-Creates the most closed-walled operating system, and charges to program for it.

-Uses obscure and illogical languages for his walled garden's standard

-Perpetually disrespects other platforms and options which are open-source and available to 'teach people to think'.

What I don't understand is why, when schools are facing record-low budgets(thanks, war-profiteering asshole politicians), are they buying the most expensive option for tablets?

Why do they not have a pile of the HP TouchPads (super cheap, around $200US) and just run Android on them? They are large, the screen looks fantastic, it's cheap as dirt, and it runs the most popular mobile OS.

You can develop full APK apps for Android...from the Android platform. It's not even hard.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui

I bought a TI-84+ for a sibling last month, and it still has TI-Basic and ASM(via computer) just like my 5-year-old one. $105 or so at Target.

I think for reasons of standardized tests and testing acceptance they don't change their flagship lines very much, if at all.

"paperless textbooks"

Also, "bullshit to sell more Apple nonsense and waste limited school funding".

Only recently, but that's the problem. Today's average student has become dumb and lazy. When I was in school, EVERYONE programmed their calculator, to the point that some teachers would take them away during class because we'd all be playing games on them instead of paying attention.

Nope.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/25/toshiba-excite-13-review/

Making it easy to learn is the complete opposite of the point here. We WANT it to be a challenge to learn, and to have good documentation for them to look things up in. That makes them learn HOW to program, as well as HOW to look up things they may not know yet. If it's just "Oh, click this blue button, then this red button, and suddenly I have a 'class' object I can drag around..." then you're not really teaching them anything useful.

I vividly remember how much fun it was to write chat or game programs for the TI- series, and I even once went as far as to write a chat program and later build a wireless(IR) connector system to 'pass notes' with friends in class. In all honesty, I believe that TI was the first computer I ever owned that was 100% mine.

It came with a basic-like language to program in(my new one accepts ASM as well), which is perfect for beginners, and the owner's manual was a 100-page tome of useful information on commands, programming, graphing, variables and data, etc. I think I learned more about math from that calculator and manual than from any of the nonsense homework the teachers gave.

Let's not forget how you HAVE to use OSX to write the code for iOS. I've taken to just writing a few DLLs in Windows and linking/interfacing them with as little Obj-C as possible on the Mac side.

And where do the apps you run this code from, and ostensibly any packaged code, come from? Last I checked, apps were downloaded.

There ARE some interpreted language apps, but they don't include code with them - you write that yourself.

If it's part of an app, you have to download it to run it. The reason the HP42 is allowed is that it doesn't include code to interpret - you have to write that yourself.

Emulators and interpreted-code-players are still not allowed. Thanks a bunch, iOverlords.

The government shouldn't be illegally spying on its citizens and doing everything in their power that is wrong and bad for this country, but that doesn't stop them.

Well, how do you know that's not what's in one of these insurance files?

I still don't understand why people assume monitoring breathing, heart rate, and skin conductivity is a 'crackpot' solution. There is a scientific basis behind it, unlike most actual 'crackpot' areas. It doesn't ALWAYS work, and it's (clearly) beatable, but it's still a science.

It's not like they're praying to the aliens in orbit to read the person's mind and tell them if they're lying or not.

Honestly, it shouldn't even matter why they shut it down. If one of their biggest direct competitors, and a competitor that frequently takes the piss out of Google with commercials and ads containing false claims of insecurity and wrongdoing, I think Google is well within their rights to unceremoniously tell MS to fuck off.

This is nonsense. Google owes MS *nothing*. This sounds exactly like "Why doesn't my competitor cater their product to me, which I will use to further compete with them, and take away their income?" Combined with them not following the TOS and advertising rules properly, I'm far from surprised Google pulled the plug again.

The correct response should have been: "YouTube is ours. Come up with your own video sharing service if you want."