I don't think they need to be mandatory, but I think what *should* happen is we need to publicly shame these parents. Every time a kid dies of Whooping Cough, those parents need to be on the news the same as if they'd drowned their kid in a bathtub.

IT Departments are innately conservative. Doing something different can get you fired. It's the same thing that led to the "no one ever got fired for buying Windows" line in the '90s. Hell, IT Departments are just now beginning to get off of XP. A radical change like 8? It's not going to fly. Windows 8 needs to become "normal" to the IT Department before they'll allow it in. In fact, I bet it'll end up being a lot like Vista. IT will hold off until 9, when issues that crop up with Windows 8 have been ironed out.

As an owner, in my experience the nice thing about the battery dock is that you don't *have* to be near an outlet. All the internals of the tablet are in the tablet itself, so the keyboard/battery dock is just that. A keyboard with a big battery. So you can juice it up overnight and drop it into your bag when you leave the next morning. For someone like me, a field engineer, that's a godsend. I never know when I'll be near an outlet. Now, admittedly, I may be a special case. But it's definitely nice for someone who's on the move quite a bit.

The full size USB port is on the "lapdock." Once docked, it basically has a full keyboard (better than most netbooks I've used) and a full sized usb port. With a USB to Serial adapter, I use mine to connect to Cisco switches quite often.

OK. TWO people will have to pay $50 for 1GB of data, which they have to share!

You're right, that sounds so much better! A $150 ($130 plus tax and then all the little fake "fees" and "services" they apply to the bill afterward) for two smartphones with ONE WHOLE GIGABYTE TO SHARE!

Breaking News! The editors of Slashdot still haven't figured out how links should work. Often, the hyperlink text has nothing to do with the linked article, or is at best hard to figure out.

Link?

Considering that the Kindle Fire runs Android, are we supposed to forgive them for intrusive DRM because they abided by their legal requirements to us? Maybe we should also be happy that McDonald's food isn't full of arsenic or Mattel toys don't have lead paint. I mean, that's great and all, but they had to do it. It doesn't make up for the sorry state of the locked down Kindle.

Incidentally, this is coming from an Amazon Prime customer. I buy almost everything off of Amazon these days, with one exception: books. For that I have my Nook, which I use mainly because it reads PDFs too.

cucumbers, squash, peppers, eggplant, string beans, pea pods, corn, okra, right

OK, overall I agree with your post. Culinarily, a fruit is sweet and a vegetable savory. That's the big difference, and it's fine for something to be botanically a fruit and culinary a veggie. I just have a few issues with your list of "fruits." First, corn is iffy. There are botanical definitions that exclude it from being a fruit, as the fruit wall is virtually nonexistent. And peanuts? You've got to be kidding me. Yeah, sure, it's a fruiting plant, but you can't seriously tell me you eat the shell. It's an edible seed.

I mean, I get what you're saying, but the edible portion of those two plants are not botanically fruits.

If I were a jet-setter that wrote checks, that might be important to me. But (A) I'm not. My work, like 99% of other people, doesn't include much travel and (B) I can't remember the last time I wrote a check.

Says someone who has clearly never belonged to a credit union.

A and B were Alpha and Beta. Also, Donut was 1.6. There was no 2.0 official release, they went straight to 2.1 (Eclair).

Also, minor version bumps sometimes have no name. Honeycomb isn't just 3.0, it's more like 3.x (3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 are all "Honeycomb"). Now, that may just be Honeycomb, which is an oddball anyway since it doesn't run on phones and isn't open source. But it may also be that going forward, only major version numbers will have desert names. So Jellybean or whatever it ends up being called may be 5.0, with any incremental 4.x versions still being considered ICS. We'll see.

Unfortunately, speaking of pictures, it only has a 5 megapixel camera. I was ready to drop my Droid X for this phone until I saw that. The ability to take decent pictures is too important to me.

The usual version of that meme omits a step 2. The problem is, there is no missing Step 3 in your example, because Steps 1 and 2 successfully siphon money away from Android to WP7 marketing. Whether that will translate into actual market success remains iffy, but the fact is, they've got a nice little racket going there.

The law could have avoided all of this by only restricting communications that would not be outside of the realm of what constitutes normal communications between a school employee and a student. That way, a counselor creating a FB page regarding scholarships information or when recruiters will be at the high school would not be illegal.

I grew up before the days of Facebook, but I had a few teachers that I'd consider friends. Isn't a close relationship between teacher and student something to be celebrated? A friendship with a teacher can lead to great things. Let's not try to destroy that over "think of the children" nonsense.