These aren't android devices that are required to be tethered to Google every waking instant to be useful.

iBooks alone with textbooks instead of physical text books, so the students aren't carrying 20 pounds of dead trees everywhere, is alone enough of a reason to do this.

Clearly they underestimated the bandwidth usage, thats kind of the point of the story, but go ahead and not read the story and tell us how they fucked it up without you actually having any clue at all.

I'm not sure you're aware of it, but not everything actually requires a constant Internet connection to function. Working offline is pretty common in the normal world, again, if you aren't on Android which does everything it can to keep you tethered to Google.

An SUV plus a utility trailer does fill the role of a pickup truck.

The cost of a minivan plus a pickup plus the fuel to commute in the pickup is greater than the cost of an SUV plus a small sedan plus the fuel to commute in the sedan.

Considering the whole iBooks is designed to allow for text book replacement thing, this is also good for the backs of students that can potentially not have to carry 20 pounds of text books with them every day.

Just because you've not bothered to understand all the ways having a tablet is a great advance doesn't mean its a 'probably'.

Schools run their own internal phone systems already? Mission creep? Just like businesses who run their own phone systems? At a certain scale its cheaper to pay a guy to do the work internally and do it in a way thats for YOUR best interest, not the guy selling it too you.

And by 'becoming their own ISP' what that probably translates too is upgrades to the existing private data lines between he schools and a bigger pipe into the district main data center to carry student bandwidth instead of buying WiFi access from AT&T/Verizon at a ridiculous rate. They'll buy bulk bandwidth instead of consumer and save a fortune.

Depends somewhat on lifestyle. If I'd had a minivan, I'd also have needed to buy a pickup truck. An SUV fills both roles. Neither quite as well as the ideal vehicle, but well enough that it makes more sense than two vehicles... actually three since we also needed a commuter vehicle.

Agreed, unless you also need to tow stuff and/or go off road. Even if you don't do that stuff very much, renting an SUV or truck for those occasions isn't feasible, because as far as I can tell all rental car companies prohibit towing and off-road use. I do tow stuff regularly (boat, camp trailer, ATV trailer, utility trailer), and need to seat at least six people, which has made an SUV the practical and logical choice.

Now that my kids are moving out I no longer need so much seating, so a pickup truck is becoming the practical and logical choice. I'd like to upgrade to a bigger camp trailer, so one with a powerful diesel engine is looking particularly attractive.

Everytime you see someone talk about parents doing something like this being 'wrong' you can rest assured that they've never had any children or taken care of them for any length of time.

Then post your bullshit on your own websites. No one wants to listen to you ramble on about crap that you utterly fail to understand and whine like a little girl.

Go back to your hole and whine about what network providers blacklist your retarded lists of open proxies.

Bennett HAselton is an ignorant douche who complains when he gets blacklisted by various email lists because he distributes lists of OPEN PROXIES and he's too stupid to know WHY he gets blacklisted ... and then calls that censorship.

He's an ignorant fucking douche, nothing more.

Any tangental work he does is irrelevant and generally most of the crap he spews is wrong. You get more accurate information from Fox news.

It's not the human *touch* that people crave in a complicated interaction with a system. It's human *versatility*.

Thus more personnel does no good, if those personnel are rigidly controlled, lack information to advise or authority to act. The fact that they're also expected to be jolly and upbeat as they follow their rigid and unyielding rules only turns the interaction with them into a travesty of a social interaction.

What would work better is a well-designed check-in system that handles routine situations nearly all the time, along with a few personnel who have the training and authority to solve any passenger problems that come up.

I'm pretty sure birth control exists.

the seller has no clue about what Zorro cards are inside

I can understand the display cards and SCSI cards - those have function - but everything else (framegrabber cards and such) seems like rather hopelessly outclassed stuff?

There is something utterly fucked up with that statement. Don't confuse me, its nothing you did.

The fucked up part is that 'news sites' are so fracking biased!

What I wonder is why the wikipedia article isn't locked already.

For the past several decades, the US political system has considered these to be equivalent. Google "only remaining superpower" to read the evidence. You'll also find lots of uses of the phrase by non-Americans implying that they accept this as fact. Some of them complain, of course, but they often do so in ways that effectively acknowledge the fact of US rule. The US government is now immune from any so-called laws and is free to use its power as it likes anywhere in the world.

That may have been true 10 or 20 years ago. Nowadays, here in the US and in many other countries, the common media and governmental meaning of "terrorist" is now "anyone we don't like".

This is a rather familiar sort of linguistic change that has happened to many other words in the past. There's not a whole lot we can do to persuade people to stick with the original definitions. After all, we can't even persuade people to stop using "literally" to mean "figuratively". What's our chance of persuading politicians that they shouldn't similarly retarget handy insult words to refer to their opponents?