Yes, well I will not pay attention to you unless you can state your argument in proper Latin, as you would when degrees really meant something, in the early 19th Century. Seriously, you write of standards dropping to accommodate job seekers, in English?

exit SARC mode

Anyway, when people were still studying the trivium and the quad-whatever-it-was. they were still doing it to get a job, when not going just to make contacts like the nobility and upper commoners' sons (like the son of the Franklin from the Canterbury Tales).

William Shakespeare would probably agree. Once, he spelled his name three different ways on the same sheet of paper. Likewise, so would The Honorable David S. Crockett. So, for that matter, would a German co-worker of mine who moved to the US at about 12 years old, and never really learned the spelling rules although he had not a trace of accent when I knew him (Stanford Math department didn't care much, either, since they gave him a PhD after he left the company).

No, but the trees saved will surely reverse Global Climate Change.

I assumed that the Kemal Attaturk reforms were *designed* to make Ottoman and Seljuk literature unreadable, so that the new Turkish nation could modernize without the dead weight of history, just as the "first" Chinese Emperor tried to have all the works written before him, especially Confucius, destroyed for that purpose.

And knowing Stalin, the readers of the Latin-alphabet books were equally pulped.

First, I doubt that Finnish spelling is as complex as English.

Second, I was exposed to letters in kindergarten, then started reading words in the middle of 1st grade, just like everyone else in my 1st grade class (the ones who could not were held back [OK, the one person flunked]). Before that (reading from "Tip", our school's equivalent of the more famous "Dick and Jane" books), the closest that we got to reading in the Fall half of 1st grade was the teacher trying to tell me that a bucket started with the letter "p" and was pronounced "pail" even though there was no champagne bottle in it (she didn't like it when I used that very point, for some reason).

(For the non-US, kindergarten was a half-day grade zero that exposed children to letters, digits, minimal socialization, and most importantly naps when we were not sleepy. Nowadays, most children have a grade -1 called "pre-school" as well, ignoring the question of whether they have had day care from infancy because their complete set of parental units had to work)

Third, why are we discussing methods of teaching English in the US when the article is whether Germany is raising a generation of illiterates? Is there a slashdot.org.de to which this should have been limited? Or should we also discuss here whether Chairman Mao's decision to drastically simplify Chinese orthography from historical Chinese is designed to produce a nation of illiterates, or is it just NewSpeak (from 1984), since modern PRC Chinese will be unable to read anything from before the change or anything written by Chinese writers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the Chinese Diaspora?

Correction: Algorithms will be carried out by computers, but the computers will be groups of women with adding machines, as they were up to the middle of WWII.

CompSci will be useful to the extent that it relates to handling large numbers, or if they can build robots using what is left. Losing Heathkit may well have doomed us to be recreated after the last living computer person has died.

The Apollo CSM never pulled along side another space based object and latched on because it didn't need to on any of the missions except 13, and that mission wouldn't have needed to do so if the service module hadn't had a one-in-a-program explosion. The DID do that during at least two Gemini missions that I watched growing up.

The original design version of the shuttle would have been far more useful, but it was Proxmired away.

Which Earth2, though? There have been several, and ALL had at least one hot chick and one guy who looks like Major West from Lost In Space (either of them).

Yes, really they should have started the study at the year 1364, to get more years into the mix. That 1364 is about the start of the Little Ice Age, rather than starting in the middle of it as they do, is entirely beside the point, and should not affect the results at all. Six hundred and fifty years containing most of a period of excessive cold is a far better case of "Cherry-picking" than a mere five hundred.

Exit SARC mode

BS, as this was discussed in Social Studies when I was still in high school (yes, over 30 years ago). It wasn't a Federal case, but the precedent was widely followed.

Speed limits are not a Federal law, but a state one (hence Montana dropping them for "reasonable speed" every few years), so the tickets go to reducing the local town's debt, instead.

It isn't, officially, just as there are no quotas, officially, and NFL defenses never had bounties for opposing players, officially. And Brutus is an honorable man.

Except after a couple of times that the police lose, YOUR lawyer can sue the department for legal harassment. Why do you think that the families of Mafia members aren't always in court, except for protections like this?

Or D) GoDaddy has managed to get Danica Patrick in even less clothing in their commercial. Or one of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition models, etc.

Prove that you are right to them, or it is just your religious dogma. Maybe the "flowering plant" trait reoccurred, like stripes in the two types of horse that we call zebras which are more closely related to Equus equus than to each other (or at least, so I am claiming without citing supporting evidence)?

Biology isn't just a collection of meaningless facts, or Linneaus' original prejudices, after all.

The mini-series with Richard Chamberlain was a good adaptation of the book.