That is because you are looking for a reason to keep the current failed system, or spend huge amounts of money on non-solutions. The kid doesn't have to "Hide among the shelves" and you know it. The kid can sit in a comfortable seat in front of a Starbucks, they can sit in a nice padded seat at the Library, or they can go to a friends house, or they can get online dozens of other ways. Pretending like they have to skulk around between shelves is simply a lie. Congratulations. You are another reason that the public schools system is a failure.

Yeah. Having an Emplant board. I've owned several Amigas, and hung out with several other Amiga owners. Blow it out your arse sideways.

You know what? I am suggesting that they go near them, yes. I noticed you left out, Home Depot, Lowes and etc. in your lie. Congratulations. You are official one of the reasons that our public education system is a failure.

We are talking about tablets. You are in the wrong discussion.

Yep, the iPad is the educational systems version of the military's $500 toilet seat.

Excuse me? It is the schools job to educate children. The public education system has almost 4 million employees who have been certified as being experts at imparting information to children. It most certainly is their job to write books if that is the best way to impart that information.

They are talking about becoming an ISP to support this $20 million investment in iPads. Writing textbooks comes WAY before becoming ISP when it comes to a school and school board's business. Write me a $20 million dollar check, and I will get you textbooks written with a copyleft license. Your distribution costs most certainly will be close enough to zero as to not even being worth mention. A $20/month Linode account will give you enough bandwidth to distribute to the entire state, if not the entire nation. That is if you couldn't get someone like Microsoft or Google to host it for free.

Neither the iPads, nor the current general textbook purchases cover those with disabilities, and for those few kids that don't have access to read electronic books, an ebook reader can be had for less than the cost of a printed textbook. Frequently way less.

No, every one of your excuses are cop outs.

Yes, but alas, the situation is much more complicated than fishing.

The claim that kids and their parents don't have access to internet is severely overstated. We are not only talking about the US, we are talking about California. There is free internet everywhere for those of us that want it. Becoming an ISP would only be to try and capture those kids and parents where the parents find getting near a Starbucks, Lowes, Safeway, Home Depot, McDonalds, etc. to be more trouble than it's worth.

Beyond that, I have to question the intelligence of buying iPads. We are not in 2010 anymore. There are plenty of perfectly capable tablets available at under $100.

Yes. That is in fact precisely how I feel about it. Teaching 'em how to use the pole is right in there as well. It's woeful what the education system in this country has become. It's awful how entitlement programs are designed to self-perpetuate by cutting off recipients when they just begin to get their shit together. And it's awful how we don't actually permit people to be self-sufficient in this country; grow your own food in your own backyard and you just might get a visit from the cops.

Ranty McRanterson, I know. But seriously, at the rate at which we shit upon the disadvantaged in this country, it's a wonder we ever even hear from them, let alone see or smell them.

Well, at least there's that to make all this time spent Slashdotting worthwhile. If I am an anything fanboy, I am one for Neal Stephenson.

I had very few problems with termination on my Amiga. It seemed to work fine with any termination I used. Macs were where I had problems. And the Amiga was in fact the first computer that really had great plug and play. It had a microkernel-based OS and the drivers could be loaded from option ROM on the cards automatically, and then later they could be replaced in memory with a newer driver loaded from storage. In spite of this, Amiga themselves actually released at least one storage controller (MFM+SCSI) with no autoconfiguration; I had one in my first A2000 running a ST225 and later, a SQ135.

Yeah, for those users, Amiga offered the A2000 with an accelerator, and called it the A2500. You probably recall.

That's why they didn't do that. They wanted to maintain the library of software that would run on the A500. Without that, the A500 would have been a sad joke. At $600 as a package with a TV encoder, it was cheaper than most accelerators. You couldn't expect people to ever add anything but a memory upgrade.

That difference is minuscule compared to having an '020, let alone an '030.

Wasn't this the opening scene for Jurassic Park?

I suppose I'm discussing with some ukrainian "patriot".

A Finn who saw the scars your attempt to conquer our country left on innocent people. And now you're doing the exact same thing again - you prop up a puppet regime and have it request help. Only your puppet got ousted, so now you're going with plan B: russian troops posing as rebels.

Uncle Sam wants to fight "bad russkies" and he wants to do this with your hands beacuse it's cheaper.

You're wasting your time. Everyone who has the bad luck to live next to Russia knows the truth about you.

I'm a Pole - that's why I'm freaking out.

And Otto Wille Kuusinen was a Finn and Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian. Good luck on your chosen career.

I want no part in this madness.

Then stop working for a madman.

Because it was the thing to have, not just for the coolness factor or the utility of being able to run MacOS (and faster than it would run on the Mac, too) but because it added more I/O including some highly credible serial ports. You're going to use your serial port for a MIDI interface, right? Given that nearly all you need is some level-shifting hardware, since it has a 31,250bps mode? And if you have two Amigas, which is not unlikely since you might well want one with the old chipset and one with the new, your parallel port is likely to be used for PLIP. It's actually fairly speedy. Then you only need one egregiously expensive ethernet card.

I mean, if you're not messing with the Amiga to recapture the past, then what are you doing? Most of the classic games run in emulators, and there's really no point to using the hardware any more except as an affectation. It would be fun perhaps to use the Amiga in a nerdy stage show, but there's no point to trying to do "real work" with it. It's an amusement.