...provided they don't show the same damn one every time. I find a lot of good shows through the "Recommended for You" category, if they teased one of those I'd be OK with it. But it's a slippery slope. You kids won't believe this, but used to be we didn't have to sit through half an hour of commercials in movie theaters, they even showed cartoons before the movie. And my lawn, get off it.

From TFA(screenshot): "There's also an all- new browser designed to get stuff done online."

Admittedly, getting stuff done online with IE could be painful. Glad they saw the light.

"First-name basis" implies that one is fairly well acquainted with the person in question, so an introduction would be unnecessary.

...or let teachers introduce technology into the classroom. "

Oh hell no. Tech in the classroom is not an end unto itself, and certainly not a justification for Powerpoint. Don't get me wrong, PP can be a useful tool (in some cases), and yes, it don't work without tech in the classroom. But the idea that any random PP show is valuable because "it's introducing students to technology" is ridiculous. Students are on a first-name basis with technology, they don't need to be introduced to it.

Granted that's an idiotic problem, but in fairness I remember being annoyed by the stupidity(but not THAT stupid) of number-line exercises over 40 years ago. Yes, the standards are loose enough to allow educators to make crappy problems and exercises. They should be.

Common Core isn't a curriculum, it's a set of standards: At this grade, students should learn how to do these things. How you teach them to do it is not mandated, so educators are free to try different approaches. Some of those suck, but that's nothing new, parents have been complaining about "New Math" for as long as I've been alive.

I think you don't know how to read the standards. MD.A.2 doesn't require that teachers write a single problem that includes all those elements. It suggests that they cover a number of problems that incorporate those features. Perfectly reasonable. Yes, that's too vague if you're defining requirements for a software project, but that's not what they're doing. "Standards" and "requirements" are not interchangeable, requirements are narrow and quantifiable, standards are broader and more open to interpretation. Note that in the article you cite "requirement" appears only once, and in a very specific context.

Hell, I've been working in tech for 30 years, and I have to get my daughter to show me how to do stuff on my iPhone half the time, because nothing is discoverable, if you don't know how to get to a feature there's no way in hell to figure it out, and 70-year-old minds with failing short-term memory will have a heck of a time remembering what you have to swipe over and in which direction to get to the pics of their grandkids. And a tablet's tiny screen is hardly friendly to aging eyes.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and they've conducted case studies where seniors did all kinds of awesome things with tablets. Oops, no they have not, but they are planning to run some tests in a few months. Sure would be interesting to see how they turn out.

" they dump it as heat into rivers as the storage infrastructure simply doesn't exist"

I'm pretty sure excess electricity from windmills and PV farms are not creating hot water that has to be released into rivers, but feel free to prove otherwise.

"liquid fuels don't require a lot of expensive infrastructure to store and transfer."

You sure? Granted, much of that infrastructure is already build and paid for, but gasoline doesn't refine and transport itself, and gas stations don't just spring up by themselves, nor are they cheap to build.

Do let us in on the joke.

Not as bad as CA, but this year's snowfall is just a fraction of normal. Expect lots of fires in the forests of OR and WA this year. I don't know where Shatner gets the idea that Seattle has more than it can use.

You don't just hand a kid a tablet and wish him luck. Apple has done quite a bit of work to allow central administration of app deployment, security, and OS configuration that, to my understanding, Android can't match. They're far from perfect, two years ago they had next to nothing, but it's evolving pretty quickly. But as bad as iPads are for this use case, Androids would be worse, albeit cheaper.

I work in education, and the idea that you'll just roll out a new tech to hundreds of thousand of kids is just asinine. Start small, work the bugs out, then go big. Especially if you're deploying tablets, trying to manage them is like herding cats. Apple's made some progress in that area, but they're still a huge PIA to manage. I hope there's a serious, ie external, investigation into who drove this fiasco. While incompetence on this scale isn't unimaginable, I suspect shenanigans. Follow the money.

Are you saying that Comcast can rid itself of bureaucrats?

Or are you saying you can't rid yourself of bureaucrats, but you can rid yourself of Comcast? If so, let me in on the secret. My options are Comcast or very crappy DSL or satellite. Thanks for those great choices Free Market!

I still have the oven that was installed in my house in 1959. Works great. Finding parts is a bitch, but it only breaks once every decade or two. Microwave died last week, I'll have to hunt down a two-dial model.