Not finding a bug like that would have gotten a tester put on a PIP at Microsoft in 2000.

In my former SDET opinion, It shows that Apple doesnâ(TM)t do enough professional testing.

Do you seriously believe that guy's PR? Innovation at scale? Yes, the rage of customers stamping their feet in anger has to measure on the Richter scale before Microsoft makes a change. How much do you want to bet that the next 5 windows mobile devices will try to be a better Iphone?

A lot of the good research about how brains work contains science and statistics that are the basis of this article's misinterpretation.

Here are some real facts that probably led to this opinion Obama has.

a) Brains learn over time and with repetition and focus. Thoughts, patterns of thinking, and skills are basically etched into our brains over time.
b) It takes roughly 10,000 hours to reach "mastery" of a skill - and there don't seem to be any shortcuts.
c) IQ higher than 120 seems to be enough do Nobel prize level work -- as long as you put in your 10k hours in the same subject and work hard at it. IQ higher than `80 is enough to be a chess grand master if you put in 10k hours.
      Kids that focus can learn calculus much, much earlier in their lives than they generally do now simply by spending a lot more time doing math.
d) On average, for the average kid - kids in poor schools make almost as much progress as kids in rich schools do each year until the summer time, where they forget a lot of what they learned, causing them to come into each new year as if they lost a few months of the last year's learning, and over time that required catching up time adds up to a huge step behind, which makes them less and prepared for college and a job that requires college level skills.

In other words - if you're below average - you can put in time and get to be average or above average at most mental skills, and if you're slightly above average - given time you can be effectively as good as a genius at most mental skills.

The secretary of education is missing some other key pieces for sucessful learning though.
a) Emotional responses and environment have a huge impact - basically if we're under emotional stress or pressure, the logical part of our brain turns off and we think like mammals or lizards, and in those phases, the only way to learn is by mindless senseless repetition. Teenagers are subjected to so much emotional stress and pressure it's cliche.
      This is part of the reasoning behind lame school uniforms.
b) Culture has a huge impact on what people are good at and what they aren't.
      Some asian languages literally require less area in the brain to teach math basics, and this is often wrongly attributed to be genetic.
c) Teaching, learning, and persuading only happen with an emotional connection of some sort with the teacher -- respect, likeness, trust.

Part of the reason school is so boring though is that people are only conciously focused about 10% of the time, and the rest of the time they're on autopilot.
Multiply that by dozens of kids and you effectively have to assume that they're all on autopilot most of the time and try to teach in a way that gets through autopilot.

Anyway - if you are bored with school, learn on your own -- that's how the most successful people get where they get. Obama's just trying to have less people in prison and more people in the US able to do brain things, because by the time you're out of school kid, there won't be any damn jobs left for people who aren't absoulte badasses at whatever field they decide to go into.

Pointers to books with better explanations and with more pointers in their appedixes to the research they summarize:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Love
http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business-Essentials/dp/006124189X/ref=pd_sim_b_7

To use your analogy: Yes, requisition 700 billion bucks to buy the lowest quality RAMBUS DIMMS that are known to fail repeatedly but overpay for them because "they're worth a lot of money", and their value will recover as soon as we go back to that technology, since it's "technically sound" according to our computer models.

Yes, we can fix the problem by giving the same vendors who sold us this POS the first time more money because the reason the mainframe crashes and loses data is because "we don't believe in it enough", and it's all just a "crisis of confidence".

And when the clueless (l)users who have no idea how a mainframe works complain that things keep crashing and they don't want to spend any more money on your crashing mainframe, ignore them because their expectation that mainframes should not lose data or waste money is silly, and that all opinions we shouldn't buy more RAMBUS is irrational because they're users, and they don't know anything, even when they have PC's at home that they're paying for right now.