I just hope that more hot young females are inspired by the fine example of Christmas Jones to become nuclear physicists.

...but most of the long takes in modern movies are made possible because of CGI being used to hide the shot breaks and camera transitions, fill in walls, remove crew members, and basically do all kinds of stuff that make it appear seemless. A shot that is apparently uncut by no means indicates that no CGI is used. Not that it should bother you much - bad CGI is just like bad lighting, bad editing, bad directing, bad acting, or any other component of film. CGI doesn't kill movies - Michael Bay using CGI does.

Someone call Mazlan Othman asap!

Does anyone remember XPLORA, the Peter Gabriel interactive CD-ROM project? I am imagining something like that...

Meanwhile, MMO is all about fantasy. Who in the world wants to be Michael Jackson? How is that fun?

Now David Bowie world - that would be off the hook! Everyone starts with a gun/sex toy and you can change your name, race or gender at any time. In fact, I am amazed Bowie doesn't already have a MMORPG.

I for one can't wait for the first batch of experimenters to be laid low by their Cyanobacteria infected meals. Open sores, indeed!

OK, since the author of the article seems to be totally ignorant of the actual issue, let me help you. This is nothing to do with "customer rights" and everything to do with stealing.

Your iPad/PlayStation/XBOX costs MORE than you are currently paying for it. Apple/Sony/Microsoft is selling it to you more cheaply because they want to make up the difference by selling you software.

So the companies have a few choices. 1) charge much more for the hardware and worry that people will not buy it. 2) undercharge for the hardware and lock people in to a closed app store. 3) sell two different versions - locked and unlocked - and let people choose which one they want.

Some open systems like PCs do #1 while some smartphones do #3. But most content-based products do model #2. When you "jailbreak" your product and use that to exit the app store ecosystem, that is basically saying "I know you want $800 for this, but I only want to pay you $400". We have a word for that. It is called "stealing". If you want to buy a toaster and it costs $20, but you only want to pay $10, you can't just tell WalMart that it is your "customer right".

And all of this talk about companies "forcing" you to do this or that. Wake up! You DO NOT HAVE TO BUY AN IPAD. If you don't like being locked in, don't engage in criminal behavior - just buy something else that is open. Geez people.

- davevr

There are a lot of different skills that count broadly as math.

There is counting. Recognizing quantities (by sight or by touch). Arithmetic (+, -, *, / ). Recognizing shapes. Finding unknowns. Mapping concrete items to abstract concepts (A A A = 3 As). Using variables. Algebra, Geometry, etc, etc. These are different skills. I am sure we have all met children who can tell you that "6+9=15" but if you asked them "if mommy gives you 6 cookies and daddy gives you 9, how my do you have?" would be stumped.

It sounds from the article that they dd not eliminate all maths, just abstract symbol manipulation, like "3+4=7".

It is pretty well established by people like Piaget that there are certain windows in childhood. During those times, the mind can easily absorb certain concepts that before or after those times they either cannot or all or can only with great dificulty or other exceptional circumstances.

The most widely accepted window is the window for early language learning, where beyond a certain age you will likely never be truly multi-lingual - you will always have a first language and zero or more secondary ones. However, there are several others. Mother-bonding happens within days of birth. Arithmetic sense (the ability to count, recognize quantities and relations) is one of those that is also quite young - 4-6 or something if I recall. There is a similar window for social behavior. There is also evidence that topology is such a window.

Ironically, despite the western obsession with early reading, there is no evidence that there is any window for reading. People who learn to read later in life - even 40's and beyond - can learn to read with little trouble and quickly become indistinguishable from early readers in terms of reading speed and comprehension. In fact, there is no evidence at all that early reading has any positive effect.

There are already schools that emphasize non-academic ways of learning. For example, in the Waldorf schools, children are not exposed to ANY academics at all - not even letter shapes or counting - until they are 7. Then the academic load builds slowly up, with more emphasis on outdoor play, spoken language and song, and craft-making than on book learning or lecturing. Despite this, most of these students have standard tests as high or higher than students from other private school that place more emphasis on academics.

My personal opinion (as someone with lots of kids in school) is that our current education system puts too much stuff in kids heads that they cannot process because it is not relevant to their daily experience. It is better for kids - especially young kids, under 10 or so - to play outside, engage in imaginative play, and to develop deep emotional connections with people around them than to learn to read or memorize multiplication tables. Academics can come later.

Consumers are most interested in freedom from buggy, hard-to-install, hard-to-configure, don't-play-my-youtubes, unsupported-by-my-PC-maker codecs.

Bold stand? PLEASE. Google makes almost all of their money in China by selling ads on their US site to Chinese companies, not from google.cn. If they really felt China was evil, they would pull out their sales team and stop selling personal information to the "evil" Chinese. But you notice that there is no talk of that from these jokers.

Why didn't they just call it the iPhone DX?

Or, more accurately: "We were cool with doing business with you, even effacing our own corporate values, because your country is a lucrative market. But after billions of dollars we still get our hat handed to us in the marketplace by the local competitor. We lost our good execs, and all of the good people we poached from other companies have abandoned ship. So now we need a way to get out without looking like the miserable failures we are. So we pretend it has something to do with human rights, even though we didn't care when there was money to be had."

Before reading the article, I had no idea that McDonalds et al. were not already growing their "meat" in a vat... Are you telling me that a Hot Dog actually contains a part of a real animal? Amazing!