Well put, Baron_Yam. It's not just one country closing their doors; it's England, US, Korea, while Putin stares grinning.

Thank you. I don't have the fastest internet connection, and some sites just don't render at all. The idea of keeping a local cached copy on my computer came from early 1990's and it is still a good idea. I really don't give two cents about cross-site scripting/caching/money-making 1/1000th penny bits. It's worthless to this end user. If my internet service gave me a large bandwith, richness of my experience, cross-site shit, and third-party plugins that reference things in Australia for a client in the USA would be no problem. Right now, I am happy with just successful rendering of the resource to which I manually pointed my browser on a given website. That website can blame my ISP, my lack of memory, my CPU's speed or even HD space (that's not a problem right now). To me, the site failed to load, and I PAY THAT WEBSITE INCOME, by rendering advertisement which never loaded in my browser. Loud and clear enough? No? That website designer/engineer/whoever needs to go back to the early 1990's, until they figure it out. Otherwise, I'm skipping that website.

Poor Murdoch. Everything worth publishing that he touches turns to useless gold. So much for National Geographic. If he let's the publication still give in-depth coverage, he wins. If he does not, his gold will turn to stone. Wait for the press release. His Sunday papers aren't bought by anyone who's worth a shit. Is that his goal with National Geographic? We'll see it in NAT GEO's context. Real or Dung, and who has won?

It appears that you're growing the computer to limits beyond what I expected. Well done.

How about a "divide by zero" error, since this is less of a non-answer as NAN? Why not be more specific?

Interesting point that null and 0 are not the same thing. In multiplication and division, 0, 1, and infinity are special in a non-linear world. In ratio's, we tie the linear (1+2) to the non-linear (1/2 + 2/1 = 2.5). The 1 is the identifier, rather than the add-on. The zero is only treated in the numerator. The infinity results in answers equal to infinity in the numerator, or infinitely close to zero when in the denominator, assuming it is not in both (lol). What if we had it wrong? What if 1 (ONE) was the weird one in division? It's weird that everything between 0 and 1 go to infinity, when in the denominator. What if something divided by zero (nothing) equaled the numerator, and anything divided by 1 went to infinity ? This, in my view, would make more sense, since the 1 is the identifier bit in multiplication, but zero (add nothing to something) is the identifier bit in the linear. It just makes sense that you would have two permutations of weirdness between the linear and non-linear, that don't add up. The math would be a little weird, however. 1/0 = 1*1. 1/1=NULL/UNDEFINED/Infinity. I'm probably wrong and can be proven so. I just remember as a kid thinking, "If I take a shoe, and divide it by nothing, I have my shoe. If I divide it by one, what the heck do I have? I think I came up with infinity." Oh well. Dividing by zero sounds absurd, until II see the source code and ran it.

Example?

Please state any scientific evidence against evolution that you might have. I'm OK being surprised, because that makes life interesting.

I agree. The religious-right consolidate power through the masses, as the masses leave religious affiliation, according to recent surveys; The whole thing makes me wonder what would happen if the penis was penalized for babies, rather than male pocket books. Sounds inhumane, but so does shutting-down clinics after daddy ran off.

My experience with both math and spelling words is that I learn much more when I manually write-out the word several times or work out the problem myself several times. In both instances, I get a feel for what I'm learning, because I personally experience walking through the word or math relationship (EG: x, y graphing).

The computer interface needs to understand the context of what we type more intuitively. Loooooook at speeling cooorection. Spelling correction is atrocious, because it doesn't learn MY jargon after a year of inputting the same acronyms. The device doesn't learn the words common in my parlance, even after a year of typing in the same old words. If Google, Apple and MS want to make an interface that's not much better than 1990, their devices have to treat context intelligently for given fields, or accept acronyms after a human corrects their auto-correct, and apply this learned-intelligence to character recognition on white-boards for the average k12 environments in math, geometry, etc. A white-board app that can intelligently figure out my hand-writing in a context taught by both teacher and student will win my heart. A device that constructs the proper graphical mark-up using latex, word-processing, tables, graphs, is very cool, and we're half way there (embedding Latex, R, tables in documents). Context recognition by our devices with intelligent social engineering will allow one-off corrections by the teacher, because the teacher is always right, and allow one-off questions from the device when the teacher isn't. Don't ask your device to do this today; its answers will vary. EG: A name in address book is not always recognized in iphone notes, body of email, etc.

We can tin-foil all we want, but can we follow the money? If Universities are subsidized by grants from the Federal and State governments, from non-profit organizations and from private industry, there has to be a paper trail. If the trail is littered with dead-ends, it is contigent on us to make the financial in-flows and out-flows transparent. Somebody is being paid the money we have invested in education. If we pay more in tuition, pay less in teacher salaries, and our economic productivity has gone lower in the mean time, somebody is bleeding the system. It's easy for me to say "text books" and "privately funded research" as the culprits, but I prefer a more holistic and realistic view-point. Only those in education can tell us where money is bleeding, or how/why productivity has dropped through their personal experiences. Please contribute, if you have any insight into this plight.

The technology exists to allow a consumer to pay for five programs from one channel, two from another channel, etc, but ala cart subscriptions are for channels, instead of specific programs. This model is a throw-back to the analog TV channel frequency issue I grew up with. The model followed cable TV "stations", but that model is obsolete, because you can give a consumer a specific program that is broadcasted exclusively from a specific broadcaster. The broadcasters have to allow ala-cart program selection from the consumer. This follows more closely a free market model, because the channel with the most popular programs will have direct subscriptions to those programs, and they can rid the less popular programs that nobody pays for. The burden of producing a new show as a new idea or enterprise is still a free item (free rider) for the subscriber, and potential economic failure for the channel, but it is also a future revenue stream, if subscribers are willing to pay for later episodes. This will also remove the sometimes rather large disconnect between advertising fees and viewership. I'm not privy to advertising fees for a specific program, however, the quality of commercials for the super-bowl, Stanley Cup or the Olympics is better than most other commercials from the same companies.

I've never bought cable because it's too expensive. If I had my choice, I'd watch Game of Thrones on HBO, and The Vickings on the history channel, because I like these programs. The rest of the programs from HBO and the History channel don't interest me. On the other hand, if I could pick and choose 50 shows that I could watch WHENEVER I WANT, from 200 channels, so I get the programs on the science, arts, history, and world news THAT I WANT, then I might pay. Otherwise, I'll continue with public television, hoping for a better model.