. . . we still have some pretty awful things happening on a daily basis due to religion, even mainstream religion. Especially here in the center of the U.S. where perhaps the people from the blue-states on the coasts don't realize how big the problem is.
Of course we know how bad it is, why do you think we live in blue states? Let the middle go to hell, civilization will survive on the coasts, and anyone who wants to be a part of it will get on a bus and get the hell out of the heartland.
Anyone who stays, gets what they deserve.
[ Am I serious? At least half the time. The rest of the time I feel as bad for girls who grow in in the American bible-belt as I do for girls who grew up under the Taliban. ]
The Macbook Pro has Firewire. It just doesn't have Firewire 800.
You may be thinking of the iPod, which has lost Firewire support entirely in the current iteration.
I paid $2 for a silent ringtone. I assigned it to all members of the group "idiots" in my address book, and it's as though they have stopped calling me.
Re:Its not the smart kids that change the world
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 1
...its not the smart kids. Its the kids that are motivated and put in the effort into doing something.
This is precisely the point of the system. The smart but unmotivated (represented liberally here on slashdot) complain that they system fails them, but only because they fail to understand the system and its purpose.
The educational system, public and private, is designed to allow/force 'the cream to rise to the top'. The only problem is that high IQ isn't the system's definition of cream.
I don't know of any combined phone/pda/mp3 player/game console/electric razor that allows you to shut off the *phone*
The N-Gage QD, whatever its weakness may be, can do this, but it isn't the best mp3 player out there (mono). Still, it's nice to pack only my QD, instead of a phone and my Gameboy.
Because if you delete early and often, you've committed no crime. If you wait to delete it until someone (feds, cops, *IAA, UN-black-helicopter troopers, whoever) demands you turn it over to them, you're screwed.
After all, you break laws too (everybody does, they are written that way). You just haven't been caught yet. (I know this because if you had, you wouldn't have all you email archived!)
Yikes! Where could you have possibly gotten the idea Windows was supposed to be easy? Certainly not from me or my TiBook.
Seriously, though. I know you only say that to make a point. And I agree, it is absurd that you have to hack the registry to turn of a "feature" that slows even a high-performance PC into a dog the instant you open a folder full of pirated movies. The only explanations I can come up with are:
1. The MPAA paid them to do it.
2. They are incompetent buffoons.
Since it is impossible to even delete a movie file while it is being scanned and an icon is created, #1 seems like an unlikely option.
To be completely fair, there is some lag on my Mac too, when I click on a movie file, while it opens a preview with QuickTime. But that can be avoided by not browsing folders full of movies in column view.
the 'feature' to automatically create an icon for movies REALLY pisses me off. is there a way to permanently disable it?
Why, yes. Yes, there is. It is a registry edit, and I'm sure there are tools out there to do it for you, if you are uncomfortable with that. What is it, you ask? Well I'll tell you . . . no I won't. Use your google-fu. If it takes you longer than 10 minutes to find and implement it, you need a new google-fu sensei!
When the PSP comes out it'll be the gaming Sony that's competing with Nokia's N-Gage, so we'll love Sony that day.
No. No. No. That will be the gaming Sony that is competing with Nintendo's Game Boy, which owns ALL the old skool cred in portable gaming, so we will hate Sony that day.
Also, we don't hate N-Gage for competing with Nintendo, we just hate it for sucking. If it didn't suck (like the PSP won't suck) THEN we'd hate it for daring to compete with old skool cred.
For Christians, there seems to be ample evidence of the truth of their belief, so why wouldn't they want others to know about what Christ did and why?
This displays a fundamental lack of understanding of christianity I would not believe possible in modern day America. For christians there is ABSOULUTLY NO evidence of the truth of their beliefs. The entire religion is based on blind faith in an un-provable, unobservable principle. The existence of ANY proof would obliviate the need for faith, the entire foundation of the religion.
Any religion that relied on proof of its tenets could be proven wrong. That would be a very badly designed religion.
I've seen this same behavior in my iBook G4 (12", 1Ghz). Not often or reproducible, but it IS annoying. I've been unable to find any reference to this happening to iBooks on Apple's support pages, and since they didn't recommend a fix for any of the systems they do list it as a problem for, I haven't tried to do anything about it, except increase the frequency of auto-saves in my apps.
I hope the fix works for iBooks too. I haven't lost anything important from it yet, but it is only a matter of time.
the fact that you probably cannot upgrade the ethernet capabilities in a mac mini to even fast ethernet is probably the bigger strike against the mac mini. In a lot of problems that employ parallel computing, the network latency can be as important as the processor speed
You seem to be forgetting
IP over Firewire. It may not quite be gigabit, but it is fast, easy to set up, and supported, by default, on both the hardware and the OS. Of course now you are free to complain that the mini doesn't support Firewire 800!
[Self-icing coffee drink!]
We are familiar with self-heating coffee drinks such as Caldo Caldo from Chiari & Forti in Italy, and more recently Nestle's Nescafe branded Hote When You Want It line in the UK. Now the trend is going in the opposite direction, with a new "self-icing" coffee drink in Italy. It is called Freddo Freddo (translates as "Cold Cold") and has been introduced by Chiari & Forti alongside the Caldo Caldo product. It uses the same technology as the self-heating drink, and is ready in 40 seconds after pressing the bottom of the plastic cup and shaking.
You know, if you hadn't been so absorbed in something your boss wasn't paying you to do, you might have noticed them come in the door and raise the alarm. I have a tip for the future: when put in charge of looking after a cash register stuffed with cash, try and stay alert on the task at hand and perhaps you won't get robbed so often.
Let me sumarize; You have missed the point. The contents of the register are not worth loosing your life over, there not worth getting in a confrontation with a twitchy mugger, there not worth much at all-
Even you have missed the point a little. The contents of the register aren't even his!! If the register had $10 or $10,000 it wouldn't be worth his getting a hangnail or a little dust on his shoes. If someone else wants the money, why should he care?
"
If we're not songwriters, and not hugely successful commercially (as in platinum-plus), we [recording artists] don't make a dime off our recordings." - Janis Ian
No pity for the "artists" who don't write their own songs. Only a little more for the ones who do but still signed with a major/RIAA label.
Many pirates (that is what we who steal our music off p2p are) justify it by saying "the money wouldn't go to the artist anyway, so why not pirate it," but really, I just download music I wouldn't pay for because it is not worth money. I always pay for the stuff that is worth it, even if the label will get all the profits. (This has not left me paying for much music in the last five years)
If if I really like an artist I go to their shows, and I have never bought a ticket to a show of an "recording artist" who is not a songwriter.
How can you dis the context-sensitive formatting palette! 9 times out of 10 the button/setting/command I want is on the palette, right where I want it. This is so much better than the vanishing menus in Office for Windows, or cluttering my screen with more toolbars. My screen (and everyone else's) is wider than it is tall. I have no interest in another toolbar across the top of my screen.
If your other criticisms weren't better than this I would think you were trolling.
There could be a back door in the spam filter, but I have another [slightly] less sinsiter possibility.
Mail.app ships with a preset filtering rule to color-lable messages from Apple in blue. The junk filter may be set not to act on messages which are already being filtered (colored, flagged, moved to a specific folder) by one of your rules. Try deleting the rule to colorize the mail from Apple and see if it starts junk filtering it.
Also worth noting, Apple will remove you from its mailing lists, any email from them includes links/instructions to do this.
[Note to moderators: this whole thread is offtopic]
I will not try to deny the inherent emotional appeal of belief in a creator, or in creator-granted rights. This belief is a great comfort to many delusional people, and it is even possible that it is the fundamental concept underlying modern society.
Let me further grant that I make no effort to "convert" to a logical school of thought those who have chosen, in the complete absence of any evidence, to believe in such things.
But allow me to restate my thesis. If you think you have any right outside the framework of government and society you have lived MUCH too sheltered a life. When I say "much to sheltered" I mean you obviously live in a country where people have a great number of rights, and have had them for so long that they have forgotten what it costs to get them.
This planet is populated by billions of people who do not have that advantage. The theoretical rights that a creator has granted them mean nothing to them because they do not have the good fortune to live under a GOVERNMENT that honors those rights.
You (or god) may assure them that they do indeed possess inalienable rights, they are just being prevented from exercising them, but I do not think that will be much consolation. Try to tell a young woman in a fundamentalist Islamic state that she has the right to an education, or to marry for love, or to go outside into the sunlight without covering from head to toe. Watch the comfort that it gives her when her father and brothers set her on fire to clean the stain that her speaking to you placed on their honor.
The only force that exists with enough power to grant or protect a right is the state.
I'm sorry that you feel that way. I'm sorry that you think your rights are given to you and taken from you by the state. Your life must be very sad.
It's not. Believing that my rights are precious and must be protected makes my life happier. I am grateful every day for every right I retain. I do not take them for granted, and I do not forget or disdain the multitudes that died fighting the tyranny of religion and unenlightened mysticism to give them to me. If they had been given to me free of charge and could not be taken away what value would I place on them?
Didn't you take a political theory or a government or a civics class in junior high? I swear, your teacher covered all this. Weren't you paying attention?
Please, don't try to use the propaganda fed to you before your brain was developed enough to reason as an explanation for not applying reason to things now.
This is some crazy shit, it's like Ayn Rand and Pat Robertson were first cousins, and they mated:
What a crock. Property rights are just that: rights. They exist in and of themselves.
Government doesn't grant them or take them away; it merely deigns to enforce them.
Our rights were invested in us by our Creator, to invoke the old-fashioned expression. They exist.
Either way you look at it, the government protects our rights. It does not grant them, and it does not have the power to take them away.
This is nuts! I won't even start on the idea of crediting the mass hallucination of a "creator" with granting you ANYTHING. I'll just leave that alone on the grounds that you MIGHT not have actually meant it since you did call it an "old-fashined expression."
If you think you have any right outside the framework of government and society you have lived MUCH too sheltered a life. You do not have ANY rights without a government to grant them to you. Without someone much, much, more powerful than yourself (the state, in case you are confused) protecting you you only have rights inside you own mind, and those will only last until you come into contact with someone stronger, smarter, or just carrying a bigger club than you.
Everything you consider to be a god-given right granted to humans by their ever-lovin' creator can be taken away at the point of a gun. You don't have the right to draw breath, let alone enjoy the fruits of your back-breaking creative labor, unless you have the backing of a society, a state or some sort of government. Only the existence of a police force prevents the strong from doing as they see fit with the weak. (Note: geeks are weak)
You may think that you SHOULD have some particular right. You may believe that something should belong to you, or that beacuse you created it you should be able to control it, but the fact is you are not strong enough to force this view on everyone else, and there is no all-powerful creator to do it for you.
The only force that exists with enough power to grant or protect a right is the state. Nothing else is big enough. No one else has a vested interest in doing so. Don't sell the state short, it is the reason you work for someone, instead of belonging to someone. (I you don't believe me, just ask someone who lives in a state too weak to grant and enforce rights)
Neal Stephenson, from Snow Crash, on being a bad-ass
Until a man is twenty-five he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastry in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
I always laugh when I hear people talk like this. I assure you that an unarmed man, no matter how he is trained does not represent a hijacking threat on an airliner anymore. Please remember that there were FOUR planes on 9/11. On one of them, armed hijackers were unable to gain controll of the plane and fly it to their target. What was the all important difference between that plane and the first three?
I'll give you a hint. The attackers were no more bad-ass on the first three planes. They were no better armed. They were simply living in a pre-9/11 world, whereas the occupants of the plane that went down without reaching its target were living in a post 9/11 world. (Thanks to the magic of in-flight phones)
It is no longer possible to do what was done on 9/11. It had already become impossible before the towers fell. Every human being who has the possibility of getting on an airplane now knows that negotiating is no longer an option. If your plane is hijacked you are already dead, so you might as well go down fighting.
If you think that you or anyone else is such a martial arts bad-ass that you can take an entire plane, your teachers owe you a refund. Too many kicks to the head have damaged your brain. Only on TV do people come at you one at a time. In real life they will just keep piling on until the weight on your chest is too much for to you take a breath and then you die.
This IS what will happen to the next person, armed or unarmed, trained or untrained, who tries to hijack a plane. No pair of nail clippers, no box knife, not even a gun or (probably) explosives will ever be enough to hijack a plane in a post 9/11 world
Sleeper agents getting hired by airlines as pilots. There is the new nightmare scenario. Pilot training is now the world's deadliest martial art.
last I checked Greenwich Village was an area inside--wait for it--London.;)
Actually, Greenwich Village is in New York City, New York, USA. Greenwich, England is an entirely different city from London, England.
Also just for the record, local time is fine, EXCEPT ON AIRLINE TICKETS! It is ridiculous to get a ticket for a multi-hop flight with times for arrivals and departures in multiple time zones (or ANY tz except GMT)
It's simply absurd to suggest that your typical educator or politician blindly believes that computers are the solution to America's education woes.
Educators do not think computer will solve every problem, just the one of what to do with your students during the school day.
I am an educator, I have sat on the tech curriculum committees of every school I have worked at. Allow me to relate some of the truly stupid ways teachers use or want to use technology. At an elementary school tech curriculum planning meeting I was part of I listened to a KINDERGARTEN teacher tell me that her 5 year olds understood graphing and needed to be starting to learn Excel. She went on to say the they needed to be taught to use digital cameras and photo editing software.
We are talking about kids who cannot color inside the lines. The cannot count to 20 without skipping a couple of the teens. Fifth grade teachers in the meeting agreed that they should be taught Excel because it would be useful to them in middle school!
At the same school I had a teacher who had not bothered to teach her kids how to use an encyclopedia (or even bring a set into the room) assign her students an online research project on a rain forest animal. For those of you who are not parents or teachers of young children that means she turned EIGHT-YEAR-OLDS loose on the web (with no supervision or instruction before hand I might add). Would any of you be surprised to learn that anaconda.com is NOT a website about snakes!
It doesn't matter if teachers and administrators do not claim that computers will solve all of the schools problems. Just making them available creates an entire new class of problem. I like to call it the "teaching Powerpoint is easier than teaching" problem. Any teacher who doesn't feel like teaching reading right now can simply point his/her kids at a computer and tell them to "research." It is now assumed by virtually every teacher I have spoken to that children are not only computer literate, but that they are more computer literate that their teachers!
The teacher who set eight year old kids loose at anaconda.com did not get into trouble for giving the assignment. Or for failing to prepare her kids for it, or for failing to supervise their computer use. The kids got in trouble. The Principal assumed that they had gone there on purpose because "these kids all have computer and the web at home" so they must have known what they were doing.
I talk about this with anyone who will listen, but I assure you that educators are not willing to hear what I am saying. Technology makes teachers jobs easier because it replaces real teaching time (that has to be planned for) with supervision in a computer lab while student stare mesmerized at the flickering CRTs. A computer is better than Ritalin at getting kids to sit still for hours on end.
Give a teacher access to a computer lab, or better yet a computer cluster in his room and watch as his free time multiplies, his stress flows away, and his kids get stupider by the minute. If we cared about our children and whether or not they learned anything in school we would not allow them to use a word processor until they could write good essays by hand. they would not use a spreadsheet until they were taking accounting, and they would not go to the internet to research a subject until they had exhausted all the paper sources in the library, and written a rough draft of the paper. And they would never be allowed to touch Powerpont. Not with a ten foot pole.
Luck for [lazy] teachers and Microsoft, we don't care if our students learn. Only that they sit quietly, and keep their hands to themselves.
Of course this does not precisely apply to those teachers who were actually hired to teach computer science, although they too should be prohibited from teaching Powerpoint.
Most of us are going to use this to back up movies that we have bought that are dual layered.
I think you meant "Most of us are going to use this to back up movies that we have RENTED that are dual layered." I like to think of it as time-shifting a la Blockbuster.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course we know how bad it is, why do you think we live in blue states? Let the middle go to hell, civilization will survive on the coasts, and anyone who wants to be a part of it will get on a bus and get the hell out of the heartland.
Anyone who stays, gets what they deserve.
[ Am I serious? At least half the time. The rest of the time I feel as bad for girls who grow in in the American bible-belt as I do for girls who grew up under the Taliban. ]
Kill 'em all, and let Google sort 'em out.
The Macbook Pro has Firewire. It just doesn't have Firewire 800. You may be thinking of the iPod, which has lost Firewire support entirely in the current iteration.
I paid $2 for a silent ringtone. I assigned it to all members of the group "idiots" in my address book, and it's as though they have stopped calling me.
The educational system, public and private, is designed to allow/force 'the cream to rise to the top'. The only problem is that high IQ isn't the system's definition of cream.
The N-Gage QD, whatever its weakness may be, can do this, but it isn't the best mp3 player out there (mono). Still, it's nice to pack only my QD, instead of a phone and my Gameboy.
What movie did you see!?!
Zooey Deschanel played Trillian beautifully. I'm going back to watch her again.
Why delete?
Because if you delete early and often, you've committed no crime. If you wait to delete it until someone (feds, cops, *IAA, UN-black-helicopter troopers, whoever) demands you turn it over to them, you're screwed.
After all, you break laws too (everybody does, they are written that way). You just haven't been caught yet. (I know this because if you had, you wouldn't have all you email archived!)
Seriously, though. I know you only say that to make a point. And I agree, it is absurd that you have to hack the registry to turn of a "feature" that slows even a high-performance PC into a dog the instant you open a folder full of pirated movies. The only explanations I can come up with are:
1. The MPAA paid them to do it.
2. They are incompetent buffoons.
Since it is impossible to even delete a movie file while it is being scanned and an icon is created, #1 seems like an unlikely option.
To be completely fair, there is some lag on my Mac too, when I click on a movie file, while it opens a preview with QuickTime. But that can be avoided by not browsing folders full of movies in column view.
I've seen this same behavior in my iBook G4 (12", 1Ghz). Not often or reproducible, but it IS annoying. I've been unable to find any reference to this happening to iBooks on Apple's support pages, and since they didn't recommend a fix for any of the systems they do list it as a problem for, I haven't tried to do anything about it, except increase the frequency of auto-saves in my apps.
I hope the fix works for iBooks too. I haven't lost anything important from it yet, but it is only a matter of time.
His PowerBook on the other hand . . .
Many pirates (that is what we who steal our music off p2p are) justify it by saying "the money wouldn't go to the artist anyway, so why not pirate it," but really, I just download music I wouldn't pay for because it is not worth money. I always pay for the stuff that is worth it, even if the label will get all the profits. (This has not left me paying for much music in the last five years)
If if I really like an artist I go to their shows, and I have never bought a ticket to a show of an "recording artist" who is not a songwriter.
If your other criticisms weren't better than this I would think you were trolling.
Mail.app ships with a preset filtering rule to color-lable messages from Apple in blue. The junk filter may be set not to act on messages which are already being filtered (colored, flagged, moved to a specific folder) by one of your rules. Try deleting the rule to colorize the mail from Apple and see if it starts junk filtering it.
Also worth noting, Apple will remove you from its mailing lists, any email from them includes links/instructions to do this.
I will not try to deny the inherent emotional appeal of belief in a creator, or in creator-granted rights. This belief is a great comfort to many delusional people, and it is even possible that it is the fundamental concept underlying modern society.
Let me further grant that I make no effort to "convert" to a logical school of thought those who have chosen, in the complete absence of any evidence, to believe in such things.
But allow me to restate my thesis. If you think you have any right outside the framework of government and society you have lived MUCH too sheltered a life. When I say "much to sheltered" I mean you obviously live in a country where people have a great number of rights, and have had them for so long that they have forgotten what it costs to get them.
This planet is populated by billions of people who do not have that advantage. The theoretical rights that a creator has granted them mean nothing to them because they do not have the good fortune to live under a GOVERNMENT that honors those rights.
You (or god) may assure them that they do indeed possess inalienable rights, they are just being prevented from exercising them, but I do not think that will be much consolation. Try to tell a young woman in a fundamentalist Islamic state that she has the right to an education, or to marry for love, or to go outside into the sunlight without covering from head to toe. Watch the comfort that it gives her when her father and brothers set her on fire to clean the stain that her speaking to you placed on their honor.
It's not. Believing that my rights are precious and must be protected makes my life happier. I am grateful every day for every right I retain. I do not take them for granted, and I do not forget or disdain the multitudes that died fighting the tyranny of religion and unenlightened mysticism to give them to me. If they had been given to me free of charge and could not be taken away what value would I place on them? Please, don't try to use the propaganda fed to you before your brain was developed enough to reason as an explanation for not applying reason to things now.If you think you have any right outside the framework of government and society you have lived MUCH too sheltered a life. You do not have ANY rights without a government to grant them to you. Without someone much, much, more powerful than yourself (the state, in case you are confused) protecting you you only have rights inside you own mind, and those will only last until you come into contact with someone stronger, smarter, or just carrying a bigger club than you.
Everything you consider to be a god-given right granted to humans by their ever-lovin' creator can be taken away at the point of a gun. You don't have the right to draw breath, let alone enjoy the fruits of your back-breaking creative labor, unless you have the backing of a society, a state or some sort of government. Only the existence of a police force prevents the strong from doing as they see fit with the weak. (Note: geeks are weak)
You may think that you SHOULD have some particular right. You may believe that something should belong to you, or that beacuse you created it you should be able to control it, but the fact is you are not strong enough to force this view on everyone else, and there is no all-powerful creator to do it for you.
The only force that exists with enough power to grant or protect a right is the state. Nothing else is big enough. No one else has a vested interest in doing so. Don't sell the state short, it is the reason you work for someone, instead of belonging to someone. (I you don't believe me, just ask someone who lives in a state too weak to grant and enforce rights)
I'll give you a hint. The attackers were no more bad-ass on the first three planes. They were no better armed. They were simply living in a pre-9/11 world, whereas the occupants of the plane that went down without reaching its target were living in a post 9/11 world. (Thanks to the magic of in-flight phones)
It is no longer possible to do what was done on 9/11. It had already become impossible before the towers fell. Every human being who has the possibility of getting on an airplane now knows that negotiating is no longer an option. If your plane is hijacked you are already dead, so you might as well go down fighting.
If you think that you or anyone else is such a martial arts bad-ass that you can take an entire plane, your teachers owe you a refund. Too many kicks to the head have damaged your brain. Only on TV do people come at you one at a time. In real life they will just keep piling on until the weight on your chest is too much for to you take a breath and then you die.
This IS what will happen to the next person, armed or unarmed, trained or untrained, who tries to hijack a plane. No pair of nail clippers, no box knife, not even a gun or (probably) explosives will ever be enough to hijack a plane in a post 9/11 world
Sleeper agents getting hired by airlines as pilots. There is the new nightmare scenario. Pilot training is now the world's deadliest martial art.
Also just for the record, local time is fine, EXCEPT ON AIRLINE TICKETS! It is ridiculous to get a ticket for a multi-hop flight with times for arrivals and departures in multiple time zones (or ANY tz except GMT)
I am an educator, I have sat on the tech curriculum committees of every school I have worked at. Allow me to relate some of the truly stupid ways teachers use or want to use technology. At an elementary school tech curriculum planning meeting I was part of I listened to a KINDERGARTEN teacher tell me that her 5 year olds understood graphing and needed to be starting to learn Excel. She went on to say the they needed to be taught to use digital cameras and photo editing software.
We are talking about kids who cannot color inside the lines. The cannot count to 20 without skipping a couple of the teens. Fifth grade teachers in the meeting agreed that they should be taught Excel because it would be useful to them in middle school!
At the same school I had a teacher who had not bothered to teach her kids how to use an encyclopedia (or even bring a set into the room) assign her students an online research project on a rain forest animal. For those of you who are not parents or teachers of young children that means she turned EIGHT-YEAR-OLDS loose on the web (with no supervision or instruction before hand I might add). Would any of you be surprised to learn that anaconda.com is NOT a website about snakes!
It doesn't matter if teachers and administrators do not claim that computers will solve all of the schools problems. Just making them available creates an entire new class of problem. I like to call it the "teaching Powerpoint is easier than teaching" problem. Any teacher who doesn't feel like teaching reading right now can simply point his/her kids at a computer and tell them to "research." It is now assumed by virtually every teacher I have spoken to that children are not only computer literate, but that they are more computer literate that their teachers!
The teacher who set eight year old kids loose at anaconda.com did not get into trouble for giving the assignment. Or for failing to prepare her kids for it, or for failing to supervise their computer use. The kids got in trouble. The Principal assumed that they had gone there on purpose because "these kids all have computer and the web at home" so they must have known what they were doing.
I talk about this with anyone who will listen, but I assure you that educators are not willing to hear what I am saying. Technology makes teachers jobs easier because it replaces real teaching time (that has to be planned for) with supervision in a computer lab while student stare mesmerized at the flickering CRTs. A computer is better than Ritalin at getting kids to sit still for hours on end.
Give a teacher access to a computer lab, or better yet a computer cluster in his room and watch as his free time multiplies, his stress flows away, and his kids get stupider by the minute. If we cared about our children and whether or not they learned anything in school we would not allow them to use a word processor until they could write good essays by hand. they would not use a spreadsheet until they were taking accounting, and they would not go to the internet to research a subject until they had exhausted all the paper sources in the library, and written a rough draft of the paper. And they would never be allowed to touch Powerpont. Not with a ten foot pole.
Luck for [lazy] teachers and Microsoft, we don't care if our students learn. Only that they sit quietly, and keep their hands to themselves.
Of course this does not precisely apply to those teachers who were actually hired to teach computer science, although they too should be prohibited from teaching Powerpoint.