I've found a way to listen to vinyl and cassettes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Ridiculous, but cool.

I used to have one of those. From it I learned how to recognise the german label for 'Do not remove this retaining screw, the mechanism is spring loaded and will launch delicate parts at your face.'

I used it for a while, even though the sound was poor, just because I did like to have it running in the background and it looked cool. But it had no collector/ebay value, and I couldn't justify the price to replace another failed drive belt when my mobile phone and some cheap external speakers actually sounded better.

20KHz. The 'extra' 2KHz is to allow for the limitations of analog processing. No filter can be perfect, so you need a little padding to allow for that.

Nuclear also has a PR problem. It scares people - and if it scares people, politicians end up following the will of the people for once.

Look at Fukushima, for example. It was a media-fest for weeks. Minimal release of radiation, no nuclear-related fatalities, no land left unusable for a thousand years - but even so there was more coverage of that plant than all the rest of the tsunami damage put together. It was a bit hairy for a time when they needed to bring in emergency pumps for the cooldown, but even that was only due to a problem with the outdated plant putting all their cooling pumps in one place - not an issue with newer designs. You can blame the media for a lot of the panic, but they just can't resist a story about nuclear catastrophy. Even when there isn't actually a catastrophy, they still try to hype it up.

Even China is starting to lessen their population control program now. It was only intended to prevent a period of explosive growth that could otherwise outpace the country's ability to industrialise and construct infrastructure - and then to be abandoned once the population stabilised naturally.

The Nazis were also strongly opposed to abortion* and homosexuality, and frequently spoke of the richness of German Christian heritage and declared themselves a Christian party. Sound a lot like the American right-wing?

Or - and here is a notion that many may find strange - could it be that the left-vs-right divide is rather artificial, and not all political parties can be neatly fitted into one of two buckets?

*Though they did make exceptions for their eugenics programs, abortion was otherwise strictly prohibited.

That's one of the best parts. Pregnancy is very, very stressful on a woman's body. So much so that in the US, the maternal mortality rate is actually greater than the mortality rate for abortion. Every time a woman dies following complications of abortion it gets widely reported all through the right-wing media - and it's true, some women do die as a consequence of abortion. But even if you ignore the ones conducted for medical reasons and include only the electives, it still saves more women than it kills.

You're right. Simply banning abortion doesn't get through courts, so the accepted pro-life strategy is to make sure abortion is legal yet as impractical as possible. They pass safety standards for clinics that are impossible to meet. They pass requirements that doctors have admitting privilege at a nearby hospital, knowing that many hospitals will refuse to grant such to any doctor who performs elective abortion. They mandate patients be emotionally blackmailed by forcing them to look at 3D ultrasounds for no medical purpose and require doctors tell lies about abortion causing breast cancer. This all in turn affects the position of the pro-choice faction: Many of them don't actually like the idea of abortion on demand, but they feel they have to support it anyway, knowing that any victory for the pro-life side is just going to serve to justify the next restriction they try to impose, and the next, until they reach their ultimate objective of a country where abortion is legal but not a single doctor will perform the procedure.

When a person poses an undeniable danger to the life of health of others and actively tries to prevent action to mitigate this danger, what other option is there?

The best you can do is put them in a comfortable, luxury quarantine center. They've committed no intentional crime.

Then they can get a medical note from a doctor.

Me too. We're using that approach for the HPV vaccination now.

Note that there has been absolutely no religious outrage at all about the vaccine 'endorsing sin.' This says a lot about the cultural difference between the US and the UK.

The courts don't, but there was political intervention in that case. Someone from the DHS got involved and declared that even though the family are technically in violation of the law, said law won't be enforced in this case. It appears the media coverage got them some friends in high places.

I've read some unreliable stories by homeschooling parents who really did have academic concerns. They find another problem: There is a support community for homeschoolers, with books an courses - but because the overwhelming majority of them are religiously or politically motivated, so is that community. There's no support for anyone who wants to homeschool for other reasons. You go to any homeschooling community, and you'll find them promoting books about literal creation and implicit american exceptionalism throughout.

There's also a very small number of people who have to homeschool because conventional education isn't available - severe disability with no local specialist schools, or behaviorial issues which resulted in expulsion from all public schools within range.

Basic information theory says this approach is going to have some trouble.

There was/is a p2p network, the OFF system, which was based around a similar idea. All it ever exchanged was random data. Two random blocks, XORed together, made the desired data - all you needed to know was which blocks. It was basically a technological cheat to subvert the legal system. Sneaky, but courts tend to frown on systems which are clearly designed to subvert the intent of a law.

You can see the same thing in the US debates on abortion and gun control. Both sides are afraid of incrimentalism by the other, which compels them to adopt the extremist position in order to prevent that strategy working.