My mailman hates me. First off, they were trying to deliver my previous tenants mail into the box before I purchased the place, so he was mad when he met me that I hadn't picked up the mail in like 6 months (when it was really like a week).
My mailbox is gets 100% full within a week from all of the junk mail that comes in. It's pretty bad.
I only have a handful of bills that still come in through paper-mail, and most of that is from places that offer e-billing but not to cancel the paper-billing.
Trying to load it from my mobile device over 4G, and over my desktop via hard-line. It's either not loading, or running a LOT slower than the beta was the other day.
Yeh, I used to do that back in college. But now I don't have the patience for it... partially because I now want a smaller box (not puny, but smaller) and I hate working in those little things with these huge hands. I make enough now that if the aggravation factor is too high, I'd rather just buy something off the shelf.
That being said, since my "big box" strategy has failed these last 3 times I might have to return to that. At least I'll know what I'm getting and can scrutinize each piece via forums/reviews before buying it.
When it comes to big-box, I've been a big + trusted fan of Dell over the decades. They weren't bullet proof, but they were fairly solid. Unfortunately, my last 3 purchases from them have been... well... quite bad. And by bad, I don't mean "the drivers on their support page stunk" but "their choosing of custom hardware has stunk"
My big Dell tower: had a usb / SD module at the top that was shorting out. Replaced it, still shorting out. I didn't even have to get to Windows to have problems with it. I remove it, it's fine. OK, so no big deal... it was the equivalent of the appendix. The machine went more-or-less fine without it, though it took me a while to trace it down to that part. That part was annoying: as it was the last thing I thought of checking after video card, ram, hard drive, etc.
My next purchase was a laptop. Now here I wasn't going to fault them THAT much because it was a cheap cheap laptop. So this one I kind of blame on myself for buying garbage.
Now... recently, I bought an Alienware machine. It was great in concept: the X51 is a gaming machine. Not bleeding edge, but solid, in the form factor of an XBox. I figured: great, a solid development machine that can my a multimedia pc under my TV when it ages out. Unfortunately they included a custom-built lower-voltage nVidia 660 GTX that had a slew of problems that they're now trying to deny. At first the support guys stickied the post and were actively working with customers to find the cause of the issues. Once found, support unsticky-ed the post and started pushing it down by replying to other posts for no reason (pushing it onto 2nd/3rd page).
So, I'm done with them. Even if just anecdotal... 3 times in a row is enough to make me look elsewhere.
Supposedly things shifted recently in the XBox / gaming division... that they're profitable now. I don't recall "how" profitable, though it's still probably small. And I don't know for sure if it was true of just marketing rhetoric.
BUT... even if not, there are indirect profits. Things like "getting your kid used to Microsoft" with something fun. Word Processing and the like don't exactly hook those kids into LIKING your product or even tolerating your product. And with console gaming growing more and more... you can't rely on PC gaming as much as the old days to hook those kids into liking the brand.
Between the techie teens being introduced to *nix, and non-techie teens starting to get into OSX... they need something to keep their name on their minds.
I'm not saying it's going to totally brainwash people to grab MS tablets or anything, but it probably helps a little bit. And in this fragmenting market, every little bit helps.
Dont't get it, meat is meat, and with spices on it'll taste the same. If people get upset by horsemeat, cowmeat , dogmeat or whatever, maybe they shoudln't eat meat at all.
I don't think problem is so much that people don't think ProteinX is less efficient than ProteinY...
But, if you're lying about what kind of meet is being sold... then what else are you lying about? How about the health standards? What about the chemicals used in said animal? As much steroids and stuff they put in beef (food-animals) what about animals that might not have been raised for food? What about a racing horse which can have nastier stuff in there.
Let's put it this way... let's say you find out your casual s*xual partner is lying about some pretty heavy s*x stuff... perhaps about how faithful and/or if they've gone bare-back with someone else just before you met. How much are you gonna trust "It's OK, I've been tested"
About the SUUURE thing... fine... i don't believe it. But honestly, I don't try to convince anyone evolution is right as I believe everyone should just chill and believe what they want. The problem is, said person would not stop trying to convince me HE was right. Until I walk away.
That, and he was trying to use science to explain the teeth thing that even I know was not science.
But seriously: according to the people that try to convince me that the christian-bible-creation thing is right... they say that dinosaurs were all herbivores until Eve+Adam ate the apple.
Because, you know, the T-Rex and such had sharp meat-eating teeth just for show. SUUUURE
I said as a SCIENCE. I think public schools SHOULD have a separate class to learn the beliefs of other cultures... if for no other reason than to give everyone a better understanding of everyone else. But such a class would be sociology.
Some schools here want creationism thought as a science. As in, squeeze it in between Astronomy and Physics. But... what they do does not follow any method of the scientific method nor to they even give anything close to scientific for the theory. The "facts" they use are from the bible... because *obviously* the bible is right so anything based on it is therefore right. That's NOT science.
Wow, I thought the US was the only stand-out / weird-country with anti-evolution nuts in power.
I guess there are other countries in this unfortunate "club"
If you don't want to believe in it (or that it's even possible) then fine... believe in whatever you want.
But stop trying to prevent other people from learning it. Please. And please stop trying to pass religion off as science... such as those museums that say Adam rode on a dinosaur, and that dinosaurs were vegens until the apple incident.
I flew for the first time in a while a couple of months ago and gave it a try. The line was shorter and if they want to go blind seeing me nekkid then so be it, and I doubt one time would mean much with the health concerns (frequent flyers another story).
I'd gone to the airport prepped accordingly and took of my slip-on shoes, my thinner belt, emptied my pockets entirely... ready to just go through quickly.
STILL... they had to pat me and a bunch of people down.
W T H I thought the whole point of this thing was to go through quicker AND not have to be man-handled!?
I agree... the price for an individual TV episode is quite low. A movie, not so bad. I guess if you're a broke High School / College student you can convince yourself it's "OK" easier. But anyone making money that can afford broad-band... you can afford to buy stuff instead AND add patience to the equation.
I've spent a fair bit of coin over the years on iTunes. But spread out it's not too bad; maybe a couple bucks a week on average. Like, drinking a glass of free water instead of a bottle/glass of soda at a restaurant once week.
Back "in the day" I could understand it more. DVR's weren't as common, certain things were pain to get: not everything was released on DVD and even IF it was you had to wait at least a year from the air-date for it to come out. And if you just wanted to buy a few episodes that you missed then you were SOL... you had to buy the whole season. And the box sets took up a lot of space. And your cable provider didn't offer OnDemand for Network AND Cable. etc.
Now: I can just buy a couple of episodes if I really want. I can rent the movie online... not much cheaper than BestBuy but it's more convenient. I can watch some episodes for free (and legal) on Hulu, others for cheap on Netflix, for free on my Cable's OnDemand, and I can buy most TV episodes 24 HOURS after airtime on iTunes.
256 was enough for me: the OS, Office, a couple of AAA games, and my development stuff.
After a while, I needed to install some other stuff too... apps that I needed to run fast for developing. I got a little closer to the 256 than I'd feel comfortable so I upgraded the PC to 512GB SSD and moved the 256GB SSD to a cheap laptop.
256GB probably would've been fine in the long run, but I wanted a little wiggle room.
Meanwhile, I have about 1.5TB of iTunes videos and such on a second hard drive.
As a student... you're going to school. SOMEONE is paying for it one-way or the other so it's a waste of time and money to zone-out / play-games / day-dream / etc. Also, it's just plain silly... you should KNOW the content for your future instead of just focusing on the diploma. It's your responsibility to try to do your best.
But... as a professor... you need to make it engaging. I had SOME professors that appear to have modeled themselves after Ben Stein's famous scene in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" God awfully boring. Meanwhile professors teaching that exactly-same class-number on a different day made it interesting and fun. It's your job to teach; which includes stimulating the students' minds. Teaching is NOT just repeating paragraphs from a pamphlet in a monotonous voice while the students read-on.
What stinks is when it's for a 101 class... that's the student's main introduction into a topic. If you bore them, you are either going to make them hate the rest of the topic while they're in college or they might change their minds about their majors. While a GOOD professor will keep them interested and want them to continue actually learning the topic. The 101 course teaches the fundamentals, without them you are going to have a hard time; so the better you teach them the better they will do.
A bunch of my friends have a large gaming library installed and like their SSD because it reduces load times and such.
However, said friends also do NOT delete the older games they no longer play... in case they want to return to it in x months/years. This was they don't have to go to the hastle of re-installing AND they get to keep their save-games + progress. As games are now measured in the multi-GB range, a 250GB drive fills up (relatively) quickly.
Personally I delete my older games and only have a couple of large ones on at a time. However I also use my PC for development and thus need room for tools. In my case, 500GB is the sweet-spot... as I have have the extra room in case I need to install some more development / database stuff or if I want to install a handful more games
The average person just watches a movie: a 5,600 RPM drive is more than fine.
The Beyond-average users might watch a movie that they're ALSO going to be editing... in which case I imagine a higher random-seek-time might be nicer if they're cutting/pasting/adding-effects/etc. Home movies, stuff for professional work, etc.
These drives typically are used for the OS and whatever apps you want the fastest performance. Fast boot times, quick load times, quick action-times within the application, etc.
But even with 500GB, some people have so many apps and games that 500 is pushing it... so they have to decide which application do they want fast performance and which can they just throw on their large HDD drive.
Some people I know don't want one because they can't fit their 3TB movie collection on them. That's not what they're really for at the moment since the sizes aren't that high. And besides, the average person doesn't really need the performance of a SSD just to watch a movie. To edit/scratch/whatever perhaps, but not to watch movies or listen to mp3s. A slower HDD is fine for that.
Since it's a mine there has to be a finite amount. What happens when THAT runs out?
Oil and coal are biological in origin, and thus only located close to the surface, and can be "used up". But rare earths, and other non-biological ores, are not "used up" in the same way, because you can always just dig deeper. The cost may go up, but there is no reason to believe we will ever run out of ore.
Are you sure you don't have that backwards?
Biological means that, EVENTUALLY, it's renewable. Even if it means waiting hundreds of years, thousands, or even millions... eventually biological processes will create more. Dead carbon becoming coal, oil, whatever.
WITHOUT RECYCLING... digging up non-biological ores means you'd eventually run out. Sure, the amount of MetalX is probably great enough that if you knew where to dig it would take many many lifetimes to use up. But eventually, you WOULD use it up.
And prior to that hypothetical time... you'd also reach a point that you'd be spending more resources to mine that ore than it would make it feasible. Imagine if you use up everything easily obtainable in the next 200 years... and you find the rest of the veins are 20miles underground. Well, it's not just a matter of it "costing money" more to get there. Good luck getting down there to mine since the furthest we've ever drilled is like 10miles with a narrow drill bit.
Not necessarily... tablet/notebook can be used like a projector/smartboard/blackboard. If the professor is using a set of tools (I don't know any names) he could set up that whatever gets shown on the smart-board also show up on the tablet. Like as he's writing an equation or circling a picture for a slide. In which case, some users might prefer looking at that (and being able to zoom it and such) than sitting in the back of a packed class-room and not being able to make everything out on the screen.
I'm not saying it's a good idea... but a tablet CAN serve multiple function types. Sure: on one hand it's good for reading source material (e-books, websites, dictionary listings, etc) but it can ALSO be used as a personal "screen" for the professor to push what he's doing.
Sure, a lot of the above is reduced if the class room is set up in a smart way AND if the professor makes solid + legible slides AND writes in large enough text on the blackboard / smartboard. But my experience, 1 or more of those conditions is usually faulty even with seasoned professors.
I'm not saying this is a good idea, or even a real solution to anything. But to play devil's advocate...
It does help with students that perhaps can't see the screen well. SOME of the lecture halls at my old school... sitting towards the back made it difficult to make everything out on the projector because some professors would try to squeeze too much info in with small fonts or poor small handwriting. With a proper zoomable display on a Tablet this would be removed. And depending on how they do it, could make referring back to the day's lesson a little easier.
Also, the school COULD require that all students get a specific model/brand of a tablet. Upping the first year's tuition by a couple hundred dollars wouldn't be too insane... and now every has an iPad 4 or whatever. Also they could probably standardize on an app or use an HTML5 template to push these out. If they standardize the tablet brand+model it wouldn't have to be the nightmare you depict.
Again, I'm not saying it's a good idea but it might not be too stupid either.
I said a painful existence, followed by Hell after they eventually die however (old age, stabbed by inmates, cancer, whatever). That is, assuming you believe in hell... because you tend to die first before going there.
And of course, that ignores the root thesis of my statement: that the death penalty for rapists would mean a lot more dead rape victims too.
Slashdot Mirror
My mailman hates me. First off, they were trying to deliver my previous tenants mail into the box before I purchased the place, so he was mad when he met me that I hadn't picked up the mail in like 6 months (when it was really like a week).
My mailbox is gets 100% full within a week from all of the junk mail that comes in. It's pretty bad.
I only have a handful of bills that still come in through paper-mail, and most of that is from places that offer e-billing but not to cancel the paper-billing.
SOOO MUCH junk mail.
Trying to load it from my mobile device over 4G, and over my desktop via hard-line. It's either not loading, or running a LOT slower than the beta was the other day.
Did slashdot just "slashdot" themselves?
I'm not talking about the fact that Helium is in short supply.
But the article explicitly states they'd be using Helium, and the AC states that "OMG Fireball City LOL"
It
Yes, a giant ball of gas catching fire when fired upon and crashing into DC will sure help protect it.
You do realize that they tend to use Helium now-a-days, right? And helium is fire retardant.
I'd list a bunch of "Archer" quotes from one of my favorite episodes, but I'm too lazy to look them up.
Yeh, I used to do that back in college. But now I don't have the patience for it... partially because I now want a smaller box (not puny, but smaller) and I hate working in those little things with these huge hands. I make enough now that if the aggravation factor is too high, I'd rather just buy something off the shelf.
That being said, since my "big box" strategy has failed these last 3 times I might have to return to that. At least I'll know what I'm getting and can scrutinize each piece via forums/reviews before buying it.
Not to flame, but I'm done with them.
When it comes to big-box, I've been a big + trusted fan of Dell over the decades. They weren't bullet proof, but they were fairly solid. Unfortunately, my last 3 purchases from them have been... well... quite bad. And by bad, I don't mean "the drivers on their support page stunk" but "their choosing of custom hardware has stunk"
My big Dell tower: had a usb / SD module at the top that was shorting out. Replaced it, still shorting out. I didn't even have to get to Windows to have problems with it. I remove it, it's fine. OK, so no big deal... it was the equivalent of the appendix. The machine went more-or-less fine without it, though it took me a while to trace it down to that part. That part was annoying: as it was the last thing I thought of checking after video card, ram, hard drive, etc.
My next purchase was a laptop. Now here I wasn't going to fault them THAT much because it was a cheap cheap laptop. So this one I kind of blame on myself for buying garbage.
Now... recently, I bought an Alienware machine. It was great in concept: the X51 is a gaming machine. Not bleeding edge, but solid, in the form factor of an XBox. I figured: great, a solid development machine that can my a multimedia pc under my TV when it ages out. Unfortunately they included a custom-built lower-voltage nVidia 660 GTX that had a slew of problems that they're now trying to deny. At first the support guys stickied the post and were actively working with customers to find the cause of the issues. Once found, support unsticky-ed the post and started pushing it down by replying to other posts for no reason (pushing it onto 2nd/3rd page).
So, I'm done with them. Even if just anecdotal... 3 times in a row is enough to make me look elsewhere.
Supposedly things shifted recently in the XBox / gaming division... that they're profitable now. I don't recall "how" profitable, though it's still probably small. And I don't know for sure if it was true of just marketing rhetoric.
BUT... even if not, there are indirect profits. Things like "getting your kid used to Microsoft" with something fun. Word Processing and the like don't exactly hook those kids into LIKING your product or even tolerating your product. And with console gaming growing more and more... you can't rely on PC gaming as much as the old days to hook those kids into liking the brand.
Between the techie teens being introduced to *nix, and non-techie teens starting to get into OSX... they need something to keep their name on their minds.
I'm not saying it's going to totally brainwash people to grab MS tablets or anything, but it probably helps a little bit. And in this fragmenting market, every little bit helps.
Dont't get it, meat is meat, and with spices on it'll taste the same. If people get upset by horsemeat, cowmeat , dogmeat or whatever, maybe they shoudln't eat meat at all.
I don't think problem is so much that people don't think ProteinX is less efficient than ProteinY...
But, if you're lying about what kind of meet is being sold... then what else are you lying about? How about the health standards? What about the chemicals used in said animal? As much steroids and stuff they put in beef (food-animals) what about animals that might not have been raised for food? What about a racing horse which can have nastier stuff in there.
Let's put it this way... let's say you find out your casual s*xual partner is lying about some pretty heavy s*x stuff... perhaps about how faithful and/or if they've gone bare-back with someone else just before you met. How much are you gonna trust "It's OK, I've been tested"
I clicked submit too soon.
About the SUUURE thing... fine... i don't believe it. But honestly, I don't try to convince anyone evolution is right as I believe everyone should just chill and believe what they want. The problem is, said person would not stop trying to convince me HE was right. Until I walk away.
That, and he was trying to use science to explain the teeth thing that even I know was not science.
:-)
But seriously: according to the people that try to convince me that the christian-bible-creation thing is right... they say that dinosaurs were all herbivores until Eve+Adam ate the apple.
Because, you know, the T-Rex and such had sharp meat-eating teeth just for show. SUUUURE
"I don't want to live on this planet any more."
That opening quote is from one of my favorite Futurama episodes. And thus well chosen.
I believe that Evolution is right, or at least as right as we can ever be.
But if someone is strong in their beliefs of... well.. however the earth and man came about. I'm not going to trounce on their rights to believe it.
But it's sad when someone tries to stifle science, in any form, because it goes against something they believe.
I said as a SCIENCE. I think public schools SHOULD have a separate class to learn the beliefs of other cultures... if for no other reason than to give everyone a better understanding of everyone else. But such a class would be sociology.
Some schools here want creationism thought as a science. As in, squeeze it in between Astronomy and Physics. But... what they do does not follow any method of the scientific method nor to they even give anything close to scientific for the theory. The "facts" they use are from the bible... because *obviously* the bible is right so anything based on it is therefore right. That's NOT science.
Wow, I thought the US was the only stand-out / weird-country with anti-evolution nuts in power.
I guess there are other countries in this unfortunate "club"
If you don't want to believe in it (or that it's even possible) then fine... believe in whatever you want.
But stop trying to prevent other people from learning it. Please. And please stop trying to pass religion off as science... such as those museums that say Adam rode on a dinosaur, and that dinosaurs were vegens until the apple incident.
I flew for the first time in a while a couple of months ago and gave it a try. The line was shorter and if they want to go blind seeing me nekkid then so be it, and I doubt one time would mean much with the health concerns (frequent flyers another story).
I'd gone to the airport prepped accordingly and took of my slip-on shoes, my thinner belt, emptied my pockets entirely... ready to just go through quickly.
STILL... they had to pat me and a bunch of people down.
W T H I thought the whole point of this thing was to go through quicker AND not have to be man-handled!?
I agree... the price for an individual TV episode is quite low. A movie, not so bad. I guess if you're a broke High School / College student you can convince yourself it's "OK" easier. But anyone making money that can afford broad-band... you can afford to buy stuff instead AND add patience to the equation.
I've spent a fair bit of coin over the years on iTunes. But spread out it's not too bad; maybe a couple bucks a week on average. Like, drinking a glass of free water instead of a bottle/glass of soda at a restaurant once week.
Back "in the day" I could understand it more. DVR's weren't as common, certain things were pain to get: not everything was released on DVD and even IF it was you had to wait at least a year from the air-date for it to come out. And if you just wanted to buy a few episodes that you missed then you were SOL... you had to buy the whole season. And the box sets took up a lot of space. And your cable provider didn't offer OnDemand for Network AND Cable. etc.
Now: I can just buy a couple of episodes if I really want. I can rent the movie online... not much cheaper than BestBuy but it's more convenient. I can watch some episodes for free (and legal) on Hulu, others for cheap on Netflix, for free on my Cable's OnDemand, and I can buy most TV episodes 24 HOURS after airtime on iTunes.
256 was enough for me: the OS, Office, a couple of AAA games, and my development stuff.
After a while, I needed to install some other stuff too... apps that I needed to run fast for developing. I got a little closer to the 256 than I'd feel comfortable so I upgraded the PC to 512GB SSD and moved the 256GB SSD to a cheap laptop.
256GB probably would've been fine in the long run, but I wanted a little wiggle room.
Meanwhile, I have about 1.5TB of iTunes videos and such on a second hard drive.
It's somewhat the fault of both parties.
As a student... you're going to school. SOMEONE is paying for it one-way or the other so it's a waste of time and money to zone-out / play-games / day-dream / etc. Also, it's just plain silly... you should KNOW the content for your future instead of just focusing on the diploma. It's your responsibility to try to do your best.
But... as a professor... you need to make it engaging. I had SOME professors that appear to have modeled themselves after Ben Stein's famous scene in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" God awfully boring. Meanwhile professors teaching that exactly-same class-number on a different day made it interesting and fun. It's your job to teach; which includes stimulating the students' minds. Teaching is NOT just repeating paragraphs from a pamphlet in a monotonous voice while the students read-on.
What stinks is when it's for a 101 class... that's the student's main introduction into a topic. If you bore them, you are either going to make them hate the rest of the topic while they're in college or they might change their minds about their majors. While a GOOD professor will keep them interested and want them to continue actually learning the topic. The 101 course teaches the fundamentals, without them you are going to have a hard time; so the better you teach them the better they will do.
This
A bunch of my friends have a large gaming library installed and like their SSD because it reduces load times and such.
However, said friends also do NOT delete the older games they no longer play... in case they want to return to it in x months/years. This was they don't have to go to the hastle of re-installing AND they get to keep their save-games + progress. As games are now measured in the multi-GB range, a 250GB drive fills up (relatively) quickly.
Personally I delete my older games and only have a couple of large ones on at a time. However I also use my PC for development and thus need room for tools. In my case, 500GB is the sweet-spot... as I have have the extra room in case I need to install some more development / database stuff or if I want to install a handful more games
Hence why I put the editing bit...
The average person just watches a movie: a 5,600 RPM drive is more than fine.
The Beyond-average users might watch a movie that they're ALSO going to be editing... in which case I imagine a higher random-seek-time might be nicer if they're cutting/pasting/adding-effects/etc. Home movies, stuff for professional work, etc.
These drives typically are used for the OS and whatever apps you want the fastest performance. Fast boot times, quick load times, quick action-times within the application, etc.
But even with 500GB, some people have so many apps and games that 500 is pushing it... so they have to decide which application do they want fast performance and which can they just throw on their large HDD drive.
Some people I know don't want one because they can't fit their 3TB movie collection on them. That's not what they're really for at the moment since the sizes aren't that high. And besides, the average person doesn't really need the performance of a SSD just to watch a movie. To edit/scratch/whatever perhaps, but not to watch movies or listen to mp3s. A slower HDD is fine for that.
But for how many years?
Since it's a mine there has to be a finite amount. What happens when THAT runs out?
Oil and coal are biological in origin, and thus only located close to the surface, and can be "used up". But rare earths, and other non-biological ores, are not "used up" in the same way, because you can always just dig deeper. The cost may go up, but there is no reason to believe we will ever run out of ore.
Are you sure you don't have that backwards?
Biological means that, EVENTUALLY, it's renewable. Even if it means waiting hundreds of years, thousands, or even millions... eventually biological processes will create more. Dead carbon becoming coal, oil, whatever.
WITHOUT RECYCLING... digging up non-biological ores means you'd eventually run out. Sure, the amount of MetalX is probably great enough that if you knew where to dig it would take many many lifetimes to use up. But eventually, you WOULD use it up.
And prior to that hypothetical time... you'd also reach a point that you'd be spending more resources to mine that ore than it would make it feasible. Imagine if you use up everything easily obtainable in the next 200 years... and you find the rest of the veins are 20miles underground. Well, it's not just a matter of it "costing money" more to get there. Good luck getting down there to mine since the furthest we've ever drilled is like 10miles with a narrow drill bit.
Not necessarily... tablet/notebook can be used like a projector/smartboard/blackboard. If the professor is using a set of tools (I don't know any names) he could set up that whatever gets shown on the smart-board also show up on the tablet. Like as he's writing an equation or circling a picture for a slide. In which case, some users might prefer looking at that (and being able to zoom it and such) than sitting in the back of a packed class-room and not being able to make everything out on the screen.
I'm not saying it's a good idea... but a tablet CAN serve multiple function types. Sure: on one hand it's good for reading source material (e-books, websites, dictionary listings, etc) but it can ALSO be used as a personal "screen" for the professor to push what he's doing.
Sure, a lot of the above is reduced if the class room is set up in a smart way AND if the professor makes solid + legible slides AND writes in large enough text on the blackboard / smartboard. But my experience, 1 or more of those conditions is usually faulty even with seasoned professors.
I'm not saying this is a good idea, or even a real solution to anything. But to play devil's advocate...
It does help with students that perhaps can't see the screen well. SOME of the lecture halls at my old school... sitting towards the back made it difficult to make everything out on the projector because some professors would try to squeeze too much info in with small fonts or poor small handwriting. With a proper zoomable display on a Tablet this would be removed. And depending on how they do it, could make referring back to the day's lesson a little easier.
Also, the school COULD require that all students get a specific model/brand of a tablet. Upping the first year's tuition by a couple hundred dollars wouldn't be too insane... and now every has an iPad 4 or whatever. Also they could probably standardize on an app or use an HTML5 template to push these out. If they standardize the tablet brand+model it wouldn't have to be the nightmare you depict.
Again, I'm not saying it's a good idea but it might not be too stupid either.
But for how many years?
Since it's a mine there has to be a finite amount. What happens when THAT runs out?
Umm, read my post again?
I said a painful existence, followed by Hell after they eventually die however (old age, stabbed by inmates, cancer, whatever). That is, assuming you believe in hell... because you tend to die first before going there.
And of course, that ignores the root thesis of my statement: that the death penalty for rapists would mean a lot more dead rape victims too.