I've tried reading the Koran. So far, I've parsed the first eight Sura.

Even being a Christian and having significant historical knowledge of the Bible and its history, the Koran is still very, very difficult to understand for a westerner not familiar with the history of the Koran. There are significant direct references to Biblical, Arab, and Islamist events that are frequently made and referenced throughout its passages. Even more difficult are the indirect references. Many messages and commands require background knowledge in order to construct what is being said. If you want to study the Koran, you are best off taking a university course on it, or at least going to some community and/or Islamist center where the instructor knows and understands the material.

I found the Old Testament far more entertaining. Granted, all the lineages were a bit dry, and detailed blueprints of the Arc of the Covenant just don't help me day-to-day, ya know, but heck, collecting foreskins for a king to wed his daughter, that stuff's just good as gold!

Tears of My Soul, by Kim Hyun Hee

If anyone would like to receive the best insight currently possible on the North Korean regime and how perverted their hold is on their citizens, then this is the book to read. But that's the icing on the cake. Anyone who seeks wisdom on suffering, listen to the words of a woman who blew up an airplane carrying 115 passengers and has to live with that fact for the rest of her life. She knows better than anyone what suffering truly is.

Try one man, 1200+ users, 500+ machines, and 8 servers. Public school. Less salary than you can shake a stick at. But I'm passionate about K-12 public education, and I love helping kids. Don't like it? Tell your superintendent why, then walk away.

I think both you and I know that a school environment is not a business environment. A business generally has income dependent on productivity. A school has generally a fixed income dependent on student enrollment. If the submitter can increase productivity by hiring another employee, it's worth money to the company. If a school can increase productivity by hiring another employee, it doesn't mean jack squat.

In terms of your ratios, I have little sympathy. And take your rants out someplace else. It's not productive to the conversation.

ROI: Return on Investment

I had the displeasure of working inside Walmart stores for four years. (Thankfully, not for them, just in them.) They printed on every one of their distribution packaging boxes at the time, "Collapsing this box and sending it back saves the company $0.11.) Now there's ROI as simple and as plain-as-day.

How much time is lost due to computer or program downtime? How much time is lost due to broken code? How inefficient is having programmers share in tech support duties? How much money is this costing the company? Tell the company what they save by hiring another employee, and they'll make it happen.

After their success with Olestra, I'm sure they have eager investors on speed-dial with money to burn on the next artificial-vice-substitute.

Two words: Government shutdown.

And while that -is- the answer, there's a deeper meaning here. NSA spying is yesterday's news. People only care about today's news, and they only care about it for as long as it remains news. As soon as the shutdown is yesterday's news, we'll get angry about something else. Our nation's vane hubris keeps our minds tied to the present, leading our general populace to share little concern for the past.

What the NSA is doing is terrible, but the raping of our nation's economy by private financial interests is still far worse. Even more atrocious was starting a war with a foreign nation on false pretenses. But that's all behind us now. Let's get out there and raise our Don't Tread on Me flags against ObamaCare; we live in a democracy, and dammit, if we don't raise up our voice for what's wrong, we're not doing our patriotic duty.

(And if you don't understand the irony of that last sentence, then please don't leave a comment.)

Now that the government is shut down, does that mean the domestic spying program is also?

And while I'm at it, would it be unpatriotic of me to suggest that the government shutdown may be a tactful diversion from the domestic spying program? Snowden's Sunday leak was largely ignored Sunday by the major news networks in favor of the impeding shutdown.

It's worth mentioning that House and Senate representatives and President ... will get paid through the shut down.

Let's introduce a constitutional amendment that clearly specifies in the event of the failure of the House to pass a budget to fund the federal government that salaries for all of its members, as well as members of the Senate, go unpaid.

They got themselves into this mess, because they personally have no skin in the game. If they each had something to lose, then they wouldn't gamble away what many others can't afford to lose.

Besides, one of my most hated acts in politics are these last-minute dealings. Say that, after months of negotiations, leaders of both parties reach a compromise in a meeting at 8:00 PM, then the House & Senate pass the bill prior to midnight. Does anyone ever wonder how the actual budget legislation gets published so quickly? Or who actually writes the bill? Or whether anyone has time to read what's in it before voting on it? One of the many crimes in government today is how so much legislation is passed by legislators who've never read it but only base their vote by what they think is in it.

My wife came back recently from a vacation to her home country. Green-card permanent resident alien. Detained at customs in the airport for three hours. She sat by herself in a room with no knowledge of why she was being detained. After three hours, an officer came into her room and said, "You're clear to go." She asked multiple times to multiple personnel why she was being detained, and everyone said, "We're not at liberty to say."

Six years ago, my sister-in-law was immigrating to the United States for the very first time. She came over on a fiance visa. Prior to her arrival, they had decided to wed in her host country before coming over to the United States. My brother called USCIS on three separate occasions to see if this would be acceptable.* Three times, the helpline said yes. When my sister-in-law arrived at her port-of-entry, the customs official casually asked where they were going to get married. My brother said that they had already wed overseas and had plans to visit the immigration office the following day to file the change-of-status paperwork. The officer immediately detained my sister-in-law, made a few calls, then provided her and my brother one last opportunity to exchange luggage, say goodbye, and then placed her on the same plane on the return flight back to her home country. There was no opportunity to argue, make phone calls to lawyers, senators...nothing. Another ten months, 32 pages of government paperwork, and $800 dollars in immigration fees later, and she finally stepped foot on American soil.

You show me a customs officer, and I'll show you a sadist. Nothing gets these people more excited than the opportunity to concurrently fight terrorism and inflict misery in the process.

* For those ignorant to the immigration process, the line between a spouse and a fiance is not as defined as you may think. In fact, most spouses immigrate to the United States on a fiance visa, because it's faster to file and process. (Google "Immigrating a spouse using a fiance visa" and find out for yourself.) But legal-story-short, the way my brother did it was not the way the customs agent accepted it, despite three different representatives at the USCIS saying otherwise.

How long until the US Government censors this paper in the interests of national security?

Or how long until a commentator on Fox News calls the authors terrorists?

Did they weigh that variable at all against what percentage of their peers used the app? To what extent do kids care about privacy in the face of peer pressure?

Facebook demands substantial personal information about you, but last I checked, it's still the most popular social networking app kids use.

This is like when the NSA illegally spies on US citizens.

My point: some things don't need an analogy. This is one of them.

If I were to give it an analogy, I believe this would be the most fitting...

The NSA's surveillance program is like Soylent Green. Both are just so, so wrong.

If this is true, it would be huge. Citizens don't count for much in terms of US policy decisions, but an unfair boost to chosen businesses would tick off every other business in the US and abroad - the economic ramifications would be nothing short of tectonic.

I hate to be the cynic, but no, it wouldn't be huge. Politics has become the greatest spectator sport of the 21st century. Everyone has an opinion about what's wrong, but no one's willing to act on it enough to create substantial change.

We nearly hanged Nixon (and Ford for pardoning him) for Watergate. We have bigger scandals than Watergate happening today, scandals involving the usurption of our civil liberties by our own government, but no one's doing anything about it except complain. Like the boiling frog, we've become so acclimiated to these changes that I doubt we'll be able to leap out of the situation before it kills us.

I'm angry and sad at the same time.

First purchase was made back in 2001...pair of Benwin speakers....still with me this moment on my desk. Been a customer ever since. Even did many a purchase on behalf of the school district.

Too, too bad.

Does anyone else know of a good online fire-sale type vendor like CompGeeks?

Could you name the schools? Better yet, do you know of any newspaper that reported this?

(I'm currently a tech director for a ~1000 student school district in Minnesota. Any info on how and why this failed would be really helpful in my dialog with teachers and administrators regarding the issue.)