I hope this proposal is considered with more than the usual amount of skeptical reserve. The name was changed more than once but I'm fairly certain that the "Trusted Computing" group was previously acting as a lackey of the entertainment cartel. They managed to introduce new points of possible breakage making computer based media more prone to failure (e.g. HDCP and the forced failure of expensive monitors purchased by early adopters).
If this is the same group then you can almost guarantee that they will include backdoors and other nastiness intended to inhibit unapproved behavior by the owner of the drive.
Maybe I'm too easily amazed but you're comparing a device that was well over $500 to a $200 device? As for quality engineered products Apple has had some variations in results over its 30+ years but I can't think of anyone else with a record as good.
The iPod touch has fantastic engineering and Apple's recent laptops are as ubiquitous as they are (despite a premium price) for very good reasons.
Don't get me wrong. I think it is very fortunate that there are irrational Apple haters who will diss and avoid Apple products while buying and singing the praises of Zunes, Garmin and all the others. It supplies a market force that keeps the prices of Apple products less extreme. Thanks.
This article and many like it are just attempts to distract attention from a more fundamental issue. Why is Moore's law essentially almost null and void when it comes to provisioning of internet bandwidth? How do things need to be organized so we get the same sort of benefits in this area as we get in such diverse areas as printer performance, large flat screen monitors, processor speed and capability, memory cost, hard drive capacity, etc?
The only area of this part of the economy that seems to be mystified by the idea of Moore's law are the monopoly and duopoly ISP's. Qwest proudly proclaimed they would guarantee a certain level of bandwidth without price increases for some number of years. Are they kidding? Their costs keep dropping toward zero per bit and they think they are being generous because they will restrain themselves by not increasing prices! What a load of crap.
Nobody thinks bandwidth is cost free (see below for some details). What is clear to anyone involved in digital electronics for the past fifty years is that except for monopolies and government interference the price for a given level of service will always be dropping precipitously. The fact that it isn't for internet access is evidence that there is something rotten going on.
About that cost free issue it is worth noting that even for things that are not free, like roads, it does not make sense to make every road a toll road. The same sort of idea may make sense for a modest and increasing level of bandwidth. The FCC will be considering exactly this topic in the near future. The free lunch for fat cat monopolists may be in some danger.
All the local channels in my area have gone HD (mostly 1080p)
Since 1080p is not part of the ATSC standard I doubt this is exactly the case. Broadcast signals are limited to 1080i but that is obviously rather easy to adapt to a 1080p display. However BluRay discs and some of the game console titles are encoded at 1080p. If there is a cable company using that standard it would be rather ironic since their added compression tends to stomp all over the existing signal.
Last I heard the only things actually broadcast in HD are the World series and the Super Bowl
Are you kidding? The switch to HD in the US has been occurring for over ten years with programs being added by the major networks every year. I don't believe there are any prime time shows that are not available in HD at this point.
The explanation of the confusion is that the introduction of DVD's provided a transitional media source that ramped up resolution without the stark contrast. If you compare a customary OTA, cable or VCR image directly with a free OTA HDTV even on the same HDTV set the difference is not subtle. But DVD on a standard NTSC set and then the same DVD on an HDTV set provide two increasing levels of video fidelity.
It is not the case that people are so unobservant, it is just that video fidelity is only one criterion and program content is much more important. Avoiding annoying complexity is rather important also and HDTV adds a lot of it despite the best efforts to minimize it.
Please, you think Feynman lacked in mathematical ability in any way? When he was an undergrad he was a Putnam scholar (ie he was one of a few who had the top result in an annual Putnam exam). Without question his field was theoretical physics rather than mathematics but it wasn't from lack of mastery of mathematics.
Sorry if I'm missing some subtle irony here but this comment seems nonsensical. People always have and always will 'break the rules'. What does that have to do with setting up rules that reasonably allocate scarce resources? If the rules work as designed then a potentially valuable capability has been enabled. If someone breaks the rules and interference occurs you report it to the FCC, they investigate, shut down, and fine the offending party.
It seems as though you are petulantly complaining that you don't want to even face the possibility of having to act in your own interest. Cry me a river. I also recall how people were quite certain that wifi would not possibly work because chaos was inevitable.
Have you actually connected a converter box? I've done it for a few of my mother's friends while visiting her in Tucson. In each case there was an RF connector that put the converted DTV signal on channel 3 or 4 of the analog TV. Do you know of any TV that cannot use an RF signal? (Yes, that was a rhetorical question). They also had component outputs but those did not have to be used.
On the other hand I completely agree that existing unlicensed users have no legitimate complaint.
Have I accidentally stumbled into the past when nonzero rest mass for the neutrino was still a proposal rather than a rather well established part of theoretical and experimental physics?
If the neutrino (or more precisely the three flavors of neutrino) had zero rest mass and travelled at the speed of light along light-like paths then the mechanism for solar fusion would predict far higher neutrino flux than has been measured experimentally ever since the calculation was made in the 50's. But non-zero rest mass allows neutrinos to oscillate among the three different flavors and makes the calculations agree with experimental result (for neutrino flux at the Earth).
Ray Davis was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for his work on this issue as described in the article on "Neutrino Oscillation" in wikipedia. Nonzero rest mass for the neutrino is not exactly controversial at this point. That makes "philosophy of science" issues framed around it rather quaint this late in the game.
The bigger question is which shift is likely to be more important. Is the big shift going to be to generic touchscreens which are slight modifications of the current mouse programming interface or to multitouch which is an attempt at a basic reorganization of the human computer interface?
In the article they say: "Such devices are popular in the region for their ability to allow users to input Asian language characters with a stylus". A stylus driven touchscreen is inherently NOT multitouch. Multitouch is a niche market compared to touchscreens in general but it is also distinct from it. The article is about Newton era technology which is not the technology which drives the iPhone and iPod touch.
I realize this thread has devolved to being just about interplanetary and interstellar flight segments but it is still worth noting that getting to Mars is not good enough. You need to drop into and climb out of a fairly daunting gravity well. Refueling your plasma engine won't be sufficient for a return trip to Earth. You need chemical engines with their thrust characteristics to land and take off from Mars.
Costs rise precipitously if you have to carry all you chemical fuel during your initial launch. To overcome that hurdle you need something like Zubrin's plan for manufacturing chemical rocket fuel on Mars. On the other hand the plasma engine concept appears very appealing for travel between Earth orbit and Mars orbit. Maybe we could even build the first space elevator on Mars to finesse the Mars gravity well issue eventually.
No, the joke is that the next paradigm of user interface is introduced and you don't have a clue. There were also people who reacted to the mouse and GUI's in 1984 saying that people would never give up the power and flexibility of the command line interface for this clumsy, intelligence-demeaning fad that Apple was pathetically trying to foist on the public.
When multitouch is firmly established as the dominant UI technique several years from now (hint: it isn't just for zooming pictures, that's why I referred to the class library and API's, not just a particular demo), try to recall how completely you missed the point.
In case you missed my comment above I'll just repeat exactly what is different in the Apple UI: MULTITOUCH. This is not just a slight variation on the common mouse API's. There is a fundamental evolution of the class library for product development.
Anyone who wants to can download the SDK from Apple if you are curious about the differences at the technical level. It will entail much more than just the iPhone but that is where it is first appearing.
Multitouch interface rather than just an augmented mouse is the big deal about recent developments at Apple. It is at the API level so the perception of it is only beginning to penetrate public consciousness. It will also require time to be better utilized by developers just like it took time for the window, icon, menu, pointing device interface to become ubiquitous. In that former case (wimp interface) and the current multitouch example Apple leads in deployment by years before Microsoft "innovates" the same thing eventually.
If you think multitouch on the iPhone is not unique then I don't think you're viewing the scene very clearly. (By the way that is part of why people indicate that they find it so cool).
Your comment only mentioned oil which is remarkably ignorant in reference to Nigeria if no reverse spin is put on it (e.g. "I meant just the opposite and you should have known that intuitively"). That is a problem when one intends to be sarcastic or ironic. Sometimes when you write something that is dumb, it just sounds dumb. No, I don't customarily troll on/. as my karma score indicates. I'll also put Caltech and Stanford up against wherever you attained your smarter than a chimp status.
Are you kidding? It appears your "/sarcasm off" is about WMD. Nigeria has huge oil reserves and they are a major producer. Is it customary for your comments to be so ill informed?
In a world utterly dominated by desktop computing I would agree that the mouse is no in real danger of obsolescence. However, if the laptop and ipod are the only areas of explosive growth there is little opportunity for the mouse to exist.
I just recently got a MacbookPro and started with an adversarial relation to its trackpad. I had some slight familiarity with other people's laptops and always found the trackpads with or without the pseudo-joysticks to be pointlessly annoying. I would always want to plug in a real mouse. For the MBP I tried using my son's wireless two-button scroll wheel mouse and found it to be wonderfully familiar though it was less convenient since it requires a decent flat surface and is one more thing to carry.
On the other hand the trackpad, which is just like the multi-touch trackpad on the Macbook Air, started to ingratiate itself with the new repertoire of gestures. Many of us forget that the mouse itself took some time and experience to "disappear" as really useful user interface has to become invisible to be truly useful.
Of course for an iPod touch or iPhone the idea of using a mouse is more than slightly ludicrous. But with a million iPhone 3G sales in the first weekend how long will it be before the majority of devices running OSX is these little handheld devices? Throw in all the Apple laptops and that day arrives even sooner. For personal use the desktop may be going the way of minicomputers and mainframes. They'll still be there and will probably still use a mouse as a pointing device. There just won't be many of them compared to all the more portable platforms.
I suppose I've been clear enough in my defense of the use of calculators in K - 12 education. The points being that calculators are better suited to the tedious details involved and my claim that there is almost no mathematical significance to the displaced memorized routines.
I probably have not been as clearly insistent about the value of mathematics education in K - 12 (I wouldn't distinguish it as "real" mathematics since the current curriculum is mainly about arithmetic and tediously artificial "word problems"). Mathematics was understood by Plato as an essential part of a liberal education and should be recognized as such even more today. In other words it is not to be justified by being practical or specifically useful on a daily basis. Mathematics is justified as part of the curriculum because it is among the most remarkable of all human achievements and it is worthwhile trying to impart some of it to anyone who wishes to be educated.
But however one feels about that thesis I wish we could get past the idea that rote calculation is significantly about mathematics and that as a result calculators somehow interfere with something important. It isn't, they don't.
Most people will never have any practical use for mathematics anytime in their life
Does anyone (other than authors and editors) have any practical use for literature? Why would we bother having English classes beyond spelling and grammar? The answer is that it is part of a liberal education.
My point about calculators and mathematics is that it is entirely appropriate to explain how to use calculators in preference to tedious and error prone pencil and paper calculations. That sort of instruction doesn't teach mathematics in any case. People with nostalgic attachment to "the good old days" when students learned to extract square roots don't have a clue what mathematics is about. Explaining to students why the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers has mathematical significance but no insight into that is obtained by using pencil and paper rather than a calculator.
I suppose it is pointless to explain, but anyone who thinks calculation is what mathematics is about does not have any understanding of the subject. Often it is necessary to be able to perform or follow a calculation, but it is nowhere near the essence of the subject. For example the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was great mathematics but it was not related in any way with some super duper calculator. The Riemann hypothesis is an area of great mathematical ferment with not a calculator in sight. Long division never has been a summit of mathematics. It is repeated guessing and correction just like extracting a square root. The quadratic formula (i.e. completion of the square) comes up so often it is useful to have it memorized but it is Galois Theory that matters (mathematically speaking), not a calculator that has the quadratic formula built in. Calculation relative to mathematics could be thought of as roughly analogous to spelling relative to literature. Mathematics is a creative intellectual pursuit, not calculation.
"This has led to mathematics at university being compromised and able-students being neglected, and has cost the economy billions of pounds in lost mathematicians."
This is a ridiculous quote from the report. If one were to take the trouble to even glance at the appendix A of the report it is easy to see the grand pronouncements have slim foundation. The A and O level exams in the UK are without question significant but they are just used to make relative judgments among current students. None of the cited questions bear on anything that rises above the level school book arithmetic, algebra and geometry. For instance note that algebra in this context has very little to do with what is studied in a university level algebra course.
If this were a report about "dumbing down" of the mathematical tripos exam at Cambridge or the Putnam exam in the US, then the conclusions might not seem as silly. Anyone with a meaningful interest in math is way beyond the standard of the O level exams.
On a more general level people need to come to terms with the gradual but unmistakeable increase in the level of achievement in general intelligence tests over time. That's right, the trend is exactly the opposite of what the old fogies are always claiming (claimed in every generation since the ancient Greeks and probably before).
Rather than publishing silly reports like this one, they could better spend their time exclaiming: "You kids get off my lawn!"
"I suspect the green LED can be turned off with a firmware patch"
and
"The green LED can be turned off with a firmware patch"
The second statement actually provides useful information which could be either true or false. The first statement is a pointless waste of keystrokes. I realize that may be a bit harsh but why would it matter what you suspect?
Why do people continue to refer to a screen capture as though it would be equivalent to a picture taken by the built in camera? Unless the perpetrator made a picture of himself the desktop background, a screen dump is not likely to be even slightly useful. In fact it is almost certain to be useless except for the possible coincidence that personal information happened to be visible on the screen exactly when the screen dump is performed.
The salient points to recall from the article is that the thief was an acquaintance of the victim and the photograph was decisive in solving the case.
my 800Mhz imac can no longer play the itms videos without glitching
I've got a 450 MHz G4 tower Mac and its plays higher resolution content fine (e.g. HR HDTV files which are about 700 MB per hour) as long as I use something more capable like VLC for playback rather than iTunes or QuickTime Player. Other advantages of VLC include playing more formats without messing with the potential jungle of ever changing codecs. It is worth noting that VLC plays DVD's including ISO files made from the DVDs which can be anywhere on the network. For that reason I will only be interested in AppleTV when it is possible to integrate VLC smoothly with it.
It is odd that the Mac is usually the solution that just works without a lot of tedious effort but for media playback it seems like VLC taken that role.
So while this is all very interesting, please consider the fact that there are no legal ways to get Mac OS X for it currently.
You forgot the section arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If you want to run OS X on an AppleTV or any other hardware then grow a pair and just do it. Try to restrain yourself from breaking into an Apple Store and stealing anything. Other than that you are pretty much in the clear.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope this proposal is considered with more than the usual amount of skeptical reserve. The name was changed more than once but I'm fairly certain that the "Trusted Computing" group was previously acting as a lackey of the entertainment cartel. They managed to introduce new points of possible breakage making computer based media more prone to failure (e.g. HDCP and the forced failure of expensive monitors purchased by early adopters).
If this is the same group then you can almost guarantee that they will include backdoors and other nastiness intended to inhibit unapproved behavior by the owner of the drive.
Maybe I'm too easily amazed but you're comparing a device that was well over $500 to a $200 device? As for quality engineered products Apple has had some variations in results over its 30+ years but I can't think of anyone else with a record as good.
The iPod touch has fantastic engineering and Apple's recent laptops are as ubiquitous as they are (despite a premium price) for very good reasons.
Don't get me wrong. I think it is very fortunate that there are irrational Apple haters who will diss and avoid Apple products while buying and singing the praises of Zunes, Garmin and all the others. It supplies a market force that keeps the prices of Apple products less extreme. Thanks.
This article and many like it are just attempts to distract attention from a more fundamental issue. Why is Moore's law essentially almost null and void when it comes to provisioning of internet bandwidth? How do things need to be organized so we get the same sort of benefits in this area as we get in such diverse areas as printer performance, large flat screen monitors, processor speed and capability, memory cost, hard drive capacity, etc?
The only area of this part of the economy that seems to be mystified by the idea of Moore's law are the monopoly and duopoly ISP's. Qwest proudly proclaimed they would guarantee a certain level of bandwidth without price increases for some number of years. Are they kidding? Their costs keep dropping toward zero per bit and they think they are being generous because they will restrain themselves by not increasing prices! What a load of crap.
Nobody thinks bandwidth is cost free (see below for some details). What is clear to anyone involved in digital electronics for the past fifty years is that except for monopolies and government interference the price for a given level of service will always be dropping precipitously. The fact that it isn't for internet access is evidence that there is something rotten going on.
About that cost free issue it is worth noting that even for things that are not free, like roads, it does not make sense to make every road a toll road. The same sort of idea may make sense for a modest and increasing level of bandwidth. The FCC will be considering exactly this topic in the near future. The free lunch for fat cat monopolists may be in some danger.
All the local channels in my area have gone HD (mostly 1080p)
Since 1080p is not part of the ATSC standard I doubt this is exactly the case. Broadcast signals are limited to 1080i but that is obviously rather easy to adapt to a 1080p display. However BluRay discs and some of the game console titles are encoded at 1080p. If there is a cable company using that standard it would be rather ironic since their added compression tends to stomp all over the existing signal.
Last I heard the only things actually broadcast in HD are the World series and the Super Bowl
Are you kidding? The switch to HD in the US has been occurring for over ten years with programs being added by the major networks every year. I don't believe there are any prime time shows that are not available in HD at this point.
The explanation of the confusion is that the introduction of DVD's provided a transitional media source that ramped up resolution without the stark contrast. If you compare a customary OTA, cable or VCR image directly with a free OTA HDTV even on the same HDTV set the difference is not subtle. But DVD on a standard NTSC set and then the same DVD on an HDTV set provide two increasing levels of video fidelity.
It is not the case that people are so unobservant, it is just that video fidelity is only one criterion and program content is much more important. Avoiding annoying complexity is rather important also and HDTV adds a lot of it despite the best efforts to minimize it.
Please, you think Feynman lacked in mathematical ability in any way? When he was an undergrad he was a Putnam scholar (ie he was one of a few who had the top result in an annual Putnam exam). Without question his field was theoretical physics rather than mathematics but it wasn't from lack of mastery of mathematics.
Sorry if I'm missing some subtle irony here but this comment seems nonsensical. People always have and always will 'break the rules'. What does that have to do with setting up rules that reasonably allocate scarce resources? If the rules work as designed then a potentially valuable capability has been enabled. If someone breaks the rules and interference occurs you report it to the FCC, they investigate, shut down, and fine the offending party.
It seems as though you are petulantly complaining that you don't want to even face the possibility of having to act in your own interest. Cry me a river. I also recall how people were quite certain that wifi would not possibly work because chaos was inevitable.
Have you actually connected a converter box? I've done it for a few of my mother's friends while visiting her in Tucson. In each case there was an RF connector that put the converted DTV signal on channel 3 or 4 of the analog TV. Do you know of any TV that cannot use an RF signal? (Yes, that was a rhetorical question). They also had component outputs but those did not have to be used.
On the other hand I completely agree that existing unlicensed users have no legitimate complaint.
Have I accidentally stumbled into the past when nonzero rest mass for the neutrino was still a proposal rather than a rather well established part of theoretical and experimental physics?
If the neutrino (or more precisely the three flavors of neutrino) had zero rest mass and travelled at the speed of light along light-like paths then the mechanism for solar fusion would predict far higher neutrino flux than has been measured experimentally ever since the calculation was made in the 50's. But non-zero rest mass allows neutrinos to oscillate among the three different flavors and makes the calculations agree with experimental result (for neutrino flux at the Earth).
Ray Davis was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for his work on this issue as described in the article on "Neutrino Oscillation" in wikipedia. Nonzero rest mass for the neutrino is not exactly controversial at this point. That makes "philosophy of science" issues framed around it rather quaint this late in the game.
The bigger question is which shift is likely to be more important. Is the big shift going to be to generic touchscreens which are slight modifications of the current mouse programming interface or to multitouch which is an attempt at a basic reorganization of the human computer interface?
In the article they say: "Such devices are popular in the region for their ability to allow users to input Asian language characters with a stylus". A stylus driven touchscreen is inherently NOT multitouch. Multitouch is a niche market compared to touchscreens in general but it is also distinct from it. The article is about Newton era technology which is not the technology which drives the iPhone and iPod touch.
I realize this thread has devolved to being just about interplanetary and interstellar flight segments but it is still worth noting that getting to Mars is not good enough. You need to drop into and climb out of a fairly daunting gravity well. Refueling your plasma engine won't be sufficient for a return trip to Earth. You need chemical engines with their thrust characteristics to land and take off from Mars.
Costs rise precipitously if you have to carry all you chemical fuel during your initial launch. To overcome that hurdle you need something like Zubrin's plan for manufacturing chemical rocket fuel on Mars. On the other hand the plasma engine concept appears very appealing for travel between Earth orbit and Mars orbit. Maybe we could even build the first space elevator on Mars to finesse the Mars gravity well issue eventually.
No, the joke is that the next paradigm of user interface is introduced and you don't have a clue. There were also people who reacted to the mouse and GUI's in 1984 saying that people would never give up the power and flexibility of the command line interface for this clumsy, intelligence-demeaning fad that Apple was pathetically trying to foist on the public.
When multitouch is firmly established as the dominant UI technique several years from now (hint: it isn't just for zooming pictures, that's why I referred to the class library and API's, not just a particular demo), try to recall how completely you missed the point.
In case you missed my comment above I'll just repeat exactly what is different in the Apple UI: MULTITOUCH. This is not just a slight variation on the common mouse API's. There is a fundamental evolution of the class library for product development.
Anyone who wants to can download the SDK from Apple if you are curious about the differences at the technical level. It will entail much more than just the iPhone but that is where it is first appearing.
Multitouch interface rather than just an augmented mouse is the big deal about recent developments at Apple. It is at the API level so the perception of it is only beginning to penetrate public consciousness. It will also require time to be better utilized by developers just like it took time for the window, icon, menu, pointing device interface to become ubiquitous. In that former case (wimp interface) and the current multitouch example Apple leads in deployment by years before Microsoft "innovates" the same thing eventually.
If you think multitouch on the iPhone is not unique then I don't think you're viewing the scene very clearly. (By the way that is part of why people indicate that they find it so cool).
Your comment only mentioned oil which is remarkably ignorant in reference to Nigeria if no reverse spin is put on it (e.g. "I meant just the opposite and you should have known that intuitively"). That is a problem when one intends to be sarcastic or ironic. Sometimes when you write something that is dumb, it just sounds dumb. No, I don't customarily troll on /. as my karma score indicates. I'll also put Caltech and Stanford up against wherever you attained your smarter than a chimp status.
Are you kidding? It appears your "/sarcasm off" is about WMD. Nigeria has huge oil reserves and they are a major producer. Is it customary for your comments to be so ill informed?
In a world utterly dominated by desktop computing I would agree that the mouse is no in real danger of obsolescence. However, if the laptop and ipod are the only areas of explosive growth there is little opportunity for the mouse to exist.
I just recently got a MacbookPro and started with an adversarial relation to its trackpad. I had some slight familiarity with other people's laptops and always found the trackpads with or without the pseudo-joysticks to be pointlessly annoying. I would always want to plug in a real mouse. For the MBP I tried using my son's wireless two-button scroll wheel mouse and found it to be wonderfully familiar though it was less convenient since it requires a decent flat surface and is one more thing to carry.
On the other hand the trackpad, which is just like the multi-touch trackpad on the Macbook Air, started to ingratiate itself with the new repertoire of gestures. Many of us forget that the mouse itself took some time and experience to "disappear" as really useful user interface has to become invisible to be truly useful.
Of course for an iPod touch or iPhone the idea of using a mouse is more than slightly ludicrous. But with a million iPhone 3G sales in the first weekend how long will it be before the majority of devices running OSX is these little handheld devices? Throw in all the Apple laptops and that day arrives even sooner. For personal use the desktop may be going the way of minicomputers and mainframes. They'll still be there and will probably still use a mouse as a pointing device. There just won't be many of them compared to all the more portable platforms.
I suppose I've been clear enough in my defense of the use of calculators in K - 12 education. The points being that calculators are better suited to the tedious details involved and my claim that there is almost no mathematical significance to the displaced memorized routines.
I probably have not been as clearly insistent about the value of mathematics education in K - 12 (I wouldn't distinguish it as "real" mathematics since the current curriculum is mainly about arithmetic and tediously artificial "word problems"). Mathematics was understood by Plato as an essential part of a liberal education and should be recognized as such even more today. In other words it is not to be justified by being practical or specifically useful on a daily basis. Mathematics is justified as part of the curriculum because it is among the most remarkable of all human achievements and it is worthwhile trying to impart some of it to anyone who wishes to be educated.
But however one feels about that thesis I wish we could get past the idea that rote calculation is significantly about mathematics and that as a result calculators somehow interfere with something important. It isn't, they don't.
Most people will never have any practical use for mathematics anytime in their life
Does anyone (other than authors and editors) have any practical use for literature? Why would we bother having English classes beyond spelling and grammar? The answer is that it is part of a liberal education.
My point about calculators and mathematics is that it is entirely appropriate to explain how to use calculators in preference to tedious and error prone pencil and paper calculations. That sort of instruction doesn't teach mathematics in any case. People with nostalgic attachment to "the good old days" when students learned to extract square roots don't have a clue what mathematics is about. Explaining to students why the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers has mathematical significance but no insight into that is obtained by using pencil and paper rather than a calculator.
I suppose it is pointless to explain, but anyone who thinks calculation is what mathematics is about does not have any understanding of the subject. Often it is necessary to be able to perform or follow a calculation, but it is nowhere near the essence of the subject. For example the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was great mathematics but it was not related in any way with some super duper calculator. The Riemann hypothesis is an area of great mathematical ferment with not a calculator in sight. Long division never has been a summit of mathematics. It is repeated guessing and correction just like extracting a square root. The quadratic formula (i.e. completion of the square) comes up so often it is useful to have it memorized but it is Galois Theory that matters (mathematically speaking), not a calculator that has the quadratic formula built in. Calculation relative to mathematics could be thought of as roughly analogous to spelling relative to literature. Mathematics is a creative intellectual pursuit, not calculation.
"This has led to mathematics at university being compromised and able-students being neglected, and has cost the economy billions of pounds in lost mathematicians."
This is a ridiculous quote from the report. If one were to take the trouble to even glance at the appendix A of the report it is easy to see the grand pronouncements have slim foundation. The A and O level exams in the UK are without question significant but they are just used to make relative judgments among current students. None of the cited questions bear on anything that rises above the level school book arithmetic, algebra and geometry. For instance note that algebra in this context has very little to do with what is studied in a university level algebra course.
If this were a report about "dumbing down" of the mathematical tripos exam at Cambridge or the Putnam exam in the US, then the conclusions might not seem as silly. Anyone with a meaningful interest in math is way beyond the standard of the O level exams.
On a more general level people need to come to terms with the gradual but unmistakeable increase in the level of achievement in general intelligence tests over time. That's right, the trend is exactly the opposite of what the old fogies are always claiming (claimed in every generation since the ancient Greeks and probably before).
Rather than publishing silly reports like this one, they could better spend their time exclaiming: "You kids get off my lawn!"
Compare the two statements:
"I suspect the green LED can be turned off with a firmware patch"
and
"The green LED can be turned off with a firmware patch"
The second statement actually provides useful information which could be either true or false. The first statement is a pointless waste of keystrokes. I realize that may be a bit harsh but why would it matter what you suspect?
Why do people continue to refer to a screen capture as though it would be equivalent to a picture taken by the built in camera? Unless the perpetrator made a picture of himself the desktop background, a screen dump is not likely to be even slightly useful. In fact it is almost certain to be useless except for the possible coincidence that personal information happened to be visible on the screen exactly when the screen dump is performed.
The salient points to recall from the article is that the thief was an acquaintance of the victim and the photograph was decisive in solving the case.
my 800Mhz imac can no longer play the itms videos without glitching
I've got a 450 MHz G4 tower Mac and its plays higher resolution content fine (e.g. HR HDTV files which are about 700 MB per hour) as long as I use something more capable like VLC for playback rather than iTunes or QuickTime Player. Other advantages of VLC include playing more formats without messing with the potential jungle of ever changing codecs. It is worth noting that VLC plays DVD's including ISO files made from the DVDs which can be anywhere on the network. For that reason I will only be interested in AppleTV when it is possible to integrate VLC smoothly with it.
It is odd that the Mac is usually the solution that just works without a lot of tedious effort but for media playback it seems like VLC taken that role.
So while this is all very interesting, please consider the fact that there are no legal ways to get Mac OS X for it currently.
You forgot the section arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If you want to run OS X on an AppleTV or any other hardware then grow a pair and just do it. Try to restrain yourself from breaking into an Apple Store and stealing anything. Other than that you are pretty much in the clear.