I agree - you either can read it easily, or you need a course in reading cursive for specific purposes anyway. So teaching them at school is a bit overdone.

The only persons who will regret not writing cursive in school are jewellers, watchmakers and surgeons - the people who need highly evolved fine motor skills. That's difficult to (re-)gain when you're 18 or older, versus kids who have been writing cursive since age 6. But the question is: why subject the entire population to something only a few occupations will use.

So true - even the very clear and well-styled Sont toll registers are pretty hard to read nowadays. See http://dietrich.soundtoll.nl/s... for a nice example of handwriting from 1557, versus this one from 1712 (http://dietrich.soundtoll.nl/scans/toon.php?fnr=175&sid=10).

I can actually read the last one (it's about a boat from or to Harlingen, so a Dutch boat), but it's in Danish and that's not a language I can read easily even with modern type.

The obvious counterexamples to such conspiracy theorist are implementations in countries where the legal system does not base itself on a handwritten document for the constitution, and where this would be nonsensical to begin with. It's just as silly in the USA where I suppose there are machine readable versions available of every relevant document.

And while it's interesting that this is happening in Finland, it's been implemented for several years in The Netherlands already. And I'm sure, in Finland as well. Since the sky hasn't fallen down, I'm assuming impact on most children has been negligible. And the typing course my son received in exchange sure helps him a lot with his coursework on the computer. All of the children in his class leave school at age 12 with the ability to type blind with 10 fingers.

Or difficult enough to require a pretty intense course. In the Netherlands, we have at least a dozen wildly different medieval writing styles, not counting the handwriting of different writers. Given the changes in how to write the letters of the alphabet, grammar drift, and various attempts over the centuries to "modernize" the language and make it "easier to understand", reading old handwriting is nigh impossible without a decent course.

True, but this is par for the course with publishers, and one of the reasons the publishing sector is in bad straits. It's a buyers market and if you don't accept the conditions, your competitor will. So either you go out of business outright, or you merely run the risk of going out of business. Not a very enviable position to be in.

You're right, thanks.

IIRC, this was what killed off TRS (they of Dungeons and Dragons). They massively overextended by selling to a large buyer, who then proceeded to return all of the goods right before the deadline expired. They had to sell the company to either that party or someone else. So they sold themselves to Wizards of the Coast, to avoid having to sell to the original company that sank them.

The worse your business sector is doing as a whole, the more the predators and parasites come out and have a go at you.

I used to have no depth perspective from age 12 to about 20 because my lens was removed due to glaucoma. While playing baseball was something of a nightmare for me (try catching a ball without depth perspective - my main goal was to try and avoid the ball altogether), driving was never a problem. You just need to maintain a good distance from things, which is sensible advice for most drivers anyway.

Aha... so they made sure to select lucky people only. I understand. It's a good idea for a trial run :)

I personally think "weywot" is an abbreviated version of "wait... what?" - the astronomers exclamation upon discovering the object. It's currently my favorite Kuyper belt object name :)

Your initial point is fine: people rise to the expectations others have of them. Low expectations give lower results.

Your conclusion is flawed, however. My conclusions would be that we need to have higher expectations of kids, and if they fail, no problem - but they need to work at achieving the expected outcome (a good grade). I always tell my son that I know he's smart, but that it just means that for him, the lowest expectation for his grade is an A. If it doesn't work out that way, we look at what went wrong and learn from that. It's never "because you're dumb" but always "maybe you didn't start early enough with learning this?".

You can build up a good self-image in several ways, one of them is what I just described.

Unfortunately, another is to lower the bar for everyone so everyone thinks he's great: praise them for meaningless results, give out A's like candy. It's the easiest way for a teacher. But also the most insidious, vicious and harmful way for children - you're setting them up for failure later in life and then their self-esteem will take a great hit.

You had to build the feature set yourself. Quite a difference from a smartphone, designed for easy consumption of pre-packaged goods.

I remember building my own reset-button on the back of the harddisk, or looking at the joystick cabling from a failed joystick and trying to build something where you could press buttons to move things on the screen. And creating my own games because we didn't have downloads yet.

If you wanted to load tapes on the zx spectrum, you had to be ready with a screwdriver to adjust the tapeheads for every tape. Some of my highschool friends learnt soldering specifically to expand their spectrums.

Connecting to a BBS for a download later on, wasn't easy either. I had a teacher at university who wanted to demonstrate this new thing called "usenet". He spent half the lecture trying to get a connection, fiddling with the hundreds of options for each protocol that had to be set exactly right.

Yeah, a smartphone is so much harder... lol.

It all depends on what they learnt and how they apply it. But I will take any of my former co-students as a programmer, over any self-taught programmer, when I can't judge their work in advance.

The difference between someone who understands invariants and pre/post conditions for formal correctness verification, even without using it, and someone who has never even heard of the concepts involved, is huge. There are order of magnitude differences in algorithms for certain tasks, and if you don't even know that you can determine that sort of thing (and how) you're a lost case. Datamodelling is another area. Everytime I see programmers abusing the logical model, I cringe. Code first is a bad idea and with formal training you can avoid things like that.

And I mean, the halting problem. Turing machines. If you don't know Turing machines, you won't understand the implication that at a fundamental level, all computer languages are the same. If you don't know lambda calculus, understanding what Linq does, is much harder.

Etc. etc.

Ofcourse, you can have brilliant self-taught people in the field, as in any field. It's just so very rare to encounter competent ones.

Guilds aren't unions. I won't enter into the details of the whole discussion between the IWW and the AFL-CIO around the turn of the century, but suffice it to say that you can organize around owning a pet as well. And it's probably worthwile, for some. But unions are about organizing the interests of the workers as they work. Guilds are about protecting your own interests *against* other workers.

A guild would complain about H1B visa because they are "taking American jobs from American workers". A union would protest against H1B visa because employers are paying them horrible wages under bad conditions, that will eventually become the standard for ALL workers in the industry.