TL;DR your wrong, please go read the summary again.

From the summary

"AT&T overcharged two Florida school districts for phone service"
"AT&T prices charged to the districts were almost 400 percent higher than they should have been"
"AT&T violated the FCC's "lowest corresponding price rule" designed to ensure that schools and libraries "get the best rates available by prohibiting E-Rate service providers..."
"AT&T charged the school districts prices for telephone service that were magnitudes higher than many other customers in Florida,"

So, where in the summary does it actually say the FCC pays for the services themselves? AT&T should repay $63,760 it improperly received from the FCC in subsidies and the fine should go the school district to cover their high telecom costs.

If we want to argue what the summary says, it specifically calls out the fact that the districts we're over charged AND AT&T improperly received the subsidies (and it wasn't FCC money, the subsidies specifically come from a surcharge on everyone's phone bills... so that was OUR money).

Why doesn't the $170K go directly to the school district? I doubt the FCC has anything to do with ensuring the school districts budgets are compensated.

Seconded.

Everyone Else.

Its going to be something like this that will bring along the the AI uprising, innocent infinite Tamagochi matrix develops a glitch and hello Robotic Tamagotchi uprising!

I just know it!

One server, run virtual desktops and have 35-50 thin clients driving your monitors.

Its because of the "no one has ever lost a job buying Cisco" attitude that is so prevalent in the industry, many engineers drank the cool aid long ago and don't want to admit that Cisco is not completely infallible.

Almost every network engineer I know has some sort of Cisco certification, people have to continue to justify the heft price for the hardware and the expensive certifications.

Had there been no 4th or 6th grade levels, and had the "6th" graders grown up in a system where they themselves were mentors, the situation you described would not have existed.

having "grades" based on age creates a pseudo class system among students, 6th grade students feel superior to the 4th grade creating a situation where bullying is almost imminent. Strong personalities need a strong moral compass, putting the more developed kids in to a leadership role teaches them the necessary social skills to be effective leaders and not lash out at the week within the group.

You distract the kitten with the laser pointer before it explodes! Duh....

Starting from the firewall, infrastructure hardware:
Old PC with added NIC's running Astaro (now Sophos) UTM
HP Procurve 1800-8G switch (in the server closet)
Dlink 8 port gig switch in the basement (media access)
HP Procurve 802.11G AP in the basement
Qnap TS-419PII NAS (with 4x2TB drives)
Meraki 802.11N AP (Demo unit, upstairs)

Clients
7x Android\iOS devices (phones and tablets)
3x PC\Laptops
4x TV\Media players (Smart TV with Netflix, XBMC, BoxOffice, AV Unit)
2x Audio streaming devices (Squeezebox)
1x Hot Tub (remote controlled over IP)
1x Brultech home energy monitor
1x Lexmark laser printer

The phones and tablets are capable of remote controlling the media centres, audio streaming and the hot tub, good wifi coverage on both side of the house (up and down).

Sounds like your typical corporate junket.... except these aren't corporation!

Beat me to it!

Now we have to deal with peer pressure in the datacenter! Dirty cloud huggers!

Two cases of beer have been delivered to Harper already!

The U.S. just needs to lock up Bieber and we're good.

Have you seen the new tractors and combines that are available now? GPS guided, fully automated harvesting, feeding, fertilizing, etc... Automation is making its way to all areas of employment, including farm hands.

I think there are lot of useful cases, but I don't think voice control would be useful however (nobody wants to have a conversation with their microwave).

Lighting automation would be useful in a number of ways; on\off\vacation schedule, see a list of all active lights with power consumption (and then turn them off remotely), auto on\off depending on your location, etc...

Appliance automation; coffee pots have timers but why not control the settings from your remote device? Preheat the oven remotely, schedule your slow cooker based on your schedule, notifications when timers are done (microwave, oven, washer, dryer, etc...)

Power Monitoring; get a detailed report on power consumption per appliance, room, season and setup automation depending on peak hour usage rates.

Audio\Video: Crestron has some great automation, Logitech has excellent remotes, imagine if you could control the lights when settling in to watch a movie.

Security; get live feeds from your house, pickup audio, two way communication, remotely control locks (real security concern here however), random light control when on vacation.

All of these things can be done but are not integrated. If all these devices worked together we could think of some really creative ways to automate, making a phone or tablet the central control device for the home would be genius!