I thought Planck units would be a neat way to measure things, being based off of measurable constants. C would always be 1, or at least a power of 10, because Planck time is defined as the time it takes a photon to travel one Planck length, which is in turn defined by other constants and physical rules. I don't know much more about the system, but it would seem to simplify a number of calculations a great deal.
Check out planck.com for more info. I would too if my network were not eating packets right now.
People as a whole don't care about details. You do, and good for you. Unfortunately, our method of choosing public officers relies kinda heavily on this aggregate thing called voting.
IME, secretaries and clerical workers who spend hours at a computer learn the one application they use, learn it well, but have an incredibly hard time adapting to anything new. My mother's office must be one of the few left in the world that refuse to adopt MS Office--not because of any political or economical issues, but because all the workers were trained on Word Perfect and are still getting used to the idea of Word Perfect outside of DOS. Sure, if you trained them to use vim, they'd probably be faster in it than any coder on Slashdot, but the effort needed to train them would be tremendous.
And anyone can go and re-compile it for windows if they want.
Forgive a poor Windows user for his lack of l33t cross-platform programming sk1llz, but unfortunately I must be the only one who can't. It's sad too, because it seems like exactly what I've wanted for a while now.
Yeah, yeah, sure, if you're collecting resumes from job-seekers who will bend over backwards to make a good impression, then you can force them to convert it for you. However, the bigger problem for me is submission requirements. In my writing class at college, the professor requires us to send Word attachments. A Windows or Macintosh PC with Microsoft Word is a requirement listed in the course syllabus.
Would RMS rather have me flunk the class because my professor has "become a buttress of the Microsoft monopoly"? But hey, I bet if I explained that Word documents are "a major obstacle to the broader adoption of GNU/Linux", she'd be just fine with it.
Sexuality is a biological part of normal, everyday life...
This is true, but I think there are very real side effects of over exposure to sexuality. When sex isn't put in the proper context, children don't associate sex with the sense of intimacy and respect that it deserves. This leads to many problems among teenagers who are sexually mature but not psychologically mature enough to decide what's appropriate and safe.
However this doesn't necessarily mean nudity is bad. Showing nudity without evoking a sexual context is difficult, but the reverse is incredibly easy. Britney Spears, who has never shown as much as a nipple in public, is a larger and more important sexual figure than any porn star. We kid ourselves when we try to make a division between Maxim and Playboy. Yes, there's a little bit more fabric on the bodies in one, but we all see past that little eyepatch and we know it.
I'm sorry I missed that in your post, and I'm sorry yours doesn't work half as well as mine.
Call it luck, but I've yet to find a lighting situation where I couldn't see the screen, and I find your pessimistic summary of the screen's abilities to fall quite short of my experience. Trust me that I am not lying, and trust me that I do not wear night-vision goggles when I play. So, given all my experience with the same screen that you have, I must strongly disagree with you and say that it is nowhere as bad as you claim.
Like you, I got a GBA for Christmas. Apparently unlike you, mine came with one of the many external lighting adapters available for the GBA. With it, I can play perfectly fine in any number of places, even in pitch black night.
I don't know why people complain so much. Just go out and buy a damned light if it bothers you that much. They're not expensive and they work pretty well. Geez, the original Gameboy, the most successful console ever with good sales for 11 years, didn't come with any lighting and no one thought a thing of it.
Re:Why can't anyone see the implications of this?
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 2
Change is scary stuff That's why nobody like this idea.
I thought no one liked this idea because it has an extremely limited market focus and it's ungodly expensive.
If you are asking why does this matter, think of it as a small, portable emergency startup disk, and listen to some jamming tunes while your macs are running fine.
Mind if I ask why an emergancy startup disk needs to be small and fully portable? Everyone's saying that the big benefits of the iPod are its size and weight, two things that can be important if you're lugging it around all day. On the other hand, if you're looking to use it as an external drive, chances are you won't be keeping it in your pocket, so you might as well get a larger drive for less.
Now that someone else has mentioned that the 20gb Nomad costs the same as the iPod (would you give up 15 gigs?) I'll mention that the 6gb version you mention costs $130 less than the iPod.
I'd give up size and weight for $130. Then again, I wouldn't buy either, because even $269 is too much for my cheap ass. (See my thoughts on MP3-CD players.)
I realize that there are drawbacks to a CD-MP3 player. It's a tradeoff, like any purchase. Nothing's perfect. However, for the price, I can ignore those drawbacks because I don't feel a smaller size and better skip protection are worth the extra $300.
As for the point about space.. One CD will last you a long car trip, three CDs will hold most people's entire collection. (One CD in the player, the other two in a dual-CD jewel case.) You are seriously overstating the limiting factor of "only" 700mb of songs at a time.
Re:Think before you gripe....
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
$399 for 5gb? Screw that. I'd rather pay $100 for a Rio Volt. 700mb of songs per CD with an unlimited number of CDs, provided you change them.
Yeah, this should compete favorably with the solid state units, but they've already lost to the CD-MP3 units, IMO.
I think (my opinion only) that we should get rid of AC and allow people to read anonymously but NOT post that wauy
This is a horrible idea. Registration is a nuisance for the user, and I applaud Slashdot for being one of the few discussion sites remaining that allow new users to contribute without jumping through hoops.
You'd probably say that registration is fairly painless and it's worth it for a site like Slashdot. And I'd agree, mostly. But too often I run into discussion sites where I want to post one little thing -- help someone along in their search, correct somebody on their facts -- knowing full well I'll never be back at that site again. If that happens to Slashdot, too many people simply won't bother to post, and Slashdot will be the lesser for it.
First of all, you can't realistically burn media at 24x. The current media technology doesn't support it. The 24x drives only READ at that incredible spin rate, so don't get stuck on the spin rate.
According to Storagereview (mentioned in the article), the Plextor 24x reads at 40x, and writes at a max of 24x. Taking its cue from CD readers, the Plextor doesn't a write at a constant speed. Depending on the position, it burns at 16x, 20x, and 24x, averaging ~23x throughout the whole disk. As for media, certainly, the bargain brand at CompUSA probably won't hit 24x, but there are brands that will.
Now, the perceived performance difference between 12x and 24x is quite neglible (IMO), so I'd go for whatever's cheaper.. once again IDE, but probably an older Plextor.
To illustrate the point, with the buffering capability and the resulting sustained throughput of even a mediocre SCSI flavor, you can read directly from a SCSI ROM and write directly to a SCSI writeable (CD-R, RW, etc.).. without any space consuming and time consuming mastering to hard drive.
With the high buffers on even low end IDE CD-RWs, bad burns due to buffer underflow are less and less common, and with technology like Plextor's BurnProof, they're practically impossible. And since we've already decided on going with SCSI for all of the other drives, why wouldn't we be able to do a direct CD-ROM to CD-RW dupe? Hell, get a cheap IDE DVD-ROM, stick it on your other IDE channel, and burn with impunity at full speed.
On the other hand, I myself have many IDE drives, so I've got a cheap SCSI card which runs my rather old 4x2x20 Plextor (and a scanner, but that's something else). I got it back before BurnProof, when buffer underflow was a real problem for IDE burners. But really, if you've only got a couple drives and don't have a $7k budget, your computer will not be gravely injured if you go with an IDE drive.
And in this unique configuration where nearly everything else is SCSI, there is no harm done by getting two IDE optical drives and giving them their own channels.
I'm not joking. "Streaming video" right? Which sites really use it? Porn sites. Which sites propelled RealMedia into the spotlight? Which sites have consistantly upped the demand for bandwidth as soon as it becomes available? Which sites have been the most successful online, before and after the "dot-com" bubble?
Admit it, Slashdot, porn makes the Internet go round.
As for the rest of your reasons for using DSL, they're pretty marginal. Remember that during the outbreak of Code Red, most of the home clients running IIS who got infected didn't even know they were running it. Having a static IP is a big deal for you and me, but it isn't to people who are used to dial-up ISPs and have never thought it possible or necessary.
There are things broadband ISPs can do to attract people like us, but, let's face it, we're more of a liability than a benefit: we use more than our alloted share of bandwidth (much less than the number they quote in the commercials, and easily exceeded by your distro's latest ISO), bitch at the slightest problem or outage, and expect a lot more out of the service than your average user. They don't want us. They want the average user who sits at home collecting his porn and doesn't bother them.
OK, if you want to work on semantics, then no, the attacks were not performed by or on the behalf of Islam. However, in this continous attack-counter-attack 'war' going on, bin Laden would very much like it if Muslims around the world joined and supported his cause. To bring this about, he is characterizing it as a war between Christianity and Islam, and it's fairly clear now that the attacks were his opening move in this new war.
Militarily, the Tet Offensive was a horrible defeat for the North. They attacked 20-some villages, suffered major losses doing it, (to the tune of 20 Vietcong dead for every American dead) and yet they couldn't hold on to a single one. The victory of the Tet Offensive had nothing to do with the battlefield and can in no way be considered a loss for the US without considering domestic politics and public opinion. What the Tet Offensive did do, which made it so successful, was show the US that nowhere in Vietnam was safe, that land supposedly under American control was as dangerous for American soldiers as Hanoi.
Like you say, and you're right when you say it, the Tet Offensive was the turning point of the war. It was then that the public (not necessarily the anti-war movement) woke up to the idea that there was no way we could win this thing. That aside, we were definitely not losing--US troops won every battle they fought in.
It has been stressed repeatedly by all parties involved that this is not a Muslim attack, it was terrorist attack by extremists who happen to be Muslim and contort its teachings to justify their actions.
All parties involved except said Muslim extremists, who would like very much for us to start targeting innocent Muslims, because it would rationalize their actions. It's freaky-weird to listen to the Taliban spokesman on Al Jazeera say the same thing as the bigots on the 700 Club.
(Strange aside: While I was looking for the link to the Christian Broadcasting Network--CBN, Google listed its DMOZ category as "Arts > Television >... > Syndicated > Jerry Springer > Views and Opinions".)
It's been a while since I read the book, so I don't know whether you or the AC are right, but one thing struck me about the article's comparision with 1984 and Big Brother.
They were hailed as the people's technology, a friendly eye in the sky, not Big Brother at all but a kindly and watchful uncle or aunt.
The part I don't get is "not Big Brother at all". To the proles of 1984, Big Brother was not the menancing symbol of omnipresent totalitarianism it is to us. Big Brother was the helpful and benevolent figure protecting us all from the evils of thoughtcrime. Replace "thoughtcrime" with "terrorism", and I don't see a single difference between Big Brother and the British system.
"Big Brother is watching you" is scary to us only in light of 1984.
Consider "Big Brother" without its 1984 connotation. It's a fairly comforting term that conveys the image of a loving older sibling who knows what's good for you and is strong enough to protect you. Ever heard of "Big Brothers, Big Sisters"? It's a mentoring program for at-risk youths that pairs them with a "Big Brother" who's there not to spy on them, but to provide guidance and support. Orwell purposely and knowingly took this meaning and twisted it into something perverse, the way politians have always done--all the bills that are superficially designed to "protect the children" while imposing on civil liberties, for example.
"CCTV: Watching for you" should be no less frightening to us than Big Brother's comforting reminder.
Everyone keeps saying that "if you ban cryptography, it won't stop the criminals from using it." That's not the point at all.
The point is to head off Slashdot's vision of the future where everyone uses cryptography for everything. If you ban cryptography, the criminals will still use it. This is true. However, they'll be the only ones using cryptography, and therefore be much easier to spot.
The NSA doesn't want to decrypt grandma's shopping list. It's a waste of time. Rather, if grandma starts using Government-Approved encryption, and the criminals keep using PGP, all Carnivore has to do is look for PGP, and whammo--you've found your criminals. They don't even have to decrypt it; simple use of real encryption is a sign of guilt.
Certainly, there are other reasons to oppose this legislation, very real reasons that we must not let this happen. But "it won't work" isn't going to cut it. Because it will work, just not in the way you think it will.
If it's "the right thing to do", then why won't a private association be able to do it?
Because "the right thing to do" (as the original poster would have it) isn't always the most profitable thing to do. However, I'll say that I don't think Internet access is a necessity; the "digital divide" is a crock of shit.
The Internet is a toy for people with too much money and with too much time on their hands. No one needs it, and there's no reason to subsidize it. This idea that school children will be behind in their studies is baseless. Your local library is a much better resource than Yahoo.
"Computer Skills" are worthless as well. With or without their own computer, most people are clueless when facing an unfamilar system. They teach classes in Word for Christ's sake.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought Planck units would be a neat way to measure things, being based off of measurable constants. C would always be 1, or at least a power of 10, because Planck time is defined as the time it takes a photon to travel one Planck length, which is in turn defined by other constants and physical rules. I don't know much more about the system, but it would seem to simplify a number of calculations a great deal.
Check out planck.com for more info. I would too if my network were not eating packets right now.
People as a whole don't care about details. You do, and good for you. Unfortunately, our method of choosing public officers relies kinda heavily on this aggregate thing called voting.
But you forget the great axiom: "A person is smart, but people are stupid."
IE, you, by yourself, would be very interested in what this guy has to say. You, plus a few thousand of your fellow voters, wouldn't give a shit.
IME, secretaries and clerical workers who spend hours at a computer learn the one application they use, learn it well, but have an incredibly hard time adapting to anything new. My mother's office must be one of the few left in the world that refuse to adopt MS Office--not because of any political or economical issues, but because all the workers were trained on Word Perfect and are still getting used to the idea of Word Perfect outside of DOS. Sure, if you trained them to use vim, they'd probably be faster in it than any coder on Slashdot, but the effort needed to train them would be tremendous.
And anyone can go and re-compile it for windows if they want.
Forgive a poor Windows user for his lack of l33t cross-platform programming sk1llz, but unfortunately I must be the only one who can't. It's sad too, because it seems like exactly what I've wanted for a while now.
Yeah, yeah, sure, if you're collecting resumes from job-seekers who will bend over backwards to make a good impression, then you can force them to convert it for you. However, the bigger problem for me is submission requirements. In my writing class at college, the professor requires us to send Word attachments. A Windows or Macintosh PC with Microsoft Word is a requirement listed in the course syllabus.
Would RMS rather have me flunk the class because my professor has "become a buttress of the Microsoft monopoly"? But hey, I bet if I explained that Word documents are "a major obstacle to the broader adoption of GNU/Linux", she'd be just fine with it.
Sexuality is a biological part of normal, everyday life ...
This is true, but I think there are very real side effects of over exposure to sexuality. When sex isn't put in the proper context, children don't associate sex with the sense of intimacy and respect that it deserves. This leads to many problems among teenagers who are sexually mature but not psychologically mature enough to decide what's appropriate and safe.
However this doesn't necessarily mean nudity is bad. Showing nudity without evoking a sexual context is difficult, but the reverse is incredibly easy. Britney Spears, who has never shown as much as a nipple in public, is a larger and more important sexual figure than any porn star. We kid ourselves when we try to make a division between Maxim and Playboy. Yes, there's a little bit more fabric on the bodies in one, but we all see past that little eyepatch and we know it.
I'm sorry I missed that in your post, and I'm sorry yours doesn't work half as well as mine.
Call it luck, but I've yet to find a lighting situation where I couldn't see the screen, and I find your pessimistic summary of the screen's abilities to fall quite short of my experience. Trust me that I am not lying, and trust me that I do not wear night-vision goggles when I play. So, given all my experience with the same screen that you have, I must strongly disagree with you and say that it is nowhere as bad as you claim.
Like you, I got a GBA for Christmas. Apparently unlike you, mine came with one of the many external lighting adapters available for the GBA. With it, I can play perfectly fine in any number of places, even in pitch black night.
I don't know why people complain so much. Just go out and buy a damned light if it bothers you that much. They're not expensive and they work pretty well. Geez, the original Gameboy, the most successful console ever with good sales for 11 years, didn't come with any lighting and no one thought a thing of it.
Change is scary stuff That's why nobody like this idea.
I thought no one liked this idea because it has an extremely limited market focus and it's ungodly expensive.
If you are asking why does this matter, think of it as a small, portable emergency startup disk, and listen to some jamming tunes while your macs are running fine.
Mind if I ask why an emergancy startup disk needs to be small and fully portable? Everyone's saying that the big benefits of the iPod are its size and weight, two things that can be important if you're lugging it around all day. On the other hand, if you're looking to use it as an external drive, chances are you won't be keeping it in your pocket, so you might as well get a larger drive for less.
Now that someone else has mentioned that the 20gb Nomad costs the same as the iPod (would you give up 15 gigs?) I'll mention that the 6gb version you mention costs $130 less than the iPod.
I'd give up size and weight for $130. Then again, I wouldn't buy either, because even $269 is too much for my cheap ass. (See my thoughts on MP3-CD players.)
I realize that there are drawbacks to a CD-MP3 player. It's a tradeoff, like any purchase. Nothing's perfect. However, for the price, I can ignore those drawbacks because I don't feel a smaller size and better skip protection are worth the extra $300.
As for the point about space.. One CD will last you a long car trip, three CDs will hold most people's entire collection. (One CD in the player, the other two in a dual-CD jewel case.) You are seriously overstating the limiting factor of "only" 700mb of songs at a time.
$399 for 5gb? Screw that. I'd rather pay $100 for a Rio Volt. 700mb of songs per CD with an unlimited number of CDs, provided you change them.
Yeah, this should compete favorably with the solid state units, but they've already lost to the CD-MP3 units, IMO.
I think (my opinion only) that we should get rid of AC and allow people to read anonymously but NOT post that wauy
This is a horrible idea. Registration is a nuisance for the user, and I applaud Slashdot for being one of the few discussion sites remaining that allow new users to contribute without jumping through hoops.
You'd probably say that registration is fairly painless and it's worth it for a site like Slashdot. And I'd agree, mostly. But too often I run into discussion sites where I want to post one little thing -- help someone along in their search, correct somebody on their facts -- knowing full well I'll never be back at that site again. If that happens to Slashdot, too many people simply won't bother to post, and Slashdot will be the lesser for it.
First of all, you can't realistically burn media at 24x. The current media technology doesn't support it. The 24x drives only READ at that incredible spin rate, so don't get stuck on the spin rate.
.. without any space consuming and time consuming mastering to hard drive.
According to Storagereview (mentioned in the article), the Plextor 24x reads at 40x, and writes at a max of 24x. Taking its cue from CD readers, the Plextor doesn't a write at a constant speed. Depending on the position, it burns at 16x, 20x, and 24x, averaging ~23x throughout the whole disk. As for media, certainly, the bargain brand at CompUSA probably won't hit 24x, but there are brands that will.
Now, the perceived performance difference between 12x and 24x is quite neglible (IMO), so I'd go for whatever's cheaper.. once again IDE, but probably an older Plextor.
To illustrate the point, with the buffering capability and the resulting sustained throughput of even a mediocre SCSI flavor, you can read directly from a SCSI ROM and write directly to a SCSI writeable (CD-R, RW, etc.)
With the high buffers on even low end IDE CD-RWs, bad burns due to buffer underflow are less and less common, and with technology like Plextor's BurnProof, they're practically impossible. And since we've already decided on going with SCSI for all of the other drives, why wouldn't we be able to do a direct CD-ROM to CD-RW dupe? Hell, get a cheap IDE DVD-ROM, stick it on your other IDE channel, and burn with impunity at full speed.
On the other hand, I myself have many IDE drives, so I've got a cheap SCSI card which runs my rather old 4x2x20 Plextor (and a scanner, but that's something else). I got it back before BurnProof, when buffer underflow was a real problem for IDE burners. But really, if you've only got a couple drives and don't have a $7k budget, your computer will not be gravely injured if you go with an IDE drive.
And in this unique configuration where nearly everything else is SCSI, there is no harm done by getting two IDE optical drives and giving them their own channels.
The reason most people have DSL is porn.
I'm not joking. "Streaming video" right? Which sites really use it? Porn sites. Which sites propelled RealMedia into the spotlight? Which sites have consistantly upped the demand for bandwidth as soon as it becomes available? Which sites have been the most successful online, before and after the "dot-com" bubble?
Admit it, Slashdot, porn makes the Internet go round.
As for the rest of your reasons for using DSL, they're pretty marginal. Remember that during the outbreak of Code Red, most of the home clients running IIS who got infected didn't even know they were running it. Having a static IP is a big deal for you and me, but it isn't to people who are used to dial-up ISPs and have never thought it possible or necessary.
There are things broadband ISPs can do to attract people like us, but, let's face it, we're more of a liability than a benefit: we use more than our alloted share of bandwidth (much less than the number they quote in the commercials, and easily exceeded by your distro's latest ISO), bitch at the slightest problem or outage, and expect a lot more out of the service than your average user. They don't want us. They want the average user who sits at home collecting his porn and doesn't bother them.
OK, if you want to work on semantics, then no, the attacks were not performed by or on the behalf of Islam. However, in this continous attack-counter-attack 'war' going on, bin Laden would very much like it if Muslims around the world joined and supported his cause. To bring this about, he is characterizing it as a war between Christianity and Islam, and it's fairly clear now that the attacks were his opening move in this new war.
The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, right after the US started attacking, called upon all Muslims to join a new jihad against the US.
In his taped interview sent to Al Jazeera, bin Laden claimed basically the same thing. (He called the US' actions a Christian crusade against Islam.)
Militarily, the Tet Offensive was a horrible defeat for the North. They attacked 20-some villages, suffered major losses doing it, (to the tune of 20 Vietcong dead for every American dead) and yet they couldn't hold on to a single one. The victory of the Tet Offensive had nothing to do with the battlefield and can in no way be considered a loss for the US without considering domestic politics and public opinion. What the Tet Offensive did do, which made it so successful, was show the US that nowhere in Vietnam was safe, that land supposedly under American control was as dangerous for American soldiers as Hanoi.
Like you say, and you're right when you say it, the Tet Offensive was the turning point of the war. It was then that the public (not necessarily the anti-war movement) woke up to the idea that there was no way we could win this thing. That aside, we were definitely not losing--US troops won every battle they fought in.
It has been stressed repeatedly by all parties involved that this is not a Muslim attack, it was terrorist attack by extremists who happen to be Muslim and contort its teachings to justify their actions.
... > Syndicated > Jerry Springer > Views and Opinions".)
All parties involved except said Muslim extremists, who would like very much for us to start targeting innocent Muslims, because it would rationalize their actions. It's freaky-weird to listen to the Taliban spokesman on Al Jazeera say the same thing as the bigots on the 700 Club.
(Strange aside: While I was looking for the link to the Christian Broadcasting Network--CBN, Google listed its DMOZ category as "Arts > Television >
It's been a while since I read the book, so I don't know whether you or the AC are right, but one thing struck me about the article's comparision with 1984 and Big Brother.
They were hailed as the people's technology, a friendly eye in the sky, not Big Brother at all but a kindly and watchful uncle or aunt.
The part I don't get is "not Big Brother at all". To the proles of 1984, Big Brother was not the menancing symbol of omnipresent totalitarianism it is to us. Big Brother was the helpful and benevolent figure protecting us all from the evils of thoughtcrime. Replace "thoughtcrime" with "terrorism", and I don't see a single difference between Big Brother and the British system.
"Big Brother is watching you" is scary to us only in light of 1984.
Consider "Big Brother" without its 1984 connotation. It's a fairly comforting term that conveys the image of a loving older sibling who knows what's good for you and is strong enough to protect you. Ever heard of "Big Brothers, Big Sisters"? It's a mentoring program for at-risk youths that pairs them with a "Big Brother" who's there not to spy on them, but to provide guidance and support. Orwell purposely and knowingly took this meaning and twisted it into something perverse, the way politians have always done--all the bills that are superficially designed to "protect the children" while imposing on civil liberties, for example.
"CCTV: Watching for you" should be no less frightening to us than Big Brother's comforting reminder.
Everyone keeps saying that "if you ban cryptography, it won't stop the criminals from using it." That's not the point at all.
The point is to head off Slashdot's vision of the future where everyone uses cryptography for everything. If you ban cryptography, the criminals will still use it. This is true. However, they'll be the only ones using cryptography, and therefore be much easier to spot.
The NSA doesn't want to decrypt grandma's shopping list. It's a waste of time. Rather, if grandma starts using Government-Approved encryption, and the criminals keep using PGP, all Carnivore has to do is look for PGP, and whammo--you've found your criminals. They don't even have to decrypt it; simple use of real encryption is a sign of guilt.
Certainly, there are other reasons to oppose this legislation, very real reasons that we must not let this happen. But "it won't work" isn't going to cut it. Because it will work, just not in the way you think it will.
Believe it or not, Madonna is her real first name. She'd be madonna.ciccone.com.
If it's "the right thing to do", then why won't a private association be able to do it?
Because "the right thing to do" (as the original poster would have it) isn't always the most profitable thing to do. However, I'll say that I don't think Internet access is a necessity; the "digital divide" is a crock of shit.
The Internet is a toy for people with too much money and with too much time on their hands. No one needs it, and there's no reason to subsidize it. This idea that school children will be behind in their studies is baseless. Your local library is a much better resource than Yahoo.
"Computer Skills" are worthless as well. With or without their own computer, most people are clueless when facing an unfamilar system. They teach classes in Word for Christ's sake.