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Comment Re:Expensive? (Score 1) 285

Just put the PDFs on a website for parents and school children to download.
Also put the source files up so that people can enhance the texts.

All US schools seem to have a web site, so the incremental cost of distribution is close to $0.

>Your proposal then requires the school boards to fund such productions
Minus the cost of paying huge sums to the publishers. The savings will accrue pretty darn quickly.

Comment Re:Expensive? (Score 3, Insightful) 285

>textbooks were $50-100+ a piece

They cost that because the publishers are in a nice corruption loop with the school boards.

The school boards bless particular books from particular publishers and the publishers update the books each year so they have to be re-purchased. Unknown benefits flow from the publishers to the school board members.

Obviously it would be cheaper for education districts to band together and commission their own textbooks that cost $0 to distribute once written. But the school boards are strangely disinterested in this option.

Comment Re:Thank Google, not Verizon (Score 1) 234

>I personally don't see what the point of Gigabit speeds at home are.

Moving data. When I'm moving a 1TB file of binary data, I would prefer I didn't have to leave it running overnight.
I do this every few weeks. As it stands I usually end up using walknet with a hard disk, but that doesn't work when the onward journey is to the other side of the county.

Comment Re:Not on Arrakis (Score 2) 97

> BTW, if you averaged all the elevations on earth, none of it would be above the level of the ocean.

This would be true of any planet with any amount of surface water.
Given a perfect sphere, the water is just going to spread out and cover it.

You can't go around leveling the land without impacting the water level. They are linked.

Comment Re:Are they forgetting that this is the UK? (Score 4, Informative) 44

there is no constitution in the UK

False. It's just not a "written constitution" - IOW it is a body of tradition that everyone recognises, along with certain Acts which are regarded as more important than others (especially relevant when the law conflicts, as normally the later would just cancel out the earlier).

Consider: If there were no constitution, what would be the legal basis for Parliamentary supremacy?

It's a system of threats and balances. The queen grants a constitutional basis to the parliament and the parliament grants continued existence to the queen. It's worked quite well since Cromwell. Much more stable than these new fangled republics.

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