(Shrug) My point is that cursive writing is a hobby, indistinguishable from any number of other worthwhile hobbies. We don't have time to indoctrinate kids in any of those other hobbies, so... sorry, yours doesn't belong in public schools, either.

I agree to some extent. If the time spent learning and drilling long division could be spent instead on mental estimation and (especially) statistics, we'd be better off.

Yes, it would be nice to do all of the above, but that isn't reasonable. There are more new things to teach kids every year. Some old stuff needs to fall off the desk to make room.

cursive writing merits several courses and practice just for the psychomotor training and brain activity involved.

Well, why not just make them spend an hour a day playing Counterstrike instead? That's probably even better for repetitive, thoughtless psychomotor training.

their focus is on training workers and uniforming thought processes. that would be the opposite of education in my handwritten book.

But you just said that was a good thing. I'm confused. Either we should be making students engage in rote, repetitive exercises in classrooms, or we should not. Which is it?
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and of course i wonder how you are so sure that there will be many keyobards around in a few decades time ...

Nothing short of a coincident nuclear war, zombie apocalypse, asteroid strike, and nearby gamma-ray burst is going to lead the human race back to handwriting as a data entry method. Anyone who says otherwise has a heavy burden of proof to meet.

Where do you draw the line? Why not make kids extract roots by hand? Run a few iterations of Newton's Method while they're at it? At some point you're just misusing the limited classroom time you have available. Long division probably crosses that line, and cursive writing indisputably does.

Yeah? When was that?

When the scientists were explaining how to blow shit up real good.

We can start by stating the obvious: It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone's gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion

They can start by taking religion out of that list. You can choose your religion. You don't choose any of those other things, at least not without life-changing surgery.

No kidding. Imagine what would happen if I asked their pastor if I could deliver a biology lecture on Sunday.

These things are seldom as black-and-white as they appear at first. From what I've seen in the US, courts often apportion the blame across multiple parties in a civil lawsuit. Let's say that on the way home from the bar, I drive over a curb and kill someone walking on the sidewalk. If the victim's family files a wrongful death suit, the court might decide that I'm 95% responsible, the pedestrian is 2% responsible for wearing dark clothing at 2 AM, and the city is 3% responsible for failing to follow regulations on curb height. The resulting damage award will be split accordingly.

So it's very believable that a court might find FTDI partially responsible for any damages that occur as a result of their deliberate attack against other peoples' hardware. Even a 1% share of the blame for a serious-enough malfunction could be enough to bankrupt the company. They may be morally right, they may be legally right from a criminal-law standpoint, but nevertheless, under US law, they may have cut their own throats if any innocent parties were harmed by their actions.

This was an incredibly stupid move on FTDI's part.

Because some people understand that the election of Reagan, like everything else in politics, was a reaction to something else. In Reagan's case, his success was a reaction to confiscatory taxation, disastrous economic policies, and out-of-control growth of Federal bureaucracies under Carter and earlier administrations.

In the context of the times, Reagan was not wrong when he said that the scariest words in the English language were "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Where he went wrong was when he climbed into bed with religious fruitcakes, giving them more power over ordinary Americans' lives than even the Democrats had tried to assert.

Other people, including the most vocal on Slashdot (DURR HURR DON'T LIKE TEH GOVERNMENT? MOVE TO SOMALIA!!!11!!) don't understand the action-reaction nature of politics. They assume that things will somehow work out differently the next time their own visions of maximal statism are implemented. The neoliberal statists and Moral Majority Reaganites are just two halves of the same coin, really.

As soon as they figure out whether or not salt is bad for you, I'll be interested in their opinion on soda.

most of the time there is only one way to do something in electronics...

Wow, that's a new one on me. What would be an example?

And, personally, I can''t think of anything more important that my wife does than be the awesome mother she is to our children

That's fine, but I don't want to hear a lot of whining from your household about women getting paid $0.70 for every dollar men make, or whatever. Being likely to bail out of the workforce for years at a time has a downside, and that is it.

If the standards do not respect the users, the users will not respect the standards.

Troops are being sent because unprotected aid workers are being butchered to death

I wonder how true this is. I've heard a lot about massacred aid workers. Raids on hospitals. "Natives" deliberately exposing themselves to bloody corpses and generally acting like superstitious chimpanzees.

I heard about all of these things from the mainstream American and British news media, just as you probably did.

In fact, I heard about them on the same news programs that told me that you can only catch Ebola by fellating a corpse or doing something equally ridiculous.

Except now we're starting to hear about victims who had only passing exposure to an infected patient. Funny, I remember being told that was more or less impossible.

HBO can only be a significant streaming service if they ditch the cable/sat subscription requirement for access to HBO Go.

Cue someone calling you an idiot because you "just don't understand HBO's business model."

I'm sure they'd be along already if this story were still on the front page. They probably won't go away entirely until HBO is in bankruptcy court and/or ends up being purchased by Netflix. Denial is strong in these people.