iPods support CD quality Apple Lossless, but they do not support higher sample rates. So while you can create a 24/96 Apple lossless from a flac, you have to downconvert it to play it on an iPod. This would be less annoying if iTunes were better at managing multiple versions of a particular file. Quite possibly not exactly what the previous poster was complaining about though.

I certainly hope that terrorists and even would be terrorists end up dealing with the legal system. However, I think it is important that they end up dealing with the fuzz for the right reasons. Encouraging people to commit a crime, coordination of crimes - these are actions which are understandably illegal. Factual instruction on how to produce bang? That falls under what I would expect to be covered by the first amendment. There are too many chemistry books to outlaw and at some point chemists do need to know what happens when you mix glycerin with certain acids.

If you talk to somebody who has taken a real fluid dynamics/aerodynamics course the situation is understood, but confused questions can lead to confused answers. The Bernoulli "effect" is a relationship between speed and pressure. And yes, the pressure on various top parts of a wing will be lower than the pressure on various bottom parts, and yes the relationship (mostly) holds, and so this means that there is more speed on the top part. However, this is also true for the thin curved fan blades, paper airplanes and maple leaves. The question that you should ask is "Why is the speed and pressure different between the top and the bottom of the wing?". The Bernoulli effect does not provide an answer to this question. The equal transit time fallacy purports to answer this question but does not come close to providing meaningful numbers.

In fact, the actual answer to this question is complex. By analyzing the Navier-Stokes equation using technical concepts such as vorticity and big computers it is often possible to get reasonable numbers for actual lift. However, various limitations to these techniques mean that experimental tests are still an important part of designing aircraft.

From the US copyright act: "Works Made for Hire. -- (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or ..."

There are various caveats which can matter, but if you are on a salary and do work at home on your own equipment to solve a problem that is part of your job, then that is a work for hire and owned by your employer. As a result, if you are a salaried employee of a software company, and you do programming at home, they might well try to make the argument that this work was done "for" them and therefore belongs to them. This is why the FSF, for example, requires that professional programmers who contribute to their projects include a sign off from the contributor's employer. Even if the contributor is sure that it wasn't done as part of his work, they don't want to deal with the legal hassles if the employer disagrees.

Individual employment agreements, and state restrictions on employment agreements can further refine this. For example, in California an employment agreement forcing you to hand over work done for your own purposes on your own time is considered unenforceable.

English? Why ever would you expect a book with the tittle "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" to be written in english? Images of the text seem to match the tittle.

So if music transcription and chord theory had some practical everyday purpose, would we be justified in making students learn to do these things without even trying to show them how to play?

Engineers use computer models. Accountants use spreadsheets. How many other professions even come close to using math?

This wasn't always the case. I hear of today's law students avoiding tax class because the math is difficult. Abraham Lincoln carried a copy of Euclid's Elements in his saddle bags because he thought reading it improved his ability to argue and demonstrate as a lawyer.

Today more than ever before, the important part of mathematics in today's world is the ideas and the ability to connect the ideas. Not the ability to perform, say, those arithmetic computations which computers do so many millions of times faster. Now, a certain amount of practicing such things does contribute to the study of mathematical ideas, but if every question you study is better answered with a calculator then that is all you are training to be, and the calculator will always be better than you.

Do musicians complain that the typical high school band teachers don't understand the basics of music? This is a specific example from the TFA and it is very well chosen. People don't expect high school band teacher to world class musicians. They do however expect high school band teacher to have a feel for what music is. They expect high school band teacher to know the difference between in tune and out of tune. They expect high school band teachers to drill notation and teach counting different times, but the also expect to be connecting these things to actual music at every step of the way.

We expect this of high school band teacher because most people know what music is supposed to sound like. Most people have enough sense for how it actually works to recognize somebody who can't play, or who cannot teach how to play.

If you tried to teach a music class based on transcribing notation and chord theory, rather than listening and/or playing you'd find it hard also. Teaching kids to love music using a such a curriculum wouldn't just be hard, it would border on the absurd. Even if a few people did enjoy the raw mindless diligence to do such a thing out of context, there is no particular reason to believe that this would produce great musicians.

I'd like to add that science education in the US seems to me to be much closer to math education than music education. I remember learning to play lip service to the scientific method, but I don't remember ever being asked to sit down with some lab equipment and figure out what some relationship is. If you are given the equation, and given the experiment to "test" some particular aspect of the equation, you've removed the science, you've removed what is important.