"Given that cursive writing doesn't make any smarter, increase their work ethic, or provide them with useful skills I don't think that this trend is all that disturbing."

Except, of course, that it makes you smarter, increases your work ethic and provides a quite useful skill.

Hand writing instills in young minds the need of work hard to reach the desired results and while doing so, exercises the brain and conects abstract thinking with fine-grain motions. On top on that, once mastered, it allows to effortlessly take notes which helps fixating concepts and have a look at them at a glance for deeper understandment.

The fact all of you American saying that you left cursive as soon as you could just shows how ill-fitted your education system has become, not that cursive is of no use.

"My mother stormed up to my school innumerable times to point out this very fact to them.

"He's handwriting is messy"
"But is the answer right?"
"Well, yes, but it's messy."
"But you could read it, and the answer was right?"
"Well, yes...""

Your mommy was just defending her beloved child. The conversation should have gone instead.

"He's handwriting is messy"
"But is the answer right?"
"Who knows? HIS handwriting is messy, just like his mother's ortography, and the goal of the test is knowing the answer AND comunicating the answer. Since he fails at the latter I have no idea about the former and I qualify accordingly."

"It's a waste now. It's going to be a waste in 20 years time, which is where the country noted in this article is in education terms compared to the UK or US."

If with this you mean that UK or US' education was much better 20 years ago, then you may be right. In terms of good results it looks like Finland is certainly ages beyond UK or US.

I've seen some people, that might be considered conspiracy theorists, that believe this is the intent. If it is possible to remove children from foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and Federalist Papers then it would be much easier to convince children to be quiet and obey Dear Leader.

I'm not saying it is a very convincing argument but I've seen it made many times now.

| ...cursive is just a way of trying to make your writing prettier.

"No, it is most certainly not. You're missing the point. It's not for looking pretty, it's for writing quickly quick while retaining legibility."

Not only that. At least when properly done, handwriting is faster to read than printing because letters in a word get conected together and are basically more recognized than read.

It's been a lot of time and research to produce tipesettings that more or less reach that level when done by machines, forget about that coming from a human.

"Morning after" is not abortion. It only works if the egg has not attached to the uterus wall. In this sense, throwing away fertilized eggs would also be abortion. It is not. It is what nature does with almost all fertilized eggs.

So your claim is that the bug you are talking about is unknown? That you haven't seen it? My, that's quite a problem in logic, isn't it?

There seems to be a big chasm opening in the Linux world. Not to worry though, there is stable Linux out there. There are two forks of Gnome and a large variety of alternative desktops to choose from. You can still install Jessie without systemd and Devuan, Slackware, and Gentoo intend to keep that option open.

As for the lockup bug in TFA, in most projects, the kernel versions in question would be internal release only. The outside world would never see them. For example, my debian system is on 3.16 even when I enabled the backports repo.

The final bit, not all soft lockups are fatal. They are never a good thing, but they sometimes just indicate that something is taking longer than it was ever expected to and it needs to either be speeded up or broken into more manageable pieces so something else gets a chance to run.

Not always, but unfortunately in the majority of cases. So advice to the OP would be to put both languages on his CV and learn none.

Indeed. Only cure for that: Management that signed off on the "solution" goes to prison and/or has to compensate the company for the damage from their personal funds.

Indeed. On a breach like this, somebody should go to prison for a year or two for gross negligence.

There's the problem, dependencies out the wazoo. And no, that is not par for the course for system tools in Linux. Look at ldd /sbin/init. Those are the only dependencies. To have a 'normal' system, you'll need to add a shell (ldd /bin/bash)

That depends. Have state governments tried to take cars off the road by increasing the price of license plates? If so, when and where has this happened, and what results have been common?