Yes. But my point is that just email works just like that. Yahoo users can email Gmail users. However, you can't see google+ posts on facebook. That is where the analogy with phone companies breaks down. Email and phone calls are analogous. Social networks are not analogous to either email or phone calls.

Agreed. Many people follow news sites from facebook. Facebook has become their portal to the rest of the internet.

No, not really. If I use gmail and you use yahoo there is nothing lost in our email conversations. If I use facebook, and you use google+, then logging into facebook doesn't show me your stuff. I'd have to go to your system to see your stuff. If i had 20 friends all on facebook, its easy. If they were on 20 different systems, I have to have 20 tabs open. To make it similar to email, then if you post on Facebook, or on google+, then I'd see it in my "aggregator system", and it'd be like I was simultaneously on both. So whose Ads do I see? If I built it, I wouldn't see any. So why would they let me scrape their sites? I don't know, why would they?

No, actually, its like AT&T has 98% of the market share, and someone is whining, "why doesn't everyone start up their own independent telephone network space". Like I want to use the yellow phone to talk to people about baking, and the green phone for talking about movies. Not gonna happen.

Right. I remember those days. It was back when everyone was on Yahoo! What made Yahoo! chat rooms work was that you could go there and find people. What makes Facebook work is that is where everyone is now. I could (and do) use google+, but I get almost nothing out of it because nobody is there. This is called "network effect".

Mathematica use QT.

Type alt-f2, now type systemsettings.

I pretty much just stick with the packages my distro makes available. It is simple and it works, why fix it?

And we don't want it to happen. Fragmentation is not a real problem compared to the advantages of organic growth rates. Choice is a good thing.

I was born in Austin, Texas. I personally know christian fundamentalists who hear it preached from the pulpit that vaccination is dangerous. Here in California, I've met fewer who take that stand, but I've never yet met anyone who was against vaccination who wasn't a fundamentalist.

Yet it is possible to approach the study of music without recourse to the use of an instrument. We are talking about teaching math early, not talking about never teaching multiplication tables.

Actually, no. TFA was talking about trying to persuade people to change their minds by presenting them with facts in various ways. What they found was that facts don't matter to a significant portion of people, and that some people will even move further away from rationality after being presented with facts that counter their beliefs.

The point is that there is a lot that can be learned without recourse to rote memorization, and that teaching young children rote work is detrimental. We are thus given a choice. We can wait until they mature enough to bang their head against the wall, or we can start them with valid material that doesn't require the discipline that rote memorization requires. I'd say start early, rather than not.

He also taught physics in brasil. While doing so, he lectured on the polarization of light. When he asked the class for a physical example, no one could give him one, so he walked to a window and pointed at the sky at the horizon. The point he made in his book was that mechanical rote learning is worthless without the ability to connect it. Copying what he put on the board and memorizing it was NOT what he wanted.

I am sorry, but if you think that repetitive arithmetic helps with intuitive sense for math, then I must admit I think you are stupid, or you fail to comprehend "intuitive" sense. I've done a lot of tutoring of Maths and Physics over the decades. Math majors have an inferior intuitive sense of probability theory than do business majors. The ability to parrot a proof, or calculate for an hour without making a sign error, has nothing to do with understanding. Sometimes understanding what something is, and what it is useful for, is more important than "arithmetic". If you want to teach visualization, then show them animations. Teach them about slopes by showing them. Then teach partial diff eq by showing them, not by making them solve them. The world would be different if kids who didn't know their multiplication tables could discuss intersections and linear programming concepts (and even solve them after being shown the graphs), even if they can't do enough math to draw the graphs by hand. That is the point.