If students didn't have them or smart phones, they'd be doodling, spacing out, sleeping in class as well. It is just a diversion.

That are 100% human controlled in the USA. but the first death at the hands of autonomous vehicles will be all over CNN the first time it happens. There will be congressional investigations, Department of Transportation studies, and on and on - yet, ideally they theoretically take the worst part of driving out of the equation - the driver.

I converted the ObjC to java utilizing a home grown tool, it doesn't spit out perfectly compilable code, but good enough that a few hours of tweaking and fixing a few oddities (grand central dispatch) it was all working flawlessly. Using SQLite as the data store and avoiding CoreData was a big help, just custom data type objects and custom reader code (I did have to write a custom class to map the cursor reading the data in java). Process would be the same for Windows phone as well. Now, the trouble is, you make a change to business logic on one platform you need to make sure it is representative across all of them...

For iOS I obviously stuck with XCode. All the business code was in ObjC and the database was SQLite. So, in .NET (since I can write things quickly in that) I wrote a simple lexer that converted almost all the ObjC business code to Java. After that, it was a matter of fixing some compile errors, but a much better time savings than rewriting all the code from scratch. With this approach, there were no new bugs (well limited) introduced since I was able to use proven code.

I built a rather extensive commercial App on iOS. By abstracting the data/business layers well, when going to android it was as simple as writing a lexer to convert almost all the code. What took me 1000 hours of development took 8 hours to port over.

The only thing that was really required was writing the UI, which was targeted for Android.

Whatever their lobbyists tell them to do. Nothing more.

At home, people frankly don't need PCs anymore. At work? Yes.

My mother, nope - doesn't need a PC. All she does it surf the internet and check her email. Pages is more than enough if she needed to write a word document.

If my grandparents needed a device? I'd get them a tablet. There is simply nothing they do that would require a PC. Email, photos? All through a tablet.

I don't see most of the population needed a PC anymore, it is simply too much for anything they would ever do.

Not to say there isn't a need for a PC market, but IMO that market is much smaller than most think.

Of course physicians can make better informed decisions, they are pragmatic and know the results and outcome of disease

But what about when their child gets sick? Do they make the same decisions then? It is one thing to make those decisions on your own, but what happens when it is applied to someone else you care for?

I assume the results are different.

It is with the fact that companies like Monsanto now *own* the genetic code to the crop and can destroy anyone they think is "using" it without paying them a fee.

That is the real danger and threat to society. Add in the few strains of the crop being produced now and it becomes an even bigger threat to being totally wiped out with a single disease.

Monsanto and their unholy alliance with the US Government is the danger, people.

That public schools in America are nothing more than prisons?