Exactly how each teacher training institution decides if your subject knowledge is good enough is up to the individual institution. Some have an entry test, some a list of specific degree title's they will consider, some assess it during an interview. I did my PGCE at St Martin's College (now part of the University of Cumbria) and they primarily looked at your degree, but if that didn't pass muster would discuss it with applicants during the interview.

That doesn't sound ideal! I take it the teacher in question wasn't much use when asked difficult questions? As an ICT teacher I find my subject knowledge gets tested an awful lot more my pupils asking interesting questions than by the demands of the curriculum.

It's the best feeling in the world. We've been teaching year 7s to program (in Scratch) for the last half term (great fun!), and to see how some of them just "switch on" at being able to make their own programs and simple games has been mind-blowing.

I am afraid you are mistaken: to begin a PGCE you need to demonstrate suitable subject knowledge - the easiest way to do so is having a degree in a related subject. If your degree is not relevant , there exist two-year conversion courses where the first year is spent at university learning the requisite subject knowledge. If you don't have a degree you can't become a teacher in the UK.

Of course, once you are a qualified teacher you can transfer to teach other subjects at the discretion of your school - If an otherwise skilful teacher wants/needs to change to a subject where they lack the necessary knowledge it is not unknown for schools to send them on a conversion course.

Comp Sci graduates teaching ICT are in the minority in the UK, but there are valid reasons for that. I have a MEng in Software Engineering, and my Sixth-Formers frequently ask why I'm "wasting" my time in teaching - even they are aware that I could double my salary if I worked in industry. Of course teaching has non-financial rewards, but it's completely understandable that the vast majority of Comp Sci graduates would rather work elsewhere.

The Head of ICT you quoted almost certainly doesn't need to teach programming at the moment, so I suppose it doesn't much matter if he hates it. Be thankful that people like this exist, however; in a few year's time (once the curriculum fully changes to Computing instead of ICT), you'll be replacing them!

boot times where 5+ min. never worked right. plug and play didn't work, no standards on HW.Drivers sucked.

Those things may have been true of (IBM Compatible) PCs in the early 1990s, but my Amiga would definitely beg to differ.

It's not French for anything - Nova Scotia is Latin.

The French call it Nouvelle-Écosse, meaning New Scotland.

40Khz dynamic range

Frequency is measured in Hertz. Dynamic Range is measured in dB.

Just in case you weren't trolling: if you can notice a "loss of fidelity" in an mp3 you listen to in the car there is something wrong with your encoder. LAME -v2 (~192kbps) is almost impossible for even those with Golden Ears to ABX under ideal circumstances. In a car with 70dB of background noise you'd struggle to identify a 64kbps encode.

She was playing the lottery. That's more evidence of a lack of numeracy skills than the resultant conversation, IMHO.

I don't think the removal of Ethernet from the Model A is just about building down to a price.

I know that if I approached the network manager at my school and said "I want to buy 30 linux computers that pupils can use to write and execute their own code. Oh and by the way they all need network access", he'd have a blue fit!

I could see us buying a few model B's to teach the sixth-formers about networking, but for general use in my school the model A would be a much easier sell to the powers that be.

I teach ICT, and don't currently have my own classroom - there are some days when I teach in 5 different computer suites.

5 classes per day means I only have to assist ten pupils per lesson and I'm up to 50 keyboards touched, and that doesn't include the keyboard of the teaching machine, my work laptop or my home PC etc.

No wonder I seem to catch every bug going round...

You must have a lead foot! I drive a 1.6 HDi C4, and average 720 miles (1150 km) on 13 gallon (60 L tank), mainly city driving. I don't do much motorway driving, but on the last major trip (Liverpool to Worthing and back - about 450 miles / 720 km) I used less than half a tank . The Missus tells me off for being a boy racer if I drop the average MPG below 60!

Reading car stories on Slashdot always weirds me out. I know the US gallon is smaller than the imperial gallon, but seeing numbers like "mid 40s mpg" being considered good for a diesel is just wrong. You'd have to try pretty hard in the UK to buy a car (other than an SUV) with such crappy fuel economy.

Yes I would, but then I live in a country that has a half-way decent electrical supply.

Isn't the speed of computation pretty irrelevant if there's a delay built in to the challenge/response routine?

Would that be the Dinorwig Pumped Storage Power Station?

That's because AMD doesn't build its own stuff. They had fabs in the US, and were in the process of building a new one in NY, but were forced to sell off their fabrication after Intel's anti-competitive practices nearly bankrupted them.

Nonsense - you can hack the Wii to allow you to play games from a USB HDD (works brilliantly if you have small kids - no discs to get lost / smeared with little fingerprints). You use a utility to read the discs on the Wii and it saves image files to the HDD.

Playing the image files on an emulator would be a pretty small step from there, and no piracy required.