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Check out an eighth grade exam from 1900. They had to know as much as you would at the end of high school, maybe the first year of college, except for calculus and trigonometry.

http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Teachers/1895exam.html -- though note some of the answers given are wrong, such as that given for "case", "cognate", and "trigraph"; and "syllabification" is used instead of "syllabication" these days.

At any rate, I believe that we've been giving less content to students and keeping them for longer hours.

Wow, it's true - be ignorant of history and it's as if you were born yesterday.
From music law:

In 1917, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled that all uses of copyrighted work, even those for which a specific fee was not charged, required compensation.

So ASCAP became, in a sense, a collection agency for creators who did not have the time or resources to monitor thousands of outlets themselves. It would charge users a blanket fee, usually based on some percentage of their income, and then split it up among ASCAP's members.

But even though ASCAP's mission was legal, it took more than a decade to whip everyone into line, from hotel and restaurant owners to theater operators.

Radio finally signed up, too, though not happily. As recorded music gradually became the backbone of radio programming, ASCAP payments turned into an ever-growing expense - though in the bigger picture, still a modest one. In 1939, the dominant NBC network earned a $45.2 million profit on ad sales of $165 million. ASCAP's total charge to all of radio, NBC included, was $4.3 million. But that wasn't radio's only concern about ASCAP.

First, by the 1930s the major movie studios had bought up many music publishing houses, to ensure themselves a steady flow of music for films. As radio saw it, this tilted ASCAP policies toward Hollywood rather than radio.

Second, ASCAP had become virtually the only game in town for popular music - a fact that not only gave it muscle in dealing with licensees but enabled it to tightly control which writers could get into the lucrative ASCAP game.

Unless you bundle it with some kind of computer giveaway or those fabled $100 laptops, it's not going to be the 'great internet equalizer' or lead to any kind of social equity...

It's not hard to buy a $100 computer. It's not going to be particular new or (in my opinion) particularly useable, but you can get one.

Just check craigslist or your local flea market or swap meet. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if computer donation charities get a growth spurt
because of this wifi program. Check out some links like these for information on donating your own old machines:

http://www.crc.org/
http://www.techsoup.org/recycle/donate
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Computers_fo r_Learning_pro.html

-Cinnamon

I love that old joke, what's so hard about the english language?

Plural of Goose is Geese
Plural of Moose is Moose.

Tooth, Teeth
Booth, Booth

What's not to get?
(More at places like this: http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Literacy/reading.asp )

I'd guess many more than 50% of computers in operation have a CD drive. Probably more like 80%. This article about technology in schools says about 50% of computers in U.S. schools had CD-ROM drives as of 1998. I'm sure things are different in some other countries. The stat is from seven years ago and schools tend to be behind home use in technology in the U.S.

I'd guess a bit more than 10% have DVD drives.

Zip isn't dead just yet, but what hurts it the most is the price, not the technology. Sure, I can get a working used Zip250 drive for $5 (and did recently), but the disks are more than that apiece.

I'd say a lot less than 95% of today's computers have USB installed. CD-ROM drives have been around much longer than USB. Sure, you can add a PCI USB card to most PCs but many people haven't. Some "bargain" PCs from a few years ago have no expansion slots at all.

Portable HDs require SCSI, USB, or Firewire. There are lots of systems out there that have none of these.

Removable mass media as a whole is obviously not dead. The RIAA and MPAA are fighting for every penny they can get from a huge removable mass media distribution system. The electronics department at most discount stores has more space devoted to prerecorded removable mass media than to the devices to read them, the screens on which the video is displayed, and the audio systems on which the sound is played combined.

The 3.5" floppy will die when there's an alternative that costs less than $5 per unit for media and is re-recordable in a decent amount of time. None of the flash-based media (CF, xD, SD, MMC, Memory Stick, etc) are at that price point yet. Zip isn't there. CD-RW and DVD-RW need someone to figure out how to record new data over the old without a separate blanking process.

32 meg SD cards are on Froogle today at $8.31 per unit. Once that's down a few dollars and nearly all the PCs shipped in a 5-year period have card slots the we'll see CF1/CF2/SD/MMC/SM/SMC/xD/MemoryStick1/MemoryStick2 /MemoryStickPro/MemoryStick Duo/MemoryStickROM/whatever take off.

The card readers make more sense than individually packaged USB drives. Even a 7-in-1 and sometimes a 9-in-1 reader is cheaper than one unit of the media anyway. There's no reason not to package a new system with a multi-format card reader and save the user the expense of buying the reader over and over with each unit of the memory.

Make PCs and Macs bootable from USB (or internal with some other interface) card readers, make card readers ubiquitous, make the media cheaper, and kiss the floppy goodbye in a few years.

Who will own the content that is typed in the laptop. The school can claim they own the laptops. Unlike a paper notebook, that is mine and it would take a court order to look in it. Plus, it is not like mail, which is even more gaurded. I can see relationships between people breaking down as everyone is worried about saying the wrong thing.

Your homework (and the teacher's lesson plans for that matter) can be classified as work-for-hire and the school could claim copyright on anything you did for a class. I've never heard of a school doing this though!

More info:

• Who Owns What?
• K-12 PRIMER ABOUT COPYRIGHT LAW

The second link says you must sign a work-for-hire agreement before your work can be classified as work-for-hire, but as with all things copyright, see a lawyer! :-)

This land is your land, this land is my land
From the redwood forest to the New York island.
From the snow-capped mountains to the Gulf Stream waters
This land is made for you and me.

As I go walkin' my ribbon of highway
I see all around me my blue blue skyway
Everywhere around me the wind keeps a-whistlin'
This land is made for you and me.

I'm a-chasin' my shadow out across this roadmap
To my wheat fields waving, to my cornfield dancing
As I go walkin' this wind keeps talkin'
This land is made for you and me.

I can see your mailbox, I can see your doorstep
I can feel my wind rock your tip-top treetop
All around your house there my sunbeam whispers
This land is made for you and me.

"Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted, said 'Private property.'
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
This land was made for you and me."

• At an NPR story: here and here
• Here for more info.
• Here for info from the Woodiy Guthrie foundation.
• Here for the Lyrics from Arlo Guthrie, Woody's Son.
• 
  
  IMHO whoever claims to "own" this is as sick as the people who claim to "own" the image of Martin Luther King as property. See the commentrary at the internet archive: here.

Here's a link with more information about the uniqueness of the recording:
Woody Guthrie - This Land Is Your Land

You mean like .us ? That's the top level domain for the United States. There's a list here

This is abso-friggin-lutely right. Dave Farber is no MS stooge. For the uninitiated, Mssr. phriedom, you might check out a couple of links about the man before making a fool of yourself.

jMC

Consider basic telephone service. Almost 6% of households in the US do not have telephone service. (See also here and here.) If we as a society were really interested in bridging the "digital divide", shouldn't we be trying to help the 6% of our population who are still living in the 1800's, rather than trying to help the (relatively well-off) 50% or so who have most 20th-century technology but simply don't have internet access?