They're asking the wrong questions, focusing on short-term test score results. The right questions are: For teachers, does the technology increase the adoption rates for new materials? And for students, do the laptops increase information and computer literacy rates? Improving either or both of those rates will have significant impacts further down the line.

Assessing the effectiveness of these measures by looking at immediate test scores is akin to judging a new company mission statement by the next quarterlies -- it's foolish and short-sighted.

It sounds like CWIS may be what you're seeking. It's a free web-based turnkey package, developed at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and funded in part by NSF under the National Science Digital Library initiative. CWIS is written in PHP/MySQL, includes a search engine, a recommender engine, and a raft of other features, and is currently in use in a wide array of contexts.

I think what you're referring to is link aggregation in OS X, which allows you to bond two ethernet ports together under one IP address to double the possible bandwidth in and out of the machine. Since it deals only with combining devices internally, it's probably not useful in this situation.

Under OS X there are also "aggregate devices" for combining incoming audio streams into a single virtual device for multichannel recording, but that seems even less applicable.

The headline on this article is blatantly misleading. A gag order is issued by a court after legal proceedings, and if Apple had tried to get a gag order against this girl and her family, that would indeed have been newsworthy. What Apple did do was to offer the girl a refund for her dead iPod (which they had no obligation to do, as it was out of warranty and there was no clear evidence that Apple was at fault), and as part of the standard paperwork that goes with such an offer it specifies that the girl and her family would in turn not try to use the refund as evidence of wrong-doing on the part of Apple. For a more complete analysis, see:
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/08/03/apple-most-assuredly-not-slapping-family-with-gagging-order-ov/

The Times seriously misreported this story (apparently for the sake of sensationalism to sell papers), and now Slashdot is feeding the fire. :P

It'd be a revival rather than a reboot, but I would buy a new version of Autoduel in a second. It offered an outstanding balance between freedom of action and goal-oriented play, and who doesn't love driving around in a car loaded with cool weapons?