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User: Belial6

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  1. Re:Mission creep. on How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads · · Score: 1

    I am in IT, and you are massively overstating the case. Over stating to the point of it being a lie. That is why you tried to use a PC argument against better value tablets.

    You and I both know that there are two viable tablet OSes. They both have management tools. This is a new installation, so existing software ownership is not an issue. You are making excuses for schools spending over 4 times as much for their hardware than they need to.

  2. Re:Mission creep. on How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads · · Score: 1

    That is because you are looking for a reason to keep the current failed system, or spend huge amounts of money on non-solutions. The kid doesn't have to "Hide among the shelves" and you know it. The kid can sit in a comfortable seat in front of a Starbucks, they can sit in a nice padded seat at the Library, or they can go to a friends house, or they can get online dozens of other ways. Pretending like they have to skulk around between shelves is simply a lie. Congratulations. You are another reason that the public schools system is a failure.

  3. Re:Mission creep. on How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads · · Score: 1

    You know what? I am suggesting that they go near them, yes. I noticed you left out, Home Depot, Lowes and etc. in your lie. Congratulations. You are official one of the reasons that our public education system is a failure.

  4. Re:Mission creep. on How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads · · Score: 1

    We are talking about tablets. You are in the wrong discussion.

  5. Re:I still can't for the life of me on How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yep, the iPad is the educational systems version of the military's $500 toilet seat.

  6. Re:Expensive? on How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads · · Score: 2

    Excuse me? It is the schools job to educate children. The public education system has almost 4 million employees who have been certified as being experts at imparting information to children. It most certainly is their job to write books if that is the best way to impart that information.

    They are talking about becoming an ISP to support this $20 million investment in iPads. Writing textbooks comes WAY before becoming ISP when it comes to a school and school board's business. Write me a $20 million dollar check, and I will get you textbooks written with a copyleft license. Your distribution costs most certainly will be close enough to zero as to not even being worth mention. A $20/month Linode account will give you enough bandwidth to distribute to the entire state, if not the entire nation. That is if you couldn't get someone like Microsoft or Google to host it for free.

    Neither the iPads, nor the current general textbook purchases cover those with disabilities, and for those few kids that don't have access to read electronic books, an ebook reader can be had for less than the cost of a printed textbook. Frequently way less.

    No, every one of your excuses are cop outs.

  7. Re:Mission creep. on How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads · · Score: 1

    The claim that kids and their parents don't have access to internet is severely overstated. We are not only talking about the US, we are talking about California. There is free internet everywhere for those of us that want it. Becoming an ISP would only be to try and capture those kids and parents where the parents find getting near a Starbucks, Lowes, Safeway, Home Depot, McDonalds, etc. to be more trouble than it's worth.

    Beyond that, I have to question the intelligence of buying iPads. We are not in 2010 anymore. There are plenty of perfectly capable tablets available at under $100.

  8. Re:different than prostetic hand on Wearable Robot Adds Two Fingers To Your Hand · · Score: 1

    Which would make the fact that the person is missing a limb irrelevant to the use of this device, and we are back to letting all of the other comments that deal with this outside of the scope of prosthesis for people with missing hands.

  9. Re:Lie detector on Biofeedback Games and The Placebo Effect · · Score: 1

    Lie detectors are means of trying to detect a 'Tell' . The specifically try to find a 'Tell' by measuring bodily functions that the vast number of people have no voluntary control over.

    You are either completely ignorant of how lie detectors work, or you are hoping that if you wish hard enough, you can make unpleasant realities go away.

  10. Re: Lie detector on Biofeedback Games and The Placebo Effect · · Score: 1

    Actually, that is accurate enough, although doesn't tell the whole story. Lie detectors are means of trying to detect a 'Tell' . The specifically try to find a 'Tell' by measuring bodily functions that the vast number of people have no voluntary control over. Placing 0% faith in lie detectors is even more foolish than placing 100% faith in them.

  11. Re:different than prostetic hand on Wearable Robot Adds Two Fingers To Your Hand · · Score: 1

    The person missing a hand or an arm would be better served by a robotic hand or arm. Even if refined, this idea would always be less useful than even current high end prosthetic replacing the actual missing limb.

  12. Re:And? on The Improbable Story of the 184 MPH Jet Train · · Score: 0

    It is only strange because you are unaware of how useless fuel economy ratings are. And you miss the point of both the OP and my response. After decades of technological advancement, only a minimal amount of improvement was added, and that was at the cost of huge amounts of added complexity.

  13. Re:And? on The Improbable Story of the 184 MPH Jet Train · · Score: 1

    My Metro had AC, and had no problem reading 75MPH under normal driving conditions. Sure the Prius has more power, and more safety features, but given that it is 20 years later, and the system is massively more complex, I can't forgive the 10mpg. Even if the Prius matched the metro in MPG, it would still be unimpressive that the Toyota engineers could only match the Metro when they added the little bit of extra power and massive amounts of complexity.

    Read the original post. The complain isn't that the newer device isn't more powerful. It is that the newer device adds massive complexity and cost to achieve minimal improvements.

  14. Re:Too long on Microsoft's Missed Opportunities: Memo From 1997 · · Score: 0

    I am always amazed at the zealotry that Apple fans exhibit. MS has almost lost to Apple? Apple is closer to desktop Linux market share than it is to Windows. Apple made a big hit with the iPhone, but is consistently losing market share there to Google. Apple is no where close to displacing MS.

  15. Re:And? on The Improbable Story of the 184 MPH Jet Train · · Score: 2

    That's how I feel about my 2012 Prius getting 42 MPG while my 1992 Geo Metro got 52 MPG.

  16. Re:Lie detector on Biofeedback Games and The Placebo Effect · · Score: 1

    Lie detectors are fine if you understand their limits, and what the results mean.

  17. Re:Hard to get excited. on Mozilla Doubles Down on JPEG Encoding with mozjpeg 2.0 · · Score: 1

    Your math is a lie.

  18. Re:Maybe, maybe not. on Obama Administration Says the World's Servers Are Ours · · Score: 1

    And those other countries don't get to determine what US laws are and definitly don't get to override them. It seems the answer is that there are businesses that simply cannot operate in both countries due to incompatible laws.

  19. Re:Non-compete agreements are BS. on Amazon Sues After Ex-Worker Takes Google Job · · Score: 1

    Since the point of them is that you cannot work in the field you have experience in, they essentially all do.

  20. Re:Non-compete agreements are BS. on Amazon Sues After Ex-Worker Takes Google Job · · Score: 1

    Non-Competes should be enforceable. They should just require the employer that is trying to enforce it to pay 100% of the employee's salary during the time that the non-compete is in effect.

  21. Re:Wait, *why* couldn't we do this? on New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel · · Score: 1

    What the heck are you doing to your cars?

  22. Re:Now I'm confused ... on New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel · · Score: 1

    Because energy production and energy storage are not the same thing.

  23. Re:Electric cars are inevitable on New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel · · Score: 1

    Two obstacles. Generation and storage. The fact that people constantly get confused and think these are the same thing is one of the reasons it gets dismissed.

  24. Re:waste of time on New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel · · Score: 1

    I'm not really buying the 70mpg claim for your Metro. I had a metro, and it was almost always at 52 mpg averaged over about three tanks of gas. It is possible that you drive more efficiently than I do, but that is a mighty big spread. My Suzuki Swift (4-cylinder Geo Metro) was pretty consistent at ~42 mpg. Other than, that, I completely agree. There really is no excuse for 30 years of innovation, and the move to hybrids for gas mileage to have gone down. Sure, newer cars are heavier, but new innovation should have more than covered the difference in weight.

  25. Re:Thanks for pointing out the "briefly" part. on Half of Germany's Power Supplied By Solar, Briefly · · Score: 1

    Use water storage as a capacitor. It is possible that the power company does know better than me on how to manage the grid, and they just decided to do it badly. We all see companies all over that choose to do things badly. Sometimes it is because doing it well would reduce profits. Sometimes it is because one department can look like it is saving money by forcing greater costs onto another department, sometimes it is because a person with influence is lazy, and sometimes it is because the guy that has been working at the same job for 40 years is afraid of change. Whatever the reason, solving both spikes and drops is relatively trivial from an engineering point of view.