"Did you know a thief could steal all of your valuables if they used a key to unlock your front door?" And did you know that if you give the thief the key and tell the thief when you are going to be away from home you are more at risk?

Sounds like an essential component for a Voight-Kampff machine.

Thanks for the follow-up. I wasn't reading more into your post than you intended but I should have summed up in my own post....it is indeed ironic that the idiot could foist his beliefs upon a school system he doesn't participate in (except, I guess, as a tax payer). Unfortunately, the fundamentalists seem to be increasing in number or at least they seem increasingly successful in changing systems to fit their world views. I wonder how long it will be before we are told what we can and can't teach in our own home...

We home school our children in no small part due to the way that public schools here have become places where religious fundamentalism is taking over. Unlike many public schools around the country, we can actually teach our children the theory of evolution. Our children can read anything that we feel they have the maturity to handle. And so on.

It is ironic to us that while home schooling used to be seen as a mechanism for right-wing religious fanatics to indoctrinate their children it is increasingly embraced by left-wing wackos like us who want their children to learn everything they can and who are repulsed by book banning and other forms of legislated censorship.

Any book with the word "Devil" in the title is going to raise of the ire of the whack-job Christian-Far-Right types in rural South Carolina. As will any book that includes the words "bruised testicles" or otherwise acknowledges any aspect of the human reproductive system. Hell, I'm sure they even found something in the Agatha Christie novel to complain about.

I've been through these checkpoints in New Mexico and Texas many times but I was never curious about their history until I read the "flushing the entire constitution down the toilet these days" comment. Got me to wondering how long the checkpoints have been around and who got them started. Best I can tell, they started in the early 90's (1993 is the earliest mention I can find).

Interesting GAO report on the Border Patrol from 2005, if anyone is interested:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05435.pdf

So the checkpoints are nothing new but certainly they were expanded and additionally empowered after 9/11 to (on paper anyway) act as a deterrent to terrorism. My only addition to the "flushing" comment is that it is nothing recent -- it started long ago. The Man just uses every excuse to flush more of our rights farther down the pipe. Galling.

Hands down, Phrogram is the best language for teaching young people to program. It's a language purpose-built for teaching kids (it used to be called KPL or "Kids Programming Language") and it scales with the child. A young person can start by coding simple graphical applications and "graduate" to database access and even sockets programming. http://phrogram.com/

From the article: "Actually, he said, nothing about the bomb is secret. He smiled and added, 'The secret of the atomic bomb is how easy they are to make.'"