Sorry about replying twice to your post, but I forgot to comment on this:

First of all, we have to remember that the sample questions were from the 4th and 8th grade, but the test he failed was 10th grade. At that age level, the questions might already be hard enough that it's justifiable to have forgotten a couple of rules and fail as an adult.

It's his reaction that's terrible. Because if you don't understand those rules when they're relevant, you're not going to be able to move on to the harder stuff. Is this guy seriously telling us he has 15 hours towards a doctorate and doesn't have the math skills to even begin to understand statistics?

The stuff you learn up to high school isn't supposed to be 100% relevant to the field you choose to work in when you're old enough to make that decision. It's supposed to enable you to choose any career at that point, and maybe even more importantly, have a general understanding of how the world works.

This guy is so strictly confined within his own bubble that he thinks children should be optimized for his one career path out of thousands. And he's on the school board. Ouch.

They have to be. Someone who fails that math test isn't capable of producing reliable original work for anything. You can't trust their results, because they don't have the capacity to evaluate them critically .

In fact, I wouldn't allow a person who fails this test to go car shopping.

Yeah, what's up with that? You start using a calculator when you start focusing on the hard stuff, not when the entire question is "(47 x 75) ÷ 25 =". How are you supposed to learn anything from solving that with a calculator?

According to rumors I've heard, this isn't Linux as we know it. They're going to run Qt as close to the hardware as possible with everything else stripped away. And we'd better hope it works, because it's the last chance we have of a Desktop Linux-compatible toolkit getting significant phone market share. I don't want to develop in Java, goddamnit.

You misunderstand how QML is supposed to be used. It's nothing at all like building a web app. Its biggest problem right now is that there aren't any good books about how to use it correctly, and what your overall design philosophy should be.

If we are to stay with the web analogy, in terms of usefulness QML/C++ is to plain C++ like CSS/HTML is to plain HTML. Positioning, reacting to changes, tasteful animations etc. are all extremely simple in a declarative UI. Explaining how to use it would be too much for one post, but it's becoming so powerful you'll soon be able to manipulate your UI using shaders. I've added comments to explain the basic QML, but the original article is here.

Image { // Create a new image object
        width: 180
        height: 180
        source: "winter.jpg"

        Text { // Create a new text object parented to the image object
                id: theItem // Give this object an id to refer to
                anchors.fill: parent // Automatically and constantly adjust to the size of the parent
                horizontalAlignment: Text.AlignHCenter
                verticalAlignment: Text.AlignVCenter
                font.pixelSize: 120
                font.family: "Times"
                color: "blue"
                text: "Qt"
        }

        ShaderEffectItem { // Create a new ShaderEffectItem object
                anchors.fill: parent // Automatically and constantly adjust to the size of the parent

                property variant source: ShaderEffectSource {
                        sourceItem: theItem // The object that the shader will draw
                        smooth: true
                        hideSource: true
                }

                property real amplitude: 0.02 // Define new variables for the shader to interact with.
                property real frequency: 20
                property real time: 0
                NumberAnimation on time { loops: Animation.Infinite; from: 0; to: Math.PI * 2; duration: 600 } // Animate the time variable. You can also make animations that automatically animate objects' size changes when you do, say, width = 300.
                fragmentShader: " // Embedded fragment shader code
                        uniform highp float amplitude;
                        uniform highp float frequency;
                        uniform highp float time;
                        uniform sampler2D source;
                        uniform lowp float qt_Opacity;
                        varying highp vec2 qt_TexCoord0;
                        void main() {
                                highp vec2 p = sin(time + frequency * qt_TexCoord0);
                                gl_FragColor = qt_Opacity * texture2D(source, qt_TexCoord0 + amplitude * vec2(p.y, -p.x));
                        }"
        }
}

I'm sorry, my brain turned off after that last sentence. What were you saying again?

There are other lightweight systems that use the Linux kernel, but ignore GNU. We should be grateful that MeeGo is designed properly. Other real distros aren't marketed to consumers, whereas MeeGo devices will start appearing in stores soon. I'm looking forward to being able to buy devices that are immediately both usable and powerful.

Even with Asus it was more like power on, overwrite their distro with Debian, mess around with drivers, start using the next day...

Replying to myself, but posting that got me thinking. Maybe this isn't necessarily a difference in men and women. Could it be that men simply don't have a reason to believe they're being discriminated against, so they have to face challenges instead of making excuses?

Hear hear. I've had problematic coworkers from both sexes, but 90% of the cases where someone expected their work to be respected because it existed were women. I don't know where this attitude comes from, but I think it could explain many of the people who see discrimination everywhere.

Just last week one female coworker was complaining that an opinionated colleague is hard to work with. Funny thing is that I get along with him perfectly well because I can be equally forceful about my opinions, and neither of us hold any grudges. Conversely, the last time I argued with a female coworker she started ignoring our project rather than dealing with it.

Mind you, I don't believe this makes female employees unemployable, or that 100% of them do this. Men have other problems, and I'm probably too much of an opinionated asshole too. It's the people who believe women and men aren't different* who are crazy.

*on average, obviously.

A lot of people in the media seem to want Nokia to fail, but the N900 is in fact highly successful in its market segment. When it was launched, Nokia said Maemo wasn't ready for mass consumption yet, and now say that it is exceeding sales expectations. According to Engadget, it sold 100 000 in the first five weeks, not months.

What Nokia also said is that the next product *will* be ready for mass consumption, so we can safely expect significantly stronger sales based on their surprisingly honest statements about the N900. It does have a real chance of changing the world for GNU/Linux (as opposed to Android/Linux).

And why wasn't the N900 ready for mass consumption? They haven't yet ported 100% of their features from Symbian, and most of the default applications are stuck in landscape mode due to their heritage. Don't trust the mainstream press on this. Despite reporters' bad conclusions about the cause, the UI in general is extremely well designed, and counting the number of apps in the Ovi repository is ridiculous given that the Maemo repository is full of apps.

So what you're saying is that the kneejerkers were correct? I certainly wouldn't buy anything by Apple anymore without thorough research into what kind of proprietary problems I'd be causing myself. Maybe they're actually smarter by just avoiding the logo and not wasting their time.

BTW, that article is a great example of why subsidized hardware is bad for consumers. You get what the advertising department feels it can advertise, and nothing more. If ISPs and wireless providers wanted to help ignorant consumers, they could help them set up a few recommended products. But please, stop including the hardware in the monthly cost. That just forces everyone into the same mold unless you want to pay twice for a router or phone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Browser_for_S60

It wasn't perfect, but neither is/was the iPhone browser. The UI was obviously optimized for non-touch.

You know, personal anecdotes aren't always bad evidence. If there weren't more people like him, companies wouldn't be offering the functions he is talking about using. Even more importantly, Gates never said that everyone would be proficient at using the modern tools, so if this one guy uses them properly and the article's author doesn't, that still makes Gates right.

Are we going to hear about how correlation doesn't equal causation next? :)

Web browsers existed on many phones, but the iPhone UI was superior. Your mistake about the browser supports the gp's point, though.

Bullshit. 3G has a higher power drain, but not even in 2007 was it so high that a smartphone should've gone without.

This is why there will never be an iPhone killer. Better features are dismissed without reason, and any device offering all of the iPhone's strong points would be derided as a copy.

Under 5 cent purchases are rounded up so you can't buy individual bulk items for free.