Your average GOP voter is the same as your average democrat voter, with different parents and geography. I have never, personally, met more than one republican that didn't like science, and she was a nut-job. Also, republican or democrat is not the dividing line for individual privacy. That's a non-partisan issue (unless you're libertarian, in which case it's your quest in life to remove all privacy violations). I was skeptical, at first, about targeted approaches generated from big-data problems. Then I got on google fiber. There were some HUGE privacy concerns there, since they basically keep a tcpdump (minus packet contents) of all your internet history as part of your google-fiber profile for 3 days. Before that, they just knew that I was an adult male. After being on google fiber, all my internet ads changed from gaming and porno to high end computer hardware and data center products. As it turns out, I greatly prefer seeing computer hardware ads (particularly when I'm at work). Targeted approaches bred from privacy violations aren't necessarily a bad thing, it's what people do with them that's the problem. Technologies can be used effectively to make the world a better place, or abused to make it worse, it doesn't mean the technology is inherently evil. I don't think democrats would have problem being data-mined and invited to public events surrounding global warming policy, and I doubt these GOP voters will care that they were selected by a computer to be invited to take part in something that they're interested in.

let the monkeys choose which GUI they want. Whichever one the majority of them chose, force the others to abide by it.

Windows--in my head. Took several counseling sessions and intense electro-shock therapy, but my therapist says the scars are slowly healing.

Find a university that mirrors a Linux repository. They are very commonly hosted there. If it hosts it there, then there will be some kind of official Linux support on campus.

Well, the drivers are so bad over here that we need every advantage we can get.

Well, I'd have both OSes at a school. While the CSRs and network admins will hate you for it--I think both OSes provides the healthiest learning environment. Every kid is different. Some get things quick, some don't. Personally, I think you should just make the resources available to the students, and then let them decide what they want. That will be more informative to you about whether or not its a good idea. If you put in Linux machines, and none of the kids use them--then take them out and say its not worth it. If you put them and Windows almost never gets used, then take the Windows machines out. Trying Open Source is really very cheap. For an entire school district, you could probably have one or two Linux guys set everything up for you within a month or two.

Clockspeed is good and great and all, but that isn't a very good measure of how many calculations it can do. 6.0Ghz doesn't mean anything (especially if we're talking radio frequency) other than how quickly your processor's heart pumps. This is why the 3.0Ghz "barrier" has been in place for so long--it's because Intel internally switched from benchmarking by clock speed to benchmarking by floating point operations per second. Sure, it might be clocked at 6Ghz, but if I'm only getting a 6giga-flops outta that, I'd be better off buying an Intel Atom.