This would be decidedly Low Fidelity, but you could buy generic Mr. Microphone type devices at Radio Shack for I think $5, or possibly get a used one at Garage Sale/Thrift Store for about a $1.
Disassemble the thing take the wire leads going to the microphone itself and solder them to a mini-DIN headphone jack. Stick the jack in your MP3 player headphone or lineout port, turn on the stereo to the instructed station, and you're ready to roll.
The advantage to this system is that it is battery powered and so doesn't require you to be in the car, so that any radio would pick up the signal whether its the car stereo, your bedside alarm-clock radio, or the radio of the guy in the next cubicle in the office.
Well considering that they did wait for the show to have started on the West Coast, any true fan would have been watching the show and not logged onto SlashDot. So I think it was safe for them to post, though a spoiler warning might have been nice ofr TiVo users and other time shifters.
The Order shows similarities to stick insects, and to crickets. But only three individual speicimens have been found each representing a different new species.
Don't you think they are taking an unnecessarily harsh dig at Linux with this quote:
"After two-and-a-half years of Linux, I've finally found joy in a UNIX operating system. And I found it when I purchased a Macintosh - the first one I've ever owned." - John Hummel Jr., The Gamers' Press
While I can understand that Apple wants to get Linux users to try OS X, I don't see implying that Linux is hard to use as way to win them over. Don't you think they risk a Linux backlash from making/using comments like this?
Some additional information on this strategy can be found here and here.
The problem behind any algae based solution is A) get enough nutrients to algae (thus the iron), and B) get the algae to sink to sea bottom where the CO2 won't just be released back into the atmosphere when the algae decomposes. The problem with this experiment was that A) worked, but B) wasn't addressed.
ChooseClimate.ORG has a article that reviews many alternative climate engineering approaches for either removing CO2, or perhaps more intriguing, reducing the amount of sunlight that gets to planet's surface.
The article reviews an otherwise unrelated strategy that also involve using quicklime, but notes that burning the fuel needed for quickening the lime produces almost as much CO2 as the lime is able to absorb.
I think this system will only work if the CO2 absorbent material is produced in way thast doesn't produce any signitficant amount of additional CO2, for example using either nuclear energy, or waste heate from another process, to convert the lime, or finding a material that takes solar energy to produce a CO2 absorber (wait a minute, we already something that does that, its called photosynthesis).
I think you are actually agreeing with the original poster. Here is how I understand it.
For every four hours worked you earn a 15 minute use-it-or-lose-it break. But you can leave the premises if you want during those fifteen minutes, that's why so many government workers can still maintain a smoking habit in smoke-free buildings, they can take an outside five minute smoke break three times in the morning and three times in the afternoon. You can't however save up these breaks and take off a half hour early at the end of the day.
The 8.5 hour day that the original poster was talking about is the eaight hour workday, plus the 30 minute UNPAID lunch hour. In the agency where I work, most people (non-smokers anyway) take 10 minutes in the morning, ten minutes in the afternoon, and a 40 minute combined break/lunch in the middle of the day.
As to this new bill, one point no-one has brought-up is that most people doing IT work for the government already work in the private sector as contractors. And a good percentage of those 'IT workers' in the government do nothing more than monitor the contractors. In my agency of about 4,000 staff, 500 of whom have IT responsibility, there are likely only 100 that can explain the difference between a client and a server, or between a server and a mainframe. If you sent one of them to private industry, you will likely lose them for good. If you sent one of the remaining 400, likely the company would send them back within the first two weeks.
AS to any benefit from the private company worker coming to the government for 6-12 months, that already happens as new hires are put to work on government contracts until they prove themselves, in which case they might be given reposinibility to work as contractor outside of government.
"It's clear that even for whales, these large animals everyone loves, there's a lot we don't know,. . . Scientists based the last identification of a new species of beaked whale, in 1991, in part on specimens found for sale in a fish market in Peru."
The Japanese especially love whales, that's why they are always undertaking 'scientific studies' of whale populations, which (totally coincindentally) results in having to sell the meat of the studied whales for local consumption in Japan. Considering that technology exist to remove miniscule DNA samples from the whales to study their popluation and migration patterns, one has to wonder why the Japanese instead choose to kill the animals they are trying to learn about.
There was a massive campaign in the US when it discovered dolphins were being killed by tuna fisherman, and protests led to labelling tuna as tuna as 'Dolphin Safe'. What we need now is a world-wide campaign to to label TVs, cars, and audio systems as being made in countries where Whale is not on the menu.
How soon they forget. Just two weeks ago SlashDot ran a story on Flexible CDs which you could easily stick in the back of a paperback book since its just a flexible as paperback book cover.
I think a CD is better choice since if you think about the bandwidth requirements of running a website where EVERYONE will be able to access the software versus the minimal one time cost of a CD, I think the CD will be cheaper and will increase sales as long as you don't increase the cost of the book by more than the actual production cost of the CD (which likely would violate the GPL anyway if you're distributing any GPL s/w on the CD).
I haven't (knowingly) seen an example of subliminal advertising on the web, but this Flash animation used in an ad on Yahoo sure seems aimed at hypnotizing at least half the websurfing population. I'm thinking that if I make it my start page either I will buy a new car, or at least make sure my windshield is clean.
here I noted that Unisys has many webservers running mostly WinNT, and run a variety of webserver sw on them mostly IIS but also Lotus Domino, and Netscape. And in at least one instance they run Apache on Red Hat Linux.
Also per this chart they also run Apache on two other 'unknown' Unix platforms.
The press has picked up on this. CNET is running the story today, so I imagine MS/Unisys will have to issue a press release in response by COB today since they "weren't immediately available for comment" at the time the story was posted. Unless they are hoping that the CNET story gets written off as an April Fools joke.
FYI, per Netcraft Unisys does run most of the webservers I checked on an NT/2k platform, but doesn't seem particularly loyal to MS when it comes to Web Server software, using IIS occasionally but also Netscape and Lotus webserver SW. Also, at least one of the Unisys sites I checked (weather.unisys.com) runs Apache on Red Hat Linux.
If you have something to admit, admit it on April Fools' day.
GENIUS!
My kingdom for a modpoint, if only so that I might mod thee up.
(HMMM, it seems the Anonymous posting option has been turned off at least for logged in users. Hopefully this is either another April Fool's joke or a temporary bug. Then again if I were Taco I could see making the ability to post as AC without logging off and on again as a subscriber only option.)
Ironic that the October '01 story you linked to refers to the telephone numbers as the 'DNA of business'. Hmmm, maybe I should copyright every IP address, which would trump cybersquating laws. Amazon could tell me that Amazonsux.org violates their copyright, and I could countersue claiming that http://207.171.181.16/ violates MY copyright!
As to the original post in this thread, the guy aparently doesn't get that since its possible to code any sequence of DNA deliberately, the fact that the DNA exists in nature would only be relevant in a patent case where prior work is a valid counter claim. To show copyright infringment, you need a prior owner of the copyright to enforce their right, and would likely need to be in a creative work that consisted ONLY of the sequence (i.e. gene) in question, not in the form of an entire chromosome. Thus the ability to copyright phone numbers as referenced above.
Re:Lynx? Why use something like Lynx?
on
Qt For The Console
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Another alternative to lynx is the ARACHNE Browser for DOS and Linux. It's a fully graphical console based Internet suite (browser, email, multimedia player), and it doesn' rely on the Qt library just svgalib. It will run on a 486 with a mere 8 meg of RAM.
A full list of features and requirements can be found from the Linux Installation page of the Arachne website.
OT: Does Powers work for MI5?
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 1
Did anyone else get a kick out the fact that the two prinicpals in this story are named Spector and Austin?
Obviously the Spector name was intentional, but that their arch enemy would be named Austin is pretty funny.
Well, it *does* travel 15 degrees per hour . . . its amazing that we're not aware of the suns movement through the sky,
Umm, didn't Copernicus and Galileo straighten this out a few centuries ago? The sun, while moving in relation to the rest of the universe, isn't really moving in relation to the earth. The earth is moving around the sun and at the same time rotating in relation to the sun to give the appearance to an earth bound observer that the sun is moving accross the sky. In reality the sky is moving across the sun.
[sarcasm] Wow, and you SlashDot guys think you know something about science?[/sarcasm]
Unlike the Grammy's where we got rewarded for watching the music industries love-fest with a harangue about piracy, the only appearance by MPAA President Jack Valenti was him talking about his favourite film during one of the documentary clips at the beginning of the show.
AMPAS is made up not just of studio executives but also of the artists (actors directors cinematographers, makeup, etc.) themselves. If you think that the rantings on SlashDot against the RIAA and MPAA are meant to imply that artists don't deserve recognition or compensation for their work, then you haven't been paying attention. The MPAA and RIAA like to imply that they are standing up for the rights of artists by crushing fair-use rights, when in actuallity they have traditionally fought against artists rights since payments to artists are just another drain on their profits.
Basically, there's two 'tracks' of data. ASCII data of course. I think the limit is 64 Characters per track.
What about writing to the cards? If its just ASCII text, what's to keep your typical 20 year MIT student from altering the data on the strip to push their DoB back a year and thus get into the bar 'illegally'? Once the bar has gotten into the pattern of swiping the things, I doubt they look the face of the card other than to verify that the picture is correct.
If the Driver License is to become a National ID card with the hope of thwarting terrorism, wouldn't we need to have at least 2k of storage, and wouldn't the information have to be encrypted with only the government having access to the key? If your typical bar owner can access the 128 bytes of unencrypted data on the card, then one would assume that a well funded terrorist could write whatever they want to the card, certainly easier than forging the hologram on the front.
'Black Water'
on
Black Water
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
FYI, this is a common plumbing term for raw sewage.
My vote for responsible parties would have to include the FL sugar industry. They have been one the worst polluters in US history, and wouldn't even be there if the US government didn't impose the harshest import restrictions & tariffs for any agricultural product on foreign sugar.
Because of the sugar subsidies, the industry polutes, practices penury (the labor practice of keeping workers permanently in debt, so that they effectively have to live/work as slaves), and export other food industry jobs which pay good union wages out of the country where companies can buy sugar at world prices.
Re:Sony PlayStation 2 Linux Banned from CeBIT
on
Great gadgets at CeBIT
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I don't understand why MS thinks this will win them any fans. The story includes a MS denial that they were the ones that ratted on Sony, but the show organizers have confirmed it was them.
MS had people playing the XBox at the show, but they were paid MS employees. Sony should have just paid 1 euro to everyone that wanted to play on the PS2, then claimed they were doing the same thing as MS.
I mean, according to this, my IQ should be negative by now.
I think the problem with the study (or at least with the New Scientist write-up) is that it doesn't indicate how long the effect lasts for. It says the lower IQ was shown immediately after the rejectioin event. But what about 1 hour later, 1 day later, week, month, year, decade, etc?
I think other studies I learned about in Psych 101 or Soc. 101 indicated that rejection causes a release of adrenalin and hormones associated with stress. This is called the 'fight or flight response' and is a natural defense machanism. If our ancestors discovered they had made a mistake in their life and death environment, it likely meant they had to prepare for a physical confrontation or to flee for their life.
These stress hormones deliberately hamper the operation of higher brain functions so that lower brain functions can take priority. If you are about to be attacked by sabre tooth tiger that now plans on eating you, when you had thought you could kill it and eat it, you don't want to be admiring its asthetic beauty, or trying to decide how closely it might be related to a house cat, you want to decide quickly what's the best escape route. So naturally while these hormones are coursing through you, you're not going to preform well on an IQ test that primarily measure higher brain function.
But what about two days later, when you are back to normal, has your IQ been altered merely becase of the events two days ago? I doubt it.
It sounds like neat gadget, using IR to connect with your mobile phone for email/msg access, but the price makes no sense unless it actually comes with the phone itself.
* Metal Housing * Tiny credit card form factor * CPU: 133MHz Intel StrongARM system-on-chip processor * Memory: 32MB SDRAM; 16MB Flash ROM * LCD display: 160 x 240 pixel resolution, 16 grayscale, EL backlight * Dimensions: 1.6 x 2.5 in. (42 x 63 mm) * I/O expansion: IrDA, USB * Card slot for MMC and SD Card * Dimensions: 3.4 x 2.2 x.74 in. (85.9 x 54.4 x 18.8); Weight: 3.2 oz (92 gm) * Batteries: 2 AAA or 2 AAA Accu * Multilingual Embedded Linux operating system (German, English, French, Italian, Spain) * Multilingual Application Software: Email, Notes, Contacts, Todo, Calendar, Clock, Alarm, Games, Linux-console * PC-synchronization with MS Outlook, plus backup/restore * Email Support: SMTP und POP3 * Fileviewer: TXT, HTML, PDF, JPEG, GIF * It will be sale for the price of 649 Euros with a 32 Mb MM-Card included in April 2002 * FILEWALKER was developed and is manufactured in Germany * The desired language is chosen during initial configuration and can be changed anytime with a hard system reset.
Just because the guy was using StarOffice doesn't mean he was doing so to support OSS. StarOffice comes installed by default on eMachines PCs, and if this guy was either currently employed as a teacher, or unemployed, then its quite possible he was using StarOffice because the only PC/Office combination he could afford to buy to update his resume' was an eMachine running StarOffice.
Knowing quite few teachers (including my spouse, and my best friend) and through them other teachers, I would have to say that there are very few tech-savvy teachers out there. Many are computer literate to the extent of using Office aps, but given that my best friend is this most tech savvy teacher in his school, and he relies on me for anything more complicated than installing a modem in his PC, I'd have to say that finding one qualified to teach a Community College CS course would be a challenge.
Your best bet might be to find a Grad student in CS at a nearby university who can work teaching the courses at your school into his/her schedule.
Slashdot Mirror
This would be decidedly Low Fidelity, but you could buy generic Mr. Microphone type devices at Radio Shack for I think $5, or possibly get a used one at Garage Sale/Thrift Store for about a $1.
Disassemble the thing take the wire leads going to the microphone itself and solder them to a mini-DIN headphone jack. Stick the jack in your MP3 player headphone or lineout port, turn on the stereo to the instructed station, and you're ready to roll.
The advantage to this system is that it is battery powered and so doesn't require you to be in the car, so that any radio would pick up the signal whether its the car stereo, your bedside alarm-clock radio, or the radio of the guy in the next cubicle in the office.
Well considering that they did wait for the show to have started on the West Coast, any true fan would have been watching the show and not logged onto SlashDot. So I think it was safe for them to post, though a spoiler warning might have been nice ofr TiVo users and other time shifters.
Danish and German researchers have published a study in today's issue of Science announcing the discovery of a new Order of insects. This is the new Order of Insects discovered in almost ninety years.
The Order shows similarities to stick insects, and to crickets. But only three individual speicimens have been found each representing a different new species.
Wired had an article about a year or so ago . . .
Here's a link to the WIRED Article. The experiment you're talking about was called the Southern Ocean iron release experiment [SOIREE].
Some additional information on this strategy can be found here and here.
The problem behind any algae based solution is A) get enough nutrients to algae (thus the iron), and B) get the algae to sink to sea bottom where the CO2 won't just be released back into the atmosphere when the algae decomposes. The problem with this experiment was that A) worked, but B) wasn't addressed.
ChooseClimate.ORG has a article that reviews many alternative climate engineering approaches for either removing CO2, or perhaps more intriguing, reducing the amount of sunlight that gets to planet's surface.
The article reviews an otherwise unrelated strategy that also involve using quicklime, but notes that burning the fuel needed for quickening the lime produces almost as much CO2 as the lime is able to absorb.
I think this system will only work if the CO2 absorbent material is produced in way thast doesn't produce any signitficant amount of additional CO2, for example using either nuclear energy, or waste heate from another process, to convert the lime, or finding a material that takes solar energy to produce a CO2 absorber (wait a minute, we already something that does that, its called photosynthesis).
I think you are actually agreeing with the original poster. Here is how I understand it.
For every four hours worked you earn a 15 minute use-it-or-lose-it break. But you can leave the premises if you want during those fifteen minutes, that's why so many government workers can still maintain a smoking habit in smoke-free buildings, they can take an outside five minute smoke break three times in the morning and three times in the afternoon. You can't however save up these breaks and take off a half hour early at the end of the day.
The 8.5 hour day that the original poster was talking about is the eaight hour workday, plus the 30 minute UNPAID lunch hour. In the agency where I work, most people (non-smokers anyway) take 10 minutes in the morning, ten minutes in the afternoon, and a 40 minute combined break/lunch in the middle of the day.
As to this new bill, one point no-one has brought-up is that most people doing IT work for the government already work in the private sector as contractors. And a good percentage of those 'IT workers' in the government do nothing more than monitor the contractors. In my agency of about 4,000 staff, 500 of whom have IT responsibility, there are likely only 100 that can explain the difference between a client and a server, or between a server and a mainframe. If you sent one of them to private industry, you will likely lose them for good. If you sent one of the remaining 400, likely the company would send them back within the first two weeks.
AS to any benefit from the private company worker coming to the government for 6-12 months, that already happens as new hires are put to work on government contracts until they prove themselves, in which case they might be given reposinibility to work as contractor outside of government.
"It's clear that even for whales, these large animals everyone loves, there's a lot we don't know,. . . Scientists based the last identification of a new species of beaked whale, in 1991, in part on specimens found for sale in a fish market in Peru."
The Japanese especially love whales, that's why they are always undertaking 'scientific studies' of whale populations, which (totally coincindentally) results in having to sell the meat of the studied whales for local consumption in Japan. Considering that technology exist to remove miniscule DNA samples from the whales to study their popluation and migration patterns, one has to wonder why the Japanese instead choose to kill the animals they are trying to learn about.
There was a massive campaign in the US when it discovered dolphins were being killed by tuna fisherman, and protests led to labelling tuna as tuna as 'Dolphin Safe'. What we need now is a world-wide campaign to to label TVs, cars, and audio systems as being made in countries where Whale is not on the menu.
* they prevent the back cover from flexing,
How soon they forget. Just two weeks ago SlashDot ran a story on Flexible CDs which you could easily stick in the back of a paperback book since its just a flexible as paperback book cover.
I think a CD is better choice since if you think about the bandwidth requirements of running a website where EVERYONE will be able to access the software versus the minimal one time cost of a CD, I think the CD will be cheaper and will increase sales as long as you don't increase the cost of the book by more than the actual production cost of the CD (which likely would violate the GPL anyway if you're distributing any GPL s/w on the CD).
You Will:
here I noted that Unisys has many webservers running mostly WinNT, and run a variety of webserver sw on them mostly IIS but also Lotus Domino, and Netscape. And in at least one instance they run Apache on Red Hat Linux.
Also per this chart they also run Apache on two other 'unknown' Unix platforms.
defaults write com.apple.EOModeler CrashRandomly No
I'm pretty sure this is a twist on an old MS joke, except that the default setting for Windows was of course TRUE.
The press has picked up on this. CNET is running the story today, so I imagine MS/Unisys will have to issue a press release in response by COB today since they "weren't immediately available for comment" at the time the story was posted. Unless they are hoping that the CNET story gets written off as an April Fools joke.
FYI, per Netcraft Unisys does run most of the webservers I checked on an NT/2k platform, but doesn't seem particularly loyal to MS when it comes to Web Server software, using IIS occasionally but also Netscape and Lotus webserver SW. Also, at least one of the Unisys sites I checked (weather.unisys.com) runs Apache on Red Hat Linux.
GENIUS!
My kingdom for a modpoint, if only so that I might mod thee up.
(HMMM, it seems the Anonymous posting option has been turned off at least for logged in users. Hopefully this is either another April Fool's joke or a temporary bug. Then again if I were Taco I could see making the ability to post as AC without logging off and on again as a subscriber only option.)
Naive you are. Read this you must.
Ironic that the October '01 story you linked to refers to the telephone numbers as the 'DNA of business'. Hmmm, maybe I should copyright every IP address, which would trump cybersquating laws. Amazon could tell me that Amazonsux.org violates their copyright, and I could countersue claiming that http://207.171.181.16/ violates MY copyright!
As to the original post in this thread, the guy aparently doesn't get that since its possible to code any sequence of DNA deliberately, the fact that the DNA exists in nature would only be relevant in a patent case where prior work is a valid counter claim. To show copyright infringment, you need a prior owner of the copyright to enforce their right, and would likely need to be in a creative work that consisted ONLY of the sequence (i.e. gene) in question, not in the form of an entire chromosome. Thus the ability to copyright phone numbers as referenced above.
Another alternative to lynx is the ARACHNE Browser for DOS and Linux. It's a fully graphical console based Internet suite (browser, email, multimedia player), and it doesn' rely on the Qt library just svgalib. It will run on a 486 with a mere 8 meg of RAM.
A full list of features and requirements can be found from the Linux Installation page of the Arachne website.
Did anyone else get a kick out the fact that the two prinicpals in this story are named Spector and Austin?
Obviously the Spector name was intentional, but that their arch enemy would be named Austin is pretty funny.
Well, it *does* travel 15 degrees per hour . . . its amazing that we're not aware of the suns movement through the sky,
Umm, didn't Copernicus and Galileo straighten this out a few centuries ago? The sun, while moving in relation to the rest of the universe, isn't really moving in relation to the earth. The earth is moving around the sun and at the same time rotating in relation to the sun to give the appearance to an earth bound observer that the sun is moving accross the sky. In reality the sky is moving across the sun.
[sarcasm]
Wow, and you SlashDot guys think you know something about science?[/sarcasm]
The Oscars are awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) NOT the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Unlike the Grammy's where we got rewarded for watching the music industries love-fest with a harangue about piracy, the only appearance by MPAA President Jack Valenti was him talking about his favourite film during one of the documentary clips at the beginning of the show.
AMPAS is made up not just of studio executives but also of the artists (actors directors cinematographers, makeup, etc.) themselves. If you think that the rantings on SlashDot against the RIAA and MPAA are meant to imply that artists don't deserve recognition or compensation for their work, then you haven't been paying attention. The MPAA and RIAA like to imply that they are standing up for the rights of artists by crushing fair-use rights, when in actuallity they have traditionally fought against artists rights since payments to artists are just another drain on their profits.
Basically, there's two 'tracks' of data. ASCII data of course. I think the limit is 64 Characters per track.
What about writing to the cards? If its just ASCII text, what's to keep your typical 20 year MIT student from altering the data on the strip to push their DoB back a year and thus get into the bar 'illegally'? Once the bar has gotten into the pattern of swiping the things, I doubt they look the face of the card other than to verify that the picture is correct.
If the Driver License is to become a National ID card with the hope of thwarting terrorism, wouldn't we need to have at least 2k of storage, and wouldn't the information have to be encrypted with only the government having access to the key? If your typical bar owner can access the 128 bytes of unencrypted data on the card, then one would assume that a well funded terrorist could write whatever they want to the card, certainly easier than forging the hologram on the front.
FYI, this is a common plumbing term for raw sewage.
My vote for responsible parties would have to include the FL sugar industry. They have been one the worst polluters in US history, and wouldn't even be there if the US government didn't impose the harshest import restrictions & tariffs for any agricultural product on foreign sugar.
Because of the sugar subsidies, the industry polutes, practices penury (the labor practice of keeping workers permanently in debt, so that they effectively have to live/work as slaves), and export other food industry jobs which pay good union wages out of the country where companies can buy sugar at world prices.
Yeah, Yahoo is running the story here.
I don't understand why MS thinks this will win them any fans. The story includes a MS denial that they were the ones that ratted on Sony, but the show organizers have confirmed it was them.
MS had people playing the XBox at the show, but they were paid MS employees. Sony should have just paid 1 euro to everyone that wanted to play on the PS2, then claimed they were doing the same thing as MS.
I think the problem with the study (or at least with the New Scientist write-up) is that it doesn't indicate how long the effect lasts for. It says the lower IQ was shown immediately after the rejectioin event. But what about 1 hour later, 1 day later, week, month, year, decade, etc?
I think other studies I learned about in Psych 101 or Soc. 101 indicated that rejection causes a release of adrenalin and hormones associated with stress. This is called the 'fight or flight response' and is a natural defense machanism. If our ancestors discovered they had made a mistake in their life and death environment, it likely meant they had to prepare for a physical confrontation or to flee for their life.
These stress hormones deliberately hamper the operation of higher brain functions so that lower brain functions can take priority. If you are about to be attacked by sabre tooth tiger that now plans on eating you, when you had thought you could kill it and eat it, you don't want to be admiring its asthetic beauty, or trying to decide how closely it might be related to a house cat, you want to decide quickly what's the best escape route. So naturally while these hormones are coursing through you, you're not going to preform well on an IQ test that primarily measure higher brain function.
But what about two days later, when you are back to normal, has your IQ been altered merely becase of the events two days ago? I doubt it.
It sounds like neat gadget, using IR to connect with your mobile phone for email/msg access, but the price makes no sense unless it actually comes with the phone itself.
Here are the specs from the Invair website:
Just because the guy was using StarOffice doesn't mean he was doing so to support OSS. StarOffice comes installed by default on eMachines PCs, and if this guy was either currently employed as a teacher, or unemployed, then its quite possible he was using StarOffice because the only PC/Office combination he could afford to buy to update his resume' was an eMachine running StarOffice.
Knowing quite few teachers (including my spouse, and my best friend) and through them other teachers, I would have to say that there are very few tech-savvy teachers out there. Many are computer literate to the extent of using Office aps, but given that my best friend is this most tech savvy teacher in his school, and he relies on me for anything more complicated than installing a modem in his PC, I'd have to say that finding one qualified to teach a Community College CS course would be a challenge.
Your best bet might be to find a Grad student in CS at a nearby university who can work teaching the courses at your school into his/her schedule.