I'm having trouble understanding your reply. The people who play games don't buy $300 video cards to run Photoshop. They buy them to run very demanding 3D applications. You can't run those applications on other platforms, so it isn't a matter of going out of one's way to avoid alternatives.

"High performance desktop" gamers are a pretty self-selected group now days. If you're sitting in front of a ATX case with a discreet video card, you've gone out your way to avoid every computing trend over the last 10 years. Which is fine, but its not exactly a growth market.

That's a pretty loaded statement. If you use a tool for a specific tasks, and forgo newer tools that come out in favour of revisions of the tool that you have been using because it remains the best tool for the job, then you haven't "gone out of your way to avoid every computing trend," rather, you've continued to use the best tool for the job. There are no devices more suitable for the kind of stuff these people do than desktop computers with discrete video cards.

Somehow this still costs more than what we pay T-Mobile for two phones with unlimited minutes and text, and 2GiB for each phone.

The U.S. is a third world country with respect to cellular providers.

I already covered this in my post. Why are you replying with this?

Use your own critical thinking skills and reading comprehension, and read the full sentence.

"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

The list of opposed curricula is disjointed, "critical thinking skills" is not capitalised, unlike the two other specified subjects, suggesting that the paragraph is talking about critical thinking skills in general, and not a specific methodology of the same name. Taking into consideration the rest of the document, which rails against anything other than loyalty to the Christian faith and and Christian morality, it doesn't take a whole lot of critical thinking to understand that what constitutes "purpose" in an environment expecting total loyalty and faith can be anything that might conceivably challenge religious notions, and nor does it take a scholar in logic to understand that verbiage more broad and vague than what is needed to address a stated desire is of no use to anyone aside from a party with hidden motivations.

Critical thinking requires an understanding of context.

Not at all. The paragraph says that they oppose "the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs," because they "are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning)." They oppose this because they feel that the programs "focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."

You're cutting out crucial parts of the sentence and ignoring the flow of proposition and justification to make it seem like they object to a subset of programs that specifically aim to achieve a certain objective, when in fact they object to the entire set of programs because they feel that they all aim to achieve a certain objective.

That's a crock of shit, to be honest, even if the question was hypothetical. No part of these export laws have anything to do with subjective judgement of character.

Wait, so soldiers are expected to uphold the law, but people outside of the armed forces aren't? Or are soldiers more credible and trustworthy than people who aren't in the military?

Obviously circumventing the system would result in severe punishment by the regulatory agencies.

None. If a site absolutely must be blocked, then blackhole its IP addresses and fail resolution on the ISP's DNS servers. Middleboxes that inspect layer 4 and above are never OK, and never part of a trustworthy ISP network unless explicitly requested by the end-user.

If this kind of bandwidth is necessary for the operation of the institution, then it doesn't really matter what the hardware upgrade costs are, because they're the costs of doing business. You can't operate without paying them. That being said, if you need 1Gbps/1,000 users by 2015, and it's purely for academical purposes, then you're likely dealing with a bunch of streaming video and audio, or large applications. That kind of traffic doesn't need content filtering, and any router you'd sensibly put in front of servers hosting that kind of content will be able to handle the traffic at trivial cost. Firewalling also shouldn't be a large cost-issue in an environment with relatively few, long-lived flows, even at those speeds.

Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?

In a larger metro area? Initial infrastructure costs would probably be in the tens of thousands, but network infrastructure isn't really an optional expense for larger educational institutions these days. Going with the 1Gbps per 1,000 users, about $10k USD for two devices to handle routing for a handful of 1Gbps uplinks with the necessary failover, roughly $1,000 per 1Gbps commitment, and about another $1k yearly for support contracts. At an institution with 10,000 students, that's $120k/year for the transport, plus $1k/year for support. Or about $6 per student per semester. Not exactly prohibitively expensive considering the "technology fees" charged these days, much less so considering the general cost of tuition.

At those prices, fuck caching.

Is that really the only plausible explanation that you can come up with?

Next up is a set of pinball schematics drawn by an arrogant teenager who refused to take showers. Yours for only two million dollars!