I graduated high school in 1965 in a class of 300+. What you describe is precisely what it was then.

I concur that Algebra 1 has been the most often used problem solving method my entire life. Geometry next.

I make a living with much more sophisticated mathematics, but its use is rarely useful outside of work, around other people.

The links you supplied were worth the diversion I don't take often enough during my daily /. perusal.

Thank you for taking the time to present them.

My apologies. I missed it. Thank you for the reply. I don't want to get too caught up in /. back and forth.

My wife was a linguist and my mother-in-was an English as a 2nd language teacher faced with her language strictures formed in 1940. My wife did impress on me that language was changing all the time and my engineering background seemed to be fighting that fact.

Thanks once again for helping me lighten up.

Are you a lawyer?
That's the only place I'm aware of where attempts to freeze language has had any success when attempting to deal with precedence.

Thanks for the link. It provided the sort of report that I could appreciate from someone close enough (and timely enough!) to the issue to be believable.

That everything mentioned here on /. had such a link.

I agree with your post.
You could help the "sure to post" /. members by pointing out everyone has their fuzzy line where terms on one side are OK and the other size,not-OK. That fuzzy line moves for all sorts of reasons. As a member of the ./ society or the larger society it is worth the trouble to think about that.

Seems like the topic went from cookies to "pay wall".

If only it were so that the economics of a "single access" pay wall allowed what most users wanted ... to look around a site given the carnival barker hype that brought them to the site. When I joined /. I opted to put in $ for the privilege of "no ads", but rather quietly all of that was dropped some years ago. I am not privy to the business decisions behind that decision, but I had never complained about the charge. I, and I'll bet a significant # of others, too, am willing to pay to maintain my anonymity .. JUST as it is the case when I go in any retail store or "pay at the door" movie show, "pay at the door" music event, "pay at the door" play. All so I don't get *continually* harassed by any of those places.

10 years ago we would have had virtual reality as a common experience.

I code in 3 different languages and write my own QA in each, but only because THERE IS NO QA department. Writing useful QA always takes way longer than initial coding of the script to do its intended purpose.

Coder's lament: "Why would a user *ever* do that?"

Because they are a different set of eyes and don't do the same things the coder does.

2 weeks ago I torpedoed my own QA handling an important script that had been working fine, QA 100% successful (so my report said). A "simple", backwardly compatible enhancement entailed a QA change in order to QA the new feature. For a whole day I was ecstatic that the QA **still** passed 100%.

Next day .. that sleep I got .. brought me to my senses .. I'm just not THAT good of a coder going back to an older script. A skeptical look revealed that the QA's "simple" change was allowing EVERYTHING to pass!

QA is /not/ good if it's done by the same person. (And you don't want to wait 6 weeks so that YOU are /not/ the same person you were, and THEN write the QA. Nice try..)

Everywhere it seems: Gotta have this done last week; call it what you want -- *Lie* to the customer.. they are too naive to complain.. too wet under the ears to blame YOU instead of themselves.)

Insert your own diatribe vvvvv here vvvvv.

Yeech.

I have never been accosted in any way .. ever.

I am a male of 146 pounds with no threatening anything about me.

I'm 70. An electrical engineer whose work took me to eastern Canada, northen England, Japan, and various big cities in the US and the most time in Titusville, FL. Having graduated in 1970, the environmental movement made a big impact on what I do. In most of the places I chose to not rent a car (nor use taxis), but took public transit.

My wife, though rather constantly worried about such things for herself, lived her 70 years with the exact same experience. We lived in the middle of Austin, TX all of that time.

Its the truth.

Most people knew both would probably keep to their promise to leave, but not on the very next day! Drunks (and Uber drivers, evidently) are not known for making long range plans. It was the suddenness that caught them all without a plan.

My wording could have been improved. My comments mostly result in TLDR. I'm working on that (except at this moment).

Believe me, Uber & Lyft made a statement by leaving months before the deadline for compliance. They were well aware that they would disrupt many of their employees (one of whom I know) and, as pointed out in the article, left drunks without a plan.

Uber & Lyft have been roundly criticized for this "I taking my marbles and going home!" tactic.

Keep it up.

Haven't watch at all since 1999 and back then, only because I traveled a lot for work