Folks have always been careful what kids are taught and always will be. This is just a tussle between schools and parents over what is important, and what will be taught. I'm rooting for the parents. Nobody is preventing you from making your kid read the books.

Highways? How fresh do you want your tomatoes? How long are you willing to wait for that UPS or FedEx delivery to get to your door? Just because the highway goes through a lot of countryside between Chicago and New York doesn't mean that the road is there just for the purpose of the rural countryside it goes thorugh.

Housing tax deduction? I wasn't aware that this was only allowed for rural housing?

In any case, what authority are you quoting about what is and is not part of a successful society?

Ok, I do agree that phone subsidies for Ted Turner's ranch and the old small airport are silly. And some year, it might be fixed. But remember that Congress just got around to removing a luxury tax on phones that was created during the Spanish-American war. So don't hold your breath.

Because the piston fighters can't stop your jet powered ground attack craft.

That sort of depends on what rockets and radar they carry. Certainly, the slow but numerous drones aren't going to get into a cannon fire dog fight, but if they can detect the manned fighters, a flood of missles might difficult for the fighter pilot to evade. I wonder how much our opponents are spending on swarm intelligence for such a plan.

Quantity has a quality all it's own.

fully functioning health care system

for some definition of 'fully functioning'. I don't consider any variation on the UK NHS to be 'fully functioning'.

Solar Powered roofs
Wind power
NEED I SAY MORE

Yup, A lot more. When those high winds blow down your windmills by the thousands, how long will it take to fix? When those high winds break up your solar panels with tree limbs and bricks from the neighbors now busted chimney, how long will it take to replace half the solar panels in the neighborhood?

Maybe you'll be the lucky one and your power will be OK, but there will still be millions without power for weeks if they all rely on solar and wind. Now maybe if they all had a natural gas or propane driven generator, they'd all be OK too.

Typing in a few keywords is close enough to CLI for the purpose of this argument. And that fact that most folks don't use the more complex stuff merely means that the CLI for google search is well matched to the task at hand. It's a really poor CLI that requires the use of the complex bits of syntax for simple requests.

You can recover data from metal dust? A few seconds with a grinder on the disk faces should work quite well. Disassembly and physical destruction doesn't seem the easiest way, but it would work.

Why do republicans always side with large corporations?

The same reason the Democrats do - fund raising. It's not like the Dem's don't have their own corporate favorites, like GE, who wangled waivers from ObamaCare. They now even have their own version of crooked corporate friends in Solyndra.

Obama is a politician, anything good becomes public quickly, whatever is hidden isn't so good. If he had earned straight As, it would have been a NYTimes headline for a month before the 2008 election, just to prove how much smarter than Bush he was.

Since power plants aren't things that you can just switch on and off on a whim,

Time to turn in your nerd license while you take a refresher EE/power course. Peaking plants, often natural gas burning turbines, are designed to be turned on and off as needed.

There may be idle machinery, but no wasted electrical potential. What do you think all those thousands of power EEs do with their time if not make sure the grid is reasonably efficient?

http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/07/05/u-s-navys-brand-new-aluminum-ship-foiled-by-seawater/

Rust no, but oxidize yes.

The question isn't one of models, but of facts. Professor Richard Lindzen has a recent paper out that shows that 16 different climate models predict a positive feedback effect in the upper atmosphere, while the satellite record shows a negative feedback.

Hmmm. So agreeing with Richard Lindzen (MIT Professor of Meteorology) that the facts don't all agree with AGW makes you a Republican and an anti-science type? Seems to me to be an ignorant position on your part.

What you suggest might happen in the emergency room is charity. And since when did any offer of charity return a right of control over the charity recipient? That doesn't happen under any set of ethics or morals I know of. Nor is forcing the hospital to give free service a charitable act.

Only a slave owner has the right to demand products or services be given to him or her as a right. There is no right to health care in a free society.

It's the reason for Henry Petroski's famous remark that "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."

Hmm.. Just maybe that extra cycle time might now be spent doing something constructive that we did not do when cycle time was dear? Sending and receiving email used to be quite cheap. But add in cryptographic signatures (rfc 4871) and the cycle time spent on one piece of mail goes up an order of magnitude.

The software industry would be derelict if it didn't try to find something useful and profitable to do with the extra cycles granted it. Well, I suppose there are exceptions. I find youtube.com to be useful, even if Google doesn't find it profitable.