The teacher is claiming, specifically, that not paying off credit cards increases your credit score. This is wrong. It has nothing to do with budgeting, or leasing, or mortgages. It's about building credit via using credit cards.

You make a small purchase every month and pay it off in full. That is how you build credit. If you drive, the easiest is gas. Otherwise, groceries.

Last year my son's high school economics teacher told her class to put a balance on their first credit card and make minimum payments on it to build credit, which is 100% incorrect. Financial literacy is a problem in this country.

I think that's why 90% of people still use AOL. It's been their email address forever. I have two neighbors who still have paid (cheap) AOL accounts just to keep their email addresses.

AOL was not an internet pioneer. They were an evolution of Quantum Link, an old fashioned on-line service for Commodore computers, that competed with other nationwide services like Compuserve, GEnie, The Well and Prodigy. They actively resisted the internet until people started demanding it, and it got to being ridiculous that you couldn't access the web from AOL itself. By the time AOL introduced full, unrestricted internet access, there were already a dozen or so national ISPs doing the same thing.

I've had a PHEV for six years. It was well known when I bought the car that cold lowered the battery range. The solution is to keep it plugged in. When you tell the car what time you will be leaving in the morning, it will pre-warm the car and batteries using shore power to keep your range up. It will still be less than when it's warm, but it will be far better than starting from freezing.

My friend is the VMWare manager for a good sized university. They use it for nearly everything - desktop provisioning, servers, backups, network management, etc... Since they are so huge, I think they negotiated a lower license rate, but they are definitely eyeballing alternatives for the server stuff.

It most certainly is. At the time of it's inception, the only way to distribute audio over the internet was to stream it using shoutcast on a server platform, or one of the expensive commercial streaming platforms by Real, or Microsoft, or Apple.

For a podcast, all you needed was an RSS feed, which any blogging platform could provide, and a place to put mp3 files, which could be provided by the blogging platform, or free storage on Geocities or Yahoo.

You can absolutely spend a ton of money nowadays producing a podcast and hosting them, but the reason it exists is that costs almost nothing to distribute.

A podcast I listen to regularly likes pointing out how a one hour NPR podcast has something like 10 people making it. Producers, hosts, executive producers, editors, story consultants, etc... That podcast has two hosts that do everything. Most of the podcasts I listen to only have two or three people producing them. The one "corporate" podcast I listen to has three hosts and one producer.

The whole point of podcasting is that it's lean and efficient. You don't need expensive equipment and a dozen people. The running joke amongst the independent podcasters is that when a company announces a major podcast investment, start keeping an eye out a year or two later as when they liquidate their studios you'll be able to pick up some really nice Neumann vocal microphones for pennies on the dollar.

People thought computers would crush the working class because only rich people would have access to them. People are still making that argument to this day.

I said DC. The family lives in DC.

No, because for general internet browsing and searching I used Firefox with a script blocker. I use Chrome to access gmail and drive, and that's all. But, I get your point.

There was a news story from Washington DC, where the daughter of a Pentagon staffer had a 4.0 GPA in high school, then went in to military college and had to take remedial algebra and trig classes, as math at her high school topped out at basic algebra and geometry.

My high school math curriculum ended with pre-calc, or intro to calc in the advanced class, which wasn't even AP.

Current reading curricula is abysmal. My son is a senior in high school and has only had to read one book cover to cover. They read blog posts and news articles and short stories, but hardly any books. Fortunately he reads on his own for fun, so has decent reading comprehension. You can tell which kids don't read outside of class. Usually they can't follow a simple list of tasks or requirements.

I think people keep forgetting that the point of anti-monopoly laws are to protect the *consumer* from financial damage. What financial damage are consumers facing when they use Google Search?

The second factor to consider is friction. How hard is it to not use Google Search? It takes about two seconds to type in another URL. It takes about ten seconds to change the default browser in Chrome to something other than Google. How long does it take to install a browser other than Chrome? A minute or two?