I much prefer the touchscreen for browsing, which is the primary activity of most computer users. I also much prefer it for doing real work. I am an audio engineer, and I love the ability to go into a crowd and use my iPhone to make things sound good where the people are, instead of where the sound board is. Dragging a mouse out there would be absurd. Trying to manipulate multiple parameters at once is also much easier with a touchscreen. (assuming that it is multitouch)

I can't imagine that I'm in the only career for which touchscreens are better than mice. And for the casual user, browsing is much nicer with a touchscreen. And for non-casual use, my observation has been that most power users much prefer using keyboard commands, and use the mouse very little. The mouse is not the best input device for most things. Even in photo editing, most power users are using Wacom tablets rather than mice.

What about Enlightenment? It's still got some polishing needed, but the UI design/ eye candy possibilities are awesome.

Mobility is a huge, huge feature, though. Mobility and the touchscreen interface. I love tweaking computers, and I ran Linux for years, but now that I have my iPhone, I rarely use a "real" computer. I can't see what major feature could possibly be added to it that would make it consistently more desirable to use than my iPhone. The two reasons I still get it out are A. Proprietary software and B. A real keyboard. The keyboard thing is pretty minor, though; It is trivial to set up a keyboard to work with a mobile device.

I absolutely expect my phone to replace, not supplement, my computer. Maybe not a iPhone, but a phone of some sort. The sooner the better, I hate dragging my computer around just to do a few minor tasks.

The website is infinitely more robust than their iPhone app. Their crappy app is the reason most of my friends don't use Facebook anywhere near as much as they used to.

I don't know why we're trying to relive the worst era in math education in America. Pretty much right after Sputnik launched, American textbooks went from pretty good to awful. Go to an antique store and try to find the best and worst math textbooks. I guarantee you that every single good math textbook you find will be either pre-Sputnik, or after 1980.

Spunik was very helpful in some aspects of American science, but math education, unquestionably, is not a good place to relive Sputnik.

I think it's a lot more than a difference of culture. You'll notice a sharp decline in textbook quality after the launch of Sputnik. Sputnik freaked out Americans, so they started pumping loads of money into revamping math and science education. Money, unfortunately is not the main thing that makes a good textbook. Basically, after Sputnik, for some reason, it became necessary to cram as much set theory into every single math book as possible, whether it needed it or not.

The fact that it's not a 1:1 comparison doesn't make it invalid. The comparison has relevance regardless of the relative values of books and people. People being free and information being free are two good things. Just because one is intensely more good than the other doesn't change the fact that here are two situations that are similar, in that we are balancing one "good" against the "good" of not screwing people.

The comparison illustrates the point that there are clearly things in life that outweigh the good of "not screwing some people." Human freedom is certainly one of those things.

Is freedom of information another such thing? That's obviously a tougher issue, but the slavery comparison makes it clear that it isn't a slam-dunk argument. "It is a bad idea because it screws some people over" is clearly demonstrated to be an incomplete argument. The point was made, and made effectively, I thought. I'm really not sure why all this meta-discussion was necessary.

Absurd. At no point did his comparison imply that problems with copyright are as significant as the problem of slavery.

What is the problem with comparing things with other things of a much greater magnitude? When people compare electrons to planets, do you object because planets are obviously much, much larger and clearly must have nothing at all in common with something with such a far removed size?

His sentence was clearly saying that not screwing specific people over is not always the most important thing. This holds true for big issues like slavery, and for small issues like copyright. It's a valid comparison. What's so wrong with that?

Nothing more? That's it? We have encapsulated everything about this guy's humanity in one sentence? I'm a Christian, and I therefore disagree with Dawkins on a great many things, but I still think he's got a lot of good things to offer. I'm glad he's around. I frequently find his talks very refreshing. It's always a good thing to have devil's advocate in a discussion to weed out the crappy ideas. And regardless of your flavor of Christianity, there's certainly a surplus of crappy ideas. (Sam Harris is a way better atheist than Dawkins, though.)

I can't disagree with your second sentence, but I see no reason to believe the first. Why would you think that they don't do both, and why isn't it ok to make money simultaneously with improving user's experiences?

As much as I love the idea of open source anything, this statement seems true. Please tell me that there's another side to this discussion.

How much meaningful spectral analysis can be done on the Dirac delta function?

Look at the article for more normal pictures, and how they generally become darker when they are scaled by algorithms with the bug.

Also, the blurring algorithm seems just as likely to have this averaging bug as the scaling algorithm.