STOUTONIA
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BREAKING NEWS Students forced to exchange laptops for Palm Pilots
Eric Koeppel Online Manager
ue to the $300 million budget cuts to D the University of Wisconsin System proposed by Governor Scott Walker, each student will soon be forced to exchange his/her laptop for a Palm Pilot, one of the most laughably outdated handheld artifacts of late 1990s technological innovation. The Palm Pilot was introduced to the public in 1997 by Palm Inc. and was only somewhat in fashion for maybe about a year or two; however, due to Governor Walker’s admirable views on higher education, University of Wisconsin–Stout students will soon be bringing these clunky hunks of garbage back into style. “Students are probably going to be upset at first,” said James Tarkington, a representative of eStout, the program that used to provide laptops to students. “Admittedly, the Palm Pilot is incapable of performing even one hundredth of the
functions that say, a MacBook Pro, could. However, each device does come with one of these bad boys!” Tarkington enthusiastically pulled a stylus out from his shirt pocket and proceeded to sign his name on the Palm Pilot screen. “See, look! It’s like you’re writing by hand, but instead of on paper, it’s on a screen! And, hey, check this out...” I continued to watch as Tarkington played a riveting round of Tetris on the poorly backlit device and then attempted to stream a YouTube video on what seemed to be the world’s slowest web browser. “Okay, so maybe the internet is a little slow on this thing, which is fine, because due to the budget cuts there also won’t be Wi-Fi on campus soon anyway. But hey, did I mention that these things have a massive 512KB of storage space?” Tarkington paused and looked longingly at a nearby
student’s HP laptop for a moment before bursting into tears. “It’s just not fair. We worked so hard to put together the eStout program, and for what? To force students to carry around one of the worst inventions of the 1990s? But I guess you just have to trust a guy like Scott Walker. I mean, he is our governor after all, and he did almost obtain a college degree once, so he definitely knows what’s best for the UW System.” The Palm Pilot program will be implemented at the beginning of the fall semester. In exchange for their laptop, each student will receive one Palm Pilot, a stylus, a belt clip for the Palm Pilot and a note that reads “good luck” signed by Governor Walker himself. Note: This article was a joke and should not be misconstrued as factual news reporting.
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Keaton Van’t Hull/Stoutonia