The following assumes you were making a serious point - a self-inflicted "whooosh!" if you weren't.

Power, in this context, is relative. The power of the electronic calculator is obviously portability combined with immediacy. The resolution of which you speak so proudly came with a form factor that was inappropriate for putting in your pocket (unless you've got seriously baggy cargo pants on with room for a small CRT, a power supply, and a tape player or perhaps a microdrive).

The Spectrum's handling of maths from complex numbers upwards was also a little challenging (write your own routines from scratch).

Program retention was limited at launch time to saving to audio tape, which again hampered portability and also meant you couldn't just switch it on, factor a polynomial and get on with your life.

Horses for courses etc., and I don't think anyone would advocate using a ZX for maths, any more than you'd use a TI (or an HP) to learn BASIC programming (basic programming maybe, but not BASIC).

Absolutely. I recently treated myself to a brand-new HP50g after a couple of years of using 48 series emulators on my Mac and iOS devices. Makes maths fun again and it's inspired me to re-learn a lot of the calculus that I've forgotten since Uni. Back in the day ('87 was when I stopped learning maths the first time) I had a Casio 7000G. Rambling now, but RPN FTW!

Reading through all the comments here, you (tehcyder) seem to be popping up quite a lot. Do you have a beef with:

• humour: whilst it's merely chuckleworthy, rather than laugh-out-loud, it really is funny, both for the individual concerned and for us lot looking at the figures;
• the Jedi faith: this would be illogical and suggest that you possibly were mentally ill (see item above - it's a joke);
• all faiths other than "the one true faith": I get the feeling, call it a hunch, that you're a believer. Possibly one who's aggrieved that "your" faith has reduced in popularity over the last ten years. Possibly even blaming people who put "Jedi" down as their religion for the drop in adherents to your faith.
• all of the above
• none of the above

I've been there, done that, in terms of being a believer, and I think I recognise the signs of someone being just a little bit defensive: "how liberal the UK is", rather than "how enlightened, sure of itself and diverse the UK is" is a bit of a giveaway. Sorry if I've misjudged you, etc., but it would have been me posting verbatim what you've been doing, in the dim and distant past.

Absolutely. I gleaned the figures from a variety of sources (particularly the water one, which came from a "green eating" site complaining about the increase in water content) so there'll be some double counting. Wheat flour definitely has some water in it, maybe around 14% at the start of processing.

Most up-to-date figures I could find for the UK suggest that 76% of bread consumed is white, which given the amount of health advice we're exposed to is a little terrifying.

I like wb for toast (something quite comforting to me - I think it harks back to the simpler times of my childhood :) ), wholemeal/granary/wholewheat/malted whatever for use in sandwiches etc.

Okay, in the spirit of your comment:

What the freak is Google for?

Here's what you get when you lookup "hovis bread ingredients" (Hovis is the most popular brand in the UK and sadly plain white bread is still the most popular loaf): http://www.hovisbakery.co.uk/our-range/soft-white/soft-white

On that page it lists the ingredients (the same as it does on the bag) as follows:

Wheat Flour (milled from 100% British Wheat), Water, Yeast, Salt, Soya Flour, Fermented Wheat Flour, Vegetable Fat, Emulsifiers: E472e, E471 (made from Vegetable Oils); Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C).

Starting from the end, I think your "dough conditioner" is out "flour treatment agent". Even some home bakers use Vitamin C in their breadmaking.

So I do some more Googling (try it, you'll like it) and discover that an 800g loaf typically has about 500g of flour and 7g of yeast and may be up to 45% water - we're running out of room for the "chemicals" now.

Onwards:

Vegetable fat - fat extracted from vegetables. Ha. Binding agent, also controls the gluten development to avoid over-rising.

Emulsifiers (binding agents, prevent the separation of ingredients, improve the texture). See http://www.laleva.cc/food/enumbers/E471-480.html for the specific ones used by Hovis.

Now, was that so difficult? Use your loaf, as we might say in Britain. Don't be "suspicious" of a product, investigate. You might not like what you find, but at least you'll know and your mind can be put to rest.

And yes, as I mention in another comment, I was being "funny" - I just have a hard time when people have the means to discover information, but instead choose to sit there and develop preconceptions.

Note to mods - I certainly wasn't aiming for Insightful/Interesting/Informative :)

More a sort of "+1 stating the bleeding obvious"

See my answer to a similar comment - I'm not commenting on the quality of bagged bread. FWIW I buy fresh-baked daily from the local bakery when possible, but I do occasionally use the bagged stuff.

Please note - I make no comment on the quality of bagged vs home-baked bread - merely that our "suspicious" consumer can quite easily see what goes in to bagged bread to make it last.

Quick heads up - they put the ingredients on the side of the bag.

Which negates my answer to the AC's question how? I care about man-made global warming since it means that people I care about may have worse time of it in the future than we have. Historically, the trend has generally been that the next generation has it easier in some way (less disease, less violence, etc.).

Saying "we're all doomed" is indeed cold-hearted, short-sighted and defeatist. If you use it as an excuse to do nothing, to change nothing that's in your control to change, then it's selfish as well, FWIW.

I mean, seriously, why do you care if Earth becomes another Venus?

My twin nieces, Ruby and Winnie. My nephews Leo and Max.

Sorry to appeal to emotion, but I find your attitude a little cold, a little remote, a little shitty.

Me - eldest - degree in Agricultural Business Management, then an MSc in Computer Science (didn't want to admit I was a geek at first, thought I'd want to take over the family business one day - see below). I now work in the financial industry, having previously risen to the dizzy heights of Systems Manager at a large University in London after 17 years of broadly-enjoyable slog.

My sister - education degree. Taught for 10+ years, was getting ready to take over as headmistress, then our Dad died. Once everything settled down, she took over as manager of the family farm (a chunk of arable land, quite large-scale by UK standards, but not a full-blown agri-business type thing), a role that she has totally made her own, despite the lack of any relevant training (other than years of walking the fields with Dad, as a then-bored observer).

Brother 1 - too many degrees started for me to remember the details. I think he finished one of them. He now owns a hedge fund and works for a video production company and lives in splendid style in Whistler.

Brother 2, much younger, still at Uni, reading Earth Sciences at Durham, having dropped out of another University before the course even started. Who knows where he'll end up. Lives to travel at the moment.

Yet you use the quote to argue that they have claimed the Pi is open. The quote has no merit in that regard. They wanted and needed to provide open access but they couldn't. They don't claim the Pi is open and they're frank about the reasons why they can't make that claim.

It's not Open, get over it and move on. Use the board, don't use the board, use one of the totally open ones out there if you want. But don't make claims on the Foundation's behalf, then complain that they aren't matching them.

"Because our remit is education in the broadest sense, we wanted â" needed â" to provide completely open access to the hardware."

You provided a one line quote from a broader article in which Pete Lomas explains some of the background to why they couldn't take the fully open route, but did release all that they could. I don't think an article of this sort, written around September of this year, counts as "claiming that the Raspberry is open".

The Foundation seems to have taken a pragmatic line - as open as possible - rather than a religious one. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I for one am glad that I've got a cheap computer to work with, and I'm delighted that today's schoolkids might get to experience the excitement I had when the ZX80 first appeared.