No, this is not quite right. There are quite a few trichromatic mammals, and, well there's much more I could say, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy will set you straight.

It's very important that if a highjacked airliner is detected, it's shot down over a housing estate full of poor people instead of causing any harm to those important people who can run pretty fast and throw things a bit further than some other people who throw things.

It's not often I genuinely laugh out loud at a comment, so I congratulate you heartily on making me do so!

You must be new here. This is standard Slashdot obituary wording. Ask Stephen King and he'll explain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland is well worth a read. Politicians running education systems often want to find out how the likes of Finland do so well, but they ask the questions (going on fact-finding missions etc) and then don't like the answers they get back.

Here in the UK the drive in schools for years now has been towards pitiless onslaughts of standardised national testing at all levels, and league tables and measurement everywhere you look. It is the exact opposite of letting children learn and grow in idiosyncratic ways without pressure for them to 'acquire key skills' and essentially tick the boxes the government wants ticking. This is all driven by the business imperative to turn education into training for jobs rather than anything about nurturing well-rounded, inquisitive, open-minded, moral human beings, and is combined with some ill-informed tabloid crap about how kids these days don't respect their elders, blah blah blah.

Politicians see that the country's schools are some way down the league tables, look across the water to Finland, refuse to believe what they hear about no high-pressure exams until the end of school, teachers being respected instead of turned into drones, and so they go ahead and implement the exact opposite.

Just as most people are unaware of widespread keyboard shortcuts, think the blue 'e' is the Internet, and confuse RAM with hard disk space (emptying the recycle bin if their computers slow down with a bazillion browser tabs open), so are most users ignorant of text files and text editors and believe that if you want to write something down, you need a word processor.

This is the mentality that leads to people sending out emails with subject lines like "PLEASE READ", body text consisting of something like "See attached" and the actual content in a bloated and superfluous .docx file. Someone very intelligent known to me who I managed to get using Kubuntu following a Windows spyware infection routinely fires up LibreOffice to jot down phone numbers, and is puzzled by "this weird text thing" that I prefer to use for everything that doesn't require presentational formatting.

The only formal education in computing I received at school consisted of things like how to make words underlined in, you guessed it, Microsoft Word, so it is no wonder the average hospital employee believes they need expensive proprietary software to perform trivial computing tasks.

Well I just pointed my browser to ra.mod.uk and it took me to the website of the Royal Artillery, which is a set of regiments in the Army, not the entire Army.

It's been heartening to see the increased recognition the computing pioneers at Bletchley Park have received over the last few years, after being neglected for decades. Gordon Brown's posthumous apology to Alan Turing for the persecution he received for his sexuality was a great moment. Most people have never heard of Turing but he deserves recognition. They ought to put his face on a banknote or something. About three years ago when I was at university a guy visited from Bletchley Park to give a talk on the work that was done there, and he brought with him a genuine Enigma machine and demonstrated its operation. Fascinating stuff.

Much as I dislike Facebook, I've been reluctant to move to Google+ because I don't really want my email and my social networking to be done by the same company. It's one thing for Google to know loads about me based on my email behaviour and Facebook to know loads about me based on my posts and friends and so on, but to have all this tied together in one account is even greater cause for concern about privacy.

Parent almost certainly means the states of the federal republic (Länder). The word "Land" in German can translate as "country" or "state".

From the BBC article on this:

And I agree. No way will measuring the IQs of a large number of people using a very widespread, mainstream web browser produce an average anywhere near 80. My prediction: average user IQs of all browsers with more than a few per cent market share will be within a few points of each other. No way will you get figures like 80 and 120.