That that doesn't make sense, but you really believe that only apps on the Windows platform are buggy and never really work as required or slow or you can accidently lose your work then it's just sad that you posted it in a pseudo-tech forum.
"only", no. "about the same as", sure, although I'd place google apps in the lead.
If google really wants to compete with MS for office software supremacy, they are gonna have to change their user interface completely every couple years, while claiming no one can change to openoffice because its too different. From memory, google apps pretty much look and work the same as they did when they rolled out, so they're falling way behind in the critical "creates user frustration" metric/checkbox.
... apps tend to be really buggy and never really work as required. Either the feel is slow, you accidentally click somewhere or do something that loses all your work...
When everyone has something, it becomes irrelevant... easily replaceable and less respected. When you don't have that Lamborghini, you want it.
You're describing a collectable, like beanie babies... However, as a medium of exchange, lamborghini's suck, especially if only one guy ends up owning most of the worlds supply. Takes up a lot of space, expensive maintenance and insurance, too valuable for small transactions... sounds a lot like... printed money.
That's called "collimation", which is not an inherent property of laser light, just a typically desirable one. Laser light is monochromatic (one frequency) and coherent (all waves in the same phase). Collimation is the focusing into a narrow beam. Some laser types are inherently collimated, some aren't.
Those properties also make lasers idea for projecting holograms.
I assume the same crowd that considers "naked lady outline" truck mudflaps to be tasteful and classy, will soon have ladies with "high beams" when the brights are turned on.
First, I don't believe fusion would ever be "free." It would certainly be cheap, but the cheaper it got the more difficult and costly getting rid of the heat in society would be.
Corrupt business models will not be fixed by making one subsection of an industry cheaper.
The cost of a toll grade voice ckt from LA to NYC has dropped to approximately zero.
Long distance is not free, because the cost of itemized billing is not free. The cost of advertising is not free. The cost of customer billing support is not free. The cost of handling bill payment (and non-payment) is not free.
Long distance is a billing system that happens to provide telephone service as a side effect.
Fusion generators would be the same. Its not as if you'll ever get rid of individualized detailed billing, like how I pay a fixed fee for yearly garbage pickup as part of my taxes. Imagine if every plastic trash bag had a serial numbered sticker and an army of bean counters to keep track... trash pickup would cost a multiple of what "free unlimited" garbage pickup costs.
I've found there is no better education dollar for dollar than traveling. No matter what kind of learning you want to do, whether schoolbook, or business research, or artistic, or goalless exploration, then travel is your best bet.
Can't this guy read? Is he over the age of 21 and able to drink? Somehow I'm thinking its going to be hard to find $15K of value in visiting Nepal. I made some Jewish friends (not because they were, but they just happened to be) and probably learned more from drinking with them than I'd ever pick up on a package tour of Israel.
... money is generally becoming less important.... Money (and business) will become ubiquitous, but as money and business becomes super abundant, they will also become less valuable, less prized, less meaningful...
It's becoming less important because its becoming less ubiquitous and less abundant. More concentrated.
When every home has a Faberge Egg on a shelf, Faberge Eggs are very important to everyone. When only one guy owns them all, they're kinda irrelevant to almost everyone.
Money is the same way, more or less. When only one guy has all the funny papers with ink on them, they cease to be useful as a medium of exchange and something else springs up for exchange. "attractiveness / personal services", or commodity barter, or "will work for food", or facebook twitter friend count, or trading low UID/. accounts, or bitcoins, or just plain ole economic collapse, like now.
Get yourself a wide collection of variable pore size filter papers and the chemistry gear to do vacuum filtration thru the various sizes.
Whoops forgot the last line. Then take a couple drops of each filtration level and incubate some agar petri dishes and see what if anything grows. Bacteria, molds, possibly nothing. Those cultured plates also look interesting under the microscope.
1-3 day projects regarding sustainable energy and environmental sciences
Most/all of the answers have been mostly boxed engineering demos, not actual science projects.
The most obvious science project I can think of is gathering a whole bunch of snow, melting it, and figuring out what is inside it other than H2O.
I have done this, and there is a whole heck of a lot of pollen, and all manner of strange dusts under a microscope. Also just plain ole dirt. And its fun to "core sample" once you've got multiple snowfalls. Its easy to see distinct layers.
I'm thinking your suitcase and budget are not big enough for chemical analysis but a Really good trinocular microscope with video output to a TV is probably realistic. Add some ruled counting slides (forget the proper terminology, sorry) and some buckets / beakers to melt the water, maybe a tiny centrifuge and test tubes to concentrate "whatever"... Get yourself a wide collection of variable pore size filter papers and the chemistry gear to do vacuum filtration thru the various sizes.
My daughter has 10 more years until College... People tell me that's too soon until I point out...
I started at an on/offline college in Wisconsin before your daughter was born and graduated when your daughter was 2, so I'm guessing when she hits 18 the technology might finally be ready for her to replicate my accomplishment.
It was on/offline in that I could sign up for a class held at any site (they had at least 2 within a short drive) or online. I happened to sign up for all online, although if I wanted I could have gone to the campus 10 minutes from my home for at least some classes, whichever might have been offered at that time. I did have to drive to a school site for proctored midterms and finals.
I even graduated "online" so to speak, as I was out of state that weekend. Also I hate ceremonies.
Two small business growth opportunities : Franchised cheap proctored exams (not the $250 fee cisco tests) complete with notary service. Franchised cheap semi-supervised labs for electronics / physics / chem / bio students.
This was "at" lakeland college in Wisconsin. I have no idea if anything has changed in the past 6 or 7 years.
Of course, automated grading does not give very meaningful feedback, but maybe if they had some really great AI doing it.
For grade inflation reasons, everyone already gets an "A".
A 3.5ish GPA in 1990 means top quartile. A 3.5ish GPA in 2010 means bottom quartile, does it not? If not "quartile", at least "third" correct?
Might be more useful to automate and computerize and digitally sign a system of using class projects as a kind of portfolio. The class moron adds a "hello world" program that doesn't even compile without errors to his portfolio. The class genius adds a "reasonably full featured mini operating system" to his portfolio. Both, of course, get an "A".
In fact, we personally have discussed that we wouldn't be put out if mail delivery stopped entirely - we could stop by the post office on the way home from work 1/week.
My wife is a rural postmaster's daughter, and lets just say the local retailers loved him and his post office... Guaranteed the entire village walked past their storefront at least once per week, if not daily. I'm told the "new urbanist" types have a similar line of thinking, to encourage downtown walking foot traffic.
Great idea, and the USPS can then use e-mail to their advantage. Send customers an e-mail letting them know when they have a letter/parcel waiting for them at the Post Office.
Naw box 'em up and send out via UPS or fedex. That way you can guarantee delivery via a tracking number.
The bill is due on its dude date even if you never get the bill to begin with. I've fought this battle before when I never received a bill. You are just supposed to remember to pay them. And with most things going paperless for billing anyway, its a moot point.
Also as the second great depression marches onward, there are simply fewer bills to pay. Think of magazine subscriptions, mail order catalogs, credit cards...
Irrelevant. Look at it from the point of view of the govt.
Either the USPS can fund their retirement and pension package, or it can get funded by a govt bailout. Either way, the cash more or less comes out of the same wallet. Also at least some of the pre-funding is going to be invested in.... govt bonds... keeping demand high, and rates low. Its a win win situation. Less pointless paper shuffling, better economic outlook.
The private businesses situation is completely different. You can fund your pensions / retirements out of the executive bonus fund, or you can let the govt bail them out so your former employees don't have to die eating cat food. Hmm, I wonder which option private business executives would lobby for?
Has the US government done anything to actively sabotage the USPS?
Yes. Not every dollar of lobbying spent by UPS / DHL / fedex has been wasted.
From the fine article
"laws forbidding postage rates from surpassing inflation rates keep income down."
The inflation figures are fabricated by the govt to be unrealistically low, because so many outlays depend on it being low, in addition to incumbent reelection campaigns. Realistic inflation figures would mean realistic COLA increases for SS and frankly almost all other salary expenditures. However bad our deficit situation is now, being realistic about inflation would make it even worse. Therefore the numbers are doctored up until we can sorta afford the result. (Same thing with unemployment stats)
On top of that, the proliferation of e-mail and online bill-paying services have contributed to a 22% reduction in snail-mail volume since 2006.
Everyone I know either got email in the 90s, or frankly never will get email. For me it was '90, at least for a globally accessible internet address, if you're counting BBS / compuserve I guess I go back to '83. For my elderly mother in law it was 99. Everyone else in between. Other than children coming of age, I have never even heard of someone in my circle of friends / family / coworkers getting email after '99. It would be like blaming myspace for a sudden drop of TV viewership in 2011. Something that did start around the latter half of the 00s was the global economic second great depression, which is still going on. I would say economic local maximum peak year was probably about '07 and we've been in decline since then. That Might have a little to do with it. Abandoned homes don't get much mail. Unemployed people don't order many packages from Amazon (who mostly deliver with UPS around here, anyway). Business that close don't send bills or get payments. There are multiple "dead malls" in my area where seemingly permanently empty storefronts will never tx or rx mail. Ditto semi-abandoned industrial parks, etc.
Outside the article, think about it. UPS doesn't deliver on Saturdays, unless you pay some crazy rate, assuming they still offer that service. Does anyone care? Anyone? I'm told that UPS doesn't even attempt to deliver every day, in some rural areas. Like the driver gets the "north route" on even days and the "south route" on odd days and that's just how it goes. Does anyone really care? If my mailbox never got anything on Saturday, and twice the junk every other day, I really wouldn't care. Much like when they switched to "alternate week recyclable pickup", I gave a big "meh".
Unsolicited stuff and junk mail? Why should the government pay for something to be hauled to my home, which will land in a recycle bin, which the government will pay to pick up at my home.
My wife, the retired postmasters daughter, has explained, and I have verified, that the most profitable segment of delivery is junkmail due to intense automation, and frankly, zero insurance claims (who really cares?). The next most profitable market segment was magazines. Commercial bills break even, more or less. Finally they lose money, big time, for each handwritten envelope. He retired in the 80s, supposedly not too much has changed since then.
To be honest, the simplest and least painful way to balance the books for the USPO would be to make the sale of greeting cards and postcards illegal. So few handwritten/homemade ones would be created and sent that it wouldn't matter.
Helpful tip: Having your fingers crossed while saying something only means what you think it means (that you're lying) in Swedish, not in English. In English, it means you're hoping for a particular outcome, which could be true in this case too, I guess.
Well, OK, whatever, so what does meat-grinder mean in Swedish? Slang for some body orifice, I'm guessing from context.
A major problem in our schools is teachers who don't know the technology that they are trying to teach to the students....
Perhaps if some of the money that is spent on technology was instead used to hire more talented teachers then the problem would go away.
The system is corrupt and at the K-12 level is oriented around only hiring education majors. As a CS grad I am not legally allowed to teach kids. There are waiver programs if I got a high school teaching job in a poor area, if I worked toward a bachelors in ed. I am a little fuzzy on the NCLB requirements, a failing school might or might not have masters of ed requirements.
The point is, if you demand "more talented teachers" the system is going to provide you with a slightly higher corner of the ed major bell curve. "Lets keep doing what doesn't work, except with more motivation and expensive"
I am actually kind of surprised that Linux laptops aren't being used in the classroom more often with the increasingly wide variety of OS educational software being developed these days.
Everything in education is all about the kickbacks and the corruption. With respect to linux in the classroom, who buys the district super the season tickets, not Debian... How does the prof get a kickback on each sale of a required "octave" or "R" installation?
Three things are provided in school 1) Experience 2) Training 3) Education
For experience, these computers are useless. I got some awesome "Bank Street Writer" experience on a commodore 64 back in kindergarten. 12 years later when I graduated, no one cared. About 18 years later when I got "a real job" where word processing skills were required, it was even less useful. Computers are not unchanging inanimate objects like hammers in carpentry class.
For training, see above. I had to sit thru MS Excel classes and was tested on memorization of obscure menu options. Complete waste of time. You're an expert on office? Not anymore, hello "ribbon".
For education, I'm not entirely sure computers are necessary, even to teach computer science. Far too many "CS education classes" are the equivalent of memorizing how to create pivot tables in Excel and memorizing obscure unused corners of C++ libraries.
Computer are very important to signal to fools that the district cares about the kids, because they are showering money on them. Improving education would require a different approach, like more teachers aide hours, more specialist educators, smaller class sizes by hiring more teachers in general, etc. Gadget of the month? Eh not so useful.
.... seems to say that the trains actually draw at maximum 10,000 amps, or 6 MW at 600 V. The 3-4MW figure would then be a good estimate.
This strikes me as spectacularly unlikely. Where does the 6 MW go? If into motive power, at 700 some watts per HP, that's way over 6 thousand horsepower.
Please compare your little people-trams with a fractional mile long Amtrak line, with far lower HP. Or compare that little people tram with a mountain moving coal train, that might by combining a couple million pound engines. Speaking of million pound engines, you can push as many HP into steel on steel wheels as you want, but you'll never get over about a HP per thousand pounds without wheel spin, unless you aggressively sand. I know the average American's weight has increased over the years with HFCS and all that, but the average dinky people mover cannot weigh 7 million pounds.
Another non-engineering analysis is to compare the little people mover to a "real" 6 MW train, the TGV
Is a 6 MW class people mover 700 feet long and travels at 186 miles per hour? I think not.
It may be designed to draw 6 MW momentarily while wheels are locked before the fuse blows, kind of like how Sears (are they still in business?) used to advertise "5 horsepower" vacuum cleaners and "5 horsepower" air compressors that miraculously operated off 110 volt lamp cords connected to conventional 15 amp shared circuits at merely a couple amps real world draw. Then again they were also famous for advertising their compressor CFM at 20 psi instead of 90 psi like everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
That that doesn't make sense, but you really believe that only apps on the Windows platform are buggy and never really work as required or slow or you can accidently lose your work then it's just sad that you posted it in a pseudo-tech forum.
"only", no. "about the same as", sure, although I'd place google apps in the lead.
If google really wants to compete with MS for office software supremacy, they are gonna have to change their user interface completely every couple years, while claiming no one can change to openoffice because its too different. From memory, google apps pretty much look and work the same as they did when they rolled out, so they're falling way behind in the critical "creates user frustration" metric/checkbox.
... apps tend to be really buggy and never really work as required. Either the feel is slow, you accidentally click somewhere or do something that loses all your work ...
just like windows apps...
No, and obviously not since you can only use the machines as a proxy.
Ah, I misread, I thought the proxy site was purchasing botnet time for resale as proxies.
Interestingly, AWMproxy says it accepts payment via PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa.
Do they accept payment in bitcoin and is the botnet big enough to mine more BTC/hr than the rental cost in BTC/hr? Hmm.
When everyone has something, it becomes irrelevant... easily replaceable and less respected. When you don't have that Lamborghini, you want it.
You're describing a collectable, like beanie babies ... However, as a medium of exchange, lamborghini's suck, especially if only one guy ends up owning most of the worlds supply. Takes up a lot of space, expensive maintenance and insurance, too valuable for small transactions... sounds a lot like ... printed money.
That's called "collimation", which is not an inherent property of laser light, just a typically desirable one. Laser light is monochromatic (one frequency) and coherent (all waves in the same phase). Collimation is the focusing into a narrow beam. Some laser types are inherently collimated, some aren't.
Those properties also make lasers idea for projecting holograms.
I assume the same crowd that considers "naked lady outline" truck mudflaps to be tasteful and classy, will soon have ladies with "high beams" when the brights are turned on.
First, I don't believe fusion would ever be "free." It would certainly be cheap, but the cheaper it got the more difficult and costly getting rid of the heat in society would be.
Corrupt business models will not be fixed by making one subsection of an industry cheaper.
The cost of a toll grade voice ckt from LA to NYC has dropped to approximately zero.
Long distance is not free, because the cost of itemized billing is not free. The cost of advertising is not free. The cost of customer billing support is not free. The cost of handling bill payment (and non-payment) is not free.
Long distance is a billing system that happens to provide telephone service as a side effect.
Fusion generators would be the same. Its not as if you'll ever get rid of individualized detailed billing, like how I pay a fixed fee for yearly garbage pickup as part of my taxes. Imagine if every plastic trash bag had a serial numbered sticker and an army of bean counters to keep track... trash pickup would cost a multiple of what "free unlimited" garbage pickup costs.
I've found there is no better education dollar for dollar than traveling. No matter what kind of learning you want to do, whether schoolbook, or business research, or artistic, or goalless exploration, then travel is your best bet.
Can't this guy read? Is he over the age of 21 and able to drink? Somehow I'm thinking its going to be hard to find $15K of value in visiting Nepal. I made some Jewish friends (not because they were, but they just happened to be) and probably learned more from drinking with them than I'd ever pick up on a package tour of Israel.
... money is generally becoming less important .... Money (and business) will become ubiquitous, but as money and business becomes super abundant, they will also become less valuable, less prized, less meaningful...
It's becoming less important because its becoming less ubiquitous and less abundant. More concentrated.
When every home has a Faberge Egg on a shelf, Faberge Eggs are very important to everyone. When only one guy owns them all, they're kinda irrelevant to almost everyone.
Money is the same way, more or less. When only one guy has all the funny papers with ink on them, they cease to be useful as a medium of exchange and something else springs up for exchange. "attractiveness / personal services", or commodity barter, or "will work for food", or facebook twitter friend count, or trading low UID /. accounts, or bitcoins, or just plain ole economic collapse, like now.
Get yourself a wide collection of variable pore size filter papers and the chemistry gear to do vacuum filtration thru the various sizes.
Whoops forgot the last line. Then take a couple drops of each filtration level and incubate some agar petri dishes and see what if anything grows. Bacteria, molds, possibly nothing. Those cultured plates also look interesting under the microscope.
1-3 day projects regarding sustainable energy and environmental sciences
Most/all of the answers have been mostly boxed engineering demos, not actual science projects.
The most obvious science project I can think of is gathering a whole bunch of snow, melting it, and figuring out what is inside it other than H2O.
I have done this, and there is a whole heck of a lot of pollen, and all manner of strange dusts under a microscope. Also just plain ole dirt. And its fun to "core sample" once you've got multiple snowfalls. Its easy to see distinct layers.
I'm thinking your suitcase and budget are not big enough for chemical analysis but a Really good trinocular microscope with video output to a TV is probably realistic. Add some ruled counting slides (forget the proper terminology, sorry) and some buckets / beakers to melt the water, maybe a tiny centrifuge and test tubes to concentrate "whatever"... Get yourself a wide collection of variable pore size filter papers and the chemistry gear to do vacuum filtration thru the various sizes.
Final advice, don't collect the yellow snow.
My daughter has 10 more years until College ... People tell me that's too soon until I point out ...
I started at an on/offline college in Wisconsin before your daughter was born and graduated when your daughter was 2, so I'm guessing when she hits 18 the technology might finally be ready for her to replicate my accomplishment.
It was on/offline in that I could sign up for a class held at any site (they had at least 2 within a short drive) or online. I happened to sign up for all online, although if I wanted I could have gone to the campus 10 minutes from my home for at least some classes, whichever might have been offered at that time. I did have to drive to a school site for proctored midterms and finals.
I even graduated "online" so to speak, as I was out of state that weekend. Also I hate ceremonies.
Two small business growth opportunities : Franchised cheap proctored exams (not the $250 fee cisco tests) complete with notary service. Franchised cheap semi-supervised labs for electronics / physics / chem / bio students.
This was "at" lakeland college in Wisconsin. I have no idea if anything has changed in the past 6 or 7 years.
It'll probably be pretty much the same way anyone with a seven digit UID gets treated on Slashdot.
Sorry to break the bad news to you.
At least he won't have it as rough as the six digit UID ers.
Of course, automated grading does not give very meaningful feedback, but maybe if they had some really great AI doing it.
For grade inflation reasons, everyone already gets an "A".
A 3.5ish GPA in 1990 means top quartile. A 3.5ish GPA in 2010 means bottom quartile, does it not? If not "quartile", at least "third" correct?
Might be more useful to automate and computerize and digitally sign a system of using class projects as a kind of portfolio. The class moron adds a "hello world" program that doesn't even compile without errors to his portfolio. The class genius adds a "reasonably full featured mini operating system" to his portfolio. Both, of course, get an "A".
In fact, we personally have discussed that we wouldn't be put out if mail delivery stopped entirely - we could stop by the post office on the way home from work 1/week.
My wife is a rural postmaster's daughter, and lets just say the local retailers loved him and his post office... Guaranteed the entire village walked past their storefront at least once per week, if not daily. I'm told the "new urbanist" types have a similar line of thinking, to encourage downtown walking foot traffic.
Great idea, and the USPS can then use e-mail to their advantage. Send customers an e-mail letting them know when they have a letter/parcel waiting for them at the Post Office.
Naw box 'em up and send out via UPS or fedex. That way you can guarantee delivery via a tracking number.
The bill is due on its dude date even if you never get the bill to begin with. I've fought this battle before when I never received a bill. You are just supposed to remember to pay them. And with most things going paperless for billing anyway, its a moot point.
Also as the second great depression marches onward, there are simply fewer bills to pay. Think of magazine subscriptions, mail order catalogs, credit cards...
Irrelevant. Look at it from the point of view of the govt.
Either the USPS can fund their retirement and pension package, or it can get funded by a govt bailout. Either way, the cash more or less comes out of the same wallet. Also at least some of the pre-funding is going to be invested in .... govt bonds ... keeping demand high, and rates low. Its a win win situation. Less pointless paper shuffling, better economic outlook.
The private businesses situation is completely different. You can fund your pensions / retirements out of the executive bonus fund, or you can let the govt bail them out so your former employees don't have to die eating cat food. Hmm, I wonder which option private business executives would lobby for?
Has the US government done anything to actively sabotage the USPS?
Yes. Not every dollar of lobbying spent by UPS / DHL / fedex has been wasted.
From the fine article
"laws forbidding postage rates from surpassing inflation rates keep income down."
The inflation figures are fabricated by the govt to be unrealistically low, because so many outlays depend on it being low, in addition to incumbent reelection campaigns. Realistic inflation figures would mean realistic COLA increases for SS and frankly almost all other salary expenditures. However bad our deficit situation is now, being realistic about inflation would make it even worse. Therefore the numbers are doctored up until we can sorta afford the result. (Same thing with unemployment stats)
On top of that, the proliferation of e-mail and online bill-paying services have contributed to a 22% reduction in snail-mail volume since 2006.
Everyone I know either got email in the 90s, or frankly never will get email. For me it was '90, at least for a globally accessible internet address, if you're counting BBS / compuserve I guess I go back to '83. For my elderly mother in law it was 99. Everyone else in between. Other than children coming of age, I have never even heard of someone in my circle of friends / family / coworkers getting email after '99. It would be like blaming myspace for a sudden drop of TV viewership in 2011. Something that did start around the latter half of the 00s was the global economic second great depression, which is still going on. I would say economic local maximum peak year was probably about '07 and we've been in decline since then. That Might have a little to do with it. Abandoned homes don't get much mail. Unemployed people don't order many packages from Amazon (who mostly deliver with UPS around here, anyway). Business that close don't send bills or get payments. There are multiple "dead malls" in my area where seemingly permanently empty storefronts will never tx or rx mail. Ditto semi-abandoned industrial parks, etc.
Outside the article, think about it. UPS doesn't deliver on Saturdays, unless you pay some crazy rate, assuming they still offer that service. Does anyone care? Anyone? I'm told that UPS doesn't even attempt to deliver every day, in some rural areas. Like the driver gets the "north route" on even days and the "south route" on odd days and that's just how it goes. Does anyone really care? If my mailbox never got anything on Saturday, and twice the junk every other day, I really wouldn't care. Much like when they switched to "alternate week recyclable pickup", I gave a big "meh".
Unsolicited stuff and junk mail? Why should the government pay for something to be hauled to my home, which will land in a recycle bin, which the government will pay to pick up at my home.
My wife, the retired postmasters daughter, has explained, and I have verified, that the most profitable segment of delivery is junkmail due to intense automation, and frankly, zero insurance claims (who really cares?). The next most profitable market segment was magazines. Commercial bills break even, more or less. Finally they lose money, big time, for each handwritten envelope. He retired in the 80s, supposedly not too much has changed since then.
To be honest, the simplest and least painful way to balance the books for the USPO would be to make the sale of greeting cards and postcards illegal. So few handwritten/homemade ones would be created and sent that it wouldn't matter.
Helpful tip: Having your fingers crossed while saying something only means what you think it means (that you're lying) in Swedish, not in English. In English, it means you're hoping for a particular outcome, which could be true in this case too, I guess.
Well, OK, whatever, so what does meat-grinder mean in Swedish? Slang for some body orifice, I'm guessing from context.
A major problem in our schools is teachers who don't know the technology that they are trying to teach to the students. ...
Perhaps if some of the money that is spent on technology was instead used to hire more talented teachers then the problem would go away.
The system is corrupt and at the K-12 level is oriented around only hiring education majors. As a CS grad I am not legally allowed to teach kids. There are waiver programs if I got a high school teaching job in a poor area, if I worked toward a bachelors in ed. I am a little fuzzy on the NCLB requirements, a failing school might or might not have masters of ed requirements.
The point is, if you demand "more talented teachers" the system is going to provide you with a slightly higher corner of the ed major bell curve. "Lets keep doing what doesn't work, except with more motivation and expensive"
I am actually kind of surprised that Linux laptops aren't being used in the classroom more often with the increasingly wide variety of OS educational software being developed these days.
Everything in education is all about the kickbacks and the corruption. With respect to linux in the classroom, who buys the district super the season tickets, not Debian... How does the prof get a kickback on each sale of a required "octave" or "R" installation?
Experience with real life tools are irrelevant.
Three things are provided in school
1) Experience
2) Training
3) Education
For experience, these computers are useless. I got some awesome "Bank Street Writer" experience on a commodore 64 back in kindergarten. 12 years later when I graduated, no one cared. About 18 years later when I got "a real job" where word processing skills were required, it was even less useful. Computers are not unchanging inanimate objects like hammers in carpentry class.
For training, see above. I had to sit thru MS Excel classes and was tested on memorization of obscure menu options. Complete waste of time. You're an expert on office? Not anymore, hello "ribbon".
For education, I'm not entirely sure computers are necessary, even to teach computer science. Far too many "CS education classes" are the equivalent of memorizing how to create pivot tables in Excel and memorizing obscure unused corners of C++ libraries.
Computer are very important to signal to fools that the district cares about the kids, because they are showering money on them. Improving education would require a different approach, like more teachers aide hours, more specialist educators, smaller class sizes by hiring more teachers in general, etc. Gadget of the month? Eh not so useful.
This strikes me as spectacularly unlikely. Where does the 6 MW go? If into motive power, at 700 some watts per HP, that's way over 6 thousand horsepower.
Please compare your little people-trams with a fractional mile long Amtrak line, with far lower HP. Or compare that little people tram with a mountain moving coal train, that might by combining a couple million pound engines. Speaking of million pound engines, you can push as many HP into steel on steel wheels as you want, but you'll never get over about a HP per thousand pounds without wheel spin, unless you aggressively sand. I know the average American's weight has increased over the years with HFCS and all that, but the average dinky people mover cannot weigh 7 million pounds.
Another non-engineering analysis is to compare the little people mover to a "real" 6 MW train, the TGV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Rolling_stock
Is a 6 MW class people mover 700 feet long and travels at 186 miles per hour? I think not.
It may be designed to draw 6 MW momentarily while wheels are locked before the fuse blows, kind of like how Sears (are they still in business?) used to advertise "5 horsepower" vacuum cleaners and "5 horsepower" air compressors that miraculously operated off 110 volt lamp cords connected to conventional 15 amp shared circuits at merely a couple amps real world draw. Then again they were also famous for advertising their compressor CFM at 20 psi instead of 90 psi like everyone else.