> His real crime was ending his sentence with a preposition.

Ending a sentence with a proposition is something up with which I will not put. (Sir Winston Churchill)

> EVERY mobile device and OS that matters comes with an email client,
> do ANY of them come with a Facebook or twitter client out of the box?

Unfortunately, yes. And in some cases, not only do you have to jailbreak the device to delete Fecesbook/Twitter, you have to load a new ROM like CyanogenMod, because they're baked into the firmware by the @$$hole cellphone companies. Do not confuse a pristine Android phone with the crap that you'll get once a cellco has "branded" it.

Speaking of Toronto, here in Canada we have this thing called "winter". Snow falls, sticks to buildings, turns to ice, and eventually falls off. This can be dangerous... http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ame...

What is the available hiring pool? According to to the National Center for Women and Information Technology http://www.ncwit.org/ in a PDF document http://www.ncwit.org/sites/def...

14% of 2010 Computer Science undergraduate degree recipients at major research universities were women. This compares with 37% in 1985. Why blame Apple?

Besides what qualities do women provide that men don't? Intuitive GUIs? Did you know that Melinda French (who later married Bill Gates) pushed "Microsoft Bob" into production, and that Julie Larson-Green pushed through both the MS Office Ribbon and the Windows 8 Metro interface?

> Almost free communication to anywhere on the planet
> is an enormous thing, and it's just one thing of many.

So some guy from India can call me for free, claiming that my linux box is infected with a Windows virus; not to mention all the robocalls about the free cruise to the Bahamas that I've won.

> Pluto is a planet. The definition of a planet is arbitrary, and always will be.

If you can find an astronomy textbook from the 1830's or early 1840's, it'll list 11 planets...
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Ceres (discovered 1801)
Pallas (discovered 1802)
Juno (discovered 1804)
Vesta (discovered 1807)
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus (discovered 1781)

As time went on, more and more asteroids were discovered. Today, there are a few hundred thousand asteroids. To keep the number of planets at a manageable number, the asteroids wwere given their own class. Similarly, there are now almost 1300 http://www.minorplanetcenter.n... known objects in Pluto's vicinity. If you want to think of the solar system having 1300 planets, be my guest.

Scientists occasionally make mistakes, based on incomplete data. When more info becomes available, they correct those mistakes. E.g. they junked the Aether theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... after the Michelson-Morley experiment.

There was *ALWAYS* major doubt about Pluto's planetary status. This article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... is an example.

> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid,
> rather than the smallest planet;

BTW, it's worse than the article suggested; Pluto is actually less than 1/10th the mass of Titan.

> and the dipshits who insist that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.

So you think the ancient Greeks were dipshits? And the French who introduced the metric system? The real dipshits are the people who arbitrarily change the meanings of words after thousands of years..

One of the major arguments for IPV6 was that it would eliminate the bloated routing tables that are almost as much of a problem for IPV4 as addresses being all used up. So why does Comcast need 32 ASN's?

> Primarily because the school boards aren't in the business of
> writing textbooks or funding the creation of the same.

Classical English literature
===================
you can get Shakespeare's works *FREE* from project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...

Astronomy
========
http://nineplanets.org/ (yeah, the website name is an anachronism) *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made

Evolution
=======
Tree of Life Project http://tolweb.org/tree/

Dinosaur Specific http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/d... *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made

For those fundamentalist schools who don't believe in evolution Project Gutenberg has the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims version

A school district should be able to get a good chunk of its needs free off the web. Most of these sites will easily give permission to download and duplicate. Instead of handing out 16 KG of books to each student, hand out 16-gigabyte USB keys to each student with the necessary e-books and/or mirrored websites.

Explained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Is Lennart paid by Redhat or by Microsoft?

> The Heartland Institute skews the data by taking two points
> and ignoring all of the data in between, kind of like grabbing
> two zero points from sin(x) and claiming you're looking at a
> steady state function.

Totally, 100% false. I'll give the poster the benefit of the doubt, and assume they don't know what they're talking about. Check for yourself...
1) download the file of monthly anomalies from ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly...
2) import into a spreadsheet
3) take the slope() function for the 3rd column for the range Sept 1996 to June 2014

You get a very slightly negative result.The slope() function uses *ALL THE POINTS FROM THE START TO THE END*. I repeat, the submission is flat out wrong.