Ohio has always been ahead of the game in terms of online charter schools. I was traditionally homeschooled for the better half of my academic career. My brother went through junior high and highschool using various online solutions. From my understanding, no one was a big fan of ECOT. They provided severely underpowered machines, which were in fact locked down too much. At the time, their bureaucratic setup was confusing and stifled learning. It may have gotten better in the years since, but I can't recommend it based on what I've seen.

Following up on that, my brother also did two years with OHDELA. They had their act together much better than ECOT, but again, issued terrible hardware. This time however, it was a crummy iMac locked down even tighter than the Compaq mini towers ECOT gave out. Furthermore, OHDELA relied far too much on trying to simulate a traditional classroom. Mandatory chatrooms and timed virtual blackboards just got in the way of the original promise of working at your own pace. It may have benefited those that needed the help, but making it compulsory did more to slow my brother's progress than anything.

His final time was spent with an organization called Buckeye Online. They provided a fairly decent laptop computer (completely open!) and relied more on bookwork. This was exactly what my brother had wanted all along. He wasn't chained to a desk or required to participate in some simulated blackboard environment. All he had to do was read the chapter in his text book and then submit the corresponding lesson electronically. He blew through the material and graduated one year earlier than he would have otherwise.

Now again, a lot has probably changed since I watched my family work with these different organizations. Some may be better or worse than they were. Some of the points of contention that my brother had may be the exact thing that your child would prefer. The point is to study up on them before just blindly signing up. Most of them do offer seminars leading up to the traditional start of the school year. Go and listen, ask questions, discuss your concerns. It has been my experience that you'll usually have the ear of some of the more important people within the organization.

So can students be home-schooled electronically? Absolutely. I would say that the benefits far outweigh any negatives. Most of the perceived problems that people have with homeschooling can be quickly and easily remedied if you're not a lazy parent. Having an online support system, as provided by these institutions, definitely makes things easier. It's still not something you can just throw and your child and expect to happen. It's a framework for the parents to work within, to help out, to expand upon, and to monitor. Of course, any parent who takes their job seriously would be doing that anyway, even if their child went to a physical school.

Your suburbs and cities have already made large tracts of land unusable.

Isn't it time we have an open season on humans, then? They're grossly overpopulated and have become little more than ecological pests. Killing them in mass would free up a whole host of resources, while simultaneously helping solve world hunger.

Am I the only one that has seen the film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic? Only government-sponsored dolphins will be able to crack into Windows 8 with this enabled!

Don't kid yourself, marketing is the only reason Facebook exists. Just like any other "social" network, it's all about offering up a pipeline to consumers.

I live in a low income area. The large majority of the inhabitants are [i]generational[/i] welfare families. The only work they do is scamming pharmacies for Oxycontin to sell to other welfare persons. Or worse yet, robbing working folk to pay for their own pain pill habit. When they start to run low on monthly rations, they tend to pop out a fourth or fifth kid to gain further subsidies. Now I'm sure that there are some that are simply down on their luck and are trying to get their shit together, but they are the overwhelming minority.

Should they be sterilized? No, as the hope is for welfare programs to simply be a temporary safety-net. They should most certainly be required to take birth control however. [i]Real[/i] birth control, the kind you can't accidentally "forget" one morning. There are plenty of semiannual injections, for example. While we're at it, there should be mandatory drug testing every month as well. You slip up once (maybe twice) and you're out of the programs for life.

Social welfare programs are a wonderful thing in theory, but the abuse is widespread and really seems to do more harm than good in my neck of the woods. Stronger regulations and appropriate enforcement should be put into place so that the stereotypical system-abusing piece of white trash can be minimized. We need to be backing people as they recover from a bad hand being dealt to them by life. We don't need to put pill-billies on easy street for generations and let them drag down the rest of society with them.

A tablet isn't nearly as comfortable to read with as an e-reader. There's a lot to be said for the Nook's (and Kindle's) e-ink screen.

It's the perfect answer to everyone else's problems, though. With almost one trillion people on the face of the planet, sucking up resources, it's not going to hurt to lose some.

All suicide counselors should take this route. Either do or stop wasting everyone's time talking about it!

The best we can hope for is enough negative publicity to shut these annoying idiots down. I doubt it will happen... but one can hope.

Dreamhost is great! I've been using them for years to host about a dozen different sites. Nothing [i]quite[/i] as big as what the posters is looking for, but they do claim "unlimited space and traffic". If nothing else, their tech support is ridiculously amazing. When you contact them, you actually get someone that you can understand and that knows exactly what they're doing... even in some of the obtuse situations I've put them in. :)

Isn't that the problem? These corporation want to turn the internet into just another passive experience, like television or radio. All of the iTards out there are happy to go along with it, because as "creative" as they think they are, they're really just consumers with a credit line. Walled gardens stifle innovation by removing the power to creative from the hands of the individual and placing it solely in the palms of a select few groups. That's bad for everyone, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not.

You say that as if it's a bad thing.
I think you can stand to miss out on some of slow, boring, military propaganda that makes up video games nowadays.

Without living subjects? There are over 7 billion humans on the face of the planet. That sounds like plenty of living subjects to me. Pay the poor to be test subjects, give deathrow prisoners the choice to live by serving science, etc.

Hell, why not farm breed humans specifically for these types of experiments? If they're just uneducated, feral children then they're really no different than a chimp. Not a lot of people seem to have a problem with experimenting upon apes... but humans are off limits for some reason.

It's only an ethical problem for some. With over 7 billion humans on the face of the planet, it wouldn't hurt to start experimenting on some. Make it voluntary and pay well. Or better yet, put those deathrow prisons to use. Human life is worth no more or less than any other creature, as a general thing. The real problem is that only a select few corporations stand to profit from the outcome. No one is really in it for humanitarian reasons.