I completely agree. I work as an educational consultant, and go into many schools - I see the tiny desks (often with integral chairs) that are hard to rearrange into clusters for students to work cooperatively and collaboratively. Instead, the very furniture invites teachers to stand and lecture their students, while the students vegetate in their little cages.

D'oh absurdum!

From watching the episode, the entire point of it seemed to be to show the absurdity of a prohibition on any depiction of someone. By making a depiction of Muhammed (PBUH) that involved no image that was recognizably of him, they showed that the prohibition was ridiculous, because it is then a blanket prohibition on any image. I could say that the category icon for this story was a depiction of the Prophet disguised as a white man in glasses with a black rectangle over his mouth - suddenly that would be a prohibited image.
CAVEAT: This line of argument also means that prohibitions on depictions of things that _we_ think shouldn't be allowed are also absurd.
Finally, this is not to say that I think that any image is acceptable, but it must have to do with the objective content (or at least consensus agreement of what the objective content is), rather than what the artist intended it to depict, or what it may have been interpreted as depicting.

While it is important that there are opportunities for use of different learning styles, (such as the blogger wanting to be able to take notes during a talk) there will also be others that learn differently.
The blogger may find it best to take notes on everything that the professor is saying - there are others for whom it will be most productive to sit and listen intently and not take any notes at all.
The problem seems to be then, not the PowerPoint itself, but the pacing that the professors use. If they are to do problems on PowerPoint, they should have the steps appear gradually as they are working through the problem, and use the appropriate pacing, to ensure that students have the opportunity to follow the problem.
As for not having handouts of the PowerPoint slide, or their availability being in some way a disadvantage - I would say it's time to grow up. Adults are responsible for their own learning. If someone knows that they learn best by taking notes, then take notes anyway. The availability of the notes after the class will be something very positive for many others, and to request that the notes not be available for their sake is to fail to recognize the learning needs of others.

Apologies, I had misread regarding Android's capabilities for multitouch. And when I said features, I was of course talking about the hardware.

Well, Android has been made able to support all the features of the iPhone (or so it seems), just need some crafty driver developers now.

std::copy vs.

        int n;
        while (cin >> n)
                v.push_back (n);

Once you put in some braces to limit the lifetime and scope of n (your temporary), and when you factor in the implicit boolean conversion in the while clause, and the fact the code that calls 'copy' to perform a copying operation, I don't think you have much of a readability case. You have 5 lines (including enclosing braces) where std::copy needs 1.

On auto_ptr, perhaps you're forgetting that the intended use is to convert dynamic lifetime into scoped lifetime, like the built-ins. Eg. having member auto_ptrs instead of member pointers (and therefore the dtor doesn't have to call delete). Yes, I agree it is stupid to write Java style C++ new-ing every object instance, where a stack instance would work, giving you immediate, simple lifetime control (by tieing it to scope).

Well, I hope you improved the articles that you are moaning about. YOU are an editor. That is how Wikipedia works. If everyone sat around moaning about WP instead of helping improve it, there wouldn't even be a Wikipedia.

Anyway, WP has little to gain by being "taken seriously by a more mainstream audience". People can use it if they find it useful or they can not use it if they don't. There are now enough people that do care about WP to pay the bills.

It will never be like Encylopedia Britannica - but it has the potential to be so much more. It just takes people like you to improve it.

You're completely right. I was at Oxford when this incident occurred, and I'm appalled that the Guardian and BBC News have bought into this flagrant piece of self-promotion. From what I know of the story there was no attempt made to liaise with the University Computer Services to rectify this problem before they published the information in the paper. Unfortunately people involved in student journalism, particularly at Oxford in my experience, are only interested in bolstering their CV so that they can land a job at a British national newspaper. This means that they will do anything to promote themselves without any real thought for the consequences.