scrabble is more fun when played with the universal dictionary.

I agree, authoring tool is a huge factor. A flash-the-application work-alike for multimedia, IMHO, is the open-source holy grail.

HELL NO! And furthermore, even if Flash penetration were 100% and they fixed the bug where the player captures my Firefox url and search bar shortcut keystrokes, I wouldn't develop for it. In my 14 years of web development, the only Flash I've ever created was a hidden music player on my otherwise-DHTML animated personal homepage. As soon as HTML5 embedded sound supports multiple simultaneous audio streams, you can bet I'm turfing that bullshit. Long live the open web.

If you mean an App Store SDK, not sure what that is, but I'd bet MS will host 3rd-party apps soon.

If you mean a development SDK, they've already released one:

http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2009/09/15/xna-game-studio-3-1-zune-extensions.aspx

Look for SDK support for NVidia graphics soon.

I agree with this guy, Zune game programming could be a great educational platform:

http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2009/09/16/zune-hd-as-a-programming-teaching-platform.aspx.

If you teach kids to write Zune games, you're teaching them how to write xbox and windows games too.

zing! take that, funny guy.

chines checkers != go

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Checkers

The AP's concern isn't the right of the citizen to be informed, it's the threate to their legitimacy as a syndicator of unaltered news photos.

I think the AP is over-reacting. If it were me, I'd suspend them for six months and give them a warning that next time it'll be 20 years. We'll see how the DOD likes the loss of a valuable dissemination outlet.

And since when does the AP circulate supermodel ads for Coke?

Not insightful. I'd give you -1, incoherent.

>piles of computers and ethernet switches by themselves aren't enough to teach students .... well, anything.

Wrong. Some kids will teach themselves, and some will teach others, including teaching the teachers.

I say: if you've got access to some unused computers and the school will accept them, do it.