Yes, the point is that it's like MAD and other weapons policies: you don't want to put down your gun (or shield, for that matter) while the other guy is still holding on to his. Despite what many people say, that is completely sane and rational behavior.

The thing OP kind of sidesteps is that while Western countries countries resisted complete eradication, they did so openly. Only later it was discovered that other countries (most of which were supposedly in favor of the eradication program) kept their own samples and research anyway. Which is a perfect illustration of why the West wanted to hang on to theirs, too.

It's easy enough to call such policies insane, but nobody wants to be the only "sane" person in the room while all the nutjobs still have their weapons. That kind of disproves it would a sane approach, yes?

Guy who sells used computer hardware claims that buying new computer hardware is a bad idea, and that you should buy used gear instead. News at 11.

Not what this guy is saying is wrong, but there are other unaddressed issues. They cover issues like "power savings", but not the much more important issue of buying an unknown piece of hardware from an unknown vendor, without a warranty. Aside from that, sometimes there are issues of physical constraints-- like I have limited space, limited ventilation, and one UPS to supply power. Do I want to buy 5 servers, or one powerful one?

Also, it's not true that hardware isn't advancing. In the past few years, USB has gotten much faster, virtualization support has improved, drives and drive interface has gotten faster, etc.

And sometimes, buying "new" is more about getting a known quantity with support, rather than wagering on a crap-shoot.

So are toy cars.

So what?

Well then you're a piss-poor IT person. Otherwise you'd know that you need to know the parameters for a project before you can choose a solution, which was exactly what I was pointing out. If your company says, "we need to buy a tablet for every employee" and you just run out and buy a bunch of the cheapest Android tablets you can buy, without asking any additional questions, then you don't know what the hell you're doing.

First question: What are the requirements here?

If they don't have a very clear answer, then the next question is, why are we doing this and what are we hoping to accomplish? And then you decipher the requirements from the answer to that question. For example, if the answer is, "We need to run this specific iOS application" and you've run out to buy a bunch of Android tablets, then you're fucked. Or it could be "We need tablets fitting these specific technical requirements," which turns out you should have purchased more expensive Android tablets, and not the cheapest model. Or it could be, "We just need something that's easy to type a lot of text on," in which case you might want to put on the breaks and find out if they really want tablets, or if ultrabooks would serve better.

You have to know what problem you're trying to solve before you pick your tools.

But wait a second... You're the same guy who is suggesting that poor children should be expected to do their homework on the sidewalks outside of McDonalds? I just noticed that. Geeze, no wonder I'm responding to so many insane posts. They're all coming from the same troll.

I almost forgot:

A company does not HAVE TO advertise over the internet, and even if they do, that doesn't "drive" the internet. In fact, a lot of large companies do not advertise on the internet at all. They use their regular media outlet advertising, and maintain a website. It works for them.

Ubiquitous web advertising is simply NOT a necessary thing for the existence of the internet, and never has been. In fact the internet saw MOST of its growth when advertising wasn't nearly the bandwidth leech it is now.

In theory. In practice it has never worked and is never likely to work, because there will always be those people who aren't altruistic, and are instead power-hungry leeches.

You are correct, however, that it doesn't follow that Marx was a loon. I didn't mean that literally. I wouldn't say he was actually a loon. Rather, he was a paid tool of Statists who needed a justification for their Statist power-grabbing. And what is better justification than "the evolutionary road to Utopia"?

It was the people who followed his ideas, in hopes of gaining that theoretical but in practice unworkable Utopia, who were the actual loons.

It isn't, necessarily. It depends on what they're searching for, which we don't know from the story. Don't assume I'm being "unrealistic" just because you didn't read my comment carefully. I said the question is whether it was justified. TFA itself says some courts say no.

People PAY money to build their websites for their customers.

Customers PAY their ISPs for internet access.

Nobody -- not me, anyway -- said it was "free". I just said that Open Source was a workable model.

But pay-for-service (other than ISPs) is NOT a "necessary" thing. At all. It could go away tomorrow and the internet would continue to thrive.

Agreed. Chromebooks seem like a very good solution.

I wasn't trying to argue that iPads were actually the best solution, but rather that you can't simply compare the retail price of iPads to another tablet and conclude that the iPad is a worse solution because it's more expensive. The are a lot of factors in play. Deciding which solution is best requires eliminating any solution that doesn't meet the needs of the program, then calculating something akin to TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), and finally allowing some influence for preference. Yes, sorry guys, if the people you're serving simply prefer Apple products, even if it's only a preference, that should be a factor. You have to decide how much of a factor.

Again, iPads may not come out on top, but it's a bigger calculation than simply looking at the sticker price.

How is this labelled "Informative"? You may as well be saying, "We should cut educational expenses by only allowing smart people to have children, and only allowing well-behaved children to attend school." It completely misses the point. We, as a society, need to anticipate that lots of people will have children whether or not we individually believe it to be a wise move. Once those children exist, we need to deal with them, and the best thing we can do is to make sure they're educated, and that they have the opportunity to become productive adults.

There are plenty of IT departments that are not "enterprise" IT departments. Aside from that, "enterprise" IT departments often still go with a vendor like Dell or HP rather than trying to build their own systems, because the peripheral costs associated with building their own would wipe out any savings.

Again, I would need more of a justification before I could possibly agree with you.

What do you imagine, that poor children will go sit on the cold sidewalk next to McDonalds every night in order to do their homework? And what if the WiFi gets saturated from having a bunch of kids? I think McDonalds would likely be unhappy with this arrangement and maybe even cut off the internet. Or should these children be eating at McDonalds every night to keep McDonalds happy? Because that's great for children.

But you're right. There's also Home Depot, so 200 children will go sit in the aisles of Home Depot. I'm sure that'll work out really well.

We're quickly getting to the point where the Internet is required for living what society considers a "normal life". It's not weird to think that the Internet is becoming a form of infrastructure that should be expected to be available to everyone, like water and electricity.

It's likely that I won't respond to anything else that you write, because either you're a troll or you're... I don't know what. Dumb and heartless? Ignorantly indifferent to the struggles people face? Whatever it is, it's not worth arguing until you're actually thinking about what you're saying.

What, you don't think there's anything involved in configuring and maintaining tablets? I would guess, then, that you're not an IT guy.

You may be imagining that they're just handing out 20,000 tablets for each student to use as they please, but I would not expect that. I may be wrong, but in most cases where I've heard of schools providing tablets for children, there's an absurd amount of labor involved.

In IT in general and especially with schools, where you're going to want to restrict them, every tablet is going to have to be monitored and tracked, and regularly wiped and reconfigured. The configuration may be complex and very restricted. There will probably be 3rd party tools involved, which the IT staff will have to buy and will have to be trained on. Very often, spending a little extra to get the right tablets and tools will save enough money in labor and training to be worth it.

Nonsense. Read your Marx. Communism and Socialism don't even remotely resemble one another. The only reason people get them confused is that Communism, as defined by Marx, was the ideal human goal and has never actually existed.

What you describe as "State Socialism" is what most people just call Socialism... because socialism requires a strong State.

While some countries liked to CALL THEMSELVES communist, they were not. They were anything but. The best any of them ever managed to achieve were bad forms of socialism and fascism.

The reason for that is simple: socialism (the real economic theory of socialism) requires a strong central authority. Whereas communism (genuine communism, according to social and economic theory) has no "authority" at all.

The problem has been that once a relatively few people got all that authority, under a socialist or fascist regime, they then never wanted to give it up. So societies never "evolved" beyond that to true communism. Nor is it likely to ever happen. Marx was a loon.

If Google can "remotely configure" your device, then so can someone else if they're determined enough.

Duh.