Step 2 is a problem. My mother's time as a biology teacher ended when the school refused to discipline the students. I think the real problem is the goal that every child should be forced to learn some amount of information. Without near-term consequences, a small percentage of the students are perfectly capable of ruining the education of the rest of the students.

Because power lines are extremely leaky. You'll have massive amounts of interference from all the high-frequency data going over essentially unshielded cable.

For the same reason that all life is sacred, but killing abortion doctors is a ok.

I'm not going to argue against abortion or defend fringe groups, but your logic does not follow.

If there was a serial killer who had escaped from maximum security prison several times to continue killing, then by killing him, it would preserve more lives. Therefore, killing someone is in line with protecting all life, because all alternatives lead to more lives lost.

*why would i care about ubuntu ?*

Because it's free? And runs well on older hardware?

When netbooks are $200, things like this start to matter, especially to manufacturers. It doesn't have to be better or unique, it just has to be a good enough substitute and substantially enough cheaper.

If Connect() is so great, then why does the wxwidgets events doc hide it and practically discourage its use by stating that everything happens at run time with Connect()? Why do introductory tutorials rely on event tables rather than Connect()? In short, why does wxwidgets force developers to slog through event tables if you have Connect()?

See, you completely miss the point. The innovation with the iPod wasn't the iPod, but iTunes. 99-cents a song for a very large selection, just plug in your iPod and the friendly interface guides people to put music on it. Other companies made you purchase music elsewhere and import it into their syncing software. What Apple saw was a gap--not one in the mp3 player technology, but in the hurdles people had to jump over to get music on them.