The whole point is moot anyway until life is discovered on other planets. Does the Vatican just think that we're close to that discovery? Why debate something that is still hypothetical when making a decision now will affect absolutely nothing.

I'm not quite so sure that every president ignored nuclear power. For example, I know Reagan pushed for it in California at the very least. I think it's safe to say that the people of the US as a whole were afraid of it and therefore ignored it as a viable option.

My experience is my evidence, but you have yet to cite anything except unjustified opinion and I'm tired of hearing people who are prejudiced right from the start. I even qualified my statement by saying that perhaps it is just that like-minded people hang around each other so maybe I didn't have a broad enough sampling.

It just seems as though you're making broad, all-encompassing statements as though you know exactly what is happening in every home-schooling family. You don't, and neither do I. My main point still stands: you cannot say that "most" parents just goof-off. It's analogous to me telling you that most parents who send their kids to public school don't care about their education. There is nothing to show that. The evidence is quite to the contrary, be it personal experience or statistical.

I'm still not trying to make the claim that home-schooled children will always be better equipped. However, they are not nearly as ill-equipped as some people make them out to be. Keep an open mind.

My own experience being home-schooled was quite the opposite. I had been accustomed to poring over books for hours without a break and to see students in class, checking their cell phones, working out crosswords, and showing a complete lack of respect..... well it was appalling quite frankly.

And there's another thing. Perhaps this was again just my experience but I found that I had the ability to actually teach myself things because I would read the textbooks. Most of my undergraduate classmates seemed to have missed out on this. So rather than being "woefully unprepared" for higher education, I found myself more prepared than 99% of my classmates.

I wonder how you can definitively say that "most home schooling parents do goof off." How many families have you observed?

I am currently a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and I know of two other homeschoolers beside myself in the college of engineering. I was the top graduate in electrical engineering, one of the others I knew was the top Junior (I reviewed GPAs for an honor society) and a third is a WW Allen Scholar and is a very bright, hard-working individual in Chemical Engineering. I'm sure there are others that I don't know about and I'm sure there are some who are not so hard-working or smart. But out of my sampling of three, "most" (none really) seemed to have parents who goofed off.

Being a home-schooler myself I have actually come into contact with a lot of families who home-school and of the 20 high-school-age children or so that I know personally in town, 4 of them were National Merit Scholars and the rest have been accepted with scholarships to various universities. Again, where is your proof of "most parents" goofing off?

I do not doubt that there are some. In my experience meeting with well over 50 home-school families and over 100 kids I never had that experience. Maybe because we were all like-minded, I don't know. I have only ever met one person that knew someone who did "goof off" as a home-schooling parent. So to provide an omniscient blanket statement that says "most home schooling parents goof off" seems quite a stretch to me.

Every parent I know who home schools, does it because they /want/ their children to have a better education, not because they want to be lazy. And with the amount and type of material out there, parents don't have to be geniuses themselves. My mother didn't know beyond basic Algebra but through the curriculum she bought I was able to learn Calculus at about 14. So please, don't make general accusations without any evidence. In fact, the evidence is quite the opposite than what presupposed notions would indicate.

The point of that statement was to say that not all (or even necessarily most) scientists are agreed. It drives me up a wall when people make that broad claim. If they mean climatologists then that should be specified.

Excellent post. The question really is whether humans are causing it or whether it is merely a part of earth's natural cycle.

And I would like to point out that it is not yet a consensus among scientists that global warming is not part of a natural cycle, or that humans are causing it. According to the survey cited in this article:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
Climatologists are 97% agreed that humans are causing it, Petroleum geologists are at 47% and meteorologists are at 64%. I think engineers would be even more skeptical though one might argue that they don't have the expertise. And consensus alone doesn't mean anything. When one is among a group of people wearing rose-coloured lenses, one tends to view everything through rose-coloured lenses. Everything then begins to look like human-caused global warming.

Regardless of whether it is true or not, the way that most countries are going about it is almost laughable. At least they are trying to do something but no one talks about whether it is most the most cost-effective method. For example, spending millions to cut down on emissions from vehicles in the UK. It's admirable, but how much does it all help? Will it prevent global warming by even one hundredth of one degree C during the next ten years? Highly unlikely. Yet if they were to paint the streets white to reflect sunlight, that could potentially help a lot more and be significantly cheaper.

Here is a highly recommended video on alternative solutions:
http://reason.tv/video/show/621.html

I worked for MyLaptopGPS.com for a couple of years. They do pretty much what is being asked, offering the ability to delete certain files and even transfer files off of the laptop before deletion. This is in addition to the tracking-over-IP ability.

I saw some other comments to the effect that most thieves don't try to reformat, look for covert software, or things like that. That's true based on my experience. Most thieves either want to resell or use it.

This is actually the point that I was going to bring up. As a EE I was working on a project that would put active RFID tags in cattle. Also, my parents own a cattle ranch and I grew up working with cattle. In most of the midwest there are many small ranchers with a few hundred acres and just a few hundred head of cattle. They operate on a very slim margin, looking for a few cents gain per pound. To implement a tagging system, even at a cost of a mere $20 per head would put many of these ranchers out of business. They already have to deal with vaccines, winter hay etc. Plus, the cattle are spread out fairly wide. Where this system makes far more sense is inside feed lots where one reader could service an entire pen and the cattle are routinely sent through the chutes for weekly or monthly weighings and could be scanned as they went through.

I just want to point out that there is a tremendous difference between saying that evolution is undoubtedly false (and one should believe creationism), and saying that evolution might NOT be true.

We could never say for sure that all life came from a single organism. We can never go back in time and see whether animals did evolve the way we think they did.

I mean, being willing to question our theories is what makes science, science. If no one had questioned Newtonian physics (though it had been established and universally accepted for years) then we never would have developed to the state we are now.

This topic isn't about the Flood so I hesitate to reply here, but in case you are actually interested:

1. The Bible does not go into technical details but it is not inconceivable to imagine that at one point the earth did not have such high mountains. The point of mentioning that the mountains were covered was not to show the amount of water, but to show that no one could have survived.

2. I'm also told that there is a huge amount of water underground these days. Possibly there was not so before the Flood.

3. Shortly after the Flood account there is mentioned a man named "Peleg because in his days the earth was divided." This could possibly be a reference to violent upheavals when earth's plates actually shifted considerably. This could have given some of the high mountains we see today.

4. Nearly every major civilization has a "flood" account somewhere, perhaps as legend or on a cave wall or something. This would be expected if these races actually did all descend from the Ark's survivors, as the Bible claims.

I don't know which "God" you are referring to, but the Bible actually explains this with the Great Flood. I personally have found sand dollar and clamshells on the top of a mountain I was hiking. These got there somehow. Only some cataclysmic event would seem to explain it.