Quote - oh Rush... I love LOVE Rush!

you heard their latest Album Snakes & Arrows? best they've done since Presto

Anything but the album before it... blecch.

Presto I still treasure a lot (esp. [i]Available Light[/i] and [i]Scars[/i]).

Quote - So a 1.8 GHZ Mac G5 or equivalent Dell workstation that has been declared "Obsolete" by the  righteous Pontificators of the "bleeding edge" is going to impede my 12 year Old son's ability to develop his "thinking skills"???

Heh - I still happily use a dual 1.8 GHz PowerMac, thanks much. It happily runs any app that Poserdom can throw at it without trouble as well.

Okay - as a guy who used to have to receive school donations, let me clue y'all in:

• If it's only a couple of years old, can run the apps in the curricula, and isn't some cheap-arsed pile of eMachines crap, cool. I'd happily take it. Macs can stretch back to roughly 4-5 years old w/o too much hassle, while PC's can go back about 3 years or so.

• If it's really old, broken, incomplete, or otherwise unusable in the class, don't bother. I once had a bank donate an old IBM RS-6000 to us... they neglected to mention that it was an ancient first-gen model at the time, was the size of a typical US refrigerator (i.e. HUGE), weighed 850lbs, required 220VAC to power up, was lucky to get 10Mb/sec on the network, and had the approximate 'oomph of a Pentium I @ 90MHz (the classroom was full of P4m's and the servers bore 3GHz P4 Xeons). It was utterly useless (its scrap value was ab't $75), but the bank was able to write off their original purchase price on taxes (approx. $60k) as a charitable donation.

Quote - Donate them to schools only because our educational system is in ruins and can't even afford teachers and adequate classroom size.  Don't talk to me about it - talk to the bunglers running this country (into the ground).

Schools are controlled by localities, not national governments. They get (on average) shedloads of cash in most areas - from local, state, and federal funding. However, that money evaporates rather quickly in the morass of poor management decisions, top-heavy and bloated bureaucracies, junkets, and boondoggles that would stagger your mind. Every contractor knows the district has a blank check at the start of each fiscal year, and sets (read: inflates the hell out of) their bids to match it. I (and the state of Utah in a case a couple of years back) seen textbook budgets evaporate in deliberate and outright fraud, then watch as district management quickly plays a roundabout game of 'cover your buddy's arse' when time comes to assign blame. I have seen entire schools scrambling and fighting to grab as many students as they can due to a shortage of head-count (as a teacher, if you don't have the head-count, you don't have a job).

I have seen teachers' unions demand incerases and raises that would make you blush with envy. I have seen district administrators give themselves (and their underlings) raises that would make Congress look fiscally responsible by comparison. Then they go trotting out the "but.. but... it's for the chilluns!" argument when the legislature asks WTF happened to all the money they got at the beginning of the fiscal year.

Compare and contrast this with privately owned charter or "voucher" schools - efficient, cost-concious, higher academic standards [i]and performance[/i], and parents literally fight tooth and nail to get their kids into one whenever an opening is available.

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whew - sorry, had to let that one out. Felt good, actually.

Anyway, don't donate 'em unless they're actually worth a damn. Thx.

/P