The entire world is filled with average people. My point in my original post was that most people, for whatever reason, when writing cursive, tend to come out with seriously illegible scrawl. This has nothing to do with their lack of desire -- I have yet to come across people who pride themselves on illegible penmanship -- but the inherent lack of legibility built into the cursive system they've been taught.

So instead of starting from the illegible scrawl, they propose to the reader they start from something more legible. It's like instead of shoehorning functional programming concepts into Java, they start with ocaml.

I'm not discounting the artistic side of this entire endeavour. As a former professional musician, I do not believe everything should be useful. However, if given a choice between teaching my hypothetical children how to write cursive and print, so they can communicate, I'd much rather they were taught to print legiblly than scrawl. If they wanted to take up calligraphy, more power to them, but I do not believe in shoving art down their throats.

To be fair, though, I suspect you've never seen beautiful handwriting, or its effect on the addressee.

If average people were able to consistently create beautiful script, I would be inclined to agree. However, as the article I've linked to shows, even decent cursive results in loopy, unreadable mess.

Perhaps my comment, "deserves to die", was too strong, but the point still stands -- there's a difference between teaching for utility and teaching for art, and it appears that the schools have confused the two.

- Hard eject with soft disable (e.g. like CD-R/RW drives which physically lock closed while burning). Ensure that it unlocks when the power goes off!

You do realise that the optical drive eject buttons nowadays are soft eject, and therefore largely useless when the power is off, and the mac floppies have had the paperclip emergency eject, like optical drives you're so enamoured of, since pre-PowerPC days, right?

Could you imagine a sport where people run around shooting each other with balls propelled by compressed nerve-gas?

I can see an xkcd strip of it already.