Traditionally, Valve have always extensively playtested their game offerings. Most of the development process has been based around player feedback.

Actually, with the rise of the internet, I imagine quite a signifiganct percentage of modern geeks actually come from such societies.

Love is not an excuse to be retarded.

Vindictiveness is not an excuse for revenge.

And as we all know, the US has become a desolate wasteland of a third world country since the 1960s, right? Right?

Taking the zenith of US supremacy in the 1960s as a baseline, the US has been in constantly decline in a multitude of fields since that time.

321
- 148.

Doing this in your head the traditional way would be hard.

I would not do it in my head. I would take out a pen and a piece of paper, and slowly work through the problem step by step until I had a final answer I was confident in. If the pen was in front of me, I'd probably finish faster than someone trying in their head, and I'd be guaranteed to be more accurate into the bargin.

Mental arithmetic should not be the goal of primary education, outside of the times tables. Children need to learn methods which reward care, patience and effort to find the final answer. This has benefits beyond the classroom.

A kid shouldn't be allowed out of sixth grade if they cannot quickly answer the following questions:

40 - 16
8 * 9
1/2 - 1/3

I must disagree here. Quick mental proficiency should not be the ultimate goal. (Times tables excepted)

What should be expected of a sixth grade student is that they be able to take out pen and paper, and carefully through systematic methods to obtain the correct answer. In addition to this, they should have enough sense of number to know whether the answer is reasonable.

Pen and paper proficiency should be preferred over all other mathematical skills in primary education. Students should feel confident in their own ability to, with patience and care, work out the answer themselves.

You can teach kids to do the "borrowing" from the next column, and they will be able to do it, but they won't understand why they are doing it, which is a bad precedent to set.

There comes a point in mathematics, at all levels, where understanding of "why" needs to stop and being able to "do" becomes more important. Ultimately, we learn mathematics so that we can actually solve problems, learn technologies which make calculation simpler and which given us a robust platform for moving on to more powerful techniques.

A student who needs to use the Common Core methods to add and subtract will forever be hobbled as they progress through mathematics. While they may "understand" these simple operations, in practical terms they will be solving questions with a screwdriver instead of the power-drill they could have learned to use instead.

This isn't a subtle point or academic issue.

Of course you need to know the shortcut way to do it, but if you learn just that then you won't really be learning division, you will just be learning an algorithm which gives you the answer.

I think Dijkstra's quote about long division in Medieval universities is relevant here. It's worth noting that the invention of logarithms, printing of their tables, and their "rote" application to multiplcation, division and exponentiation is regarded as one of the keystones of the scientific revolution. We can talk about understanding until the cows come home, but at the end of the day we do need to teach students how to "do" things, and give them the tools to do them quickly and accurately.

Spelling is the least significant digit of communication.

Isn't the first what we have to do already in the real world (though you missed out a Windows machine)? As for the second statement, it might be worth trying that experiment as you're likely to be surprised.

For the record, the GP was in no way meant to be a defence of the Obama Administration, who are even more to blame for this and several other problems. I didn't feel the need to state this in the post because I presume by now everyone is more of less aware of the homogeneous nature of those in power in the US.

House Leadership was pressured by the Obama Administration to weaken many of the bill's provisions.

Pressured how? They sent lots of Emails with "RE:" in the subject title? Many phone calls were made? The people who took you to lunch chuckled at public "hysteria"? Somebody insinuated they might have the ability to strike a committee to consider, in the fullness of time, whether pork due to your constituency -- if any -- might be placed under a possible pending review?

Would the house leadership describe the "pressure" placed by the Administration as "Overwhelming", "Compelling", or merely "Gentle but Firm"? Which one of these do Legislators consider as an excuse to justify gutting the Act?

The story is BS, and pure optics. The house leadership had no intention of passing the bill ungutted.

Now the media will have a field day with that.

If the media want to have a field day with you, they can have it regardless of what you wrote.

As much as I'd like to see engineers speaking freely about problems, the consequences of doing so can be catastrophic when they don't know what they are doing.

This should not be so. The law as it currently stands promotes thes kinds of irrational, destructive practices and behaviours. We need laws that punish engineers who obfuscate, and which protect engineers who speak openly and honestly.

The law is a tool which can shape the morals and behaviour of human beings. At some point in the last 30 years, the West has completely forgotten that the law is a tool for shaping public ethics and morality, and has instead regarded it as a pen an paper RPG which can be gamed, min-maxed, and generally ruined in spirit by twisting the meaning of its letters. The degeneracy of our insitutions, private and public, has its roots in the degeneracy of the courts and legal professions and their practices.

What about the right of the general public to take pleasure and satisfaction in the petty humiliation and dehumanization of incarcerated persons? The cruelty dollar is a huge dollar, not to mention the cruelty vote.