Rilbur

The title was a (bad) reference to a TV show. Not sure what else I'd call the story, to be honest; titles have always been something of a weakness for me.

Speaking of English-language articles, look what was posted right after I finished my morning reading of the news yesterday: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/04/apple-ceo-tim-cook-responds-to-chinese-media-promises-better-service/ As far as the rest of your comments HH5... I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be able to reply to them. Between your increasing belligerence and their sheer unreadability, it's just not worth it.

Yes, I read the news. Do I read the same news as you? Obviously not, even ignoring the fact that there is a language barrier involved. Most of what I read is tech focused, from Arstechnica.com and similar -- properly researched, scholarly articles. Sometimes they lag a bit behind other news sites, but that would be because they actually bother with this thing called 'fact checking'. If you're providing something that's translated, it might be helpful to mention that -- along with linking to the original, which should always be automatic. Telling me to go find it is neither helpful, nor appropriate. It's your responsibility to provide links to information you include in your posts, and your responsibility to ensure that your communications are readable in the language of the forum you've chosen to participate in. A simple line of 'translated from article XYZ' would have sufficed. Clearly you've chosen to take my comment as a personal attack, and chosen to respond in kind. If I gave the impression it was an attack, I apologize. It was exactly what it was stated as: that source doesn't sound reliable simply because the grammar was beyond atrocious. It was intended as a subtle hint that you should have included a link to the original, but as I should have recalled, my version of subtlety is often lost on others.

HH5, I don't know where you got that second quote, but I wouldn't consider it a reliable source. The grammar is bad enough that any decent editor would have rejected it.

hh5, I don't think anyone is arguing that we should give iPads to anyone below high-school age (14 years old or so). Below that, you're right -- they're too rambunctious too rough. Beyond that, giving iPads to students is stupid when Android is cheaper and just as effective (Android's primary weakness is fragmentation, by issuing the same device across an entire school you remove that issue). And since Android is open source, that's absolutely no issue with creating a device that's ruggedized to hand up to rougher handling, something that iPads are NOT.

Saving costs is nice. But the point you're missing is that in this case, you're trimming costs that actually undermine the entire process. Maybe you save money over an iPad -- but that's actually debatable, because you'll have to provide multiple monitors in every environment. Instead of 1 iPad per person, you're stocking each classroom with as many monitors as the classroom can hold people. This creates duplication, especially when you add in the need to have additional monitors in facilities like the library. Plus you'll probably need to provide them at home for students. And even if you save costs, you create a situation with trade-offs that, frankly, are not worth it. The point of an iPad is it's portability compared to PCs. You can carry it anywhere, easily. Whip it out at lunch, on the bus, at school, etc etc. You can't do that once you bolt it to a keyboard and monitor. It's just not practical.

The issue with this 'android mini pc' would be portability. You can't whip it out in the cafeteria to study between classes, or on the bus, or at library tables.

Depends on how it's done. That said, that would only be helpful for avoiding pregnancy, not the transmission of STDs. Well, it'd help, somewhat, but...

It's recommended as a safe-sex practice, so...

I can't believe I have to explain that condoms aren't just for 'penetrative' sex -- they're also for oral.

Yes. And No. Even if HTML 5 was fully, 100% implimented, native code is always faster, and has fewer security loopholes. Plus Javascript is just a pain to work with on a serious project, even with JQuery.

The biggest problem with claiming that HTML5 works 'well' on all three is that unless they did it when I wasn't looking, they still haven't finalized the HTML5 spec. Scary thought, yes? Half the internet is running on 'specs' that aren't even finalized yet!

Disney doesn't own THX, so far as I'm aware. It was 'spun off' from Lucas Arts years ago, so Disney didn't acquire it in the purchase. Also, both Macs and Windows machines are easy to update: windows once properly configured does it automatically, the Mac just pops up a window saying 'time to install updates'.

I always buy ebook these days. The advantages outweigh the costs. No wear and tear on the book -- only the device, which you'll replace eventually anyways. Less weight -- can carry a lot more on you Less volume -- contributes to the above Doesn't require an external light source (depending on device) Can't loose your place Easy searching Non-damaging options for marking notes Ability to instantly get definitions on unfamiliar words Can't be lost Can adjust certain design elements (font size, margins) to suit your current needs I'll concede that battery life can be an issue, depending on the device, but 'page always loads' is a BS complaint based on a web browser. Also, visual compatibility is to a large degree a matter of getting proper compensatory devices (glasses). And by 'carry more with you', I mean I carry over three hundred books with me every day. More than that; that's just the best count I can get. I have 231 books in my caliber library (which means in un-encrypted e-pub format), and I think more than 100 books in my nook library. And then there's my much smaller kindle library. And I'm constantly adding more -- both from new releases, and when the publishers are finally smart enough to release older books in ebook format.

Thanks for tracking down that article. I'll retract my previous price point statements, as this guy has clearly done a lot more research than I have the time or interest to manage. I'll simply bring back to the fore that we're moving to an increasingly electronic world, and introducing students to that is likely to help them in life. And a 'school-specific' tablet device based on Android would also greatly improve the cost ratio -- over half the cost is on the device, after all, and Apple is known for it's high premiums.

Not really. No conflict. What would the point of the story be?

HH5, part of the reason the discussion was limited to K12 was because that's the only level most of the comments here make sense at. Lugh's BYOD comment, for example, really only makes sense in a K12 environment -- once you hit the college level, you are paying for the time in the classrooms, so it's expected that you'll choose to pay attention to the teacher over social media. It's expected that you'll attend. It's expected that you'll study because you choose to. And unlike in K12, the only 'trouble' you get is wasted cash. (Well, if your GPA drops low enough you cease being eligible for financial aid) College is a totally different environment, which has to be discussed in a totally separate context. At the college level, an ebook oriented education makes even more sense. Students are already expected to pay exorbitant prices to provide themselves with books, materials, and computer access. It's actually mandated that you have access to a computer with internet connection, and while libraries do provide a few loaner machines, they're a decidedly sub-standard option. As for my '50% figure' being BS, it's based on the actual prices in the college bookstore for the ebooks I looked at before being forced to go with the hard-copy. (Teacher didn't allow laptops open in her class... stupid, but she has the right to set stupid policies). As far as my 'wishes' for a cheaper device, the numbers I provided were based on actually available market devices, factoring in already established Apple trends. The entire post was designed to help provide a sense of scale to the numbers involved, and was never intended as an 'accurate' estimate. Jamessavik's post displayed a common emotional reaction that tablets are automatically too expensive for universal adoption -- something I wanted to reduce to an intellectual discussion instead. As far as my reference to a story goes, I was using it to provide a touchstone of sorts and not as a real example. I view the change to an electronically based education medium as inevitable. The advantage of ebooks completely outweighs the advantage of hardcover... because hardcover doesn't really have any advantage over an eBook, so long as the eBook is properly handled.

HH5, I think you're having issues with both the language (as usual) and cultural barriers. I included a section at the end of this post to help provide the context that is missing from the conversation, which should help with the cultural issues (and being direct and clear should help with the language issues...I hope) Everyone else... if you live outside the USA, the second half may help you. If you live inside it, I'm probably explaining that water is wet. Not all text books are available as eBooks? Well, duh, pick the ones that are! The publishers will get the hint soon enough. (And rapidly are) As for those materials costing 'extra' because of having to design? I call BS. Pure and utter. You still have to design, layout, proof hardcover books. That is already figured into the cost total based on the cost of the actual hardcover book! Moving on, you have a totally ungrounded assumption that making all materials electronic means that students can be home schooled. I don't care how you deliver the course material, a teacher's job is to teach -- a function that is untouched by the medium your books are carried in. Doubly so for a high school teacher, were you have to actively oppose students who don't want to 'waste' their time on something as minor as 'learning'. Lets be honest: K12 education is as much about 'day care' as it is about 'education' -- get the kids out of the home, and their parent's hair, for a good chunk of the day. And while you're at it, provide them with an education, a social environment, and help introduce them to the 'real world' where you can't do things whenever you feel like it. As for the textbook maker making '50% less', where on Earth are you getting that figure? They charge 50% less, that doesn't mean their profit is reduced. The 50% less is because you don't have the physically print the book. As expensive to run as a server is, it's (much) cheaper than printing thousands upon thousands of textbooks. And in the environment my post envisioned, it's entirely possible the school will be required to 'run' the actual server. As far as the 'secondary market' for college level course materials, not only is that totally irrelevant to the discussion about the K12 environment, but it's an argument in favor of moving to ebooks. The inability to transfer licenses is something the book makers will want. The fact that they can charge for books by the year instead of once-off would be a huge inducement to provide a license revocation mechanism and combine it with 'yearly' book purchases. And schools would, in this scenario, be willing to do the yearly purchase ​because they'd get the books at a reduced amount per-year. It's easier to budget $100 a year than $1000 every ten years, even though it averages out to the same amount. More than that, you can purchase exactly the number of textbooks you need for the year. As far as the book maker not wanting to make an ebook to enforce DRM... the entire point of my post, again, is that the ebooks would be consumed with proprietary software. Simply because it isn't in open ePub format doesn't mean it's no longer an ebook! The DRM would A) be baked into the app, and would be baked into a license agreement with real teeth, run through the school. And as far as the course materials being gone at the end of the year... again, we're aiming at K12. That's irrelevant. Not only would the students simply not care, but that's no different than what happens with physical books anyway! Finally, your last section again makes no sense -- and suggests a complete disconnect with the actual discussion. Simply because the book is being presented in electronic format, does not mean we're radically rewriting how schools work. We're radically re-writing how books work in school. You still have classes. You still have periods. You still go from class to class, with enforced attendance. You still have the same ugly mugs sitting across from you, the pretty girl (or boy) you can't get off your mind, the same hormonally charged teenagers forced to sit together in an enclosed space and learn the discipline to still act like people, not animals. Additionally, allow me to make one final point: not all of the systems I'm describing currently exist. They don't exist because they haven't been called for previously -- they are completely and absolutely possible, technologically speaking. I could write half of them myself, if needed! I'm assuming that both schools and publishers will take this opportunity to evolve, and improve. Publishers can increase their profit margins with this approach by avoiding physical printing, and taking advantage of the properties of electronic documents: they can change. You don't have to relentlessly proof everything again, and again, and again until it's perfect. If someone notices a flaw a year from now, you just patch it. The day after a typo is reported by a teacher in Hicksville, Ruralia, it vanishes from every copy of the book. Schools, on the other hand, get more reactive textbooks that can actually evolve over the course of the years. 'History' can now mean anything that's happened up to the present day -- major events can get written in as time passes. (Note: I'd hope that they'd put about a year's buffer between event and putting it in a history textbook, minimum, to help let events settle out first... but a 'current events' textbook becomes a possible, even plausible, idea!) I'm describing a theoretical shift, yes, but one that makes too much sense to not happen. I reference these basic changes in my story Trillion Dollar Family for a reason -- I view them as inevitable. But of course, while the change itself is inevitable... the devil is always in the details. It may take ten years for schools and publishers to finally make this shift. It may take twenty. It could take fifty -- but I doubt it. Electronics, computers​, are becoming an ubiquitous part of the modern world. Not taking the time in schools to show students how to take advantage of them... that's just criminal. Under the assumption that the difficulty is a combination of language barrier and cultural barrier: We're discussing the 'high school' phase of the K12, or k-12, or k through 12, education. Which is to say, the mandatory, state-funded education all children are required to undergo. This stretched through kindergarten at about age five, through 'grade twelve', at age seventeen. All students are required to attend schooling in these brackets, though parents may choose to send their children to private schools instead. The high school phase is grades nine through twelve, starting at roughly age fourteen. My remarks and posts have further been focused on the public part of the public education system, ignoring private schools which can set any cost they choose. The government pays for this stage -- though as I noted, students (and their families) can still be held accountable, financially, for misbehavior on the part of the student. Books are loaned to students as needed, then returned. They are expected to be returned in the same condition as distributed -- no notes in the margins, no damage to the spine, etc etc.

TL;DR: Tablet-based education may increase the cost of school materials slightly, but not as much as you might think at first blush, so long as you don't go overboard with it. And to offset that, there are any number of advantages to go with having an electronic device instead of an impossible number of paper books. A given textbook costs between one and two hundred dollars in high school. A student will, at any given point in the year, have between five and seven of these in their possession across their various courses, so they can be carrying between five hundred and a thousand dollars in their backpack -- probably somewhere in the middle. An iPad mini can be had for as little as 330$. Add in education / volume purchase discounts, and it wouldn't shock me in the least if you couldn't drop that to about 250$. Apple usually offers at least 100$ off plus special bundle offers when you buy stuff through their education program. While an iPad mini isn't as large a purchase as the MacBooks and iMacs those deals usually apply to, I don't think 50$ off is an unreasonable number to use for the purposes of this demonstration. And the 'special bundle offer' in this case would be the accessory of a decent carrying case to help absorb bumps and dents. So, one iPad, good for about 4 years if properly treated, can be about 250$. An iPad battery is good for about 2 years. Lets assume that the device is treated decently, so that battery replacement is an option at about 60$. (Again, assuming volume / education discounts, of about $10). That gives us an iPad cost of about $310 for a four year device (your typical high school stay). The ebook cost of textbooks usually settles at a good medium of about 50% of their physical cost. So our $750 dollars of textbooks could be reduced down to $375 worth of ebooks. That gives a total of $685 worth of material. A small gain, so far. Of course, books are good for seven or more years before they physically wear out. So, lets divide their apparent cost by 7 for the purpose of this conversation. The pendulum swings the other way, with a student carrying a reasonable average of 110$ in their bag at any given time. At the same time, lets divide the cost of the iPad in four, to compare yearly costs against yearly costs. It costs about $80 a year to give a student an iPad. The question becomes the ebooks that go with it. Right at the moment, I'm not sure if any publishers are looking seriously at ebook reuse for the purpose of high schools. Eventually, I assume they'll be driven into it -- the business model makes too much sense. So, lets assume that e-books are purchased by the year, at 1/4 the price of a permanent purchase (which we've established at about 1/2 of a full purchase, giving 1/8th of a physical copy). From $100-$200 per book, we're down to $13-$25 dollars. Run through the math, using the $750 balance established above, and you have $93.75 a year on books. So, we have $110 a year for physical books, Vs. around $173 a year for ebooks. You're going to want to provide decent wi-fi access to these students, so lets round that to $200. I'm going to assume that replacement textbooks will round out to be something similar to the repair costs for the iPads -- that the cost of books lost or damaged due to student neglect averages out around the same as the cost for fixing damaged screens. That said, please note that both costs are borne by the student and their family, not the school. The rule -- at least in my high school -- was that if you damaged a book, you paid for it's repair -- or replacement. Same for graphing calculators (you'll note I didn't include them in this equation, but you can get a free graphing calculator app on the app store easily). End result: So going iPad nearly doubles your cost of providing books. Ouch. But your books are going to be continuously updated, year to year. They can incorporate the advantages of moving images, sounds, animated diagrams. Instead of scantrons, students can now take their tests, complete with automatic scoring, directly on the device. Not only does this save money on the scantron machine, the scantron forms, requiring #2 pencils (which means teachers often have to keep a stash in the classroom for students who forget, lose, misplace, etc etc their own). This also improves anti-cheating measures. Question order can be randomized. My answer #2 isn't your answer #2 -- and even if you wanted to look at it, you can't unless I do! And if students want to scribble notes on the margin of the book... there is nothing, absolutely nothing to keep them from doing so now. Let them annotate these documents to their heart's content! And loosing your notes becomes a thing of the past -- intelligent design of your note-taking software means that all your precious notes are synced to a central server, easily recalled when you're issued a new device (which the student would have to pay for, as noted above). And if someone needs to borrow your notes, just shoot them an email with them. (Possible issue with taking notes and reading a textbook at the same time, but either you can get an app that handles that, or see below) Now, lets add in another wild card factor: why are we going Apple iPad? Seriously, why? While they are incredible consumer devices, this isn't a consumer environment. We don't care about 'perfect' end-user experience, we don't care about classy design, and the high price tag... ouch! Why not a custom android based device, designed explicitly for schools? If you can't at least halve the hardware side of the equation, I'd be shocked. Not just that; while you're halving the cost of the hardware side, you can build-in specs that call for heftier, more durable devices. Give it a larger frame (not screen) with a nice, thick bezel. Something that can take a beating. Bake the administrative software directly into the underlying OS, so teachers can allow a student to go onto the internet on the device in their classroom, when the teacher say's it's appropriate. The student can find their device locked into the class their currently attending, forced to be in the book the teacher wants them to be in. Let a student run two-apps, side-by-side, as seen on windows 8 tablets. Beyond that, our world is becoming an increasingly electronic oriented one. Embrace that change, don't fight it. Use it. As time has passed, the power of the mind has come to overshadow the power of the body as the source of earning potential -- electronics amplify that effect a hundred fold. A thousand fold. We need to start making electronics more available at younger and younger ages. Our goal should be to help students learn to use these devices -- not just to make the student's lives easier, but to help open up new options for them. Look at the Rasberry Pi, a computer designed to help allow programming to be introduced to high school students. If you do more research, there's other stuff out there designed to help bring computers 'back to earth' -- make them something anyone can work with. You're not going to make the masses programmers with this -- being a good programmer requires talent, training, and dedication, as well as a lot of brain power), but programming can help teach people to apply logic and problem solving skills. More than that, it helps make logic and problem solving skills the natural solution. It makes them something a student understand and chooses to use.

That's... a lot of fun. Dare I even say, ?

God have mercy on you... you just made me feel old. The teenagers in that video actually looked like children to me. They didn't use to. I don't wanna get old! (Waaaaaaah!)

While Jack has already been mentioned... frequently... (And deservedly; anything Doctor Who related is great) I'm shocked that no one has mentioned Susan Ivanova One of the best TV characters of all time... And without making her sexuality a major part of the character. Heck, if you aren't careful, it's easy to miss. (OK, you could argue that she's Bi, but I don't think that she ever really returned Marcus's affection as anything other than a friend). And the reason that makes her great (as a gay character, not a cahracter in general) is because it makes her sexuality exactly as important as it really is: not at all. It's a non-issue.

Wow... that's a much clearer way of putting it than what I tried to say.

Just to throw it in... I can't get it's vs its right consistently. I seriously can never remember which is which. What you have to do it just keep trying. Read, read, read -- and read professional work. Otherwise, you run the risk of 'encoding' common mistakes in whatever your reading (for example, I can tell when a writer reads a lot of nifty because their characters 'shutter' over something instead of 'shudder').

Because they aren't 'fixing' what's not broken, they're just trying to make things better. Programmers mindset: there's always a better, clearer, faster, more efficient, cleaner, improved, etc etc etc way of doing something. Find it. It's an outgrowth of hte fact that programmers are the laziest people on the planet -- no one ever works as hard at avoiding work as a programmer does.