no seriously....we've heard it all before

surely it's because they're trolling the trolls of the trolls

you're doing it wrong....

All of my goto shortcuts that I use on a daily basis work just fine. That includes some of the ones introduced in Windows 8 to access charms. I edited a registry key to disable the mouse-in/mouse-out actions for left, right and bottom screen. However I use win+i to open the control panel charm to shutdown the computer when I need to. You may just need a primer for windows 8 shortcuts

A tablet per child sounds like a ridiculous way to spend money, but a valid point brought up in a previous article suggests that perhaps a donation is/was made that cannot be spent on any other budgetary concerns. So....kids get tablets.

Perhaps this can be a good thing though. If we can get a gadget in to every child's hand maybe we can force the hand of major textbook publishers and get them to put out electronic copies of their books that are actually usable. I dont mean "Here is the foreword for the book get a dead tree copy to read the rest" or webpages for chapter objectives that refer back to a 5lbs hard cover book for the rest of the work.

gimme a roomba, a broom stick and a pivoting webcam.

Oh, i know. I paid outright for my GS3 last year and through some trade-in magic I got a HTC One a few months back all to keep my plan as cheap as possible

You often get the coverage and reach of the leased carrier for maybe half the cost. A typical "all you can eat" from a MVNO will cost $50-60 compared to a $80-100+ bill from the leased counterpart. The caveat here is that you're going to pay closer to retail for your handset

Contract carriers are beginning to do some interesting things to their plan structure and handset pricing like abolishing contracts and handset "lock in" but they still want you to pay an arm and a leg for such services. T-Mobile has done the best as far as price goes....they'll lower your recurring monthly charge to $50, but then you have to tack on a $20-30 fee for a handset that youre basically financing

the MSiah cometh..... no, but seriously im sure each of these ideas(as awesome as they may sound) are impossible to execute. A.) There's so much red tape that even our most awesome cutting implements wouldnt get through it. B.) They are simply impractical from a developer standpoint. It's easy to throw out idea after idea, but it means nothing until you put it in motion.

The "wifi first" aspect of the service is what makes it so cheap. The more minutes you use over wifi the less time republic has to lease from it's provider. That looks great on paper.....really great! But then you have to look at the state of wifi these days, and more specifically secured wifi. You can only piggyback your calls from an open wifi connection or one you have a password/login to use. More and more homes and small businesses are using passphrases to secure their network. Even if that password is "password" it does you no good when you drive by and the network declines you access and passes your call to the cell network.

Of course you're going to be shamed when you showcase a fatal flaw in a pacemaker to a bunch of people at a convention. It may not be the easiest thing to do, but the most responsible thing to do is to go to the company or governing body and explain things

I dont think Joe User is ready for desktop linux quite yet. The posts I have read here all talk about using the OS as it it, but you forget one thing....third-party hardware and software. Users wont be ready to use linux flavors on the desktop until vendors are ready to support them.

Case in point, I recently worked a call center job for an ISP that served rural America. The service worked for "every operating system and every browser." However, we supported Windows XP onward and Mac OSX(limited). As far as browsers we supported IE 7+, FF 3.x+ and Safari(limited). If you could connect your modem and run it smoothly using your linux box be our guest, but dont come to us with your problems. It is a process-based job which means there are step by step solutions for agents to walk users through with pretty screenshots. Your screen doesn't match? You can't follow the process with me over the phone? Powercycle your equipment and tell me if that solves your issue. If not i'll note your account and move on. Bye.

The company i worked for isn't the only one out there that's process-based as im sure most if not all level 1 helpdesk positions are. I wasn't scripted, but there are only so many words you can use to tell a customer to do what they need to do.

Until a company can step up and develop a locked down no config necessary(by which i mean changing/creating values in a text file or terminal) that looks and acts uniformly on any hardware vendors and dumb users wont touch it.

I suspect that's the answer you were looking for, but i'm afraid that's not an answer. Something like this would probably require hardware switches to be truly effective. It's much simpler to take out your battery as a few others have already stated. and dont forget to discharge the device by holding in the power key for a good 10-15 seconds.

It's been said that as we grow older we lose our sense of wonder about the world. That's certainly true of the slashdot crowd. Here we have an article talking about the technology behind creating an animated movie, and I see a bunch of comments bashing the script and progression of the movie. Face it folks, this movie isnt for you. Dreamworks wasnt trying to make it for you, and as long as youre older than 14 Dreamworks wont try to cater to you with this genre ever again. Let the kids have their fun with fart jokes, bright colors and possibly some cartoon violence. Take them into the theatre, cuff them to the seat then go down the hall to enjoy your movie with mile deep character development and a plot that takes 1:30 to make sense of.

i'm sure that's a goal too, but that's not news for nerds now, is it?

c'mon.....this is slashdot not huffington post