Of course the idea is inherently flawed. It is based on the premise that the reason these kids in these poorly performing schools are not learning is because they don't have access to electronic devices and that if they do have access to electronic devices, like the richer kids, they will perform better. The flaws in this premise are so obvious that only a Marxist/socialist progressive can't see them.

I read all four articles this submission linked to and none of them mentioned this as the motive for the programme. As far as I can tell, it's something you have made up; a straw-man you constructed just so you could knock it down. Can you offer a source that indicates this is their motivation?

There is no benefit to this other than to be able to claim that the school districts new and modern.

What's your basis for this claim? Do you actually know this or are you guessing?

There's lots of reasons why distributing learning materials electronically has advantages. I shouldn't really need to spell them out on Slashdot. And tablets - particularly iPads - are about as friendly to non-computer users as you can get.

Now, there may be some very good reasons why this particular rollout was flawed, but the idea of distributing tablets to kids is not inherently flawed. Do you have details on why this particular rollout was flawed?

So FTP (ftp:) and Email (mailto:) and Gopher (gopher:) are all the WWW?

Anything with a URI is on the WWW.

The WWW is the service that uses hyperlinks and URLs (which point away from the WWW).

URIs do not point away from the WWW, they reference resources on the WWW. Anything with a URI is part of the WWW, a URI pointing "away" from the WWW doesn't make sense. By giving something a URI, you are incorporating it into the WWW.

Since I can't follow a hyperlink from my POTS phone, it's not part of the WWW.

No, it just means that it's a leaf node. You can't follow a hyperlink from a JPEG image, does that mean that there are no JPEG images on the WWW?

Even Berners-Lee described it as a service running on the internet.

Go read Architecture of the World Wide Web , which was part-authored by Tim Berners-Lee. Or read some of his earlier work that this document was based upon, for instance Universal Resource Identifiers -- Axioms of Web Architecture , where he writes:

The Web is a universal information space. It is a space in the sense that things in it have an address. The "addresses", "names", or as we call them here identifiers, are the subject of this article. They are called Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs).

An information object is "on the web" if it has a URI.

Sorry, WWW is the web - nothing else.

Of course. It's a tautology - the WWW is the WWW. That doesn't contradict anything I said and I'm not sure what you think you are pointing out.

tel URLs may be part of 'the web' in the sense that you may put tel:-links in your web pages -- but that doesn't make tel: or ftp: or telnet: or gopher: whatever other protocol identifier you may have "the web".

Anything addressable by URI is part of the web. All of those things are leaf nodes in the information space that is the web.

By listing those things, it sounds like you are thinking that the WWW is HTTP. The WWW is not a protocol. It's an abstract information space. This is the misconception I was trying to clear up in my earlier comment. HTTP is not the defining technical aspect of the web - URIs are, and URIs are not limited to HTTP.

The Web was invented at Cern, not the Internet - the Internet has been around long before then.

I know this. This doesn't contradict anything I said. The fact that something predates the web does not mean that the web cannot encompass it. Would you say that The Colosseum isn't in Italy because it existed before Italy?

I really don't think you understood what I was trying to explain. The WWW is an information space that describes a web of interconnected resources. Just because something is older than the web or just because it uses a particular protocol that isn't HTTP, it doesn't mean it can't be an entity in that information space. Read Architecture of the World Wide Web for more information on this.

WWW is a subset of the Internet.

This is a common misconception. The WWW is not merely stuff transmitted over TCP port 80 on the Internet. It's an information space that has the ability to use the Internet as a transport mechanism. It's not a subset of the Internet, it's a higher level abstraction than the Internet.

Anything addressable by URI is a node in the WWW. For instance, POTS telephone numbers are leaf nodes because you can address them with tel:. They are on the WWW but they aren't on the Internet. Something can be on the WWW and not on the Internet and vice-versa.

Would the iPhone 5C exist if Android wasn't around?

Yes, of course it would. The 5C is essentially an iPhone 5 with a slightly bigger battery and different case. It's been a long-standing strategy for Apple to retain the previous year's model, so it's not something unusual that needs explaining by pressure from Android. The only real change is the new branding, and the colours have precedents with iPods and iMacs. I don't see anything that's a direct response to Android as opposed to Apple doing what Apple have always done.

Are you under the impression that the 5C is a budget model intended to compete with the low-end Android phones? Those were the rumours a couple of months ago, but the rumours were wrong.

Linux games that run well across multiple distributions have been out since when, the original Unreal Tournament? Perhaps even earlier? I'm talking about commercial games of course, if you go to the free software offerings the list gets larger.

Slightly earlier. There's two companies in particular that really gave a boost to commercial games on Linux - iD Software and Loki Software. It always seemed to be a bit of a hobby with iD, but Loki made their bread and butter porting games like Civ:CTP and they developed a cross-distro installer/updater they used for all of their games.

That's a bit complicated isn't it? I know in a lot of versions, you could just hit escape and you'd be dumped onto the desktop.

The original iPhone didn't really do anything that wasn't available elsewhere already.

I'm pretty sure it did. Visual voicemail for instance. Or a proper web browser.

The UK Official Secrets Act applies to all British subjects

This is not true. There are some parts that only apply to government workers, and there are some parts that apply to everybody, regardless of nationality.

Also, practically nobody is a British subject these days, and this has been the case for over 30 years. People with british nationality are British citizens, not subjects. British subjects are a different category and there's hardly anybody in that category. It's mostly just a historical technicality that the category even exists.

You missed my point. Just because you can see that some multitasking occurs, it doesn't mean that apps can't be killed in the background and then restarted transparently to the end user.

Look at what I was responding to:

I am never certain my apps have not exited in the background and will launch from scratch

Even if you can show a composited screen with some of your apps running at the same time, it doesn't mean that when you close that view, some of them aren't killed, or that others that aren't visible aren't being killed.

This is a practice that desktop operating systems are moving towards for efficiency reasons. There are clear gains to be had here for mobile operating systems, and it's reasonable to assume that any mainstream mobile OS does this to some extent.

Yet generally, I do not seem to suffer from bad battery life or memory management issues on my N9 compared to the Android phones I have. Could it be that running closer to the silicon with C, C++ and Qt apps compared to Android's virtual machine compensates for some of that putative running-in-the-background inefficiency?

Possibly. Or it may simply be the case that the apps on your Nokia phone are exiting in the background and you just aren't aware of it. I'm not familiar with the way apps running on your N9 work in this respect, but I'm an iOS developer, and I've lost count of the number of iOS users I've talked to who think that apps are running just because they appear in the app list when you double tap the home button. You can make quitting and restarting pretty seamless on iOS, the only perceptible difference from a user's perspective in most cases is a slight delay. There's no reason your Nokia couldn't be doing the same.

On Android and iOS, apart from the fact that it is much slower to switch between apps, I am never certain my apps have not exited in the background and will launch from scratch and you have to jump some serious UI hoops if you actually want to force an app to restart.

Alternative viewpoint: If apps are constantly running in the background, they are using up resources, and if you feel the need to force apps to restart, there's something wrong with them.

So Elop left Microsoft to head up Nokia, where he made supposedly very idiotic changes that had the effect of destroying Nokia's share price. Microsoft then buys Nokia at a fraction of the cost it would otherwise have been, and Elop returns to a prestigious role at Microsoft, where he's in with a shot at the CEO role.

That doesn't look the slightest bit dodgy at all.

"Wreckless" and "reckless" are two entirely different things. You can't be reckless and stay wreckless for long.