Okay, so this has just gotten flat-out sick. Remember a few weeks back when we told you about Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington (just a stone's throw from Bill Gates's house, by an astounding coinkidink) being forced by the school board to turn down $43,000 worth of free Macs because the district's current policy only allows Windows? Well, if you thought that depriving already underprivileged schoolkids of $43 grand's worth of free Macs was boneheaded in the extreme, just wait 'til you hear the latest in this mess; your head will deflate. Seriously. Keep a bicycle pump handy.

See, faithful viewer David Poves pointed us towards another King County Journal article, and this one informs us that Superintendent "Dimbulb" Silver has come up with what he apparently feels is a brilliant solution to the whole problem: instead of accepting those thirty free Macs and six laser printers that Foster High won as a grant, he'll get the school 30 used Wintels through Boeing, who regularly casts off PCs that it deems too old for its business and donates them to local school districts. Because, as you all know, 30 free computers are 30 free computers, whether they're brand new Macs or antiquated Wintels that have been beaten all to hell by disgruntled Boeing office workers over the course of the past seven years. See? Problem solved.

Oh, but wait-- what about the six free laser printers that were to come with the Macs? Well, apparently Boeing doesn't give away laser printers, so Superintendent Dimbulb figures he'll just buy six printers... with $3000 of the cash-strapped school district's funds. So let's see if we've got this straight: to "save money" by sticking with Windows, instead of getting 30 new Macs and six laser printers at absolutely no cost to the school, Dimbulb is opting to get 30 used and outdated Wintel PCs and six laser printers at a cost of three grand.

Seems like a pretty desperate course of action just to keep Microsoft happy, doesn't it? Especially since, for the same cost to the school, he could have it all: 30 brand new Macs, 30 crappy second-hand Wintels, and twelve new laser printers, still for the same $3000 he's proposing to spend anyway. You know, in AtAT's nearly six-year history, we have cranked out over 1,650,000 words (that's over seven and a half times as many words as there are in Moby Dick), and yet we have never once found the need to call someone "asinine"-- until now. We knew the man was in Bill Gates's back pocket, but it wasn't absolutely clear until now that he's so far down there he's actually scanning for polyps.

[The management would like to apologize for the previous joke, which was in extremely poor taste. In future we will endeavor to label scenes likely to contain similar off-color gags with a large "CAUTION: POSSIBLE POLYP HUMOR" warning.]

Seriously, if it's not the influence of Big Bad Bill living nearby, what possible reason could there be to keep these kids away from the Mac? Is it because the students at Foster High are "underprivileged," and Dimbulb Silver figures they should get used to owning crappy outdated Wintels all their lives? Unless local parents get this brainstem tossed out on his ear, we figure Tukwila's a lost cause. (Sorry, kids.) On the plus side, though, the Kinston Free Press reports that the four-year lease agreement for the Greene County deal (roughly 1850 iBooks for middle and high school students and teachers) has officially been approved by the Board of Education and county commissioners. And according to the Knoxville News-Sentinel, another four-year lease for 425 iBooks was just approved for elementary schools in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. So not all the nation's schools are at the mercy of dimbulbs...