Actually the argument against homeschooling is that the freedom and rights of the child have to be protected even against the rights of the parents. The children have the right and freedom to be educated about science, sexuality other religions etc. even if the parents belong to some religious sect or the other, which oppose these ideas. I find it ironic that the ones shouting the loudest against abortion, and about the rights of the unborn child, are also the ones most strongly opposed to legislation for protecting the rights of born children, because essentially their premise is that children are the property of their parents, which they should be allowed to education whichever way they please (including beating with a stick).

Well, if we use the inequality adjusted HDI the USA suddenly falls back to the 23rd place. So it's not really such a great place to life. Also about technology and science, I doubt that every time I sit in an american train.
And about the liberty-protecting Constitution, how's that working for the detainees in Guantanamo?

Except for the fact that in deep winter (obviously not a time of large photovoltaics energy production) France was importing electricity from Germany. http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/winterkaelte-franzosen-brauchen-deutschen-strom-a-814008.html (sorry only found german sources for this)

Unlike the nuclear industry who has not received any subsidies in the last 50 odd years.

Actually nuclear is not cheap at all. The return on investment which is pretty much the standard measure for how expensive a technology is is 5-10 for nuclear, similar to photovoltaics and coal/gas. Wind on the other hand has an ROI of 18-25, that means you actually have produced all the energy it takes to make and operate your wind turbine over its lifetime in about 2 years, after that it's all a positive energy (pun intented). Nuclear power plants on the other hand need about 30 years to break even. And all ROI and such calculations never include the cost of storage of nuclear waste, because it's such a difficult thing to calculate. (source:http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy)

As to the question of base load. If your grid is sufficiently large and good, and your fluctuating power sources such as wind and solar, do not follow the same circles, you don't need any base load at all. It's actually more efficient to not have base load. You can find several studies on this if you use google. Now the current problem with this approach is that electricity grids are neither good, nor smart enough.

You should really do your homework. First, for pretty much any power generation the cost of the plant is the main cost component both in terms of money and energy costs. So what the OP earlier said that the power is cheap once the plant is up and running is true for pretty much anything. Now, if we look at energy return i.e. the ratio of energy produced over the ratio of energy spend (for construction, maintenance, running and decommission) windpower beats all other means of producing energy by a large margin. The EROI of wind is ~18, for comparison hydro has about 12 and Nuclear is lower than PV-solar at about 5 or 6. That means if you build a windturbine after about 12-18 months(!) you are producing net energy. Now I admit energy cost is different than monetary cost, however they should be proportional to each other.

source:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy

It's actually quite simple, require nuclear power operators to get insurance to cover all possible costs of a nuclear disaster. Then they can operate. I have to get car insurance to cover the costs of a possible accident, so why not the nuclear industry? If nuclear becomes to expensive, tough luck. If they can't find an insurance tough luck.

What a bullshit study is that? Counting the deaths from steel production, building and maintenance for Wind and Solar, but only counting the deaths from chernobyl for nuclear. What does he think nuclear plants are build of?

Funny that you accuse the OP of logical fallacies whithout actually saying what the fallacy is. At the same time you're yourself "conduct" a logical fallacy yourself. Just because a news source as some (perceived) bias does not mean they are not correct, even correct in most of the cases. When will people learn that the truth is not always in between two extremes, but might be just as well at one extreme side. Also some source in the middle (moderate if you want to) has just as many motives as any source at the extremes, bottom line always double check.

Also how is double checking sources related to making ad hominem attacks acceptable? Yes double checking sources is good, especially if you are doubtful about their motives. However, even someone with doubtful motives can be correct. An ad hominem attack avoids the argument altogether and instead just attacks the person. So the OP was fully correct, it seems you should be doing some reading.

Wavelengths, we're pretty much always talking near-infrared. The most often used wavelength range is the so-called C-band (1530–1565 nm). This is mainly because this is where Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers work, which are necessary to create very long links without repeaters (also this is where the absorption minimum of fibres is). Less common is the L-band 1565-1625 nm. There's also the O and E band this are AFAIK mainly legacy bands which were used at the beginning of fibre optic communications. (Dense) Wavelength division multiplexing WDM/DWDM systems have channel spacings of 100 or 50 GHz bandwidth, i.e. ~1 or 0.5 nm at 1550 nm (look up ITU grid for more info). Today they usually carry 10 Gb/s data, however more and more 40 Gb/s and the next standard is 100 Gb/s (this actually uses multi-level phase and amplitude coding). About the pushing microwaves over optic lines, that's not really desired, absorption is too high, you also need diameters on the scale of a wavelength (depending on your index contrast) and finally you would not gain much, the bandwidth of your channels depends on your carrier frequency at microwave wavelengths the carrrier frequency is a couple of 100 GHz max. so that's the full bandwidth you get. compared to the C-band which contains about 70 channels at 100 GHz bandwidth each. So really no point.

For god's sake how's this modded insightful? They haven't come up with a falsifiable hypothesis?! Well tell me what the theory of AGW is? Also what's the point about about that they prove their assumptions by adding more data, you make it sound like they are searching for more data that supports their theory, like the data just magically appears out of thin air or something. Get a clue, the data comes from real sources, and yes they have added more and more data from more and more different sources and guess what it all supports the assumptions of AGW. That IS how you do science! And that is also how you come up with a scientific consensus. The anti-AGW folk or what you call them, have really had it easy in comparison, yes they only needed to come up with a clear falsification of AGW, but they haven't managed to do this. Instead they always repeat the same myths over and over again, "but, but ... the mid-evil warming period, ... sunactivity ..." all of which have been debunked over and over again. But fortunately thanks to "climategate" they don't need to make up scientific sounding arguments, they just shift to attacks on the integrity of the scientists

Quoted from an earlier post:

Yes clearly shows a strong environmentalist bias!

Have you ever looked at the sheer amount of knowledge that doctors have to know (and actually do know)? Yes they are learning baby physics and baby chemistry. We have physicists and chemists to do the non-baby physics and chemistry. You could also say the same thing for other sciences. I know friends who've taught physics to chemistry students and that was baby-physics which the chemists struggled to understand. Similarly I've had to learn chemistry for my physics degree and have pretty much forgotten almost anything about it, that didn't prevent me from getting a PhD in physics.
I wonder how much of the physics or chemistry out of your field of expertise you still remember.

Back to the topic of doctors, a lot of the stuff that doctors do is purely knowing things, but they need to do a lot of it. They don't necessarily know exactly how a drug works, they just know when to give that drug. So a lot of their work could be done with a very big flowchart, except for the fact that quite a lot is actually observation not just what you tell them.

I think you don't have a clue how doctors work. Do you really think doctors evaluate the effectiveness of a medicine by reading through scientific articles and possible even recalculating the results? No, they follow guidelines which are written by other medical people who's job is evaluating this sort of stuff. That is a good thing, because the people who make the guidelines actually do know their stuff and I trust them do to the statistics more than some doctor. The doctor's job is to know what tests to run, what symptoms to look for etc. Not to do a statistical analysis about the likelihood that you have disease X or Y.

Note that RAND can mean quite a lot of things and usually it is not exactly specified what RAND exactly means. IIRC there's been quite a few patent cases over what RAND is or not is. Also so far we don't have any proof that Apple really tried to license the GSM patents and Nokia indeed did want to charge "outrageous" fees, this is simply what Apple says and I'm inclined to take everything what either company says with a large grain of salt.
My personal suspicion is (and I don't really have anything to back this up), Nokia tried to licence the patents for a percentage of the revenue or the cost of the iphone, they possibly even do that for all phone makers. However because of Apple's comparetively high prices they would actually by significantly more than almost all other licencees. Now, is "1% of your phone price" reasonable and fair? I'd say you can argue both ways. What is actually also quite interesting, IIRC in Apples own documents they admit that they only approached Nokia for licences of the patents sometime after the iphone came out (I think it was actually a significant time after), that would mean they at least admit to having used Nokia patents for quite a while without a licence no matter what. I don't know what the usual policy for this sort of thing is though.