A newspaper may, in the end, make money largely through advertising, and to a lesser extent from subscriptions. Economy of scale has a lot of importance here - bit companies will be tens of thousands for a large, well placed advertisement.
How is the "talent" supposed to make money without the newspaper? A few click-throughs on a couple of Google ads are not going to replace the salary paid by a newspaper or magazine.
From the linked article dated March 10, 2010: Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.
Fixing the American classroom is definitely necessary. American high school kids now rank below average on academic skills amongst developed nations. But furniture is the least of it. Money is also not the problem - we spend far more than we used to, and still results are going down. How about these:
- Scrap teacher's colleges, and scrap teaching degrees. For primary school accept any of several college degrees, plus a couple of courses in child psychology, plus passing a general competence test. Above primary school, require a degree in what the person wants to teach, plus a couple of pedagogical courses.
- Save money by eliminating bureaucracy. The previous city I lived in, there were more people working in school administration that there were teaching. Fire most of the adminstrative staff.
- Get rid of teachers' unions. Their sole purpose is to be to prevent any teacher - no matter how incompetent - from being fired. When the lousy teachers continue to get paid for doing jack all, how can you encourage and support the good teachers?
- Reinstate advanced courses and limit them to the best students. For every $1 spent on special-needs kids (bottom-end of the bell curve) we ought to spend $5 on students at the top-end of the bell curve. It's not PC, but these are the students who will be driving the economy in 20 years.
- Last but not least, return control of the schools to the local communities. State and federal involvement only adds more layers of bureaucracy.
I haven't even seen the first one, and I already want AdBlock. Heck, I want AdBlock for my whole life.
Sure, the ads aren't intrusive...yet. If ads are not intrusive, the advertisers are not getting their money's worth, and they will demand that the ads become intrusive. Look at other media. Commercials DVDs now have unskippable ads at the start - horrible. Ads in web pages also started out pretty harmless. Now, without AdBlock, many sites are practically unusable.
The problem is that politics are not a simple left-right. Look at the Pournelle Axes on Wikipedia - they make a lot of things come clear. There are really two questions to ask:
1. Do you believe in big government? If you do, on the Pournelle Axes, you are on the right. If not (e.g., Libertarian), you are on the left. Both Democrats and Republicans have become "big government" parties.
2. Should the government drive social change? The democrats tend to say yes (Obamacare, New Deal, welfare programs, etc.), placing them in the top of the diagram. The Republicans tend to say "no", and hence are in the bottom half.
The problem in American politics is that there is no credible movement anywhere in the left half of this diagram. With any luck, maybe the Tea Party will change that - but this is not yet clear...
> Its a law of physics that CO2 is an infrared absorber - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true.
Its a fact that CO2 levels are rising in our atmosphere - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true
Its a fact that most of that rise is due to man - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true.
- - - - -
But your questions are too simple. The last time I posted an answer like this, I was immediately modded troll. But hope springs eternal, so here is why I count myself as a skeptic. Here are some further questions:
Will increasing CO2 increase the temperature of the earth? This is not certain, because of the complex interactions of the climate. One example: raise the temperature, and you get more water vapor. More water vapor yields more clouds, which have a *massive* cooling effect. In short: it is entirely possible that CO2 has a negligible effect on the temperature.
Set the temperature question aside for a moment: is a higher CO2 level a bad thing? CO2's primary effect on the planet is "plant food". Commercial greenhouses deliberately increase CO2 in order to increase their crop yields. If we could magically reduce CO2 to 19th century levels, we would see crop yields fall substantially.
Back to temperature. If the earth's temperature does rise, is this a bad thing? Historically, warmer periods have been times of prosperity. Most of the earth is in the temperate zone, and warmer temperatures improve the climate, lengthen growing seasons, etc. Imagine frozen Siberia as the bread basket of Asia. It is not clear that a warmer earth is bad.
Finally, how do we measure the temperature of the earth? There are many temperature stations scattered about, but the majority of them do not comply with the guidelines set up to ensure accurate measurement. Many are at airports (lots of tarmac), others - especially in very cold climates - are placed conveniently near buildings. These and other siting issues make the temperature measurements inaccurate. Satellite measurements have their own difficulties. The more you read about these issues, the clearer it becomes that we do not currently have reliable temperature measurements.
So: on the basis of inaccurate temperature data and ineffective models, what should we do? Should we commit trillions of dollars to drastic policies based on questionable science? Or should we, maybe, invest in a decent network of weather stations, invest in climate science, and *understand* what is going on?
Climate is complex, and the one thing certain about all of the climate models developed to date is that they fail to model climate. If a model is to be useful, it must make falsifiable predictions of future events. To date, no model has done better than a random-number generator. Tropical storms were supposed to increase, but did not. Sea level was supposed to rise faster that ever. In fact, the sea level has been rising steadily since the last ice age,, but the rise has actually slowed in recent times. If one thing is clear, it is that our understanding of climate is woefully inadequate.
Google screwed up here, accidentally capturing all of this data. Why they didn't just delete it, rather than doing this whole "hair shirt" thing is more than a bit weird.
But: whose fault is it, actually? If you transmit a radio signal into the public domain, do you have any expectation of privacy? Seems to me that the people using unsecured networks share a large portion of the blame here.
For the obligatory car analogy: leaving your router unlocked is like leaving your car unlocked. Transmitting unencrypted login credentials using your unlocked router is like - what? Maybe parking your car in the Bronx and leaving the keys in the ignition?
It might have been malware (maldata?) if the guy had sold his work to unscrupulous companies. Instead, the researcher who developed the Evercookie has done us all a favor: he published exactly what Evercookie does. This makes everyone aware of the problem, and you can bet that browsers and add-ins will address the problem soon.
Evercookie makes it clear that browsers need a central administration panel to manage all data that can be stored - directly or indirectly - by websites. I expect that the next major browser releases will include exactly this.
Add-ins like Flash are a more difficult problem: Really, they should only be allowed to store data through the browser, so that their storage can also be properly managed. However, Adobe (and Microsoft, and Apple, and...) will try to keep this off the radar screen.
Sure, Wikipedia is a great resource for basic information on a lot of topics. However, behind the scenes, the "volunteer politics" get pretty ugly. The kind of people who would put up with this on a Wiki-University scale are not the kidn of people you want as professors.
Professors "longevity would be determined by the community"? Even tenured professors dare not say politically incorrect things - else their tenure is suddenly meaningless. Imagine if professors held their positions on the whim of the students!
Universities should be non-profit? Why exactly? Non-profit organizations do good work in some fields, but they are just as driven as corporations - just towards different goals.
Professors should "move back and forth between the 'real world' and the university? Sure, that sounds like the kind of career that lets you do long term planning, raise a family, etc.
To the credit of the author, TFA ends with: Mr. Staley "clearly understands Wikipedia about as well as he understands universities. That is, not very well."
How about requiring the students to study and do their homework - and hold their parents responsible? We are talking here about the permanent troublemakers in schools. Those kids who would rather screw off, and disrupt the whole class doing it - far more entertaining that actually cracking a book.
Here's an example of what this educational material is really about - everything you need to know about President Monroe:
"White men getting richer than Enron. They stepping on Indians, women and blacks."
Yes, we see now. There's no social agenda here, this is truly quality education. Grammatically correct, too./sarcasm
How many of us would like to (a) help distrubute useful stuff, (b) make the lives of the **AA more difficult and (c) supporte the use of BitTorrent for distribution?
I would be more than happy to serve all three of these goals by adding BitTorrent to our company's server. The problem is finding torrents that make sense. They must be unequivocally 100% legal to distribute, and there ought to be some benefit to someone in having another seed - i.e., there are currently too few seeds out there. Probably the files to be distributed will change over time.
Does anyone have suggestions how to find content that meets these criteria?
The loss of vertical pixels is irritating, but it is only one aspect of the fact that so many monitors are formatted for watching movies. Surely computers are used mostly as computers and only sometimes as televisions - why do they all have to have this stupid, inefficient wide format?
Anyway, the other aspect of this problem is the overall loss of resolution. Twenty years ago, as a grad student, I bought a CRT monitor (24", iirc) that let me work comfortably at 2560x2048. This was great for programming, or indeed any sort of technical work!
That monitor was a standard, if somewhat expensive, Viewsonic product. Try finding an equivalent monitor today. If you are willing to shell out for a 30" monitor, you still won't find anything better than 2560x1600.
A random anecdote having nothing to do with e-voting, but probably a lot to do with the quality of voting IT systems: Last year, I asked for an absentee ballot, and never received it. This year, I asked for an absentee ballot, and received three, sent at different times, over the course of several days.
Electronic voting may be a disaster, but there are some other really fundamental flaws in the system:
If someone dies, or for that matter if they move, there is no system in place to ensure that their voter registration is cancelled. Makes "voting the graveyard" trivially easy, especially since...
Most places make little or no effort to identify the people casting the votes. You should be required to present a government-issued photo ID in order to vote, and that ID ought to be checked. I specifically know of an incident where a "little old lady" went to vote, but her number was already crossed off on the list.
Most places make little or no effort to prevent people from casting multiple votes. Referring to the little old lady above, what do you supposed happened? The person at the desk said, "oh, terribly sorry, must have been a mistake", and the little old lady was allowed to cast her vote.
Get decent administrative systems run by competent people in place first. Then, maybe, we can think about electronic voting.
Global warming not only doesn't exist, even the "movers and shakers" now realize it. We have come full cycle (and there are cycles) and are now in a cooling phase. Just like in the late 1970's, in the next several years, people will start to panic about global cooling.
Likely there is no conspiracy - incompetence is a sufficient explanation. Each generation has discover something to panic about, and no one pays attention to history: cold times around 1910, hot times around 1940, cold times around 1970, hot times around 2000, anyone starting to notice a pattern here?
Robert Bruce Thompson write science books for home study. He is currently working on a set of science kits to accompany them. You can find more information at Make: Science Room.
This sort of micromanagement is nuts. My son is - entirely coincidentally - just this instant reading a web-site about crazy laws. Like it being illegal to throw a moose out of a helicopter (Alaska), or it being illegal to sing in public in a swimsuit (Florida, I think he said).
All these sorts of laws - including the one about volume in commercials - are the result of knee-jerk reactions by legislators who have lost sight of the big picture. Probably some idiot did through a moose out of a helicopter - there's no need to add a law governing this. If the government must regulate it, this is in the purview of the FCC.
Better would be to leave it to the free market. As far as I can see, television stations are doomed anyway - the quantity, volume and general stupidity of commercials has increased dramatically in the past decade or two. If the stations continue down this path, in another decade or two, no one will care, because no one will watch standard TV anymore - everyone will be streaming over the Internet.
The Congresscritters are probably hoping that little "treats" like this will save their collective ass in the upcoming elections. In fact, they have once again proven that they need all need to be removed from office for blatant incompetence.
Why do you say forums.officer.com needs trolled? As far as I can see, most posters there agree with the decision, and also say that the cop was an idiot for pulling his gun.
There are idiots in any group. Most cops are reasonable folks. The problem is only: you never know which kind you have...
A year or two ago, they actually purchased stolen bank data, and then helped the thief go into hiding.
As far as I can see, there is every reason to charge the officials involved with trafficking in stolen goods.
We have also dabbled our toes in ebooks - we have two smart-phones, one dedicated reader, and a library of maybe 50 ebooks (as opposed to a couple thousand paper books). Even at 50 books, I am already frustrated by the quality of the ebook software on all of these devices. Reading is ok - it's the library management that sucks. Even PC-based software like Calibre isn't much good.
Here's an example: Suppose you have a mass of titles by the same author, some are individual books, others belong to various series. You've just finished a book, and want to read the next one in that particular series. With paper books, I will have put the books on the shelf in the right order. Put the finished book back, take the next one to the right. With ebooks? The books are most likely sorted by title. The series information is generally not available. You wind up opening up several books, hoping that they list the series in the right order, or that you can tell from the publication date.
This is just one minor frustration among many. When I imagine having a couple of thousand ebooks in one library - gack, it's really a pretty horrible thought.
As a techie, I send maybe one SMS per week. After a while you realize that there is such a thing as being *too* reachable. If you're getting dozens of SMS's a day, plus calls, IM, Twitter, and what not - well, there's no time to actually *do* anything.
Any answer depends partially on the official policy of your institution - particularly regarding the international students.
My usual rules for a course of this type: any standard calculator the students want. That's a dedicated calculator, not a phone or whatever. Any books and papers the students want - which may (obviously) include a paper dictionary for the international students.
It's laudable that you offer to buy calculators yourself, but don't. The practical reason: It provides students a reason to argue if they fail (his calculators didn't work, I didn't know how to use them). The political reason: schools are only too happy to have instructors donate time and money, because we care about our courses and students - this is a stupid situation that needs no encouragement.
Slashdot Mirror
A newspaper may, in the end, make money largely through advertising, and to a lesser extent from subscriptions. Economy of scale has a lot of importance here - bit companies will be tens of thousands for a large, well placed advertisement.
How is the "talent" supposed to make money without the newspaper? A few click-throughs on a couple of Google ads are not going to replace the salary paid by a newspaper or magazine.
Note that the EU directive is being fought - successfully - by activist in individual countries. In March, Germany ruled the directive to be unconstitutional:
From the linked article dated March 10, 2010: Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.
Fixing the American classroom is definitely necessary. American high school kids now rank below average on academic skills amongst developed nations. But furniture is the least of it. Money is also not the problem - we spend far more than we used to, and still results are going down. How about these:
- Scrap teacher's colleges, and scrap teaching degrees. For primary school accept any of several college degrees, plus a couple of courses in child psychology, plus passing a general competence test. Above primary school, require a degree in what the person wants to teach, plus a couple of pedagogical courses.
- Save money by eliminating bureaucracy. The previous city I lived in, there were more people working in school administration that there were teaching. Fire most of the adminstrative staff.
- Get rid of teachers' unions. Their sole purpose is to be to prevent any teacher - no matter how incompetent - from being fired. When the lousy teachers continue to get paid for doing jack all, how can you encourage and support the good teachers?
- Reinstate advanced courses and limit them to the best students. For every $1 spent on special-needs kids (bottom-end of the bell curve) we ought to spend $5 on students at the top-end of the bell curve. It's not PC, but these are the students who will be driving the economy in 20 years.
- Last but not least, return control of the schools to the local communities. State and federal involvement only adds more layers of bureaucracy.
I haven't even seen the first one, and I already want AdBlock. Heck, I want AdBlock for my whole life.
Sure, the ads aren't intrusive...yet. If ads are not intrusive, the advertisers are not getting their money's worth, and they will demand that the ads become intrusive. Look at other media. Commercials DVDs now have unskippable ads at the start - horrible. Ads in web pages also started out pretty harmless. Now, without AdBlock, many sites are practically unusable.
The problem is that politics are not a simple left-right. Look at the Pournelle Axes on Wikipedia - they make a lot of things come clear. There are really two questions to ask:
1. Do you believe in big government? If you do, on the Pournelle Axes, you are on the right. If not (e.g., Libertarian), you are on the left. Both Democrats and Republicans have become "big government" parties.
2. Should the government drive social change? The democrats tend to say yes (Obamacare, New Deal, welfare programs, etc.), placing them in the top of the diagram. The Republicans tend to say "no", and hence are in the bottom half.
The problem in American politics is that there is no credible movement anywhere in the left half of this diagram. With any luck, maybe the Tea Party will change that - but this is not yet clear...
> Its a law of physics that CO2 is an infrared absorber - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true.
Its a fact that CO2 levels are rising in our atmosphere - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true
Its a fact that most of that rise is due to man - is someone questioning that?
No, this is clearly true.
- - - - -
But your questions are too simple. The last time I posted an answer like this, I was immediately modded troll. But hope springs eternal, so here is why I count myself as a skeptic. Here are some further questions:
Will increasing CO2 increase the temperature of the earth? This is not certain, because of the complex interactions of the climate. One example: raise the temperature, and you get more water vapor. More water vapor yields more clouds, which have a *massive* cooling effect. In short: it is entirely possible that CO2 has a negligible effect on the temperature.
Set the temperature question aside for a moment: is a higher CO2 level a bad thing? CO2's primary effect on the planet is "plant food". Commercial greenhouses deliberately increase CO2 in order to increase their crop yields. If we could magically reduce CO2 to 19th century levels, we would see crop yields fall substantially.
Back to temperature. If the earth's temperature does rise, is this a bad thing? Historically, warmer periods have been times of prosperity. Most of the earth is in the temperate zone, and warmer temperatures improve the climate, lengthen growing seasons, etc. Imagine frozen Siberia as the bread basket of Asia. It is not clear that a warmer earth is bad.
Finally, how do we measure the temperature of the earth? There are many temperature stations scattered about, but the majority of them do not comply with the guidelines set up to ensure accurate measurement. Many are at airports (lots of tarmac), others - especially in very cold climates - are placed conveniently near buildings. These and other siting issues make the temperature measurements inaccurate. Satellite measurements have their own difficulties. The more you read about these issues, the clearer it becomes that we do not currently have reliable temperature measurements.
So: on the basis of inaccurate temperature data and ineffective models, what should we do? Should we commit trillions of dollars to drastic policies based on questionable science? Or should we, maybe, invest in a decent network of weather stations, invest in climate science, and *understand* what is going on?
Climate is complex, and the one thing certain about all of the climate models developed to date is that they fail to model climate. If a model is to be useful, it must make falsifiable predictions of future events. To date, no model has done better than a random-number generator. Tropical storms were supposed to increase, but did not. Sea level was supposed to rise faster that ever. In fact, the sea level has been rising steadily since the last ice age,, but the rise has actually slowed in recent times. If one thing is clear, it is that our understanding of climate is woefully inadequate.
Google screwed up here, accidentally capturing all of this data. Why they didn't just delete it, rather than doing this whole "hair shirt" thing is more than a bit weird.
But: whose fault is it, actually? If you transmit a radio signal into the public domain, do you have any expectation of privacy? Seems to me that the people using unsecured networks share a large portion of the blame here.
For the obligatory car analogy: leaving your router unlocked is like leaving your car unlocked. Transmitting unencrypted login credentials using your unlocked router is like - what? Maybe parking your car in the Bronx and leaving the keys in the ignition?
It might have been malware (maldata?) if the guy had sold his work to unscrupulous companies. Instead, the researcher who developed the Evercookie has done us all a favor: he published exactly what Evercookie does. This makes everyone aware of the problem, and you can bet that browsers and add-ins will address the problem soon.
Evercookie makes it clear that browsers need a central administration panel to manage all data that can be stored - directly or indirectly - by websites. I expect that the next major browser releases will include exactly this.
Add-ins like Flash are a more difficult problem: Really, they should only be allowed to store data through the browser, so that their storage can also be properly managed. However, Adobe (and Microsoft, and Apple, and...) will try to keep this off the radar screen.
Can you say "naive" and "idealistic"?
Sure, Wikipedia is a great resource for basic information on a lot of topics. However, behind the scenes, the "volunteer politics" get pretty ugly. The kind of people who would put up with this on a Wiki-University scale are not the kidn of people you want as professors.
Professors "longevity would be determined by the community"? Even tenured professors dare not say politically incorrect things - else their tenure is suddenly meaningless. Imagine if professors held their positions on the whim of the students!
Universities should be non-profit? Why exactly? Non-profit organizations do good work in some fields, but they are just as driven as corporations - just towards different goals.
Professors should "move back and forth between the 'real world' and the university? Sure, that sounds like the kind of career that lets you do long term planning, raise a family, etc.
To the credit of the author, TFA ends with: Mr. Staley "clearly understands Wikipedia about as well as he understands universities. That is, not very well."
How about requiring the students to study and do their homework - and hold their parents responsible? We are talking here about the permanent troublemakers in schools. Those kids who would rather screw off, and disrupt the whole class doing it - far more entertaining that actually cracking a book.
Here's an example of what this educational material is really about - everything you need to know about President Monroe:
"White men getting richer than Enron. They stepping on Indians, women and blacks."
Yes, we see now. There's no social agenda here, this is truly quality education. Grammatically correct, too. /sarcasm
How many of us would like to (a) help distrubute useful stuff, (b) make the lives of the **AA more difficult and (c) supporte the use of BitTorrent for distribution?
I would be more than happy to serve all three of these goals by adding BitTorrent to our company's server. The problem is finding torrents that make sense. They must be unequivocally 100% legal to distribute, and there ought to be some benefit to someone in having another seed - i.e., there are currently too few seeds out there. Probably the files to be distributed will change over time.
Does anyone have suggestions how to find content that meets these criteria?
Ok, I searched again and . Only $9000, what a deal! /sarcasm
The loss of vertical pixels is irritating, but it is only one aspect of the fact that so many monitors are formatted for watching movies. Surely computers are used mostly as computers and only sometimes as televisions - why do they all have to have this stupid, inefficient wide format?
Anyway, the other aspect of this problem is the overall loss of resolution. Twenty years ago, as a grad student, I bought a CRT monitor (24", iirc) that let me work comfortably at 2560x2048. This was great for programming, or indeed any sort of technical work!
That monitor was a standard, if somewhat expensive, Viewsonic product. Try finding an equivalent monitor today. If you are willing to shell out for a 30" monitor, you still won't find anything better than 2560x1600.
...pedal-powered tanks!
A random anecdote having nothing to do with e-voting, but probably a lot to do with the quality of voting IT systems: Last year, I asked for an absentee ballot, and never received it. This year, I asked for an absentee ballot, and received three, sent at different times, over the course of several days.
Electronic voting may be a disaster, but there are some other really fundamental flaws in the system:
Get decent administrative systems run by competent people in place first. Then, maybe, we can think about electronic voting.
Global warming not only doesn't exist, even the "movers and shakers" now realize it. We have come full cycle (and there are cycles) and are now in a cooling phase. Just like in the late 1970's, in the next several years, people will start to panic about global cooling.
Likely there is no conspiracy - incompetence is a sufficient explanation. Each generation has discover something to panic about, and no one pays attention to history: cold times around 1910, hot times around 1940, cold times around 1970, hot times around 2000, anyone starting to notice a pattern here?
Robert Bruce Thompson write science books for home study. He is currently working on a set of science kits to accompany them. You can find more information at Make: Science Room.
This sort of micromanagement is nuts. My son is - entirely coincidentally - just this instant reading a web-site about crazy laws. Like it being illegal to throw a moose out of a helicopter (Alaska), or it being illegal to sing in public in a swimsuit (Florida, I think he said).
All these sorts of laws - including the one about volume in commercials - are the result of knee-jerk reactions by legislators who have lost sight of the big picture. Probably some idiot did through a moose out of a helicopter - there's no need to add a law governing this. If the government must regulate it, this is in the purview of the FCC.
Better would be to leave it to the free market. As far as I can see, television stations are doomed anyway - the quantity, volume and general stupidity of commercials has increased dramatically in the past decade or two. If the stations continue down this path, in another decade or two, no one will care, because no one will watch standard TV anymore - everyone will be streaming over the Internet.
The Congresscritters are probably hoping that little "treats" like this will save their collective ass in the upcoming elections. In fact, they have once again proven that they need all need to be removed from office for blatant incompetence.
Why do you say forums.officer.com needs trolled? As far as I can see, most posters there agree with the decision, and also say that the cop was an idiot for pulling his gun.
There are idiots in any group. Most cops are reasonable folks. The problem is only: you never know which kind you have...
A year or two ago, they actually purchased stolen bank data, and then helped the thief go into hiding. As far as I can see, there is every reason to charge the officials involved with trafficking in stolen goods.
Hey, this may be the closest some /. readers will ever come to a breast!
We have also dabbled our toes in ebooks - we have two smart-phones, one dedicated reader, and a library of maybe 50 ebooks (as opposed to a couple thousand paper books). Even at 50 books, I am already frustrated by the quality of the ebook software on all of these devices. Reading is ok - it's the library management that sucks. Even PC-based software like Calibre isn't much good.
Here's an example: Suppose you have a mass of titles by the same author, some are individual books, others belong to various series. You've just finished a book, and want to read the next one in that particular series. With paper books, I will have put the books on the shelf in the right order. Put the finished book back, take the next one to the right. With ebooks? The books are most likely sorted by title. The series information is generally not available. You wind up opening up several books, hoping that they list the series in the right order, or that you can tell from the publication date.
This is just one minor frustration among many. When I imagine having a couple of thousand ebooks in one library - gack, it's really a pretty horrible thought.
As a techie, I send maybe one SMS per week. After a while you realize that there is such a thing as being *too* reachable. If you're getting dozens of SMS's a day, plus calls, IM, Twitter, and what not - well, there's no time to actually *do* anything.
Will you please polish that post up and publish it somewhere?
Any answer depends partially on the official policy of your institution - particularly regarding the international students.
My usual rules for a course of this type: any standard calculator the students want. That's a dedicated calculator, not a phone or whatever. Any books and papers the students want - which may (obviously) include a paper dictionary for the international students.
It's laudable that you offer to buy calculators yourself, but don't. The practical reason: It provides students a reason to argue if they fail (his calculators didn't work, I didn't know how to use them). The political reason: schools are only too happy to have instructors donate time and money, because we care about our courses and students - this is a stupid situation that needs no encouragement.