It's not that simple as you think. The obvious advantage of "unschooling" I can see is that it takes full advantage of kids' natural curiosity. The traditional education of the shove-boring-facts-down-kids'-throats kind completely obliterates any curiosity very fast. But. Parents have to provide guidance in order to make unschooling work. When parents don't or can't provide guidance, kids can easily take the wrong approach to the task, become overwhelmed and lose interest. Parents also have to provide intellectual stimulation in order to point their kids' curiosity in the right direction (at least indirectly by asking the right questions or buying the right books).

So I do believe that it's completely possible to raise a naturally curious kid into illiterate adult even without any abuse. When kids grow up in an environment which completely lacks any intellectual stimulation and parental guidance (specifically of the intellectual kind), they'll turn their curiosity towards some other activity and give up on intellectual achievements. Later, when they start going to school, their late start will bring them bad grades, which will demoralize them even further and make them hate education. Kids can't get curious about reading when there's literally nothing to read in their home. And they'll begin to hate reading if you force them to read under threat (of bad grades). But again, the problem is in learned behavior, not genes.

That's how I learned English. My native language (Czech) belongs to the Slavic family so it has very little in common with Germanic and Romance languages. I strongly recommend this TED talk about learning languages: How to learn any language in six months. When you play games where you don't need to understand a word of the text to get the meaning (e.g. the first Diablo, various shooter and action games, etc.), you slowly learn vocabulary. When you soak up enough vocabulary, you'll start figuring out the grammar. And then you're ready to play language-heavy RPG games like Fallout (1 and 2, I've never played Fallout 3) and various adventure games.

And since you're probably not familiar with Czech, here's the previous paragraph one more time in Czech (loosely translated sans accents because unicode makes /. barf) so you can try for yourself if you can understand it:

Takhle jsem se naucil anglicky. Muj rodny jazyk (cestina) patri mezi slovanske jazyky, takze s germanskymi a romanskymi jazyky nema moc spolecneho. Vrele doporucuji tuhle TED prednasku o uceni jazyku: Jak se naucit libovolny jazyk za sest mesicu. Kdyz hrajete hry, ve kterych nemusite rozumet ani slovu, abyste pochopili vyznam textu (napriklad prvni Diablo, ruzne strilecky a akcni hry atd.), tak se pomalu ucite slovni zasobu. Kdyz pak nacerpate dostatecnou slovni zasobu, zacnete postupne chapat i gramatiku. A potom muzete zacit hrat jazykove narocna RPG jako Fallout (1a 2, Fallout 3 jsem nikdy nehral) a ruzne adventury.

UK and Poland didn't adopt the EU charter of fundamental rights so they can just ignore this ruling. But the rest of EU must follow it, including Czech republic which finally decided to adopt the charter as well.

Well, here in Czech republic, the previous prime minister's party went from 2nd place with 20.22% of votes in 2010 (with tiny difference between 1st and 2nd place) to 5th place with 7.72% in 2013 early elections, barely making the election threshold of 5%. So yes, there's still hope at least for my country. It doesn't guarantee that the next guy in power will be sane, but at least it's nice to know that voters can actually kick the worst ones out really hard when they run out of patience.

Picard listening to Tamarians before his camping trip.

Mybitcoin.com copycat scam, right on schedule.

Sorry but you don't understand even the complete basics of genetics. Time-bomb crops wouldn't be that dangerous in the wild even if they actually existed. It's extremely unlikely that a significant portion of normal crop population would become contaminated by time-bomb genes in just a few years. And two plants with both normal and time-bomb genes still have 25% chance of producing completely clean offspring.

Also, the chance of infertile hybrid turning into multigeneration time-bomb is practically zero. It's much easier to simply break the reproductive system completely than to build a generation countdown into it.

MAFIAA does all of the above all the time. MAFIAA holds copyright to everything they've funded, not the authors (while most authors technically own the copyright, they had to assign complete control over it to MAFIAA to get funding). So I fail to see your point.

Neither of the above options.

The law should be written so that commercial distributors need to sign a contract with the author and the author can't block it by making absurd demands. The law should be intentionally vague so that judges have enough space for punishing the side that's being unreasonable. If the distributor is trying to avoid paying anything, the judge should include every last cent that can be linked to the work in question in the base revenue from which the author will get a share and set the author's percentage high. On the other hand if the author is trying to block the contract, the judge should set a very low percentage and exclude any money from the base revenue where the link with the work in question isn't absolutely clear. In case of orphan works, if the distributor puts into escrow the usual percentage he pays to other authors, judges should uphold that as "good enough" when the author later shows up and asks for more (but that doesn't mean the author can't negotiate a higher percentage of future revenues or some other formula for calculating payments in his contract).

BTW, payright is equally clear in what is and isn't covered - commercial use is covered, anything else is not. The only thing that isn't clear is how much it will cost the distributor if he doesn't sign a contract first. On the bright side, the judge can't make you pay millions when you didn't make a single cent.

Before you start speaking about ripping artists off, read this article. Nobody is entitled to hold our culture hostage for his own profit. If the law says otherwise, the law needs to change.

This trend stopped in the USA and many other western countries sometime in the late 1980s. According to official statistics, real wages of poor and middle classes have stagnated since then. In other words, the poor and middle classes lost as much actual income as they gained indirectly through technology.

Yes. Give everybody more cash and you get inflation. Take cash away from middle class and you get deflation. But the vast majority of economists is scared shitless of deflation. The government and central banks have tools to curb inflation if it gets out of hand. But if deflation sets in, the only thing they can do is sit back and watch things falling apart, because they'll be completely powerless.

Which is completely besides the point when we talk about quality from the end-users' perspective. The fact is that MAFIAA has complete control over mainstream distribution channels. So all the independent high-quality content that never reaches most of its target audience is irrelevant.

If patents lasted more than a century and we were still living in the age of steam today because of it, it'd be equally hard to tell what today could look like with reasonable patent law. Progress of art mostly follows economic development (which allows more funding). But increase in quantity doesn't always result in increase of quality.

Keep your ad hominem attacks to yourself. Thank you.

Yes, but the culture committee, which was famous for its artistic ignorance and incompetence, didn't contribute to that in the slightest.