So your solution for providing poor people with the Internet is to suggest that they go to Starbucks and McDonalds?

I guess that's a solution. I guess we could also say that poor people don't need indoor plumbing because they can just use the toilet at their local gas station. It seems to me like it's a silly, inefficient solution that will be unpleasant for everyone involved, so I'd need more of a justification before I would agree.

There are more things to consider than simply the cost of the hardware. Do the iPads have any specific features that are required for their plans? Are there specific apps that they want to use? What platforms are those applications available for? What kind of administrative tools are available for each platform, and have they already invested in any of those tools? Is their IT staff more familiar and skilled in managing a specific platform? What kinds of price cuts and support are offered by the manufacturer?

Saving even a couple of hundred dollars per unit might be a drop in the bucket when compared with the peripheral costs. Yes, IT departments everywhere might be able to save a little money on the purchase of each computer by buying all of their parts from NewEgg and installing Linux on the computer that they cobble together from parts. Still, it ends up being cheaper, when you add up all the peripheral costs, to buy ready-made computers from Dell with Windows pre-installed.

Not everyone who buys Apple products is an idiot.

On the other hand, it's a can of worms that probably wouldn't have needed to be opened if we had some kind of a plan to develop public internet infrastructure that was free/cheap for people without a lot of money.

I only bring this up because I would imagine some people looking at this and saying, "A public school system should not be intruding into the area of being an ISP, which has traditionally been an area for private business." I would respond by pointing out that the Internet really should be considered public telecommunications infrastructure.

I don't know why you have this weird agenda of insisting that any Linux on the desktop (that isn't ChromeOS) needs to remain a niche. You yourself cited FOSS desktop applications as something that people use, and that it doesn't matter what OS they use. It seems like either you're emotionally invested in being anti-Linux or you're just being difficult for the sake of it.

You have GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Skype, Dropbox, VLC, Spotify, and an ever-increasing number of games offered through Steam. People who use those applications are not a 'niche'.

I don't know what your damage is, but you should get over yourself.

Which is a problem that isn't at all solved by using ChromeOS or Android.

Just to have something pre-installed on the computer that the manufacturer has enough control over to make sure there are drivers for whatever hardware is attached. You're right that people care less and less about the OS itself, but there still needs to be an OS.

And again, it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to say, "Suggesting that people use Linux is dumb. They can just use Android or buy a Chromebook!" That's still Linux. If I want all the functionality of Chrome OS and a couple other more conventional applications (e.g. GIMP, LibreOffice), then it makes more sense to just install something more like Ubuntu. So the point is, it would be trivial for a company like HP to take Ubuntu, include drivers for their own hardware, and brand it however they want. If they buyer doesn't care about applications available exclusively for OSX/Windows, then it'll probably do everything they need.

I think you might be missing the point, in that it seems like this is not meant to be traded for actual goods and services. It's not supposed to be like money. It's not supposed to have real value. In big letters in the middle of the article, it says, "‘If Bitcoin is the toy version of what we’ll all be using the future, then i want to build the crazy art project version of the future.’"

It seems to be more like a way of quantifying social currency rather than economic currency. I get a lot of 'currency' when a lot of people owe me a favor, when they're figuratively "in my debt". I do something cool for a famous person, and they give me a coin. Now that coin becomes something like a trading card, which I can collect and trade, and who knows if or when it ever makes it back to the original issuer, or whether it would develop economic value.

This is a dumb complaint. Even if you think Bitcoin is great, there's no way it's going to do away with financial middlemen and transaction fees. Those things exist for too many different reasons. And even the fees it will eventually do away with, there would have to be some intermediate state between now and then, where businesses rely on some other business to deal with the processing of Bitcoin transactions, since Bitcoin hasn't become accepted as real currency yet.

Oh yes, I know, I'm going to get a whole speech about how Bitcoin is just as real as the US dollar because fiat currency is all made up and imaginary and all prices are set by the market and bla bla bla. I'm not claiming that Bitcoin isn't worth anything, but just that it hasn't been accepted as currency yet. If I can pay my bills or buy something with Bitcoin, it's the exception and not the rule. Plus, the value of Bitcoin is still very volatile. In practical terms, buying Bitcoins is more comparable to a speculative stock investment than it is to converting money into another currency.

So the reality of what's happening is, due to some level or customer demand, or maybe because they got a no-lose deal from their bitcoin processor, or perhaps it's just a publicity stunt, Dell has decided to accept a volatile stock as payment. Whatever you pay in Bitcoin immediately gets turned into dollars-- so Dell is really still working with dollars, but they've allowed a bitcoin payment processor to work as an intermediary to convert to the transaction into dollars.

It's a neat development, but you can't expect Dell to operate on Bitcoins at this point.

Yeah, that's kind of my point. They've spent decades being Microsoft's bitch, afraid to piss Microsoft off. And then finally Microsoft starts competing with them directly? If I were in their shoes, I'd be looking for some kind of leverage to balance the power out again. I'd grab Shuttleworth and some of the CEOs of my competitors, saying, "we need to collaborate on a viable alternative before we're totally fucked."

Especially as FOSS has grown and more applications have been pushed to the web, the 3rd party app lock-in isn't what it once was.

And among that "competition", you also have Linux clients with the potential for some level of compatibility. If you count Chromebooks as a success story, then you can't say that Linux is doomed to fail because of a lack of 3rd party apps.

Yeah, I'm actually kind of surprised that companies like Lenovo, Dell, and HP haven't made any kind of overt move toward doing what Apple does-- taking a FOSS OS and building their own distro/OS off of it, customized to their marketing needs. If I were running one of these companies, the announcement of the Surface would have been a real shot-across-the-bow that would have me rethinking my whole relationship with Microsoft.

Luckily the Surface was kind of a flop too. If it were not a flop, though, I would expect Microsoft to eventually move toward making laptop/desktop models, as they saw a marketing opportunity, and maybe network/server hardware. With Microsoft producing the Surface and buying Nokia, also selling the XBox, it's looking increasingly like Microsoft wants to go the Apple route of selling integrated hardware/software solutions instead of selling a commodity OS to run on other vendors' hardware.

A couple years ago, I actually predicted that we'd see something like a Dell/Microsoft merger within 10 years, which would then have a vertical market containing everything that businesses need for computing. Between those two companies, you have phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, switches, routers, servers, and the software to run it all. We've seen no movement toward that, and I personally think it's a bad idea, but I think that's where Microsoft wants to go.

In fact, I'd bet that someone in the military is already working on the driverless tank.

I would think part of the problem would be that, whatever checks you put in place, there's the potential to have someone alter the programming. Or someone could find a way to fool whatever detects whether there's a person in the car.

Not that I think this is a good reason not to have driver-less cars. It's kind of dumb to try to uninvent technology just because it might possibly be abused. It doesn't work. However, I endorse the FBI trying to figure out how they can protect against this kind of thing. After all, security is not an absolute. It's just a matter of making it terribly inconvenient to do bad things.