooding schools with digital devices. I in much part agree that there's not a direct -need- for student digital devices. But digital devices do enhance learning by providing greater opportunities to communicate, manage classroom content digitally and make it accessible outside school, create video lessons and "flip" the classroom, and provide formative assessments (i.e. frequent quizzing that is used to guide instruction & provide mnemonic enhancement) that have been proven to be a very effective learning tool. But these are all -instructional- changes that need to start and continue with the teacher. It's foolish for a district to follow a blind "build-it-and-they-will-come" strategy of flooding a school with digital devices and utterly failing at supporting instructional changes. If districts aren't willing to provide both continual funding for a 1-1 program as well as instructional support to teachers, then they're wasting their money. But we all need to recognize that schools are responsible for teaching students how to effectively use the internet in the pursuit of knowledge. The internet is the new information paradigm of our society, making it a necessary part of the curriculum.

The whole point of the course is to try & figure out how data structures and algorithms are implemented. It's as much about problem solving as it is coding. Sure, you could always just use std::vector in your C++ programs for vectors, but do you really understand how they work? What about binary trees and linked lists? That's the type of stuff they're teaching in these classes. Copying code & modifying it for your own purposes is fine for production, but if these students don't understand how the underlying code works, then their chances of successfully using it greatly diminishes.

I see it all the time in my courses. I emphasize to the students that they should only use methods currently covered, so they get a 0 if they go out on stackoverflow and find solutions that give them shortcuts. They fail to use critical thinking skills and gain a deep understanding of how programming works. Most of the time, their ham-fisted copy/paste code doesn't even do what the assignment requires.

1. First, it's a series, not a movie.
2. Second, HBO usually does a great job with these types of series. Game of Thrones doesn't have every battle that's in the books, but they often-times refer to the battles and the aftermath in dialog. No reason to think this would be any different.

HBO is going to have a standalone service in the near future.

Why did they spend money on the campaigns of candidates who were already quite likely to win? That seems like a suboptimal way to spend the funds at their disposal. Spend it exclusively on races where it might make a difference.

Matter of degree, but yeah.

I will if you will. Deal?

Yes, it's true. We are currently producing more oil than Saudi Arabia! But we are far from being independent.

Short of state ownership of the oil production industry and/or draconian restrictions on exports and imports the U.S. won't ever be "independent" in the sense that it is unaffected by the global price of petroleum. And that price is only influenced to a small degree by U.S. production.

1. Set standards on gasoline, there are way too many formulas that vary state to state 2. Determine how many refineries we need (haven't built any new refineries for 30+ years). 3. Determine the best locations for the refineries (logistics of incoming raw crude and outgoing fuels)

These sound like tasks best suited to a China-style command economy. You strike me as the sort of person who would find that abhorrent.

You're charging you car using energy from coal so you ain't doing any favors using a toy battery car.

Unless you live in Washington state, where roughly 6.5% of electricity comes from coal. Or Oregon, where that figure is roughly the same. Etc.

...whether you notice changes in the price of gasoline without being notified by the media. If you do then you satisfy a fairly broad definition of "middle class".

If you're too poor to own a car and, hence, don't care about gas prices, then you're not middle class. If you're someone to whom a $1/gal delta in the price of gas is more-or-less meaningless then you're not middle class. If you're someone who lives in a dense, urban environment and doesn't own a car by choice then you're probably also not "middle class".

Except when Facebook blocks your video because of alleged "copyright issues". My wife shot a video of a spider building a web on her iPod Touch, edited it in iMovie with one of their templates, and then Facebook continuously blocked her saying she was violating copyright. It was a real shame, because it was a very cool video that a lot of friends and family probably would have enjoyed.

Is undead the same as alive?

Or, you could always do this.

Burner phones? Hard to tap a moving target, and there wouldn't be any way to get the content of the phone call, unless the telecos are preserving all phone audio. Best case, they'd have metadata.