We switched to Google Apps a few years ago. In that time I've seen maybe a dozen full or partial outages. Some were not Google's fault. Internet routing or DNS problems were responsible some of the time. One instance was when a drunk driver hit a telephone pole about a quarter of a mile away and severed our fiber connection. When it is down, I still end up spending half the day dealing with the outage. But In a decade of running our email in house, I had just one outage. We did have a few instances of where our Internet connection was down so outside email did not flow, but at least internal communications worked.
It's better, arguably, to have the servers in house because at least you can be seen working feverishly to fix the problems rather than just sitting on your hands telling your boss to be patient.
If you buy Windows 8 Pro you get downgrade rights to Windows XP, Vista, or 7 Pro. If you look at Dell's business oriented lines you will see that they even offer the machines "downgraded" out of the box.
Have you every tried to drink Budweiser warm? It's probably the most tightly quality controlled beer in the world and it tastes like shit above 55 degrees.
Beer was not bootlegged during prohibition because it was harder to smuggle than liquor. Liquor was more concentrated and could get more people drunk per gallon, so it was more valuable and made smuggling it more worth the risk. This also gave rise to the modern mixed drink. The few beer brewers that survived, like Anheuser-Busch, did so by selling malt extract and soft drinks. After Prohibition ended, Americans didn't really remember what beer was supposed to taste like. It was also 1933, when the US was in the depth of depression, that Prohibition was repealed. At that point, Americans couldn't afford good beer, so only cheap beer made with adjuncts like rice, were commercially viable. That gave Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, and Pabst a nearly competition-free market to take over. Each of these brewers make remarkably similar pilsner-style lagers. Even now they still represent about 80% of the US beer market. So for two generations Americans have drunk beer that had to be chilled to be drinkable, so Americans drink beer cold, and any new beer that hits the market has to be formulated to taste cold as well.
It's not the alcohol content but the boiling that makes beer safe to consume. Ancient beers probably didn't go over 4% ABV, well within the tolerance range of many bacteria. Boiling, however, kills any enteric bacteria, worms, and any other bugs / critters in the water likely to cause disease. Wine tends to be safe without boiling since it's made from fruit juice, not fruit + water from that filthy pond over by the latrine.
A more technical answer is that, if you simply toss water and milled (cracked, but not ground into flour) grains together, you don't get a particularly lively fermentation. Boiling gelatinizes the grains and helps break down long chain starches into shorter ones that are chewed up by yeast and bacteria faster than they would otherwise be. From there, you take some of the sludge from your previous, best tasting batch of beer and use that to kick start the fermentation of the new beer. Supposedly, ancient Egyptians boiled loaves of bread to make their beer.
I agree that the boiling process is important for making beer, but it is only of secondary importance for safety. Boiling the wort (the liquid beer before fermentation) does tend to result in stronger, better storing beer, but once it passes some thresh hold alcohol and acidity threshold it is essentially safe. The modern reasons for boiling the wort are to create a more or less sterile environment where the yeast doesn't have to compete for resources, and to extract flavors and preservative compounds from herbal additions, like hops. Many modern beers don't go over 4% either, and there are no known pathogens that can survive the combination of alcohol and acidity of even a modern "light" beer. There are plenty of bacteria that can infect a modern beer, but they are not harmful to humans, just the beer. I suspect that our ancestor were making perfectly safe beef for generations without boiling.
Another thing I'd like to mention is that when you make beer you don't just boil grains. Boiling starch does not break it down into sugar. You wet your grains before hand, causing the grain to sprout and release enzymes that transform the starches into sugar. Then, extract this sugar using warm water and you have a nutrient rich, high energy food source for yeast. But, if you just throw the grain into boiling water it denatures the enzymes before they can convert an appreciable quantity of starch. The Incas did it a little differently with Maize. Saliva contains enzymes for converting starches into sugar. They would chew the maize before brewing. Incidentally, women tend to have more of this enzyme in their saliva and made better beer.
Also, ancient people really had no concept of yeast. If you threw yeast from your last batch into a new vat of wort and boiled it, it would kill off the yeast as well. So there would have been a period of trial and error and experimentation and failures before brewers figured out when to boil. Wine has another story to tell here. Wild yeast tends to colonize grape skins, and originally, the brewers would rely on those wild yeasts to ferment the wine. If they had boiled the wine, it would not have fermented. Fruit juices do have higher starting sugar content, so the yeast will consume it until the alcohol content kills the yeast. This is unlike beer, where the yeast consumes all available sugar and goes dormant. Due to the higher alcohol content, wine does keep longer than beer because there are fewer microbes that can stand the alcohol content. But again, this is not a safety issue as much as a flavor issue
Boil too early and there will be no starch to sugar conversion, and no beer. Or boil too late and you kill the yeast, and there will be no beer. So, since boiling is an extra step and would have involved much experimentation and failure, it seems likely that our ancestors were doing it for ages without boiling the wort. Since we exist, it would seem like the beer was safe enough.
For improved dynamic range the sensors would have to have a mix of pixel sizes, mimicking film. I am having trouble finding my sources where I read about this, but I think I remember the essential details. Film is coated with photo-sensitve crystals that expose when struck by photons. The trick is that it does not matter what size the crystal is, the same number of photons will expose any particular crystal. So, larger crystals collect more photons than smaller crystals and expose faster. That is why fast film is grainy. The large crystals in a fast film expose quickly but effectively reduce resolution. Slow film uses small crystal that expose more slowly but yield finer details. In addition to speed, film manufacturers can mix crystal sizes for more dynamic range. Film is generally formulated to so that in the bright areas big crystals will be present and expose quickly, but the surrounding, smaller crystals expose more slowly, letting the film continue to gather detail. In the dark areas the big crystals will expose while most of the small crystals don't. Dark areas get some of the benefits of a fast film, while bright areas get some of the benefits of a slow film. The end result is that exposure as a function of time is more of a logarithmic curve, as opposed to a digital sensor's straight line exposure. The effect is similar to digital HDR bracketing shots, over exposing one frame to pick up details in shadows then underexposing another to pickup details in hot-spots. The down side is that you can loose detail in the mid-rage exposure areas
The other solution for giving digital sensors more dynamic range is to make sensors that capture more levels of exposure, say 24 or 32 bits per color per pixel, and then compress the image data into a format our monitors and printers can display.
I always use the cashier for a couple of reasons. A: they are faster. Because my wife is a stay at home mom, I rarely have to go to the grocery store. That means the cashier's muscle memory is an order of magnitude faster than my fumbling, especially when produce is involved. When I do go to the grocery store it is generally for produce. B: Grocery store kiosks talk. I hate talking computers. I hate talking to computers. And the day when computers come equipped with RPP (Real People Personalities) will be the day I finally go off the deep end.
What was possible the most prophetic movie of the 20th century nailed this one.
Erwin: "Greetings and salutations. Welcome to the emergency line of the San Angeles Police Department. If you prefer an automated response, press one, now."
You are apparently correct about litter on your own property. "Littering is knowingly depositing in any manner litter on any public or private property or in any public or private waters, without permission to do so." (http://definitions.uslegal.com/l/litter/) That is obviously under US Law. "Pollution is legally defined as the wrongful contamination of the atmosphere, water or soil to the material injury of the right of an individual." (http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/pollution/). So, yes, legally, if pollutants are contained to the property and a new owner is properly informed of the contaminates everything should be okey-dokey. Or, if an employee is unknowingly exposed to contaminates there may be problems. But, there are also requirements for storing and disposing of toxic waste because the stuff generally does not respect property lines. (http://www.epa.gov/osw/hazard/tsd/fac_reqs.htm)
As an aside, If you read TFA, you will see that there was a case last year where a Texas business illegally dumped pollutants into a river and was caught, accidentally, by an aerial drone operated by a hobbyist. This law would have made that civilian a criminal simply for taking a picture of a private business. As citizens, we have the right to observe waste storage and disposal provided that we do not directly interfere or trespass, because, frankly, businesses have a history of environmental abuses and of covering up those abuses. That being said, my understanding is that if you own property you also own the airspace below 500 feet. So presumably, anyone flying an unmanned drone, which must stay below 400 feet, over private property would be guilty of trespassing.
Pollution only occurs when it crosses the polluter's property boundary, so I am ok with the law.....
Is that the official legal definition? If so, and pardon my french, that's a load of bullshit. What happens when in 20, 50, 100 years the property changes hands? What wasn't "pollution" before may qualify the property as a Superfund cleanup site.
TWC has a *near* monopoly on my area (Cincinnati), so it is what I use. The moment Cincinnati Bell Fioptics or Verizon FIOS is available on my street, I'm outs.
Then Napster and MP3 players appeared. Suddenly the industry was in a panic. The MPAA began an aggressive attack on downloaders, and sued anyone they could find as a scare tactic. Even though past history showed that sharing was a form of viral marketing, they wanted to kill it - perhaps because they have little control over it.
Napster launched in June of 1999 and shutdown in July of 2001. It operated throughout the peak of music sales and it's closing predated the period of rapid decline. ITMS launched in April of 2003 before the market went into a tailspin. ITMS and other legal online music sales probably caused the overall sales decline because the music is too cheap and people are so much more likely to buy a track or two online than to buy an entire album, and I'm not the first person to say it.
In any case, it tends to be sunny when it's not windy. Between rooftops and parking lots there are tremendous stretches of flat surfaces that could be productive small-scale solar power plants. That would distribute power generation, taking strain off of the overloaded high tension power distribution grid. What power solar can't provide can be generated by wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. We have the technology to get off fossil fuels almost entirely. What we lack is the will.
The only country I can think of that has the capacity and will to go carbon neutral is China. I'm convinced that in about 20 years, China will announce a green-energy program and they will convert entirely in about a decade.
In cases like antagonist, capitalist, and communist, the root word is a noun, not a verb.
According to vocabulary.com, antagonize is from Greek and shares the same root as agony. Agony is a noun, so antagonists are people who cause agony. Like wise, the root of capitalist is capital. In this context, capital is money invested for profit. So a capitalist is a person who invests money for profit. In the word communist, the root is the noun commune, as in " a group living situation where people share everything" (also from vocabulary.com). The other definition of commune, as in the phrase "commune with nature" is not related to communism or communist.
"Burgle", on the other hand, is a verb. "Burglar" is one who burgles. Technically, "to burglarize" is to make someone a burglar.
It's like an admission that we don't need more engineers and scientists, what we really need is more people who can process paperwork.
I wish I had a manager who could do the paperwork around here, and I'm just talking about an IT department. All of my managers (yes, all) have their eyes glaze over once they see two computer related terms in the same sentence. I end up spending as much time managing the department for them as I do improving the network.
The best thing a manager can do is to deal with procedure and red tape so that the technical types can get to work. To that end, Scientists and Engineers need managers who can talk the lingo.
My first CD-burner unit (a Philips unit) would consistently wreck at least one out of three CD-R burns.
That was probably the fault of the IDE interface. IDE was not consistent enough, especially if the drive was on the same cable as the hard drive, or a source CD reader if you were copying directly from disk to disk. Each IDE cable was a data bus where the drives would have to contend for bandwidth, and the IDE master drive could preempt the slave drive. My first burner was a Plextor SCSI unit, and it was extremely reliable.
The tablets are probably from their schools. OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) programs, or tablets in this case, are sweeping the country. Schools get reimbursed by E-Rate for the hardware, and by moving to electronic text books they save money over printed books and the kids no longer get to use the excuse about forgetting their textbooks somewhere. Some schools are using them to do inverted lectures, where the students watch a video lecture at home and do their work in class. But, for it all to work they need Internet connections, which many don't have at home.
McDonalds come into play because there is a McDonalds, or another fast-food joint or coffee shop offering free wireless, at almost every corner. It's a lot easier for a kid to walk a couple blocks to a fast-food restaurant than to take the bus half-way across town.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Nexus One as well.
I don't really mind not getting an update to ICS or Jelly Bean. I DO mind not getting bug fixes.
Gah! 5.9, not 5/9. You made me RTFA to figure out WTF.
We switched to Google Apps a few years ago. In that time I've seen maybe a dozen full or partial outages. Some were not Google's fault. Internet routing or DNS problems were responsible some of the time. One instance was when a drunk driver hit a telephone pole about a quarter of a mile away and severed our fiber connection. When it is down, I still end up spending half the day dealing with the outage. But In a decade of running our email in house, I had just one outage. We did have a few instances of where our Internet connection was down so outside email did not flow, but at least internal communications worked.
It's better, arguably, to have the servers in house because at least you can be seen working feverishly to fix the problems rather than just sitting on your hands telling your boss to be patient.
I don't know who's doing your purchasing, but they don't know what they are doing. Here is a nice list of Dell laptops with i7's and Win 7 Pro
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/latitude-laptops.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~ck=mn#!facets=80770~0~16063830,226292~0~14720685&p=1
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/vostro-laptops.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~ck=mn#!facets=80770~0~16063830,226292~0~14720685&p=1
Not entirely true.
If you buy Windows 8 Pro you get downgrade rights to Windows XP, Vista, or 7 Pro. If you look at Dell's business oriented lines you will see that they even offer the machines "downgraded" out of the box.
Of course it's a proper exception. It's on a computer!
Have you every tried to drink Budweiser warm? It's probably the most tightly quality controlled beer in the world and it tastes like shit above 55 degrees.
Beer was not bootlegged during prohibition because it was harder to smuggle than liquor. Liquor was more concentrated and could get more people drunk per gallon, so it was more valuable and made smuggling it more worth the risk. This also gave rise to the modern mixed drink. The few beer brewers that survived, like Anheuser-Busch, did so by selling malt extract and soft drinks. After Prohibition ended, Americans didn't really remember what beer was supposed to taste like. It was also 1933, when the US was in the depth of depression, that Prohibition was repealed. At that point, Americans couldn't afford good beer, so only cheap beer made with adjuncts like rice, were commercially viable. That gave Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, and Pabst a nearly competition-free market to take over. Each of these brewers make remarkably similar pilsner-style lagers. Even now they still represent about 80% of the US beer market. So for two generations Americans have drunk beer that had to be chilled to be drinkable, so Americans drink beer cold, and any new beer that hits the market has to be formulated to taste cold as well.
It's not the alcohol content but the boiling that makes beer safe to consume. Ancient beers probably didn't go over 4% ABV, well within the tolerance range of many bacteria. Boiling, however, kills any enteric bacteria, worms, and any other bugs / critters in the water likely to cause disease. Wine tends to be safe without boiling since it's made from fruit juice, not fruit + water from that filthy pond over by the latrine.
A more technical answer is that, if you simply toss water and milled (cracked, but not ground into flour) grains together, you don't get a particularly lively fermentation. Boiling gelatinizes the grains and helps break down long chain starches into shorter ones that are chewed up by yeast and bacteria faster than they would otherwise be. From there, you take some of the sludge from your previous, best tasting batch of beer and use that to kick start the fermentation of the new beer. Supposedly, ancient Egyptians boiled loaves of bread to make their beer.
FWIW, ancient brews were probably a LOT like kefir -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir
I agree that the boiling process is important for making beer, but it is only of secondary importance for safety. Boiling the wort (the liquid beer before fermentation) does tend to result in stronger, better storing beer, but once it passes some thresh hold alcohol and acidity threshold it is essentially safe. The modern reasons for boiling the wort are to create a more or less sterile environment where the yeast doesn't have to compete for resources, and to extract flavors and preservative compounds from herbal additions, like hops. Many modern beers don't go over 4% either, and there are no known pathogens that can survive the combination of alcohol and acidity of even a modern "light" beer. There are plenty of bacteria that can infect a modern beer, but they are not harmful to humans, just the beer. I suspect that our ancestor were making perfectly safe beef for generations without boiling.
Another thing I'd like to mention is that when you make beer you don't just boil grains. Boiling starch does not break it down into sugar. You wet your grains before hand, causing the grain to sprout and release enzymes that transform the starches into sugar. Then, extract this sugar using warm water and you have a nutrient rich, high energy food source for yeast. But, if you just throw the grain into boiling water it denatures the enzymes before they can convert an appreciable quantity of starch. The Incas did it a little differently with Maize. Saliva contains enzymes for converting starches into sugar. They would chew the maize before brewing. Incidentally, women tend to have more of this enzyme in their saliva and made better beer.
Also, ancient people really had no concept of yeast. If you threw yeast from your last batch into a new vat of wort and boiled it, it would kill off the yeast as well. So there would have been a period of trial and error and experimentation and failures before brewers figured out when to boil. Wine has another story to tell here. Wild yeast tends to colonize grape skins, and originally, the brewers would rely on those wild yeasts to ferment the wine. If they had boiled the wine, it would not have fermented. Fruit juices do have higher starting sugar content, so the yeast will consume it until the alcohol content kills the yeast. This is unlike beer, where the yeast consumes all available sugar and goes dormant. Due to the higher alcohol content, wine does keep longer than beer because there are fewer microbes that can stand the alcohol content. But again, this is not a safety issue as much as a flavor issue
Boil too early and there will be no starch to sugar conversion, and no beer. Or boil too late and you kill the yeast, and there will be no beer. So, since boiling is an extra step and would have involved much experimentation and failure, it seems likely that our ancestors were doing it for ages without boiling the wort. Since we exist, it would seem like the beer was safe enough.
My brain went here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vInmy1-i-w
- Cause of death looks like OG.
- "Over gold." - Yeah. Any signs of foul play around here ?
- No, sir. Looks like a case of just too many gold chains.
For improved dynamic range the sensors would have to have a mix of pixel sizes, mimicking film. I am having trouble finding my sources where I read about this, but I think I remember the essential details. Film is coated with photo-sensitve crystals that expose when struck by photons. The trick is that it does not matter what size the crystal is, the same number of photons will expose any particular crystal. So, larger crystals collect more photons than smaller crystals and expose faster. That is why fast film is grainy. The large crystals in a fast film expose quickly but effectively reduce resolution. Slow film uses small crystal that expose more slowly but yield finer details. In addition to speed, film manufacturers can mix crystal sizes for more dynamic range. Film is generally formulated to so that in the bright areas big crystals will be present and expose quickly, but the surrounding, smaller crystals expose more slowly, letting the film continue to gather detail. In the dark areas the big crystals will expose while most of the small crystals don't. Dark areas get some of the benefits of a fast film, while bright areas get some of the benefits of a slow film. The end result is that exposure as a function of time is more of a logarithmic curve, as opposed to a digital sensor's straight line exposure. The effect is similar to digital HDR bracketing shots, over exposing one frame to pick up details in shadows then underexposing another to pickup details in hot-spots. The down side is that you can loose detail in the mid-rage exposure areas
The other solution for giving digital sensors more dynamic range is to make sensors that capture more levels of exposure, say 24 or 32 bits per color per pixel, and then compress the image data into a format our monitors and printers can display.
I always use the cashier for a couple of reasons. A: they are faster. Because my wife is a stay at home mom, I rarely have to go to the grocery store. That means the cashier's muscle memory is an order of magnitude faster than my fumbling, especially when produce is involved. When I do go to the grocery store it is generally for produce. B: Grocery store kiosks talk. I hate talking computers. I hate talking to computers. And the day when computers come equipped with RPP (Real People Personalities) will be the day I finally go off the deep end.
What was possible the most prophetic movie of the 20th century nailed this one.
Erwin: "Greetings and salutations. Welcome to the emergency line of the San Angeles Police Department. If you prefer an automated response, press one, now."
You are apparently correct about litter on your own property. "Littering is knowingly depositing in any manner litter on any public or private property or in any public or private waters, without permission to do so." (http://definitions.uslegal.com/l/litter/) That is obviously under US Law. "Pollution is legally defined as the wrongful contamination of the atmosphere, water or soil to the material injury of the right of an individual." (http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/pollution/). So, yes, legally, if pollutants are contained to the property and a new owner is properly informed of the contaminates everything should be okey-dokey. Or, if an employee is unknowingly exposed to contaminates there may be problems. But, there are also requirements for storing and disposing of toxic waste because the stuff generally does not respect property lines. (http://www.epa.gov/osw/hazard/tsd/fac_reqs.htm)
As an aside, If you read TFA, you will see that there was a case last year where a Texas business illegally dumped pollutants into a river and was caught, accidentally, by an aerial drone operated by a hobbyist. This law would have made that civilian a criminal simply for taking a picture of a private business. As citizens, we have the right to observe waste storage and disposal provided that we do not directly interfere or trespass, because, frankly, businesses have a history of environmental abuses and of covering up those abuses. That being said, my understanding is that if you own property you also own the airspace below 500 feet. So presumably, anyone flying an unmanned drone, which must stay below 400 feet, over private property would be guilty of trespassing.
Pollution only occurs when it crosses the polluter's property boundary, so I am ok with the law. ....
Is that the official legal definition? If so, and pardon my french, that's a load of bullshit. What happens when in 20, 50, 100 years the property changes hands? What wasn't "pollution" before may qualify the property as a Superfund cleanup site.
TWC has a *near* monopoly on my area (Cincinnati), so it is what I use. The moment Cincinnati Bell Fioptics or Verizon FIOS is available on my street, I'm outs.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Verizon http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Again-Confirms-FiOS-Expansion-is-Over-118949
Then Napster and MP3 players appeared. Suddenly the industry was in a panic. The MPAA began an aggressive attack on downloaders, and sued anyone they could find as a scare tactic. Even though past history showed that sharing was a form of viral marketing, they wanted to kill it - perhaps because they have little control over it.
I found this nifty little chart that illustrates the matter very well. http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-music-industry-sales-2011-2 (The chart is flawed, however because it is a tally of shipments to stores, not retail sales to customers)
Napster launched in June of 1999 and shutdown in July of 2001. It operated throughout the peak of music sales and it's closing predated the period of rapid decline. ITMS launched in April of 2003 before the market went into a tailspin. ITMS and other legal online music sales probably caused the overall sales decline because the music is too cheap and people are so much more likely to buy a track or two online than to buy an entire album, and I'm not the first person to say it.
How is that different than what is done now?
In any case, it tends to be sunny when it's not windy. Between rooftops and parking lots there are tremendous stretches of flat surfaces that could be productive small-scale solar power plants. That would distribute power generation, taking strain off of the overloaded high tension power distribution grid. What power solar can't provide can be generated by wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. We have the technology to get off fossil fuels almost entirely. What we lack is the will.
The only country I can think of that has the capacity and will to go carbon neutral is China. I'm convinced that in about 20 years, China will announce a green-energy program and they will convert entirely in about a decade.
It can if it is used to hack a SCADA system. Granted, it would be neigh impossible to target a specific person.
In cases like antagonist, capitalist, and communist, the root word is a noun, not a verb.
According to vocabulary.com, antagonize is from Greek and shares the same root as agony. Agony is a noun, so antagonists are people who cause agony. Like wise, the root of capitalist is capital. In this context, capital is money invested for profit. So a capitalist is a person who invests money for profit. In the word communist, the root is the noun commune, as in " a group living situation where people share everything" (also from vocabulary.com). The other definition of commune, as in the phrase "commune with nature" is not related to communism or communist.
"Burgle", on the other hand, is a verb. "Burglar" is one who burgles. Technically, "to burglarize" is to make someone a burglar.
It's like an admission that we don't need more engineers and scientists, what we really need is more people who can process paperwork.
I wish I had a manager who could do the paperwork around here, and I'm just talking about an IT department. All of my managers (yes, all) have their eyes glaze over once they see two computer related terms in the same sentence. I end up spending as much time managing the department for them as I do improving the network.
The best thing a manager can do is to deal with procedure and red tape so that the technical types can get to work. To that end, Scientists and Engineers need managers who can talk the lingo.
But you have to admit, they really know what they're doing.
No, I've had the same experience.
My first CD-burner unit (a Philips unit) would consistently wreck at least one out of three CD-R burns.
That was probably the fault of the IDE interface. IDE was not consistent enough, especially if the drive was on the same cable as the hard drive, or a source CD reader if you were copying directly from disk to disk. Each IDE cable was a data bus where the drives would have to contend for bandwidth, and the IDE master drive could preempt the slave drive. My first burner was a Plextor SCSI unit, and it was extremely reliable.
Hens are quite used to not having teeth. Now a hare with no teeth will be in sorry shape.
The tablets are probably from their schools. OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) programs, or tablets in this case, are sweeping the country. Schools get reimbursed by E-Rate for the hardware, and by moving to electronic text books they save money over printed books and the kids no longer get to use the excuse about forgetting their textbooks somewhere. Some schools are using them to do inverted lectures, where the students watch a video lecture at home and do their work in class. But, for it all to work they need Internet connections, which many don't have at home.
McDonalds come into play because there is a McDonalds, or another fast-food joint or coffee shop offering free wireless, at almost every corner. It's a lot easier for a kid to walk a couple blocks to a fast-food restaurant than to take the bus half-way across town.