I found it really outrageous that this professor was successfully accused of being a racist -- which is an accusation that carries alot of weight and can affect tenure. Talking, passing a calculator that is essentially a computer and cheating isn't a cultural or racial issue. What kind of message did that send?
At the same time, I observed plenty of cases where the university (not the academic staff) engaged in very blatant gender and racial bias that was ignored.
It was easy to cheat if you were an Asian, and you cheated using a foreign language. In one egregious example, some students were sharing a graphing calculator with study material loaded on it. The professor kicked them out of the exam, but was brought up on charges for racial insensitivity and the students were allowed to retake the test.
Back in the day, a generation of tinkerers cut their teeth on radio and television sets. They would test the functioning of vacuum tubes in the drugstore, and buy souped up parts to improve the picture.
Nowadays, the kiddies can't do anything with these newfangled OLED tv sets! How are you going to learn about repairing broken TVs if the TV never breaks???
I am a state government employee who worked for several years in the private sector. By my reckoning, the distribution of incompetent people is about the same than at your average large company -- they just look different. Most state governments expanded rapidly in the 70's and 80's, so you have this massive cadre of 45-60 year olds who are burnt out and useless. Big corporate places purge the old people, replace them with clueless foreigners (working for a bodyshops that happen to be run by some Exec VP's wife in most cases), laid off corporate types who are now consulting, and recent graduates without clue.
The real problem with government is the leadership. In the past, the professional managers blunted the effect of politically appointed executives who couldn't find their ass with both hands. Today, the corps of those professionals is in dire straits in most states, because most states did not hire and "grow" new employees in the 90's and 00's. So the smart people are retiring, only to be replaced by people who will be retiring in 3 years.
Nobody here knows WTF they are talking about, so let's take this from another approach.
Scenario: You develop a miracle product which can suck electricity out of thin air. It's a killer app and you'll sell millions of them. So you start your company, get the product manufactured in China and get ready to sell it. After doing all of this, you for some reason license the trademark of the long-defunct Radio Corporation of America -- a trademark you don't control and is mostly used to sell universal remote controls and cheap stereo cable.
Why would you do that? Why build a brand that nobody remembers and that you don't own? It makes no sense.
Let's say you have a bunch of WebDevs who love using some popular extensions, and you'd like to provide them with a fully prepped workstation every time a box is built. (I have an SLA that calls for our users to have a fully functional new PC ready to go within 40 minutes of unboxing, and we unbox about 500 PCs/week.) Too bad -- unless you have a crew of smart masochist admins who spend a few hours/days packaging up a solution. (We can do this in minutes for 95% of Windows, Linux and even Mac apps via an API or consistent install mechanism) One exception: if you get lucky, Ubuntu has 20 people who package a few select extensions.
Or lets say you have a global distributed network linked by MPLS or Frame Relay with limited bandwidth. You have a population of Firefox users who run with admin rights (really bad practice on any platform btw), and would like to setup mirror servers for the Firefox update mechanism. Too bad -- you can't do that either, unless you hack each update and each client as well.
Or lets say you want to migrate Firefox user settings from workstation to workstation, or between VDI sessions or between linux terminal servers. Too bad -- Mozilla creates a directory with random characters for user profile data.
Or lets say you want to provision proxy settings? Again, random profile directory, sorry.
Or maybe you want to disable auto-update, because a critical 3rd party application won't work with Firefox 3.5 for another month. Again, you're fucked, unless you jump through hoops.
I get the message. I'm responsible for over 100,000 people's computing environment, and Mozilla could give two shits about me. That's fine.
The punchline is, Google will be finished porting Chrome to Mac and Linux soon. Then they'll provide enterprise manageability, as they did for other tools. Then, people like me who manage lots and lots of workstations will look at switching to have one, common, managed browser on 3 platforms. That's 100k people who'll go home and install Chrome and tell their friends how great it is. (Just like those home users who brought FF to work, except much faster, since there's no restrictive IT @ home)
Actually, several people have attempted to propose and develop solutions or provide staff/funding for these problems -- the Mozilla people just don't care.
When Firefox was first released, it was a breath of fresh air -- a fast, effective browser that discarded the bloat which plagued Seamonkey.
Firefox laid the groundwork that has brought us to the current state of browsers... there's a competitive market, except in the business space, where the inability to manage browser settings has made the enterprise the last refuge for Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the project doesn't have the desire to expand its impact further -- they refuse to accept bug reports or feature requests regarding issues that are critical to business users, and shout you down when you try to complain.
So you have this great browser, but you can't script the install, can't manage update distribution (ie. autoupdate is not appropriate in many use cases), and manage config in a sane way.
Now instead of fixing those issues, they are "fixing" something that isn't broken -- the extension system that makes Firefox so cool for so many people!
It's IBM legacy kit. There are no new customers for AS/400 hardware, so confusing them doesn't matter. Plus, IBM's various divisions are in different cities, and don't play together well. AS/400 = Minnesota, Intel = Raleigh, Mainframe = NY
I'd say a more likely NSA "backdoor" would be some sort of subtle flaw in the implementation of an encryption, hash or some other algorithm critical to Windows. NSA spends alot of time and money on cryptanalysis.
Smart grid is really needed to provide the ability to support electric cars without taking out the power system, and to provide peak-demand load management for people who use power at peak times (ie. businesses, during the day). People aren't going to run washing machines at 2AM in the summertime to avoid a $0.50 fee and get smelly clothes since nobody will be around to flip the laundry into the dryer.
The problem at the residential level is that other than the electric cars that nobody wants there is minimal value to shifting residential power demand for most people -- their demand is at night, since there aren't many housewives hanging out at home anymore. From what I've read, energy usage isn't the problem -- the problem is providing sufficient power during periods of peak demand. Additionally, many, many places don't have the necessary last-mile power infrastructure to handle the electric cars that are supposedly going to drive increased consumer demand.
Plus, nobody has plugin electric cars, and the excessive costs will keep it that way. Why would you buy a $40,000 car that is similar to a compact car and requires upgrading your home electrical system to own? Just buy a diesel Jetta, which has a far lower TCO. Hell, hybrid diesel-electric cars are probably more practical.
Upgrading the infrastructure of every side street in every city is going to cost billions and take years. And it will meet resistance -- residential neighborhoods with trees and overhead lines will find the new supply lines also mean that the utility company will eviscerate every tree.
However, in practice, states generally don't tax that much, unless it's less-obvious taxes such as sales tax and property tax.
Let me guess, you're a college student who rents? Property taxes are quite obvious. In New York, I pay about $6,000 per year in city and school taxes. $500/mo.
Sales taxes are equally obvious if you spend any money. My family probably spends about $25,000 year in non-food transactions. About $2,000 of that is taxation.
The states most certainly do get a lot of funding from the Federal government, for example highway funds.
That's exactly what I said. The Federal government pays states to administer certain programs -- including the Interstate highway system.
Prior to the current US government, the country tried to do things your way under something called the "Articles of Confederation". Under that regime, the US government was at the mercy of the state legislatures to provide funds and was unable to levy significant taxes.
Guess what? It was an utter failure.
Tariffs and excise taxes were able to fund government operations until the 20th century, when the role of government mushroomed. In those days we had no standing army, minimal navy, no debt, no social programs, no social security, etc.
Assuming the allegations were true, how can you explain AMD's continued presence in OEM machinery anyway? HP (for instance) certainly didn't stop selling AMD-based desktops, servers, etc., and Intel+HP are like fraternal twins.
The AMD OEM machines at BestBuy, etc that HP is/was selling are mostly low-end or midrange consumer desktops at the bottom of the profit curve. The higher margin, higher priced machines were almost always Intel.
You see the effects of Intel's manipulation in the corporate market... with large quantity buyers like Fortune 500 and government, resellers and vendors often sell PCs at a loss, counting on backend rebates from vendors like Intel and memory vendors to make a 1-3% margin. In general, the money in PC sales is from services... Dell will charge $100 (@ 70% margin) to install a $500 PC (@ 2% margin). The vendors compete aggressively for that business.
Intel knows this, because they have their own field marketing groups who are able to figure out who is planning on buying computers. They use that intelligence to bully vendors -- if they know that 400,000 PCs are being sold, they can use that information to manipulate the rebates and affect the ability of the PC vendor to win business.
You might ask: "Why do they care if Dell sells a PC at a 10% loss, only to make up for it in services?".
The answer to that its in Intel's interest to keep the overall price of a PC stable -- around $500 in large quantity. Intel does lots of math on everything that they do -- they wouldn't let you go to the bathroom if the ROI of letting you wet your pants was 6% higher. Stability makes it easy for Intel to do the math and shape product demand to meet their product launch/production schedules. If PC vendors were allowed to engage in an all-out price war, it would push down the prices for the most expensive substitutable commodities in a PC purchase (ie the Processor) and jeopardize the PC vendor's cash cow -- the $100/pc installation. (Because "soft costs" in a lease cannot exceed a certain amount). By manipulating the market, Intel essentially sets a price floor to discourage the PC vendors from getting too aggressive.
"Look, we beat the analyst's earnings estimates again! We we rock at this governance thing... lets talk to the compensation committee about increasing our honoraria."
Another example: Your company gets sued and you have to capture user data from 200 computers. The lawyers do their thing a year later and tell you that you can throw out data from 150 of them. Now you have 10TB of empty SAN that costs you $27/GB/mo.
Depending on the era that you were talking about, slaves were used on a variety of tasks. Some of the best teachers in Rome were Greek slaves, for instance. In most circumstances, public construction was funded personally by Roman Generals and other rich folk, and they would use their employees (ie. the legionnaires) to perform the construction tasks.
Construction was useful, as it kept the soldiers busy and occupied. Occupied soldiers don't try to overthrow their patrons.
You obviously know next to nothing about the US government and how it operates.
A few things:
- States have plenty of taxing authority
- Pre 1920, most Federal revenue came from the taxation of imports
- States don't go to the Federal government for money -- they administer some programs on behalf of the Federal government
These days, smaller, more rural states tend to get screwed, as the large states have more recipients for high-dollar programs like Medicare & Medicaid.
News is alive an well, just not in the traditional, dominant media outlets. We have online blogs and weekly newspapers that are in many cases thriving. In my hometown, a tiny rural weekly called "The Altamont Enterprise" has such a demand for local advertising that they've had to add a second section. 15 years ago, it was a 10 page weekly, now its closer to 50.
Why the growth? The local newspaper, the Hearst-owned Albany Times-Union doesn't really provide a service to people in the outlying areas of Albany. Even within the area that the traditional paper claims to serve, the editorial practices of the paper marginalize it as a provider of news that people want to hear. Often, you know when important things are going on because they don't appear in the paper.
When the daily papers die, others will take their place. The only thing missing will be the editorial boards that are typically in cahoots with politicians and business. Keeping them on life support is suppressing the development of new news organizations.
I was the oldest child of a middle class family of 3. I applied to 2 public and 3 private universities and was accepted to all of them, but with minimal financial aid. I chose to attend a nearby public university that offered a quality education that cost approximately $10,000/year in the late 90's.
Why did I make this choice?
- I could afford to finance about 75% of tuition via savings that my parents had set aside for me. - I worked various jobs while in school, eventually hitting $15-17/hr, which more than covered the remaining tuition & expenses. - I didn't want to screw my siblings out of an education or force my parents into debt. In the end, I was able to leave about $4,000 of my parent's savings for my brother or sister.
I have friends who are teachers who decided that they needed to attend small, private New England colleges with tuition and expenses over 350% more than my education. One of those friends and his wife makes $120k combined teaching, but after years of deferments owes over $300,000 a decade after graduation (not including graduate work form a private school which would have been FREE had they gone to the state university) -- my friend and his wife can barely afford rent, and will likely become homeowners when they inherit a house when one of their parents pass.
People don't need bailouts, they need to live within their means and not assume that they are entitled to a specific lifestyle or type of job due to the circumstances of their birth. If you can't afford four years of college, borrow money to go to trade school and work as a plumber, HVAC, electrician, etc. If you really want to go to college, you'll be able to earn the money to do so.
The SAT example is like saying that people prefer driving to flying, because no students arrived at the SAT exam site via helicopter. Kids aren't taught cursive, so shockingly, they do not use it to write.
People sign their names in distinctive ways, making it possible to authenticate a document by comparing it to past signatures. At a glance, I can identify my dad, wife, boss and several of my colleague's signature.
In today's society where we are more anonymous and the people we deal with every day have no interest in us as an individual, so it is less effective. But if you interact with a group of people on paper long enough, you recognize signatures. Now we trust a computer to assert identity based on a person's knowledge of a 6-10 character key combination. Doesn't sound like progress to me.
Back in the day, a signature was enough, and a high-value document was "secured" by a signature authenticated by a notary stamp.
In the US, all children are special and you cannot force them to do anything. If you tried to make a child read and write by 2nd grade, parents would complain because their special snowflakes had self-esteem issues.
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No, I went to a SUNY school.
I found it really outrageous that this professor was successfully accused of being a racist -- which is an accusation that carries alot of weight and can affect tenure. Talking, passing a calculator that is essentially a computer and cheating isn't a cultural or racial issue. What kind of message did that send?
At the same time, I observed plenty of cases where the university (not the academic staff) engaged in very blatant gender and racial bias that was ignored.
It was easy to cheat if you were an Asian, and you cheated using a foreign language. In one egregious example, some students were sharing a graphing calculator with study material loaded on it. The professor kicked them out of the exam, but was brought up on charges for racial insensitivity and the students were allowed to retake the test.
Back in the day, a generation of tinkerers cut their teeth on radio and television sets. They would test the functioning of vacuum tubes in the drugstore, and buy souped up parts to improve the picture.
Nowadays, the kiddies can't do anything with these newfangled OLED tv sets! How are you going to learn about repairing broken TVs if the TV never breaks???
It has to be sold with a PC component. Most vendors provide a $3 mouse to satisfy that requirement.
I am a state government employee who worked for several years in the private sector. By my reckoning, the distribution of incompetent people is about the same than at your average large company -- they just look different. Most state governments expanded rapidly in the 70's and 80's, so you have this massive cadre of 45-60 year olds who are burnt out and useless. Big corporate places purge the old people, replace them with clueless foreigners (working for a bodyshops that happen to be run by some Exec VP's wife in most cases), laid off corporate types who are now consulting, and recent graduates without clue.
The real problem with government is the leadership. In the past, the professional managers blunted the effect of politically appointed executives who couldn't find their ass with both hands. Today, the corps of those professionals is in dire straits in most states, because most states did not hire and "grow" new employees in the 90's and 00's. So the smart people are retiring, only to be replaced by people who will be retiring in 3 years.
Nobody here knows WTF they are talking about, so let's take this from another approach.
Scenario: You develop a miracle product which can suck electricity out of thin air. It's a killer app and you'll sell millions of them. So you start your company, get the product manufactured in China and get ready to sell it. After doing all of this, you for some reason license the trademark of the long-defunct Radio Corporation of America -- a trademark you don't control and is mostly used to sell universal remote controls and cheap stereo cable.
Why would you do that? Why build a brand that nobody remembers and that you don't own? It makes no sense.
I said "in a sane way".
Let's say you have a bunch of WebDevs who love using some popular extensions, and you'd like to provide them with a fully prepped workstation every time a box is built. (I have an SLA that calls for our users to have a fully functional new PC ready to go within 40 minutes of unboxing, and we unbox about 500 PCs/week.) Too bad -- unless you have a crew of smart masochist admins who spend a few hours/days packaging up a solution. (We can do this in minutes for 95% of Windows, Linux and even Mac apps via an API or consistent install mechanism) One exception: if you get lucky, Ubuntu has 20 people who package a few select extensions.
Or lets say you have a global distributed network linked by MPLS or Frame Relay with limited bandwidth. You have a population of Firefox users who run with admin rights (really bad practice on any platform btw), and would like to setup mirror servers for the Firefox update mechanism. Too bad -- you can't do that either, unless you hack each update and each client as well.
Or lets say you want to migrate Firefox user settings from workstation to workstation, or between VDI sessions or between linux terminal servers. Too bad -- Mozilla creates a directory with random characters for user profile data.
Or lets say you want to provision proxy settings? Again, random profile directory, sorry.
Or maybe you want to disable auto-update, because a critical 3rd party application won't work with Firefox 3.5 for another month. Again, you're fucked, unless you jump through hoops.
I get the message. I'm responsible for over 100,000 people's computing environment, and Mozilla could give two shits about me. That's fine.
The punchline is, Google will be finished porting Chrome to Mac and Linux soon. Then they'll provide enterprise manageability, as they did for other tools. Then, people like me who manage lots and lots of workstations will look at switching to have one, common, managed browser on 3 platforms. That's 100k people who'll go home and install Chrome and tell their friends how great it is. (Just like those home users who brought FF to work, except much faster, since there's no restrictive IT @ home)
Actually, several people have attempted to propose and develop solutions or provide staff/funding for these problems -- the Mozilla people just don't care.
When Firefox was first released, it was a breath of fresh air -- a fast, effective browser that discarded the bloat which plagued Seamonkey.
Firefox laid the groundwork that has brought us to the current state of browsers... there's a competitive market, except in the business space, where the inability to manage browser settings has made the enterprise the last refuge for Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the project doesn't have the desire to expand its impact further -- they refuse to accept bug reports or feature requests regarding issues that are critical to business users, and shout you down when you try to complain.
So you have this great browser, but you can't script the install, can't manage update distribution (ie. autoupdate is not appropriate in many use cases), and manage config in a sane way.
Now instead of fixing those issues, they are "fixing" something that isn't broken -- the extension system that makes Firefox so cool for so many people!
It's IBM legacy kit. There are no new customers for AS/400 hardware, so confusing them doesn't matter. Plus, IBM's various divisions are in different cities, and don't play together well. AS/400 = Minnesota, Intel = Raleigh, Mainframe = NY
I'd say a more likely NSA "backdoor" would be some sort of subtle flaw in the implementation of an encryption, hash or some other algorithm critical to Windows. NSA spends alot of time and money on cryptanalysis.
Smart grid is really needed to provide the ability to support electric cars without taking out the power system, and to provide peak-demand load management for people who use power at peak times (ie. businesses, during the day). People aren't going to run washing machines at 2AM in the summertime to avoid a $0.50 fee and get smelly clothes since nobody will be around to flip the laundry into the dryer.
The problem at the residential level is that other than the electric cars that nobody wants there is minimal value to shifting residential power demand for most people -- their demand is at night, since there aren't many housewives hanging out at home anymore. From what I've read, energy usage isn't the problem -- the problem is providing sufficient power during periods of peak demand. Additionally, many, many places don't have the necessary last-mile power infrastructure to handle the electric cars that are supposedly going to drive increased consumer demand.
Plus, nobody has plugin electric cars, and the excessive costs will keep it that way. Why would you buy a $40,000 car that is similar to a compact car and requires upgrading your home electrical system to own? Just buy a diesel Jetta, which has a far lower TCO. Hell, hybrid diesel-electric cars are probably more practical.
Upgrading the infrastructure of every side street in every city is going to cost billions and take years. And it will meet resistance -- residential neighborhoods with trees and overhead lines will find the new supply lines also mean that the utility company will eviscerate every tree.
Let me guess, you're a college student who rents? Property taxes are quite obvious. In New York, I pay about $6,000 per year in city and school taxes. $500/mo.
Sales taxes are equally obvious if you spend any money. My family probably spends about $25,000 year in non-food transactions. About $2,000 of that is taxation.
That's exactly what I said. The Federal government pays states to administer certain programs -- including the Interstate highway system.
Prior to the current US government, the country tried to do things your way under something called the "Articles of Confederation". Under that regime, the US government was at the mercy of the state legislatures to provide funds and was unable to levy significant taxes.
Guess what? It was an utter failure.
Tariffs and excise taxes were able to fund government operations until the 20th century, when the role of government mushroomed. In those days we had no standing army, minimal navy, no debt, no social programs, no social security, etc.
The AMD OEM machines at BestBuy, etc that HP is/was selling are mostly low-end or midrange consumer desktops at the bottom of the profit curve. The higher margin, higher priced machines were almost always Intel.
You see the effects of Intel's manipulation in the corporate market... with large quantity buyers like Fortune 500 and government, resellers and vendors often sell PCs at a loss, counting on backend rebates from vendors like Intel and memory vendors to make a 1-3% margin. In general, the money in PC sales is from services... Dell will charge $100 (@ 70% margin) to install a $500 PC (@ 2% margin). The vendors compete aggressively for that business.
Intel knows this, because they have their own field marketing groups who are able to figure out who is planning on buying computers. They use that intelligence to bully vendors -- if they know that 400,000 PCs are being sold, they can use that information to manipulate the rebates and affect the ability of the PC vendor to win business.
You might ask: "Why do they care if Dell sells a PC at a 10% loss, only to make up for it in services?".
The answer to that its in Intel's interest to keep the overall price of a PC stable -- around $500 in large quantity. Intel does lots of math on everything that they do -- they wouldn't let you go to the bathroom if the ROI of letting you wet your pants was 6% higher. Stability makes it easy for Intel to do the math and shape product demand to meet their product launch/production schedules. If PC vendors were allowed to engage in an all-out price war, it would push down the prices for the most expensive substitutable commodities in a PC purchase (ie the Processor) and jeopardize the PC vendor's cash cow -- the $100/pc installation. (Because "soft costs" in a lease cannot exceed a certain amount). By manipulating the market, Intel essentially sets a price floor to discourage the PC vendors from getting too aggressive.
Easy.
"Look, we beat the analyst's earnings estimates again! We we rock at this governance thing... lets talk to the compensation committee about increasing our honoraria."
Another example: Your company gets sued and you have to capture user data from 200 computers. The lawyers do their thing a year later and tell you that you can throw out data from 150 of them. Now you have 10TB of empty SAN that costs you $27/GB/mo.
Familiarize yourself with Roman history.
Depending on the era that you were talking about, slaves were used on a variety of tasks. Some of the best teachers in Rome were Greek slaves, for instance. In most circumstances, public construction was funded personally by Roman Generals and other rich folk, and they would use their employees (ie. the legionnaires) to perform the construction tasks.
Construction was useful, as it kept the soldiers busy and occupied. Occupied soldiers don't try to overthrow their patrons.
You obviously know next to nothing about the US government and how it operates.
A few things:
- States have plenty of taxing authority
- Pre 1920, most Federal revenue came from the taxation of imports
- States don't go to the Federal government for money -- they administer some programs on behalf of the Federal government
These days, smaller, more rural states tend to get screwed, as the large states have more recipients for high-dollar programs like Medicare & Medicaid.
News is alive an well, just not in the traditional, dominant media outlets. We have online blogs and weekly newspapers that are in many cases thriving. In my hometown, a tiny rural weekly called "The Altamont Enterprise" has such a demand for local advertising that they've had to add a second section. 15 years ago, it was a 10 page weekly, now its closer to 50.
Why the growth? The local newspaper, the Hearst-owned Albany Times-Union doesn't really provide a service to people in the outlying areas of Albany. Even within the area that the traditional paper claims to serve, the editorial practices of the paper marginalize it as a provider of news that people want to hear. Often, you know when important things are going on because they don't appear in the paper.
When the daily papers die, others will take their place. The only thing missing will be the editorial boards that are typically in cahoots with politicians and business. Keeping them on life support is suppressing the development of new news organizations.
I was the oldest child of a middle class family of 3. I applied to 2 public and 3 private universities and was accepted to all of them, but with minimal financial aid. I chose to attend a nearby public university that offered a quality education that cost approximately $10,000/year in the late 90's.
Why did I make this choice?
- I could afford to finance about 75% of tuition via savings that my parents had set aside for me.
- I worked various jobs while in school, eventually hitting $15-17/hr, which more than covered the remaining tuition & expenses.
- I didn't want to screw my siblings out of an education or force my parents into debt. In the end, I was able to leave about $4,000 of my parent's savings for my brother or sister.
I have friends who are teachers who decided that they needed to attend small, private New England colleges with tuition and expenses over 350% more than my education. One of those friends and his wife makes $120k combined teaching, but after years of deferments owes over $300,000 a decade after graduation (not including graduate work form a private school which would have been FREE had they gone to the state university) -- my friend and his wife can barely afford rent, and will likely become homeowners when they inherit a house when one of their parents pass.
People don't need bailouts, they need to live within their means and not assume that they are entitled to a specific lifestyle or type of job due to the circumstances of their birth. If you can't afford four years of college, borrow money to go to trade school and work as a plumber, HVAC, electrician, etc. If you really want to go to college, you'll be able to earn the money to do so.
Do you accept or make payment via credit card, check or ATM debit? Congratulations, you (indirectly) use COBOL.
The SAT example is like saying that people prefer driving to flying, because no students arrived at the SAT exam site via helicopter. Kids aren't taught cursive, so shockingly, they do not use it to write.
People sign their names in distinctive ways, making it possible to authenticate a document by comparing it to past signatures. At a glance, I can identify my dad, wife, boss and several of my colleague's signature.
In today's society where we are more anonymous and the people we deal with every day have no interest in us as an individual, so it is less effective. But if you interact with a group of people on paper long enough, you recognize signatures. Now we trust a computer to assert identity based on a person's knowledge of a 6-10 character key combination. Doesn't sound like progress to me.
Back in the day, a signature was enough, and a high-value document was "secured" by a signature authenticated by a notary stamp.
In the US, all children are special and you cannot force them to do anything. If you tried to make a child read and write by 2nd grade, parents would complain because their special snowflakes had self-esteem issues.
It's illegible because most people born after 1975 weren't taught how to write.