Octavia Butler would be a key (and mind-altering) example of one black woman's perspective on cultural as different from "hard" sf. I'd start with the Patternist series (available in one book) which blew my mind.

Ursula LeGuin would be a great one too.

And Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin, for it's handling of created language as resistance.

And for gosh-sakes the more-recent Perdido Street Station by China Miéville would surely be memorable, as would John C. Wright's Golden Age, the great hyper-punk masterpiece.

If words are created by usage, unschooling is a word. I was actually surprised that the idea was new to Slashdot. The term's thirty years old, and it seems so close to the "DIY" ethic often lauded here. I first heard about it when I saw the entertaining "Teenage Liberation Handbook" fifteen years ago.

I totally support parents choices and different kids' needs. My own eight year old twin daughters weren't doing badly in school, but one was starting to fall behind in math and spelling, and really having a hard time dealing with that emotionally. Our kids are nice and well behaved, so the teachers aren't able to offer special attention (they're not causing problems, you know?) So this year we're opting to support her to do better at home, and we'll see how it goes.

We're in Vancouver, Canada and they were in French Immersion, so we're getting them a Francophone art-teacher tutor. We read a lot, we're working on math, they are interested, I'm not worried as long as their mom and I have the privilege to spend the time with them. For now we're all giving it a try.

It's obviously not something every family can do, but it's not an idea to be dismissed. They invented public school so parents could work, (since child-labor laws made them hire adults.) It's hard to find time to really support kids' education whether they're in school or not. Some successful kids do well in school, some are bored but get through it, some (like Einstein) fail and might have done better without school at all.

I think it would be quite interesting to have all public officials tested for this abnormality. From president/PM to beat cop and judges. Gotta start somewhere.

I support your plan to take away rights, you go first.

I thought cocaine was schedule 2 because it has approved medical uses, like as an anesthetic during eye surgery? If it didn't, I'm sure it would be sched 1. And if they were reasonable, heroin might be sched 2 with usage as a pain med for at least terminal patients, but they might become addicts.

If by "we" you mean "the USA," then "we" are already the largest exporter of arms (mostly small arms) to the rest of the world. Most of these got to thugs and dictators who are all about killing starving people, our kind of customers. It doesn't seem to be working, if anything such policies destabilize societies and lead to higher population growth due to uncertainty.

Not like it's really relevant, but in court I once saw a man approach the judge and set his cell-phone down in front of himself on the stand. Then while answering the questions the judge asked, he said he didn't have an address or phone number!

I've always been curious what the judge would have said had they noticed the phone sitting there in front of the guy. But I was either not a snitch, or next in line and too nervous to say anything.

I believe anonymous violation of a law you believe to be unjust can be a valid form of protest. If enough people started flaunting copyright laws (or whatever other law) it would bring the issue to a head and cause a response or change.

Clearly the fact that upsets the RIAA etc isn't that downloaders are anonymous, it's that they're losing money. File sharing will have "won" when enough people do it, even if they don't have an ideology to back it up. Casual human behavior changes the world all the time. I don't know if it's good or not, but it does seem to be happening.

In Ecco the Dolphin on the Playstation, you could slip through a glitch in one of the high-speed tubes in the Hanging Gardens level and fly your little dolphin in the air all around the difficult maze of waterslides. It was pretty, way up high. I only managed it once accidentally, and there was no way to get back in.

There were more such "backstage" glitches, but that's the most spectacular.
  http://web8.orcaserver.de/ecco/glitches/ (They don't seem to have this exact one, hmmm.)

If a company owns the patent on the gene that makes me sick, can I sue them for causing my illness?

Corporations function as legal fictional entities. They pay taxes out of their income or wealth just like a real person. Legally they surely do pay taxes (or dodge them.)

Now, usually they are owned by individuals who use them to share (and avoid) responsibility for the corporation's actions. Those shareholders do end up gaining or losing relative to corporate taxes. The management (hired by the shareholders) may try to pass those tax expenses off to the customers, cut salaries and expenses, or cut shareholder profits and dividends.

So it's simplistic to say "corporations don't pay taxes." Then how can they make cars or have chain-stores or make life-saving (or not) new drugs? They do, otherwise, who legally owns all the stuff corporations own? They exist, they pay taxes, and I suppose they can even die can't they?

What seems to be happening here is that shareholders are getting the benefit when corporations avoid taxes on the profits from money they invest. They could invest locally and pay local taxes, but they funnel money off through a tax-haven to... dodge taxes. So, it ain't me who's gonna pay for taxing some scammer corporation. If they have to raise their prices to pay for inflated corporate profits, then I won't buy their stuff.

The clearest account of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle is probably the study by the RAND corporation, they are not a hippy-dippy group. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/MR1382.ch7.pdf They found that clearly, the police started assaulting non-violent crowds before any windows were broken. The crowds were sitting down blocking access to the convention center, and the Seattle PD and co started gassing, pepper-spraying, and beating them at about 9 AM. The window-smashing started later. There was a small group (maybe a hundred out of 30,000 demonstrators) who did plan to spray-paint and break windows. I think that was dumb myself, it obviously muddied the violence the police were engaging in. The police lost all tactical control the didn't have a plan by then (they never confronted the window-smashers at all). And later they chased a bunch of people into Capitol Hill, panicked when locals were angry at them, and tear-gassed a residential neighborhood. Since then we've seen several things: 1. cops try to preemptively intimidate and arrest people (months or years later, these are thrown out of court.) 2. They usually are more agressive at the beginning of an event (like the RNC), and then they get milder, like they've "learned from their mistakes." This might take the sting off, but it seems to be a pattern, so I wonder if it is a planned tactic. Also, at the RNC in Philadelphia in 2000, the city took out insurance to pay for possible constitutional rights violations. I call that premeditation, and the city and the insurer should be liable. Blah, blah, rant rant. The Rand Corp. document really is an interesting play by play. I think the people giving orders should go to jail.