gerbal

It costs more and introduces additional complexity. It would be far useful to allow any arbitrary Google Account to join any arbitrary classroom, and trust that Teachers can do a decent job figuring out who is in their classes.

The problem with open source software in academia and education is the price. The cost of hiring a developer to maintain and support a piece of software is more often than not far more than the cost of a software license from a company that provides decent quality support and customer service.

Google has quite a good history of keeping private information private. Unless I'm mistaken. In anycase, Chromebooks are quite popular in education, and the efficient integration of services at a low (or free) cost outweighs any unsubstantiated privacy concerns.

> it is imagination what separates losers from winners! :)

Imagination and lucrative government contracts.

The K810 is quite a nice keyboard, IMO better than the Apple bluetooth keyboard in terms of feel. It appears to be functionally identical to this new K480 and would appear to have the exact same physical keyboard.

It appears to be the drivers who will be fined.

The decline in laptop sales has slowed [1]. IMO a big part of the decline in tablet sales may have to do with Chromebooks. They have hit a niche in the lower end that tablets supposedly killed 4 years ago. That combined with a saturated market and no new Wiz-Bang Tablets so far this year.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2599990/windows-pcs/mac...

A Chromebook might be what you are looking for. Powerful enough to run full Ubuntu on, built in keyboard, built in ssh client and an easy to access terminal.

>15" tablets with wireless keyboards/mice and robust remote management capabilities

you just described a chromebook. And at 1/3 the price of a tablet, Chromebooks are plenty appealing in ways a tablet just isn't

4) Chromebooks have also exploded on the low end of the market (5 million+ sales in 2014).

The bullshit "super tablet" the techcrunch article describes sounds more like a $250 chromebook/netbook than a $800 'super tablet.'

>Once people can use their smartphones with a full size keyboard/mouse/monitor, it's game over for tablets and PCs.

You already can do that. You've been able to do that for the past few years. You can connect a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, and a display with the appropriate adapter. Android has supported it since launch, and iOS for atleast as long.

People don't want their phone to be their PC. They want something physical they can use to get work done. Institutional and corporate purchasers are some of the largest consumers of new desktops and laptops. They want discrete, manageable hardware, not to have to deal with the nonsense of buying all of their employees a phone.

I'd expect it's a question of volume. The USPS and Customs do inspect international mail, however there is probably just so much of it that most contraband sneaks under the radar.

Pygal has been ported to Javascript[1] and can be embedded in arbitrary web pages. I don't know quite what to make of that. Though the implementation in trinket.io[2] is pretty cool

[1] https://github.com/trinketapp/pygal.js/

[2] https://trinket.io/charts

Also being available everywhere. I like Text Mate quite a bit, but being single platform makes it harder to recommend.

Instead of using income as a proxy for affordability, using actual cost of rent by census tract would be way better. The ACS data he used includes Rent values and property values, both of which are a much better measure of affordability than income.

Or the sort of data provided by Kwelia.

[1] http://kwelia.com

Basic income might make it reasonable to eliminate TANF, some portion of SNAP, and some unemployment, but it doesn't eliminate the core need for Medicare and Medicaid.

In the basic income scenario outlined, the poor and the elderly will still need subsidized health insurance (assuming the current employer-provided health insurance model) or health coverage of some sort.

Social Security is also something of a dicey proposition. While it would be possible to use basic income to reduce social security benefits, it's role as a social insurance scheme to provide for the elderly couldn't be substituted in its entirety by simple basic income. Social security disability and death benefits would also need some more thought.

Commuter rail is also a much smaller, cheaper target to reach for. And it would have a much greater impact on the quality of life in urban and suburban areas.

However, the barriers to commuter rail in much of the country are stupid and entrenched. In Raliegh, NC, the main barrier to commuter rail is a county commissioner who believes in some absurd conspiracy theories [1].

[1] http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive....

> Uber and Lyft are in trouble because they wanted to be exit strategy profitable rather than simply profitable.

I think this gets at one of the key problems with the current psychology of startups. Everything is build around creating an illusion of rapid, exponential growth, even if that growth is unsustainable. In the long run the exit focused strategies of startups and VCs mean we are going to be left with a few monolithic tech companies striding among the burnt out corpses of energetic, innovative startups, left to die because they couldn't reasonably target a high value exit strategy.

Similar thing happened in the south. We used to have reasonably good, popular and well used bus services in most of or cities. But then the civil rights movement happened and state and local governments cut funding and dismantled bus systems lest they have to desegregate.

Open source clone, rather.

For Linux, which Cathode does not support.

NPR is not a public broadcaster in the sense of other nation's public broadcasters.

It was founded, initially, with funding from congress, as an independent, non-profit broadcaster. Currently, NPR receives very little to no funding from the Government. Something like 2% of NPR's funding comes from state, local, and national government. Though individual stations may receive radically varying amounts of government funding.

It is Public in the sense that it serves the public interest and is funded by listeners.

Sculpteo[1] and Shapeways[2] seem to be the two largest printers. According to what I have read[3], they are priced roughly in line with the costs of materials, plus some overhead.

You may just want to find a maker space somewhere near you[4] and go print it there. Plus then you get to play with their kit and meet some cool people.

[1]http://www.sculpteo.com/

[2]http://www.shapeways.com/

[3]http://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1b1701/is_shapew...

[4]http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Spain

I'm being sarcastic. Also some departments use different self-signed certs than the university at large. Not a great situation.

The university I work for uses Self-signed certs for everything but ssl. Apparently setting up properly signed certs is too expensive. And it's more effective to have the IT staff spend an inordinate amount of time convincing end-users that the warnings about invalid certs from various applications are nothing to worry about (I'm looking at you Andoid and OSX).

Those are too abstracted, it's hard to figure out what they are icons for. For instance, the Adobe suite icons are impossible to decipher.

It's a personal preference, but I think the term "growth hacker" is fairly silly. It sound like an unskilled oncologist.

I think it's one of those roles startups don't know they need until it's a little too late.

I was recently talking to a founder about his small startup. They had initially hired a Marketer to help build audience and publicize their product. But what they discovered is that they weren't ready to have a dedicated Marketer. With only two developers the time needed to support the marketer was detracting from developing the projects. Now he's looking for a Marketing Engineer, someone who can fill the role of marketer, developer, and product engineer. While not be as good at any of these tasks as a dedicated professional, someone who can fill in the cracks is more useful to a new startup.

I told TimeWarner I was moving to Manitoba to get them to stop hastleing me to move my service to my new address.

+5/+1 more like. The sea will rise, but it's just a question of how much.