I mean, this is a group that makes their money by paying off people to get them information, in ways that are hinted are against the law (likely they're getting other people to break the law of other countries, even if the company themselves aren't)... but they're against hackers that break the law? It seems a a bit hypocritical to me.
It's only hacking if it is done by someone not in power, or not on the behest of someone in power.
In the same way, when it is the powers that be are stealing information through nefarious methods, it is just business as usual. When you do it to them, they call their friends - who arrest you.
The sun won't go into a red giant phase for approximately five billion years not 200 million, but even before that, our galaxy will collide with Andromeda which will be interesting to say the least, though likely not too much of a worry for our little solar system - unless we our orbit changed drastically to the inner parts of the galaxy which isn't all that likely.
Some calls apparently were from people claiming to be with the Liberal party, acting rude, calling at very late/early hours
Interesting, it seems like more and more of the world population is wanting more libertarian, open minded, moderate type leaders - rather than the old guard, which to me seem to be in the exact same place as the likes of the **AA in the music world - grasping and clutching at grains of sand as they trickle through their fingers. As they get more and more desperate, their methods and tactics get more and more dirty, desperate and despickable.
Mythbusters already busted [mythbustersresults.com] that middle one. I'd like to see them test the ripping out a man's heart one, though I'm not sure PETA will appreciate them testing on live animals.
Hey, for the sake of scientific accuracy, the myth is ripping a MANS heart out without killing him, not some animals heart. I am not sure that PETA has any standing with that one...
Now excuse me while this strange web site forces my browser to full screen and scans my Linux Box for viruses...
I recently started getting calls to our home phone number (which is a silent number mind you) from those lovely "Hey, I'm calling from Microsoft to say that you need to install this program to fix your computer..." folks in some nasty call centre. While I do have a few windows machines around, the majority are also linux. I find it strangely pleasing following their instructions, but seeing how long I can drag out the fun for - not pressing the right things, getting them to repeat the instructions over and over again, trying to get them to hang up. My current record is 21 minutes, while they are peddling crap, you got to hand it to them - they really are patient when trying to snarf your money.
I am glad they went through the proper process of verifying all the hardware and have gotten to the bottom of this little fiasco - but wow, they have to be biting their lips in frustration.
I also expect a cable manufacturer is likely to be getting a strongly worded email in the near future.
I think what the mug rotation shows is that they can associate real items with virtual ones.
That's not quite the message that I walked away with. It looked as if rotating a mug (and later a bottle) simply switched the information being displayed. If rotating the mug had rotated a single object within the frame, I think it would be more interesting - such as manipulating common objects to manipulate individual models in a 3D app for example. What I saw seemed to imply that "look for something being rotated" translated to "ALT-TAB" for the environment.
The idea of a top down projector is interesting, somewhat similar to that microsoft "desk" thing that I kept hearing (the one where your entire table was actually part of the PC desktop and moving documents around interacted with what was actually on your screen) about for a while, then it tapered off.
Unless I am mistaken, this seems to be a (granted, novel and interesting) but simple business application similar to either a Kinect or whatever the Playstation equivalent was which also used a webcam from memory. I would be more impressed if someone put together an API (extra points for open sourcing it) to allow a PC and or presentation to be properly and intuitively controlled with a kinect-like controller.
Okay, so switching the display by rotating a coffee cup or bottle is nifty, but could get annoying when any movement at a board presentation switches things around. I am much more interested in seeing if the input commands are able to be modified and changed around.
We already have that part in the form of solar thermal. Infinite free and clean energy.
Not really. Our current technology in making solar cells is highly toxic and leaves a lot of waste behind. Sure, the energy that the solar cell itself makes is clean and infinite - if you don't take into account the degradation of the cell itself. but therin lies the problem. Photovoltic cells degrade over time and produce less and less charge. Solar thermal plants produce many by-products in their upkeep and regular maintenance.
Even keeping all this at bay, batteries are still a problem. We do indeed have a problem with storing the energy that these things generate. If we are to truly move on, there needs to be a paradigm shift in our needs and wants.
Our current potential to produce clean energy comes with crests and troughs. Wind isn't always there, and solar cycles on a regular basis. As a society, we would be much better to accept the fact that until we throw money at developing better batteries and that research matures an order of magnitude past where we are now (liquid salt and pumping water to and from basically), we need to curb our strain on our power usage.
I agree with the parent poster, we need to be able to store the clean energy that we use. The current drawback of taking coal, gas and oil power stations offline is the base load - that minimum current that cannot be met by our clean energy solutions - hence why we keep these horridly polluting stations running all the time.
if you want to invest money into making things green, I agree with the parent - you can invest in batteries. However, if you want to make a long term solution, then invest in room temperature superconductors. If the civilisation on this planet can make a global grid to alllow the flow of renewable energy to constantly flow around the planet - send solar power where the sun isn't shiniing, send wind power where the wind isn't blowing - then we can indeed make clean, renewable and sustainable energy.
Please, if you have the money to invest - invest in batteries as the parent suggest, or invest in being able to pass the current around so that it gets to everywhere it is needed through a superconductor. Either way, please invest in one or the other. You will be doing the earth an amazing favour.
Can the waste product(s) of using plant matter used to create biofuels be reclaimed and used elsewhere? To make paper, or perhaps clothing? Fertilizer? Feed?
Biofuels would not be likely. If they are trying to make oil replacements, then the majority of the energy contained in the plant matter would be going into oil replacement. The problem is that the very high energy density of oil/petroleum products are the exact thing that makes it appealing. Breaking the carbon chains in oil releases a very large amount of energy proportional to the amount of fuel. Granted, there are much more energy dense forms of fuel - but they are also very expensive. To make something that can store as much energy as oil from something like plants will always require that a lot of energy is inserted - so that later when the fuel is used it releases more. While it isn't impossible and is being improved all the time, it still basically requires the right fungus/bacteria/whatever to convert from low energy plant matter to something that is usable for us.
Sorry not to use a car analogy, but this one is much more fitting: Consider oil to be steak and plant matter to be plant matter. Currently we are able to drill for steak and eat it. It is a great source of energy for us. Sadly, our supplies of steak are starting to run a bit low. Now, someone comes along with a cow and says that they can convert normal grass into steak with this beast that wanders around eating grass and converting it into much higher energy dense food. The problem is that for this cow thing to make steak, it has to slowly wander around, eating huge amounts of grass and then very slowly over many years convert that plant matter into meat. This is the exact same scenario, but rather than having to wait years for a cow to make steak, oilfields are created over many, many thousands of years.
To make a high density fuel (basically something that we want and is useful) that energy had to be inserted at some point. If someone can work out how to make a cheap, clean energy source that doesn't require a vast investment of time waiting for it to mature - then there will be nobel prizes, presidential handshakes and all the gratitude of the world waiting for them.
While this is great and makes sense - I can't see this happening until much later in the peak oil scenario.
Fabricating all (most) of the stuff we make from oil now from plant matter will be a much less efficient operation and require much much more energy inserted during the production/refining process - which will of course make it much more expensive and inefficient to do. With that, I can't see it happening on any sort of serious scale until we have started running out of oil sands - let alone oil wells.
A possibly more effective solution: Refuse to fly. Take a bus, take a train, drive, or forgo travel, but don't pay into the system by buying a plane ticket.
I totally agree, but this isn't always an option - and it doesn't send a direct message. Lower numbers of passengers can be spun as a downturn due to the economy, it can be spun as more people who are scared to fly due to the terrorist attacks. A long queue of people unwilling to accept an invasive body scanner is much harder to sell as a positive if you are trying to sell body scanners.
You realize the patdown (which is considered more invasive than a police pat-down) isn't really an acceptable answer for a lot of people either.
This is a non-violence approach as best as Ghandi himself would have come up with. If the everyone opted for a pat down, then there would be massive queues as the TSA sods could not keep up with the folks in line, that gives them bad press - which is the last thing they want coming up to an election. Therefore, they put more and more and more staff on to keep up with the growing queues refusing the body scanner. Their budget blows out significantly and their methods are seen by the pollies as more and more asinine. Going into an election, the more noise and bad press that can be generated, the less politicians will want to touch it.
I live in outsde the US, but I can only implore you folks in the US to fight tooth and nail for all you can. Beat them at their own game - you have the numbers and you have the media there more than ready to take any hot load that will make the masses agitated. Use it to your (and by that defnition, everybody's) best advatage.
Take the invasive pat-down and blog about how violated you felt. If you are interviewed by someone else, be sure to portray the raw emotion, this will find a bond with all the voters out there who haven't personally experienced it. Contact your senator and write a lengthy letter outlining your outrage. Contact the airport directly and voice your objections - if they have enough complaints, they will (if they are not already) turn to be on the side of reason and common sense - make it bad business to support his TSA guideline and bring them to your side. Make yourself the martyr, and be proud, for you will be serving the betterment of your peers.
The only thing in a capitalist world that will serve your freedoms and personal liberty is bad business through bad press for those that seek to make money by taking it away from you.
Patches are not cheap to deploy, you've got to bother your customers and pay for bandwidth. It makes a whole lot more sense to put the effort into getting the right code onto the disc before it ships.
Having worked on porting the Unreal and UT Series to consoles, I know just how much testing takes place, and it really is done to a very high level. But having said that, once a product is in the wild, well, anything is possible especially with the way that folks generally try to do the "silly" things. In most games, achievement systems even reward many of those things that players years ago would have never gone through and done.
I agree with "Get it right" for console games, but I also agree that if a problem is found that can be fixed, it shouldn't cost that much to send out a few files.
This will be very interesting. I see three different players in this standoff:
Apple:
Decent hardware - not totally high end, but certainly enough for what they allow on them.
User-friendly operating system - Most of the "masses" think it is wonderful and easy to use.
Microsoft:
Aging Hardware - I think that while they had great phones ten or fifteen years ago, they haven't been keeping up with the curve save a few notable exceptions. (I could be wrong, feel free to correct me. Wasn't the N900 the last good thing before it was shitcanned?)
Poor? operating system - I don't know many people with a Windows phone, but I haven't heard a single positive review (Not counting net articles, where anyone can find a small army supporting their argument).
Google:
Aging Hardware - Again, I can't really think of the last fantastic Motorola that everyone wanted to rush out and buy.
Fastest Growing (and Most Used now unless I am mistaken?) operating system.
Given that Samsung has pretty much the shiniest hardware in their phones/tablets and they use Android, I can see an interesting bond forming between the two. Game theory would suggest that these two buddy up and have the best hardware AND the best software and try to run the market. I can't really see this going fantastic for MS in this case, seems that both Google and Apple have a good and bad aspect to the business, but MS seems to have two poor ends of the stick - the best of nothing - and I don't think that a Microsoft/Apple alliance is very likely, even with the threat of a Google/Samsung bond.
I actually think there will likely be a lot of courtcase banter going around as they square off and basically touch gloves. Once it is evident who is going to come out on top though, I don't think there will be any really super serious outcome courtcases, I think the only lawyer talk will really be the pre-match quibbling.
She is right if you are big compared to the pyramid. I am not that good at geometry, but if you are taller than the depth of the pyramid then it should work.
This was Egyptian pyramids and assumed the viewer was wandering around the base.
Indeed. She was claiming that if you stood at a right angle to a side, right at the middle and moved back away from the face, you would get to a point where you saw all four corners. I did initially try to explain that things got smaller the further away they were, and hence the far side would appear smaller and you wouldn't be able to see it, but hey, I am just an insolent eight year old. It was game on:)
If my kid came home with a note like that, I think I would ask him/her what he most wanted in the whole world (assuming new computer, gaming station, pony etc) and go out the same afternoon and buy one.
Firstly, I totally agree with your sentiment, and it is a shame the folks that modded you today forgot to turn on their sarcasm filter.
Having said that, look at it from the other side. When I hear utterly asinine stories like this, I agree that it makes me angry and frustrated with the state of the world - but at the same time, I look at the bright side. When I have kids, I will bring them up with good education, critical thinking skills and a solid understanding of science and reasoning - then I happily think about how little competition they will have in the real world when their peers are sitting under desks scared of the "eViL WiFI!".
While it makes me a little sad to see in this day and age these sort of shenanigans still going on, I can't help but think that my offspring will be like wolves amoung the sheep.
When I was in year three (That's when I was about eight, not sure what third grade means outside of Australia) I had an amusing argument with my teacher about "geometry". She claimed that if you stood right at the right spot at ground level, you could see all base four corner stones of a square pyramid. The argument ended up with me being sent to the headmasters office because I called her ignorant and facetious, but I did have my sweet moment when the headmaster informed her that she was wrong and that I was right.
Teachers do think they know it all. I guess that teaching little kids all day every day makes them think they are some sort of fountain of knowledge and information.
Having said that, I also know a few teachers who are very well informed, intelligent and I would consider all round great people.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, this is a group that makes their money by paying off people to get them information, in ways that are hinted are against the law (likely they're getting other people to break the law of other countries, even if the company themselves aren't) ... but they're against hackers that break the law? It seems a a bit hypocritical to me.
It's only hacking if it is done by someone not in power, or not on the behest of someone in power.
The government can listen to your phone calls without a warrant. But a man recording police is being tried for a 75 year jail sentance for recording police out in the open.
In the same way, when it is the powers that be are stealing information through nefarious methods, it is just business as usual. When you do it to them, they call their friends - who arrest you.
rising power output of the Sun
The sun won't go into a red giant phase for approximately five billion years not 200 million, but even before that, our galaxy will collide with Andromeda which will be interesting to say the least, though likely not too much of a worry for our little solar system - unless we our orbit changed drastically to the inner parts of the galaxy which isn't all that likely.
Some calls apparently were from people claiming to be with the Liberal party, acting rude, calling at very late/early hours
Interesting, it seems like more and more of the world population is wanting more libertarian, open minded, moderate type leaders - rather than the old guard, which to me seem to be in the exact same place as the likes of the **AA in the music world - grasping and clutching at grains of sand as they trickle through their fingers. As they get more and more desperate, their methods and tactics get more and more dirty, desperate and despickable.
A case of accuracy though - All men are living animals. Not all living aminals are men.
C'mon, the folks here should be used to these sort of mistakes causing havok with solutions/research.
Mythbusters already busted [mythbustersresults.com] that middle one. I'd like to see them test the ripping out a man's heart one, though I'm not sure PETA will appreciate them testing on live animals.
Hey, for the sake of scientific accuracy, the myth is ripping a MANS heart out without killing him, not some animals heart. I am not sure that PETA has any standing with that one...
Government Agencies here use gold plated monster cables
Gold plated optical fibre cables huh? Interesting. Very interesting.
Now excuse me while this strange web site forces my browser to full screen and scans my Linux Box for viruses...
I recently started getting calls to our home phone number (which is a silent number mind you) from those lovely "Hey, I'm calling from Microsoft to say that you need to install this program to fix your computer..." folks in some nasty call centre. While I do have a few windows machines around, the majority are also linux. I find it strangely pleasing following their instructions, but seeing how long I can drag out the fun for - not pressing the right things, getting them to repeat the instructions over and over again, trying to get them to hang up. My current record is 21 minutes, while they are peddling crap, you got to hand it to them - they really are patient when trying to snarf your money.
Hey, leave poor Marvin alone. He has a brain the size of a planet and that makes up for his sometimes less than eager personality!
I am glad they went through the proper process of verifying all the hardware and have gotten to the bottom of this little fiasco - but wow, they have to be biting their lips in frustration.
I also expect a cable manufacturer is likely to be getting a strongly worded email in the near future.
I think what the mug rotation shows is that they can associate real items with virtual ones.
That's not quite the message that I walked away with. It looked as if rotating a mug (and later a bottle) simply switched the information being displayed. If rotating the mug had rotated a single object within the frame, I think it would be more interesting - such as manipulating common objects to manipulate individual models in a 3D app for example. What I saw seemed to imply that "look for something being rotated" translated to "ALT-TAB" for the environment.
The idea of a top down projector is interesting, somewhat similar to that microsoft "desk" thing that I kept hearing (the one where your entire table was actually part of the PC desktop and moving documents around interacted with what was actually on your screen) about for a while, then it tapered off.
Unless I am mistaken, this seems to be a (granted, novel and interesting) but simple business application similar to either a Kinect or whatever the Playstation equivalent was which also used a webcam from memory. I would be more impressed if someone put together an API (extra points for open sourcing it) to allow a PC and or presentation to be properly and intuitively controlled with a kinect-like controller.
Okay, so switching the display by rotating a coffee cup or bottle is nifty, but could get annoying when any movement at a board presentation switches things around. I am much more interested in seeing if the input commands are able to be modified and changed around.
We already have that part in the form of solar thermal. Infinite free and clean energy.
Not really. Our current technology in making solar cells is highly toxic and leaves a lot of waste behind. Sure, the energy that the solar cell itself makes is clean and infinite - if you don't take into account the degradation of the cell itself. but therin lies the problem. Photovoltic cells degrade over time and produce less and less charge. Solar thermal plants produce many by-products in their upkeep and regular maintenance.
Even keeping all this at bay, batteries are still a problem. We do indeed have a problem with storing the energy that these things generate. If we are to truly move on, there needs to be a paradigm shift in our needs and wants.
Our current potential to produce clean energy comes with crests and troughs. Wind isn't always there, and solar cycles on a regular basis. As a society, we would be much better to accept the fact that until we throw money at developing better batteries and that research matures an order of magnitude past where we are now (liquid salt and pumping water to and from basically), we need to curb our strain on our power usage.
I agree with the parent poster, we need to be able to store the clean energy that we use. The current drawback of taking coal, gas and oil power stations offline is the base load - that minimum current that cannot be met by our clean energy solutions - hence why we keep these horridly polluting stations running all the time.
if you want to invest money into making things green, I agree with the parent - you can invest in batteries. However, if you want to make a long term solution, then invest in room temperature superconductors. If the civilisation on this planet can make a global grid to alllow the flow of renewable energy to constantly flow around the planet - send solar power where the sun isn't shiniing, send wind power where the wind isn't blowing - then we can indeed make clean, renewable and sustainable energy.
Please, if you have the money to invest - invest in batteries as the parent suggest, or invest in being able to pass the current around so that it gets to everywhere it is needed through a superconductor. Either way, please invest in one or the other. You will be doing the earth an amazing favour.
Can the waste product(s) of using plant matter used to create biofuels be reclaimed and used elsewhere? To make paper, or perhaps clothing? Fertilizer? Feed?
Biofuels would not be likely. If they are trying to make oil replacements, then the majority of the energy contained in the plant matter would be going into oil replacement. The problem is that the very high energy density of oil/petroleum products are the exact thing that makes it appealing. Breaking the carbon chains in oil releases a very large amount of energy proportional to the amount of fuel. Granted, there are much more energy dense forms of fuel - but they are also very expensive. To make something that can store as much energy as oil from something like plants will always require that a lot of energy is inserted - so that later when the fuel is used it releases more. While it isn't impossible and is being improved all the time, it still basically requires the right fungus/bacteria/whatever to convert from low energy plant matter to something that is usable for us.
Sorry not to use a car analogy, but this one is much more fitting: Consider oil to be steak and plant matter to be plant matter. Currently we are able to drill for steak and eat it. It is a great source of energy for us. Sadly, our supplies of steak are starting to run a bit low. Now, someone comes along with a cow and says that they can convert normal grass into steak with this beast that wanders around eating grass and converting it into much higher energy dense food. The problem is that for this cow thing to make steak, it has to slowly wander around, eating huge amounts of grass and then very slowly over many years convert that plant matter into meat. This is the exact same scenario, but rather than having to wait years for a cow to make steak, oilfields are created over many, many thousands of years.
To make a high density fuel (basically something that we want and is useful) that energy had to be inserted at some point. If someone can work out how to make a cheap, clean energy source that doesn't require a vast investment of time waiting for it to mature - then there will be nobel prizes, presidential handshakes and all the gratitude of the world waiting for them.
While this is great and makes sense - I can't see this happening until much later in the peak oil scenario.
Fabricating all (most) of the stuff we make from oil now from plant matter will be a much less efficient operation and require much much more energy inserted during the production/refining process - which will of course make it much more expensive and inefficient to do. With that, I can't see it happening on any sort of serious scale until we have started running out of oil sands - let alone oil wells.
A possibly more effective solution: Refuse to fly. Take a bus, take a train, drive, or forgo travel, but don't pay into the system by buying a plane ticket.
I totally agree, but this isn't always an option - and it doesn't send a direct message. Lower numbers of passengers can be spun as a downturn due to the economy, it can be spun as more people who are scared to fly due to the terrorist attacks. A long queue of people unwilling to accept an invasive body scanner is much harder to sell as a positive if you are trying to sell body scanners.
You realize the patdown (which is considered more invasive than a police pat-down) isn't really an acceptable answer for a lot of people either.
This is a non-violence approach as best as Ghandi himself would have come up with. If the everyone opted for a pat down, then there would be massive queues as the TSA sods could not keep up with the folks in line, that gives them bad press - which is the last thing they want coming up to an election. Therefore, they put more and more and more staff on to keep up with the growing queues refusing the body scanner. Their budget blows out significantly and their methods are seen by the pollies as more and more asinine. Going into an election, the more noise and bad press that can be generated, the less politicians will want to touch it.
I live in outsde the US, but I can only implore you folks in the US to fight tooth and nail for all you can. Beat them at their own game - you have the numbers and you have the media there more than ready to take any hot load that will make the masses agitated. Use it to your (and by that defnition, everybody's) best advatage.
Take the invasive pat-down and blog about how violated you felt. If you are interviewed by someone else, be sure to portray the raw emotion, this will find a bond with all the voters out there who haven't personally experienced it. Contact your senator and write a lengthy letter outlining your outrage. Contact the airport directly and voice your objections - if they have enough complaints, they will (if they are not already) turn to be on the side of reason and common sense - make it bad business to support his TSA guideline and bring them to your side. Make yourself the martyr, and be proud, for you will be serving the betterment of your peers.
The only thing in a capitalist world that will serve your freedoms and personal liberty is bad business through bad press for those that seek to make money by taking it away from you.
Patches are not cheap to deploy, you've got to bother your customers and pay for bandwidth. It makes a whole lot more sense to put the effort into getting the right code onto the disc before it ships.
Having worked on porting the Unreal and UT Series to consoles, I know just how much testing takes place, and it really is done to a very high level. But having said that, once a product is in the wild, well, anything is possible especially with the way that folks generally try to do the "silly" things. In most games, achievement systems even reward many of those things that players years ago would have never gone through and done.
I agree with "Get it right" for console games, but I also agree that if a problem is found that can be fixed, it shouldn't cost that much to send out a few files.
First thing I look for in a woman :)
This will be very interesting. I see three different players in this standoff:
Apple:
Decent hardware - not totally high end, but certainly enough for what they allow on them.
User-friendly operating system - Most of the "masses" think it is wonderful and easy to use.
Microsoft:
Aging Hardware - I think that while they had great phones ten or fifteen years ago, they haven't been keeping up with the curve save a few notable exceptions. (I could be wrong, feel free to correct me. Wasn't the N900 the last good thing before it was shitcanned?)
Poor? operating system - I don't know many people with a Windows phone, but I haven't heard a single positive review (Not counting net articles, where anyone can find a small army supporting their argument).
Google:
Aging Hardware - Again, I can't really think of the last fantastic Motorola that everyone wanted to rush out and buy.
Fastest Growing (and Most Used now unless I am mistaken?) operating system.
Given that Samsung has pretty much the shiniest hardware in their phones/tablets and they use Android, I can see an interesting bond forming between the two. Game theory would suggest that these two buddy up and have the best hardware AND the best software and try to run the market. I can't really see this going fantastic for MS in this case, seems that both Google and Apple have a good and bad aspect to the business, but MS seems to have two poor ends of the stick - the best of nothing - and I don't think that a Microsoft/Apple alliance is very likely, even with the threat of a Google/Samsung bond.
I actually think there will likely be a lot of courtcase banter going around as they square off and basically touch gloves. Once it is evident who is going to come out on top though, I don't think there will be any really super serious outcome courtcases, I think the only lawyer talk will really be the pre-match quibbling.
Not to mention when Kung Pow had them in it!
She is right if you are big compared to the pyramid. I am not that good at geometry, but if you are taller than the depth of the pyramid then it should work.
This was Egyptian pyramids and assumed the viewer was wandering around the base.
Indeed. She was claiming that if you stood at a right angle to a side, right at the middle and moved back away from the face, you would get to a point where you saw all four corners. I did initially try to explain that things got smaller the further away they were, and hence the far side would appear smaller and you wouldn't be able to see it, but hey, I am just an insolent eight year old. It was game on :)
If my kid came home with a note like that, I think I would ask him/her what he most wanted in the whole world (assuming new computer, gaming station, pony etc) and go out the same afternoon and buy one.
Firstly, I totally agree with your sentiment, and it is a shame the folks that modded you today forgot to turn on their sarcasm filter.
Having said that, look at it from the other side. When I hear utterly asinine stories like this, I agree that it makes me angry and frustrated with the state of the world - but at the same time, I look at the bright side. When I have kids, I will bring them up with good education, critical thinking skills and a solid understanding of science and reasoning - then I happily think about how little competition they will have in the real world when their peers are sitting under desks scared of the "eViL WiFI!".
While it makes me a little sad to see in this day and age these sort of shenanigans still going on, I can't help but think that my offspring will be like wolves amoung the sheep.
When I was in year three (That's when I was about eight, not sure what third grade means outside of Australia) I had an amusing argument with my teacher about "geometry". She claimed that if you stood right at the right spot at ground level, you could see all base four corner stones of a square pyramid. The argument ended up with me being sent to the headmasters office because I called her ignorant and facetious, but I did have my sweet moment when the headmaster informed her that she was wrong and that I was right.
Teachers do think they know it all. I guess that teaching little kids all day every day makes them think they are some sort of fountain of knowledge and information.
Having said that, I also know a few teachers who are very well informed, intelligent and I would consider all round great people.