This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?"
Or perhaps we should leave it up to corporations to make the decision according to whatever criteria they see fit, no matter how misleading the result may be. "I have here a coffee mug. It gets all of the internet [for my particular definition of all of the internet]".
Let's be clear, this isn't a matter of the government dictating what constitutes the internet, this is the judiciary making a ruling as to what the current common perception of the internet is. It is not laying down a definition, but rather making a judgement (as judges are expected to do) as to whether Apple's particular idiosyncratic definition of "all of the internet" differs sufficiently from the current average public definition so as to be misleading. We're not even talking about "essential internet" here; the Apple ad said "all".
In short, this isn't the government dictating what the web should look like, but rather the people. If the judge believed that most average UK citizen could reasonably interpret "all of the internet" to mean the same as what Apple apparently does, there would be no conflict.
14,000 years ago, Michigan was covered by a glacier. I have a hunch that SUVs did not melt this glacier.
No, as far as we can tell a combination of orbital variation to kick start things and various feedbacks (including warmer oceans releasing CO2) managed that quite nicely. Currently we are not at the point where those orbital effects are in play. In fact, the next stage of the orbital cycle should see us getting signficantly colder (though the time frame for that happening is at least a millenia or two away). Despite this we are seeing significant warming that, while attributable to a number of factors, is not currently explainable without putting a large chunk of the blame on anthropogenic CO2. So yes, there are natural effects that cause climate to change, but apparently current changes are not purely natural. 14,000 years ago the mean global temperature was only a few degrees cooler; current models (that is, to the best of our knowledge) suggest we can expect mean global temperature to increase by at least a degree or two in the next century. Given the change from 14,000 years ago to now, an extra degree or two ibn mean global temperature could hacve very significant effects.
As it becomes unstable, you will start seeing more records: cold, hot, rain, drought, record single day temperature differentials, etc. It's not going to just get warmer over short time periods.. It always amazes me that folks don't realize that.
I've been telling people this for a while.
The you've been misleading them. You may see some variability on a local level, but fluctuating extremes on a mean global level are not something that the IPCC predicts as result of global warming. There will be fluctuations because, aside from the anthropogenic effects causing warming, there are plenty of other factors that make the climate variable; some years are colder than others, and that's still going to be true even with global warming. In this case there are a number of natural factors that have aligned to make 2008 colder than previous years. According to the IPCC global warming is simply dampening how cold this year is, not causing it to be cold through some instability. Compared to the 20th century 2008 will still be rather warm, and that can potentially be attributed to global warming.
Can we lay this tired meme about increased variability due to global warming to rest though. A cold spell is merely not necessarily strong evidence against global warming*, it is not evidence for global warming.
* At this point, given the historical temperature record, a significant (mid 20th century temperatures) sustained (5 or more years) cold spell would be required to count as strong evidence against global warming.
Eiffel gained adoption within niche industries, generally in finance/business where correctness and maintainability was somewhat of a concern. These days it is getting heavily squeezed by Java, but is still kicking around nad has adherents (partly because those who did actually take it up generally stuck with it -- it is a pretty nice language in many ways).
If you're forced to maintain a bunch of code and you can choose the language would you prefer to maintain a batch of perl code or a batch of python or C code ?
I've done all three and I really *much* prefer C over both python and perl and python over perl.
Ah, but now compare C to a language like Ada or Eiffel that was actually designed with long term maintenance of large projects firmly in mind. Whatever else you may think of those languages, they are certainly near the top of the list of languages that you'd like a large codebase you're forced to maintain to be written in.
Ah, you're the people behind Durham Signature Ale -- it's good stuff! Are you planning on expanding your range of beer styles, or just focussing on the one Signature Ale?
I have similar issues; for the most part they really don't bother me: I essentially never use long tables; the number of times that float positioning has gone nuts on me are so few that (compared to other programs screwing things up) I can essentially ignore it; programming new classes is something I do very rarely, so the pain therein isn't too bad. That said, I would love to see something that made programming with TeX easier, or a replacement for TeX with more flexibility on that front (and better font handling for modern font formats). I was tempted by QaTeX, but the project is quite resoundingly dead; the principle certainly sounded nice. For font handling I rather like XeTeX.
Unless you have a subway system that will pick me up less than a block from where I am (no matter where I am), drop me off less than a block from where I want to go, and do so with a no more than 5 minute wait for said subway, it just won't replace the car.
Because you can always park within one block of where you want to go? Where do you live exactly? Any city big enough to make major public transit worthwhile (which, let's note, is what the OP was talking about) has severe parking issues in the downtown area. Expecting to park within one block of your intended destination is being very hopeful.
Applications don't have the same Level of UI consistance as Windows. Sure Windows has a few oddballs iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Office 2007 come to mind, but most have pretty good level of consistency.
Yup, Windows is just the model of visual consistency. Note that every application in that screenshot is a Microsoft application, so we're not even talking about third parties making a mess here.
It seems to me that the only people making things large and unwieldy are large closed source software companies (like MS, but others exist),
A comparable FOSS system is just as large and unwieldy. The key is that the FOSS system, because all the internals are exposed, is broken up into a vast array of separately manageable chunks. Each chunk looks relatively maintainable, but the whole system (that's Linux, GNU tools, X11, toolkits such as QT and GTK+, backend stuff like HAL and DBUS, libraries for this and that small function (zlib, jpeg handling, ffts, etc.), and then the new stuff coming in like Cairo; the list goes on) is huge and is unwieldy if someone is trying to maintain it as a monolithic whole. The GP's point is that FOSS allows you to open it up and not maintain it as a whole, and as the whole system gets more complex, the more appealing it is to open it up and farm it out as FOSS does.
Changes in solar energy output (the "ringing" of the Sun)?
Well that's certainly a hypothesis worth investigating. Thankfully people other than yourself did actually think about that one, and have done a significant amunt of research on the amount of solar variation and how much of the change in global average temperature over the last century or so is attributable to those variations. The short answer is that, while solar variation has contributed (around 30% according to the IPCC) it can't fully account for the observed temperature changes. Indeed, solar variation flattened off in the last few decades, while temperature continued to rise see here.
Naturally occuring changes in the planetary atmosphere (as has happened before on this planet)?
An interesting hpothesis; perhapsthe dramatic rise in CO2 has nothing to do with humans. Fortunately, again, other people thought of this possibility and actually did the research. Since fossil fuels have rather distinctive isotope ratios we can gauge how much of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to fossil fuel burning by analysing the changing isotope ratios of atmospheric CO2. Unfortunately your hypothesis just isn't borne out; humans are responsible for the most recent dramatic rise in levels of atmospheric CO2.
But you get the point - when we at least have an educated guess as to the 'why'...
But we do have an educated guess as to why, significant amounts of research into that, and the alternative possibilities you suggest have been explored, and the results are that, to the very best of our current understanding, anthropogenic CO2 (and to a lesser degree other anthropogenic greenhouse gases) are a very significant factor -- indeed, the most significant -- in causing the observed increase in global average temperature. That rise in temperature is easily the prime candidate for blame with regard to melting arctic sea ice.
I'm sure awesome bar is great for some people, but those of us who loathe it really loathe it. It was enough to make me switch to Epiphany for a while, but the lack of firebug plugin brought me back. Out of curiousity, how does it compare to the epiphany location bar, which searches history and bookmarks (and allows smart bookmarks, which is the real bonus for me: no "search" box, just one entry field for everything). I like how epiphany handles things, and presumed that the firefox approach was similar... I was even thinking of moving back to Firefox now that it has decent bookmarking facilities like epiphany. Apparently I should reconsider that.
What if the code doesn't match the comments? Is the code correct or the comment? Which is why it is good to the comments in a form that allows unit tests to be extracted/generated from them. That way as soon as comments fall out of sync with code testing flags an error and the code is forced the update the comments accodingly. And yes, such things exist: see JMLunit, Autotest for Eiffel, and others.
It also makes finding errors easier, as your code may not be doing what your specifications say it should do. In this day and age, if the code has some (suitably formatted) comments regarding what it is supposed to do, you can even get some pretty useful tools to automatically check the code against the specification. It's not bullet-proof, but it can catch a lot of subtle bugs that might get overlooked, particularly in subtely incorrect {use of|calls to} code that you didn't necessarily write yourself. See ESC/Java2 or Spec# to see what I mean.
I am speaking metaphorically, of course. What I have in mind is someone like Newton, who could perceive of gravity, and had to basically invent the mathematics (calculus) to prove it. Gravity was Newton's "dragon in the garage". Something he could "see", but others couldn't. The key being that what made Newton great was not that he could see it (maybe others had before him; probably) but that he had the facility to make it possible for others, indeed anyone who cared to go to a little effort, to see it to. Newton's genius was not is "seeing" an invisible dragon, but in describing how anyone could tell whether the dragon was there or not.
Perhaps someday we can figure out why (or if) prayer works -- is it quantum mechanics? What if it turned out that thinking positive thoughts about someone affected their life even if you never told them or interacted with them? (That's spooky action at a distance.:-) Well there have been a few double blind studies on the effectiveness of prayer in medical cases. The results were that prayer made no difference whatsoever (I seem to recall there was a very slight (not statistically significant) bias for patients who had people praying for them, and knew people were praying for them, to do worse). So how does prayer work? Currently all the evidence we have says that it doesn't.
I was however referring to the sunspot activity which seems to have a much stronger correlation to earthly temperatures and agricultural production. Well it certainly isn't uncorrelated, but it isn't exactly a great correlation: reconstructed sunpot number and temperature over the last 10,000 years. They track reasonably well, but there are some distinct divergences in there. Still, no one (at least no one sensible) is claiming that solar variation isn't responsible for any of the the recent warming, the question is: how much does it account for? We can put sunspot number, CO2 and temperature for the last 150 years together like so. Certainly some of the temperature fluctuation lines up nicely with sunspot number variation. The last 50 years or so, however, shows a distinct increase in temperature when sunspot number flattened out. If you're serious you'll probably not be that persuaded by a chart and some handwaving; it looks plauible that sunspots don't account for recent warming, but how do the hard numbers really pan out? If you're that keen, look up any recent papers by Solanki, who looks at sunspots seriously.
Um, So? Why should a teacher master differential equations to teach algebra? I'd rather have a good teacher that knows enough math, than a great mathmetician that can't teach. Having both taught math, and known many math teachers, I can say that in general it is very helpful to have mastered mathematics at least 2 years beyond what you are trying to teach, preferably more. Math is a subject where things come together in surprising ways, and higher level material can and does connect together various different earlier subjects in new ways. Learning more advanced mathematics usually creates a broader and much deeper understanding of what came before. A simple case: knowing calculus and linear algebra can give you a much better appreciation for the value and use of basic algebra and trigonometric functions. More advanced: knowing some topos theory can give you a much better appreciation of numbers, addition, multiplication and exponentiation.
Knowing more advanced math is not required to be able to teach high school mathematics; it does, however, make a teacher better able to teach high school math by giving them a better and richer understanding of the material they have to teach. Sure, a terrible teacher who has that extra appreciation of the material isn't a great substitute for a fabulous teacher who doesn't, but in general I think we can expect the distribution of quality teachers to be roughly the same between those who seek a degree in math and those who don't... given that, on average, those with a degree in the subject will be that much better.
They can follow 'recipes' well enough to solve questions they're used to. However, present them with a problem where they have to actually think and they're stumped. This is an important point. One of the very crucial differences between the early and late examinations is not what material they happen to test, but how they test it. The later exams have no multi-step problems where you have to think and chain a line of reasoning together (instead they have multi-part problems that hand hold you through the steps so all you ahev to do is regurgitate fixed recipes). Thus the ability to actually put together a solution to a problem instead of simply following a recipe has been lost. Given that, ultimately, it is this sort of complex logical reasoning that lies at the heart of mathematics, it is fair to say that we've cut the real mathematics out of the syllabus (and instead have a shallow shell of facts about mathematics).
The newer example questions seemed more rationalized, they test whether you know the theory or formula needed to solve the question without throwing you a curve ball. More specifically, they test whether you know the formula. That is, they test whether you have memorized the appropriate recipe. They don't test whether you know mathematics, they test whether you know facts about mathematics. The earlier questions require you to actually put together a multi-step process to get to a result rather than hand-holding you through it. They also tend to require you to actually lay out the line of reasoning you had to use. That actually requires some mathematics -- actually using and mentally manipulating abstract objects in a logical fashion; constructing lines of reasoning yourself to solve problems rather than just using fixed recipes. I'm not saying the early exams are perfect, but they do have a very distinct requirement that the later ones do not -- they require you to actually think and reason. The later tests are akin to history tests that are nothing but questions like "In what year did Columbus sail to the Americas"; they only require you to be able to regurgitate facts. Now such history exams exist, but they suck too. A real history exam should test your understand of meaning of events (both contextually at the time, and for us today), not just raw facts about events. Likewise a real maths exam should ask for more than just regurgitation of facts about mathematics.
Maths in the 1950s was designed for engineers and scientists in that generation. They learned what they needed.
Maths today is exactly the same. The fact is you can't use 1950s standards to evaluate today's exams any more than you can use today's standards to evaluate 1950s exams. Well, perhaps the people to ask as to whether things are going well or not are professional mathematicians, physicists, and philosphers of mathematics. Conveniently, a bunch of them are busy discussing this over at the n-Category Cafe. And yes, there is an element of some material beign dropped in favour of other newer material. It's worth noting, however, that there is a real concern (particularly by Tim Porter and David Corfield) that core material (that is, the essence of mathematics) is being lost in this reshuffle, and that it really does represent a significant loss in mathematics education.
Slashdotters are an anomaly because our careers and interests require us to do maths all the time. If the future historians are allowed to slack off on their trig tests, so what? They weren't going to be engineers anyway. It's interesting you say that, because the actual report was noting the economic impact of the lower numbers of students actually going on to complete higher level mathematics (in part, they claim, due to poor preparation based on lower standards). Apparently there is actually quite a demand for the skills that mathematics education can impart; high enough demand that employers in the UK are noting the lack of suitably qualified candidates (apparently financial insitutions in the UK are looking to France these days, since they produce more and better mathematicians).
Sure, not everyone is going to go on in mathematics; some will be poets, some will be historians, and so on. It is also true, however, that most people don't have their future that well written by the age of 16, and having a solid enough background in a variety of subjects, including mathematics, literature, and history, to be able to keep future options open to exploration is important.
doing the math is going to be easier, even if they didn't ask harder questions. However, the amount of automation these days means that most people aren't ever going to have to do the harder math in their daily lives. No, doing the mathematics is not going to be easier; sure the computational grind is easier, but mathematics is not arithmetic. Constructing rigorous logical chains of argument, and symbolic manipulation within formally defined systems; understanding how abstraction can be used effectively, and how it can be taken too far; and being able to think coherently and correctly about abstract entities -- these don't magically become trivial given a calculator. Personally I think part of the problem is that we've lost sight of what mathematics is, and what mathematics is not. Modern mathematics courses are simplifying away what matters in favour of shallow coverage of surface material.
I don't think teachers are being paid enough and they are certainly not valued enough by the community. Once upon a time, the best and brightest minds went into the teaching profession; it had respect and was highly valued. Now, it's whoever wants to become one, winner by default. That seems to be true for mathematics tyeachers in the UK; conveniently the BBC is also covering the rather glaring fact that the majority of people teaching mathematics aren't experts. That is, the majority of people teaching mathematics have degrees (if any) in unrelated subjects. Mathematics isn't the only subject that has a shortage of people actually qualified to teach; most of the sciences do apparently. Mathematics is far and away the most glaring case however (only 47% of maths teachers had a relevant degree, compared to 85% for biology, 83% for chemistry, and 72% for physics). Throw in the fact that mathematics is one of those subjects where a student can be permanently set back by just one bad teacher and you have a decent part of the problem.
How many internet groups will get into this just to fuck it up for everyone else? I'm sure anonymous, SA, [insert other internet group] will fill the ranks just so they can make the game and hence the tv show an abomination to play/watch. If the show producers have even half a clue they can take care of this for the show, the game may suffer though... The key is that the game will "shape and guide" the show; i.e. add texture and events to the show's world. If some griefers come and make a horrible mess of some event then the show can demote it to something that gets a casual mention: e.g. "In other news, there was yet another skirmish with an as yet unidentified alien foe; back to you John" on a T.V. in the background of the show. If things go well, they can make more of a deal of it on the show and have it feature prominently. There's no reason anything from the game world has to make the show unfiltered; the show writers will have plenty of scope to write around events from the game world (many of which will in turn be semi-scripted by those writers to begin with) and pick and choose what they care to bring into the show. The effect of griefers will be in managing to make sure keen players don't get their exploits to feature prominently on the show, which may still attract plenty of griefers, but it will only ruin the game, not the show.
Of course all of this was working on the assumption that the producers have a clue, and this is SciFi we're talking about, so I wouldn't count on it...
Sometimes simpler is better. Movies are only 1.5 to 2 hours long, and in practice that's actually not a lot of time; that's why most books get significantly truncated. Exploring anything complex, or epic in scope, in film is a hard task, it either takes a stroke of genius/luck, or a series of several films. Failign those, you get something that is muddled and fails to communicate all the material it is so desperately trying to cram in. For the most part, "take something simple and just do it well" is the best approach -- and that's why Pitch Black works, yet the Chronicles of Riddick (at least in my opinion) don't. Sure the plot of Pitch Black is simple, but the film isn't aspiring to be much more than it is, a simple thriller. By keeping a narrow focus it succeeds in that. In contrast, Riddick tries to be sprawling and epic, but just doesn't have the time to do all that needs to be done; it is entertaining, but fails at its effort to be an epic space opera.
Slashdot Mirror
This raises an interesting issue of where do you draw the line between essential and non-essential features of websites. What should the web look like? Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?"
Or perhaps we should leave it up to corporations to make the decision according to whatever criteria they see fit, no matter how misleading the result may be. "I have here a coffee mug. It gets all of the internet [for my particular definition of all of the internet]".
Let's be clear, this isn't a matter of the government dictating what constitutes the internet, this is the judiciary making a ruling as to what the current common perception of the internet is. It is not laying down a definition, but rather making a judgement (as judges are expected to do) as to whether Apple's particular idiosyncratic definition of "all of the internet" differs sufficiently from the current average public definition so as to be misleading. We're not even talking about "essential internet" here; the Apple ad said "all".
In short, this isn't the government dictating what the web should look like, but rather the people. If the judge believed that most average UK citizen could reasonably interpret "all of the internet" to mean the same as what Apple apparently does, there would be no conflict.
14,000 years ago, Michigan was covered by a glacier. I have a hunch that SUVs did not melt this glacier.
No, as far as we can tell a combination of orbital variation to kick start things and various feedbacks (including warmer oceans releasing CO2) managed that quite nicely. Currently we are not at the point where those orbital effects are in play. In fact, the next stage of the orbital cycle should see us getting signficantly colder (though the time frame for that happening is at least a millenia or two away). Despite this we are seeing significant warming that, while attributable to a number of factors, is not currently explainable without putting a large chunk of the blame on anthropogenic CO2. So yes, there are natural effects that cause climate to change, but apparently current changes are not purely natural. 14,000 years ago the mean global temperature was only a few degrees cooler; current models (that is, to the best of our knowledge) suggest we can expect mean global temperature to increase by at least a degree or two in the next century. Given the change from 14,000 years ago to now, an extra degree or two ibn mean global temperature could hacve very significant effects.
As it becomes unstable, you will start seeing more records: cold, hot, rain, drought, record single day temperature differentials, etc. It's not going to just get warmer over short time periods.. It always amazes me that folks don't realize that.
I've been telling people this for a while.
The you've been misleading them. You may see some variability on a local level, but fluctuating extremes on a mean global level are not something that the IPCC predicts as result of global warming. There will be fluctuations because, aside from the anthropogenic effects causing warming, there are plenty of other factors that make the climate variable; some years are colder than others, and that's still going to be true even with global warming. In this case there are a number of natural factors that have aligned to make 2008 colder than previous years. According to the IPCC global warming is simply dampening how cold this year is, not causing it to be cold through some instability. Compared to the 20th century 2008 will still be rather warm, and that can potentially be attributed to global warming.
Can we lay this tired meme about increased variability due to global warming to rest though. A cold spell is merely not necessarily strong evidence against global warming*, it is not evidence for global warming.
* At this point, given the historical temperature record, a significant (mid 20th century temperatures) sustained (5 or more years) cold spell would be required to count as strong evidence against global warming.
Eiffel gained adoption within niche industries, generally in finance/business where correctness and maintainability was somewhat of a concern. These days it is getting heavily squeezed by Java, but is still kicking around nad has adherents (partly because those who did actually take it up generally stuck with it -- it is a pretty nice language in many ways).
If you're forced to maintain a bunch of code and you can choose the language would you prefer to maintain a batch of perl code or a batch of python or C code ?
I've done all three and I really *much* prefer C over both python and perl and python over perl.
Ah, but now compare C to a language like Ada or Eiffel that was actually designed with long term maintenance of large projects firmly in mind. Whatever else you may think of those languages, they are certainly near the top of the list of languages that you'd like a large codebase you're forced to maintain to be written in.
Ah, you're the people behind Durham Signature Ale -- it's good stuff! Are you planning on expanding your range of beer styles, or just focussing on the one Signature Ale?
I have similar issues; for the most part they really don't bother me: I essentially never use long tables; the number of times that float positioning has gone nuts on me are so few that (compared to other programs screwing things up) I can essentially ignore it; programming new classes is something I do very rarely, so the pain therein isn't too bad. That said, I would love to see something that made programming with TeX easier, or a replacement for TeX with more flexibility on that front (and better font handling for modern font formats). I was tempted by QaTeX, but the project is quite resoundingly dead; the principle certainly sounded nice. For font handling I rather like XeTeX.
Unless you have a subway system that will pick me up less than a block from where I am (no matter where I am), drop me off less than a block from where I want to go, and do so with a no more than 5 minute wait for said subway, it just won't replace the car.
Because you can always park within one block of where you want to go? Where do you live exactly? Any city big enough to make major public transit worthwhile (which, let's note, is what the OP was talking about) has severe parking issues in the downtown area. Expecting to park within one block of your intended destination is being very hopeful.
Applications don't have the same Level of UI consistance as Windows. Sure Windows has a few oddballs iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Office 2007 come to mind, but most have pretty good level of consistency.
Yup, Windows is just the model of visual consistency. Note that every application in that screenshot is a Microsoft application, so we're not even talking about third parties making a mess here.
It seems to me that the only people making things large and unwieldy are large closed source software companies (like MS, but others exist),
A comparable FOSS system is just as large and unwieldy. The key is that the FOSS system, because all the internals are exposed, is broken up into a vast array of separately manageable chunks. Each chunk looks relatively maintainable, but the whole system (that's Linux, GNU tools, X11, toolkits such as QT and GTK+, backend stuff like HAL and DBUS, libraries for this and that small function (zlib, jpeg handling, ffts, etc.), and then the new stuff coming in like Cairo; the list goes on) is huge and is unwieldy if someone is trying to maintain it as a monolithic whole. The GP's point is that FOSS allows you to open it up and not maintain it as a whole, and as the whole system gets more complex, the more appealing it is to open it up and farm it out as FOSS does.
Changes in solar energy output (the "ringing" of the Sun)?
Well that's certainly a hypothesis worth investigating. Thankfully people other than yourself did actually think about that one, and have done a significant amunt of research on the amount of solar variation and how much of the change in global average temperature over the last century or so is attributable to those variations. The short answer is that, while solar variation has contributed (around 30% according to the IPCC) it can't fully account for the observed temperature changes. Indeed, solar variation flattened off in the last few decades, while temperature continued to rise see here.
Naturally occuring changes in the planetary atmosphere (as has happened before on this planet)?
An interesting hpothesis; perhapsthe dramatic rise in CO2 has nothing to do with humans. Fortunately, again, other people thought of this possibility and actually did the research. Since fossil fuels have rather distinctive isotope ratios we can gauge how much of the increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to fossil fuel burning by analysing the changing isotope ratios of atmospheric CO2. Unfortunately your hypothesis just isn't borne out; humans are responsible for the most recent dramatic rise in levels of atmospheric CO2.
But you get the point - when we at least have an educated guess as to the 'why'...
But we do have an educated guess as to why, significant amounts of research into that, and the alternative possibilities you suggest have been explored, and the results are that, to the very best of our current understanding, anthropogenic CO2 (and to a lesser degree other anthropogenic greenhouse gases) are a very significant factor -- indeed, the most significant -- in causing the observed increase in global average temperature. That rise in temperature is easily the prime candidate for blame with regard to melting arctic sea ice.
Knowing more advanced math is not required to be able to teach high school mathematics; it does, however, make a teacher better able to teach high school math by giving them a better and richer understanding of the material they have to teach. Sure, a terrible teacher who has that extra appreciation of the material isn't a great substitute for a fabulous teacher who doesn't, but in general I think we can expect the distribution of quality teachers to be roughly the same between those who seek a degree in math and those who don't... given that, on average, those with a degree in the subject will be that much better.
Maths today is exactly the same. The fact is you can't use 1950s standards to evaluate today's exams any more than you can use today's standards to evaluate 1950s exams. Well, perhaps the people to ask as to whether things are going well or not are professional mathematicians, physicists, and philosphers of mathematics. Conveniently, a bunch of them are busy discussing this over at the n-Category Cafe. And yes, there is an element of some material beign dropped in favour of other newer material. It's worth noting, however, that there is a real concern (particularly by Tim Porter and David Corfield) that core material (that is, the essence of mathematics) is being lost in this reshuffle, and that it really does represent a significant loss in mathematics education.
Sure, not everyone is going to go on in mathematics; some will be poets, some will be historians, and so on. It is also true, however, that most people don't have their future that well written by the age of 16, and having a solid enough background in a variety of subjects, including mathematics, literature, and history, to be able to keep future options open to exploration is important. doing the math is going to be easier, even if they didn't ask harder questions. However, the amount of automation these days means that most people aren't ever going to have to do the harder math in their daily lives. No, doing the mathematics is not going to be easier; sure the computational grind is easier, but mathematics is not arithmetic. Constructing rigorous logical chains of argument, and symbolic manipulation within formally defined systems; understanding how abstraction can be used effectively, and how it can be taken too far; and being able to think coherently and correctly about abstract entities -- these don't magically become trivial given a calculator. Personally I think part of the problem is that we've lost sight of what mathematics is, and what mathematics is not. Modern mathematics courses are simplifying away what matters in favour of shallow coverage of surface material.
Of course all of this was working on the assumption that the producers have a clue, and this is SciFi we're talking about, so I wouldn't count on it...
Sometimes simpler is better. Movies are only 1.5 to 2 hours long, and in practice that's actually not a lot of time; that's why most books get significantly truncated. Exploring anything complex, or epic in scope, in film is a hard task, it either takes a stroke of genius/luck, or a series of several films. Failign those, you get something that is muddled and fails to communicate all the material it is so desperately trying to cram in. For the most part, "take something simple and just do it well" is the best approach -- and that's why Pitch Black works, yet the Chronicles of Riddick (at least in my opinion) don't. Sure the plot of Pitch Black is simple, but the film isn't aspiring to be much more than it is, a simple thriller. By keeping a narrow focus it succeeds in that. In contrast, Riddick tries to be sprawling and epic, but just doesn't have the time to do all that needs to be done; it is entertaining, but fails at its effort to be an epic space opera.