I've seen and read of schools investing millions in computers with no tangible results in students' scores, grades, or even elevated interests in learning.

That's because instead of investing millions in computers they should be investing millions in education. Remember: The XO is not a laptop, it is an educational tool.

The big problem is actually teaching something at all, ever, no matter the tools selected for education.

Exactly. If Dvorak doesn't like the idea of sending a truckload of XO's, perhaps he should suggest some other educational gift.

And we should probably insert that famous quote by Amartya Sen:

No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press.

Enterprise environments desperately need better storage density. For example, increasing government requirements for long term record storage mean that IT departments in the medial industry are increasingly stressed. As another example, the explosion of online media distribution (YouTubes, Napsters, and the like) require insane amounts of storage. You can't just keep making the data centers bigger. At some point you must increase the amount of storage each location can hold.

The home user is just one customer for hard drives, and probably not the one targeted for this capacity of hard drive (yet). However, think about the amount of storage required to store large amounts full-quality HD video on a DVR and you might see that in a few years time even the casual home user might require this amount of capacity.

Not so long ago a 10MB hard drive was considered huge and hard to fill to capacity.

With today's freely available (OSS) Free Pascal compiler it would be easy to get started using Pascal. This compiler not only understands the Borland flavour of Pascal, but it also has flags to compile other modes of Pascal, even Mac.

But I digress. Instead of teaching the language, teach the concepts, yes. I agree with that. I'm still teaching myself some basic things as a hobbyist, and this language/compiler have helped me come to understand some comp sci concepts, such as: linked lists, pointer management, etc {yes, pascal has pointers, sigh. yes they can be just as powerful}).

I offer this as an option instead of C. Use C if you want. Use pascal if you want to use something that was designed to HELP teach students, intitially. It's way more powerful than a toy however, Pascal has grown up, it never stopped growing, and now we have a free implementation that works on several platforms.

Guess I'll get modded down with you.

Good comments are not there to document what is obvious from reading the code they must add another information that one will not easily get otherwise.

For example, instead of a comment that explains *how* something works write comments when it's necessary to explain *why* you implemented things that way.

I have the Clarion Platinum Series, by Advanced Bionics. It has eight electrodes. I elected to have the simulatenous input, where all eight electrodes would fire simulatenously.

Sidebar: Not many could handle the simulatenous mode. It made me sick for a day, but then I could notice the improvement it made on my hearing.

The microphone is on my head, directly behind my left ear. I'm positive that it's located on my head. I'm somewhat a technological geek and I immediately located the microphone and turning my head does intensify/diminish the sound I'm hearing, if it wasn't ambient noise.

I'm currently fighting with the insurance company since they don't cover speech therapy. They do, however, cover physical therapy and that's how I'm trying to change their classification of `auditory training' so that it would be covered. At $280 per session, it's hard not to watch my wallet become the interest of physicists all over (ie it's becoming inverted into negative space.)