I'm curious, since I've recently bought a new laptop with win7. What new features (other than visual eye-candy) does one lose when switching to windows classic?

+5 for a relevant informative post, I find that info amazing but easy to believe. This is the free market at its best, right?

I'm a high school math teacher with ~28 years experience, have a master's in math, never wanted to teach but fell into it, and have no doubt I'm much smarter than mr. obvious above. Of the 200 or so posts I've read on this topic, yours, willy_me, is about the only one that hits the nail on the head. The TI's are great tools, if you already know math. They are indeed fun to program. I don't allow them on most tests. One quick anecdote, I had a student a few years back who could not tell you the median of a list of five numbers, since he had only done so using his TI-83.

But, I do very much enjoy the whining of the kids who were graded down for not showing their work!

I think there's a huge psychological affect from not printing the 'u,' actually, and I'd bet there's some study that's looked at this question! It's slightly less offensive to the eye.

Well put. But another very simple reason why receiving a call is dangerous is that studies repeatedly show that they are! Research finds that using a cell phone, including hands-free cell phone use, seem to impair driving reactions and response time as much as alcohol impairment. Whether one thinks they're driving impaired is a non-issue.

So am I a complete anomaly in that I turn my machines off daily? And, I really don't care how long it takes to boot up? I put my apple powerbook to sleep because it comes up immediately, but my windows boxes I shut down overnight or whenever I'm not home. I mean, come on, it takes what, a minute or so? Time is that precious?

As a 28 year veteran public school math teacher, I'd mod your comment up. The biggest difficulty with teaching has a lot to do with the first line of your second paragraph.

Teachers also have no choice in the matter of how much of the year they work. Feel free to enter the teaching profession if it sounds so good to you.

Pardon me, but where would you get the ridiculous idea teachers don't pay into their retirement package?

The Washington Post found it's OWN paper had some very small bias towards the number of stories for Obama versus McCain. That's it, the FA only refers to the Post. The majority of the comments seem to have really made this bias a universal thing, which no one has demonstrated or found.