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Comment Re:Finland will save money on napkins (Score 2) 523

Wiritng cursive has crossed the line for decades (just teach them so they can write legibly, which is still required - but all that cursive shit, no).

However long division and other things such as doing multiplication by hand are important skills that should still be taught: it internalizes the idea that a big difficult calculation can be made easier by turning it into several smaller calculations. It's a bit like learning asm in computer science - you're (probably) never going to use it in the real world but it's important to know in the understanding of how a computer actually works.

If anything I think schools need to be able to get more people to be able to do mental arithmetic and estimation. If you understand these even if you only ever use a calculator it gives you the skills to sanity check the result (how many times have I thought "that's not right" after entering something into a calculator because it disagreed with a mental estimate, then discovered I had miskeyed a number, especially on a touch screen)

Comment Re:I'm confused (Score 1) 293

At least the editors, who are surely knowledgeable enough about technology to have a basic grasp on what a hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell is, likely from growing up reading about the Space Shuttle and thinking decades ahead about how cool it will be to power everything with such an amazing device, were able to catch this absurd inaccuracy and correct it before publishing this idiotic submission.

Wait...you mean to tell me that it was only all of the readers of Slashdot who caught that, not the editors? How did that happen?

Comment Dalek? (Score 1) 140

Doesn't look at all like a Dalek to me, it looks more like something that Aperture Science would design. (And it would say "No hard feelings" if you pushed it over, assuming you could push over this lumbering 300lb thing)

Comment Re:Tetris is based on a Russian board game (Score 1) 37

The original game is fun to play. Last month at Retromañía in Spain we had the original game running on the Russian pdp-11 clone for which it was created (unfortunately the pdp-11 clone had to be emulated - we actually have a real pdp-11 but it's a DEC built one and the original code won't work very well on it due to the lack of the Cyrillic character set). It's a good bit harder than the PC version which I think was the next version of Tetris to be written.

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