Only the drug-loving hackers go to defcon!

Where do you live that there are still payphones? Its pretty rare these days.

Why would you ever take it out? I've found SD storage to be incredibly useful on tablets, I've also found USB useful as I take thumb drives from the cad guy and copy drawings to the tablet.

This is not true, if you skip two upgrades then you have to pay the upgrade costs in between. A friend of mine just ran into this. It's especially great for her before the old version isn't sold in stores so she had to special order it.

That's pretty funny, I always hear this argument, except that my girlfriend recently had a pretty bad fall and waited several hours to see someone anyway. So in a first world nation with insurance we're still waiting, so why not insure everyone again? Why force people into bankruptcy or worse?

Interacting with unpleasant people is indeed a skill one learns from school. Social skills are a lot more than just making friends but you can see interacting with your peers, some of which will like or dislike you for no good reason as creepy if you like.

Bullies are alive and well in corporate America, you need to learn how to deal with them at some point. Why not learn among people with which you will have equal footing rather than in corporate America where you start out as a peon.

Also note, I didn't say social skills were the only value of the school system.

Yes, there are standards that are more accepted than others. IPv4 and IPv6 are pretty well accepted standards though, same with FTP, TFTP. telnet, ssh, ntp, and a myriad of other standards out there. Standards are necessary to ensure minimum levels of compatibility, so while my browser may not support every standard it definitely supports the majority of scenarios much like our education standards are supposed to do for us. This means that a student from Kansas can work with a student from California or Poland as they all have a minimum base education to work from.

Last I checked kids that go to school still see their parents only a daily basis. Parents are free influence their children all they like, that's why home schooling is allowed. There are no limitations, only minimum standards which I can't fathom how that would be a bad thing. School has a lot of purposes, everything from teaching specific subjects, to social skills.

Fortunately, people that control public school districts have to answer to a lot of people including the local community, this is why you have a local school board and supervisory roles that ensure individual schools maintain minimum standards. This means that local people get a say in how their kids are educated and federal standards ensure that they will be competitive with their peers from other regions.

In this particular case making a difference means ensuring that kids get a better education now than in the past, you know, improving the system. A system doesn't have to be perfect to be a good thing, as it evolves you move towards better and better education which then elevates society as educated people become more productive and advance the country further.

Freedom is not a purpose, it is a state of being. You are not free to make your choices if you are too uneducated to know what your choices are. So I would argue this removes freedom for people to pursue their own happiness. This is based on the assumption that without enforcable standards that the number of people educated will decline significantly.

That would also restrict worthy people from making a difference thus defeating the whole purpose in the first place.

Private school systems actually have to live up to certain standards set forth for accredidation. That is why they still teach science as science, many certainly do inject creationism as well.

The reason people think religious nuts would take over is stemmed from history when religious nuts took over. Take a look at the history of the education system and you will surely understand why people feel this way. It happened before, remove government and there is nothing stopping it from happening again.

Are you purposely being obtuse on this? Do you have any concept of how education worked before the school "system" was established? This is complete non-sense of the worst kind as it would doom us to repeat the past where the vast majority of the country went uneducated and then comes all the sweeping problems associated with the uneducated masses such as massively increased crime rates across the board and vastly increased numbers of people in poverty.

A school is a lot more than just a teacher and students. This myopic attitude needs to go away as it is detrimental to the well being of a lot of children out there who's parents are either too busy or too stupid to teach their kids themselves.

Standards are well accepted on the Internet, I wonder why there is such resistance to the same things in the real world...

That's cool, what about the billions in tax payer subsidies to pay for it as well?

Given that the government produced Reefer Madness which had hysterical views on marijuana use you can't blame people for being skeptical when they usually have their own personal experience to draw upon which counters the research which almost universally stacks the deck in their favor.

I'm not sure how many teenagers smoke weed for times a week, that would be a pretty expensive hobby to keep up.

You might also note that there are many articles about professional, highly educated women in the work place who smoke regularly. This real world evidence would run counter to this study.

As for Wikileaks tangent, most people believe that people are innocent until proven guilty so yes, until there is evidence presented people will think that way about Assange.

There has even been articles here on Slashdot about the percentage of IT workers that smoke, if all of these highly intellectual trades contains smokers then it appears the onus is on the study to counter those real life claims before trying to correlate IQ with smoking.

I don't think it's a conspiracy that the DEA for instance would be an advocate for their work. At that point it's them doing their jobs as the executive branch has directed them to do. Until the presidency wants to change the policy you will continue to see justifications no matter how bogus they are. Countering decades of bad science backed early by a political agenda will take a long time. The initial evidence used to make marijuana illegal is pretty incredible if you ever care to investigate yourself. Once you do you'll start to understand why peope feel the way they do whether they are right or wrong.

It is exceedingly difficult to manufacture a vaccine without some sort of preservative. Usually the preservative is what provokes allergic reactions. There are also other compounds which can cause it necessary to stabilize the vaccine. Most vaccines are not just dead viruses. There are valid reasons for a very small portion of the population to not get immunized. That is why it's so important for the rest of us to get vaccinated.