Here is the dirty little secret -- there hasn't been a huge influx of money. It used to be that most public schools got a majority of their funding from the state they reside in. Back in 1990, the public schools in Illinois got approximately 70% - 80% of their budget from the state. In 2010, this number is now 20%. Many states have also capped the school's ability to increase tuition to help back-fill this huge reduction in funding. The cost of things like power, water, gas, food, insurance, etc all continue to go up, and in most cases, the corporate donations to schools that used to fund research has gone down. Demand for increased enrollment has gone up (because every child NEEDS to attend school).

What you have is a case where there is much more pressure applied to each dollar that walks in that door. In response, schools have been cutting everywhere -- including the amount they spend on faculty.

Windows, Office, MacOSX, and just about every other app in the top 15 do this now. If you don't think that's the case -- you got something else coming....

tl;dr -- It's not as big of a deal as the TFA makes it out to be. The vector of attack is incredibly small, very well protected and requires a very specifically trained person with very trusted access to do. And the result would be that all they get is a webpage to pop up on a TV, that is turned on, that is tuned to that channel, and has the viewer's attention. Oh, and is on OTA.

I'd imagine a larger metro like Chicago you might get a few dozen people at most to be in this category.

Because they offer a feature that you may not have the skills or ability to do yourself? A technology like content-aware fill is one of those billion dollar patents -- and one of the reasons why people buy Photoshop. If they license it to you so you can use it within your own app, you have that power and technology that you didn't have to develop yourself -- you just include it.

They developed a new pen to get around the pressure sensitivity and accuracy issues. It doesn't use the touch screen for input, it connects to the app via Bluetooth. This is not your standard iPad pen...

Except they've been pushing out updates to the major applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom every two months since they launched CC. Illustrator has gone some MAJOR new features in the last 18 months -- most which have been a huge time saver to me. Photoshop has beefed up it's 3D capabilities and now supports 3D Printing (do I think it's best of breed? no. But it is a new feature that has been added).

They don't force updates on you. You still choose when they get installed, etc. In fact, I haven't updated Dreamweaver since the original CC update because they changed around some options in a way I didn't like. Yes, it does check with the licensing server every 30 days, but guess what? Most apps do now a days..

So, maybe you should check into the things you are ranting about a bit more...

I found the CS AP class that I took in HS was actually pretty good. My University didn't accept the credit (even though I got a 5 on the exam), but I'd say we got a further into the true CS topics than I did in my earlier college classes. The class was built around C++ and included all the fun stuff like memory management, pointers, etc. The non-AP class was done in Pascal.

The TS most likely re-written on final broadcast. If it is going out OTA, then the transmitter will repack the data as ATSC, regroom the MPEG2 content, and rewrite the PAT at the tower (usually with a custom PID for each video stream, a PID for DATA, etc, to make it consistent at the viewer's side). So changes are low there.

Since most CATV providers require a STB, very few TVs are using the ClearQAM streams directly (usually encrypted streams that require an handshaked box). Those very few that are using a CableCARD or equivalent are probably in such a minority you might not even want to bother. Oh, and the streams are re-packed when they are encrypted so garbage data is probably removed at that point.

Oh, and good luck "just walking into a CATV headend and replacing commercials." Every CATV headend that I've seen (including the one I run), don't store the commercials there, let alone have any way to change them. Those are usually controlled up-stream in some no-name office remotely then muxed or pulled in by the groomers or stat-muxers (depending on how they are setup).

Actually, that's not true. The USPS receives no money to deliver the mail that originated in other countries -- the cost to deliver that letter/package comes out of the local budget. They try to make up the amount by charging more for packages that go the other way (e.g. packages from USA to Canada) -- pretty similar to a peering agreement. For most countries, this usually works out, and is the arrangement for a great majority of the countries.

Then enter China. If you've ever had to ship something from China to the USA, you will notice it is crazy cheap -- often less expensive than shipping something from within the USA. This is because China subsidizes products shipped from there to the USA by charging only for postage to their regional export center, rather than trying to recoup the money they use to send stuff back (sending from USA to China is much rarer than the other way around).

Except on my laptop the power button sometimes means sleep. or hibernate. or deep-sleep. Sometimes it shuts down, depending on what Windows thinks it will do that day.. And, yes, this is on Win 8.1...

Not everybody could afford buying the latest and greatest.... When Descent came out, I was running on a 486/66 DX2 Packard Bell. I think I upgraded the processor on that machine to a 486/100 DX4 when D2 came out...

I was being a bit extreme, but you do realize that outside the USA, there are lots of countries that are built with multi-modal designs in mind, including transporting good via train. Although I enjoyed the read on wikipedia on trucks -- I've never heard of those darned things before. bleh.

By the way, the human race did seem to manage just fine before the advent of the semi-trailer. Sure, Wallmart didn't, but seeing that they really only became a thing in the last century, I think there is a good amount of data of how civilization seemed to work without them.

The Uniform Traffic Code has it in there, but many states delegate the responsibility to the municipalities. Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, and Ohio are just a few that I know of that address it at the state level (most have exceptions for children under the age of 13 or so). California, Texas, Utah and Oregon for example setup the law so that municipalities can do their own thing, but default that they follow the US-UTC.

http://blogs.findlaw.com/law_a...

If your child is in the street (within 3 feet of the edge, like they are supposed to be), they are much more visible to cars than on the sidewalk, and drivers WILL slow down and be more cautious. The real danger is when your kid is on the sidewalk, going along and a person turns into their driveway, sidestreet or ally. The kid can easily be hidden by other cars, bushes, trees or simply from the fact that drivers are not trained to look at the sidewalks 10 - 20 feet on either direction of where they are turning. http://ccbike.org/articles/is-...

8 might be a bit young for those rules, but there is a reason why many of the accidents that happen with bikes happen on driveways and intersections (of sidewalks). Either way, if you worry about traffic, there is no reason why your child should be in the street unsupervised whether they are on a bike or playing hop-scotch.

Like trains?