MG Siegler, in a surprisingly off the mark article:

As Josh Topolsky points out, Apple does work with school districts to lease iPads on a four-year schedule, presumably at a nice discount. But that means the school owns the iPads and temporarily gives them out to students. That goes against Apple’s stated mission that students should now buy (or get via redemption code) all iBooks textbooks and keep them forever, keeping their notes, highlights, etc.

The school leasing also probably means the iPads are staying at the schools. How does that help for homework? Or are the schools allowing students to take the iPads home, risking losing them or damaging them? That doesn’t seem like a tenable idea for many budget-minded schools.

Actually, that’s exactly what’s happening. My daughter, who’s still in elementary school, has a school provided iPad, and once in a while she’s allowed to take it home.

And while it depends upon the setup, I don’t think it’d be a large stretch to have the textbooks tied to the student’s personal iTunes account. If so, they’d have the books as long as the have the account, which is to say forever, and I’m certain Apple would be happy to provide every student with their own iTunes account.

Even if when the next iPad is announced, the current model drops in price to something like $400 — or even $300 — that’s still an expensive sell to high school students and/or their parents and/or their schools.

Right. Because the $200 iPhone they’ve already got was hard to come by. And teenagers don’t have jobs, and if they did they certainly wouldn’t blow an entire paycheck on an iPad. Yeah, and I didn’t carry hundreds of dollars worth of CD’s, a Panasonic Shockwave, and a cell phone in my backpack everyday either.

I’m worried we may have a chicken and egg problem here. Apple is giving students a huge incentive to use iPads, but it’s still prohibitive for many of those students to get one. And if many can’t get one, does the iBooks program take off like it should?

My daughter hasn’t even hit puberty yet, and she has two iPads — her own at school and the family one at home. She already lives on the thing, and you think there’s a hard sell somewhere?

I have no doubt that in the not-too-distant future, students walk around with tablet computers carrying all of their textbooks and other education needs. But we need to get the tablets in their hands to get to that future.

Dude… you’re looking in the wrong spot, and you’ve forgetten how patient Apple has become.

After reading this I’ve come to realize that politicians are pawns. Perhaps not all, but certainly enough of them are to make egregious internet censorship a true problem.

The thing I love most about the internet is that it’s real life. It’s the entire human psyche laid bare in the grossest way it ever could be. I’m hopeful that freedom will be victorious, as it has been several times throughout history, but I know that it’s going to be hard fought.

Paul Krugman:

Oh, Mr. Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods. But, if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be “balanced,” which means that every time they point out that a Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a minor misstatement.

And to myself I think “The world isn’t a fair or balanced place.” I think, as a species, we need to stop lying to ourselves and everyone else.

So here’s my forecast for next year: If Mr. Romney is in fact the Republican presidential nominee, he will make wildly false claims about Mr. Obama and, occasionally, get some flack for doing so. But news organizations will compensate by treating it as a comparable offense when, say, the president misstates the income share of the top 1 percent by a percentage point or two.

The end result will be no real penalty for running an utterly fraudulent campaign. As I said, welcome to post-truth politics.

Fuck.

Cory Doctorow:

Tor, the censorship-busting technology developed by the US Navy and promoted by the State Department as part of the solution to allowing for free communications in repressive regimes, is likely illegal technology under the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Doesn’t that mean that SOPA establishes exactly the type of repressive regime that Tor circumvents?

Merle Hoffman, on abortion:

[It’s] a decision that she believes is irrevocably the woman’s, which in turn informs the rabid opposition to it: “The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that’s why it is so strongly opposed by so many in society,” she writes in “Intimate Wars.”

I think she nailed it. That opposition to a woman’s power would also explain the systematic destruction of a Mother’s rights in some states.

Justin Menkes explains:

1. Realistic optimism.
2. Subservience to purpose.
3. Finding order in chaos.

However, there’s a fourth trait mentioned just prior to those three:

One core conclusion emerged: the best CEOs had been, and continued to be, distinguished by their ability to manifest the very best from their workforce.

Leaders inspire their teams.