In my experience this is nonsense. I agree that maths is pretty universally badly taught - after all, if you're good at maths, your career choices are being a quant paid in millions, an engineer or computer scientist paid in hundreds of thousands, or a school teacher paid in a few tens of thousands. The market (and we know that the market is never wrong, don't we, children?) systematically selects people who are bad at maths to teach maths. The results are not surprising.

But maths isn't hard. Maths is very, very easy; it is a natural way to think about more or less everything. If you take the school teachers out of the way and let children get on and learn the physics of whatever it is that interests them (for me it was sailing boats, but it really doesn't matter - we live in a mathematical universe) from the books in their own time, they will be good at maths. I really don't believe anyone is born bad at maths; we're taught to be bad at maths.

In North Korea all people do low protein diet.

Those didn't exist in 1940

As much as we love to hate, the US is far less corrupt in basically every way measurable than India and China, and India makes China look like Northern Europe.

What part of 'also did not take any alternative form of compensation (stock options, bonus, etc.) since 2003' do you not understand?

Steve Jobs reckoned he was rich enough. He was working for fun, not for money. Most good engineers are not especially money motivated. We like making things, and he did that. Well.

I had one of the very first Archimedes boxes, back before it even had a proper operating system (it had a monitor called 'Arthur', which was really very primitive). But it was a really good feeling sitting in my university bedroom with a computer which in terms of raw processing power was faster than the two fastest machines the university then owned put together. Those original ARM boxes were, by the standards of their time,very remarkable: much faster than contemporary DEC VAX, Motorolla 68000, or Intel 80286 machines. The DEC Alphas which came along at about the same time were faster, but they were also hugely more expensive!

If you give regular lectures or presentations as part of your life - and many of us do - something like this will probably pay for the whole kit fairly quickly. The ability to give presentations without fumbling with notes, the ability to walk around while talking and not be stuck behind a lectern, the ability to change slides with perhaps just a subtle nod of the head, make for very much more fluid and effective communication.

If I was still teaching regularly, I would buy one.

When I use the internet from home, my little dish lights up the satellite so effectively that not only can the satellite distinguish it from all the other radio frequency clutter emanating from northern Europe, I can push 6Mb/s up the link. Yes, I know you city folk think that's absurdly slow, but I find it mind boggling. What's even more mind-boggling is that it only eats 38 watts to do that. Of course if everyone was trying to light up the satellite at the same time it almost certainly wouldn't be able to discriminate all the different signals, but even so comms satellites are awesome technology.

The problem is that the legal limit is (in the UK at least) 60 watts. As there lasers will emit many more lumens per watt than the incandescent bulbs in use when the law was written, this doesn't stop them being much too bright.

Do they also detect pedestrians and cyclists?

Strongly agree. The problem is (in the UK at least) the limit to legal brightness is set in watts; it needs to be set in lumens.

Riding a bike is ridiculously easy, and most ten year olds can do it; but if you do it well enough to win the Tour de France you make a lot of money.

People who dedicate themselves by long practice and careful study to any skill - even a 'ridiculously easy' one - become good at it, and if it's a valued skill, the good people are more valued. It remains a fact that the average ten year old can easily write programs which will give them enough positive feedback and sense of mastery that, with encouragement, they may put in the practice and study which will one day make them well compensated.

And let's face it, a lot more people make a lot of money from writing code than from riding bicycles.

Well, give a shit. The only thing, in a globalised world, which keeps America and Europe richer than Asia and Africa, is that up until recently we've been better educated and technically more competent. That's no longer true. If you want your country to be rich enough to pay your pension in your old age, we've got to stay better educated - at least in the technical and engineering areas which increasingly drive the world economy.

...Keen to try new stuff, eager to experiment. Now it's all newbie wannabes who want something reliable, safe and unchanging.

If no one watched the show it would be cancelled and there would be no further prize money. Sure there would be a slight time lag, but the drivers of the system are the viewers and they pay for shows by selling their advertising time via an intermediary (the TV station) to advertisers.