The word "cursive" isn't used much outside North America. "(Hand)writing" (as contrasted with "printing") has much wider currency.

I don't know about you, but I can jot-down quick notes on scraps of paper a hell of a lot faster than I can get out an electronic device, open a note-taking program, and attempt to use an on-screen keyboard to type the same notes with any degree of accuracy.

That's not a fair comparison. If you're counting the time to open the memo app on your phone, you should also count the time to find a pen or pencil and a scrap of paper. For me the time which the former takes is fairly consistent, but the latter varies considerably because I don't usually carry a pen in my trouser pocket.

As an aside, you seem to be making more of an argument for teaching shorthand than for teaching writing.

By contrast Belgium's record of 18 months without a government as a result of PR should be a warning to us all.

A warning or an incentive?

The topic is undergraduate study, not research. The people who are inclined towards research will want to take a full CS degree rather than an apprenticeship.

Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve, so the idea that the USA could have a strategic cocoa reserve isn't completely ridiculous.

I think it's the gas chromatograph rather than the mass spectrometer (surely chirality doesn't measurably affect the mass of a molecule?), but they're built in to the same instrument, COSAC. This abstract sounds like a chromatograph to me.

In fairness, I saw Terry Tao get half-way through saying that 27 and 29 are twin primes on the Colbert Report the other day, before he caught himself. (Just after the 3 minute mark).

Teletype? Luxury! My mother learnt to program when she was in secondary school by posting punched cards across the country to Manchester University and getting the results back a week later.

If you ever look at a document.xml extracted from a .docx file you'll be astonished at how much crap there is in there just to support revision tracking.

Apparently so.

For some things. But a lot of the units which people in the US call English are different sizes to the units with the same name in England. And the UK certainly doesn't use $ for its currency, which I think is what the GPP was talking about, although I think they may have overlooked a context switch from the UK beta tests to the US launch.

If they're highlighting Google Play then I can see a new anti-trust investigation in the near future.

Depends on what the problem with the colo server is. It's not entirely unknown for police to seize an entire rack of servers from a colo. (E.g. 1, 2, and I half-remember incidents in other countries too).

Indeed. Now that I've trained it to treat unsolicited e-mails from Twitter as spam, I hardly see any.

I was more struck by the hostpots. I'm not entirely sure what they are, but I think it probably means that the owners of the cafes where OP does his web browsing serve their own fingers for cannibalistic patrons.