You asked how the Texas School Board was promoting revisionist history that was out of touch with the facts. I'll cite one example: The Texas School Board asserts that the founders didn't mean to have a strong seperation between church and state. The facts are they embedded in the Consitution in the last paragraph of Article 6 that there will be no religious test to hold any office reaching all the way down to state legislatures. And, as is much better known, the first amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. These mean that not only can a Bhudhist, a Hindu, an Athiest, a Jain or an adherent of any other religion can hold office and that they may not pass any law or regulation that respects or with respect to any religion. Further, many of the founders clearly were not fans of religion. One quote I remember from Thomas Jefferson (you may have heard of him and his impact as one of the founders, although the Texas School Board seems to want to eliminate mention of his influence) is: "In every day and every age the priests have been the enimies of liberty." It's not well known - one has to dig into the facts of the time, that is, do a little historical research - to know that until 1790, the residents of MA were being taxed by the gov't to support the Calvinist (Puritan) church, a practice that was stopped due to the founders insistance on a seperation between church and state. This is just one example of the efforts by the Texas school board to play fast an loose with the facts in order to promote their conservative religious ideology. There are other examples. For instance, the TSB wants to call the Atlantic Slave Trade the "Atlantic Triangle Trade." It was, in fact, a slave trade. To sugar coat these kinds of things prevents our children from leaning about the corrosive effects of slavery and racism in American history and how we can make this great country even greater if we are aware of our past, both the glorious as well as the inglorious aspects.

I wonder if the proponents of the new Texas standards have ever actually read the Constitution. In particular, the last paragraph of Article 6 includes "...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." That means that a Hindu, Bhudist, Athiest, Jain or the adherent of any religion, or lack thereof, may assume any office from local congressman or judge on up. And certainly none would be allowed to administer or legislate his religion into law or policy by the 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Seems to me, Congress is not even allowed to respect religion, let alone be guided by it or create any policy or law based on its religious origins. Of course, conservative activist judges may see this differently as many have over the years.

Firstly, I would queston your definition of a bigot. But let's go with it for a second. The reason most folks replying to this development don't qualify as bigots is that irrationality, required in your definition, is not part of thier arguments. The fact is, the Texas school board is teaching a revisionist history that is out of touch with the facts. The founding fathers really did intend a strong seperation of church and state. Ever read the Consitituion? It's in there in the statement that there will be no religious qualificacion for any federal office, which to them included congressional reps, as well as in the first ammendment which prohibited any law respection an establishment of religion. Pretty strong stuff. Further, renaming the slave trade the "Atlantic triangle trade" belies the point that the Southern economy, of which Texas was a part, prior to the Civil War was all about slaves and cotton, the latter not being nearly as profitable without the former. It's interesting that the new Texas standards require comparing Jeff Davis's inaugural with Lincoln's. They should compare the US Constitution with the Confederate Constitution (easily available on the web). The later is almost identical to the former except that the CSA Constitution enshrines slavery such that it may never be challenged. And of course, in my opinion, the Southern states, Texas included, forever gave away any claims the protection of thier "cherished institutions" on the basis of "States Rights" with the Dred Scott decision of 1856 in which they tried to cram slavery down the throats of all the Northern states in spite of any of their anti-slavery laws by saying that Southern Slavery could be enforced in the North because "...no negro had any rights that a white man was bound to respect." So, yes, folks who criticize the Texas school board's new standards on the basis that they are dishonest with the history of the country are not bigots by your definition because they are not irrational, a description that applies much more aptly to those on the Texas School Board who pushed these new standards through.

Fox "News" has shown repeatedly that they cannot seperate opinion from fact. I have now problem with them having any opinion they want, but they cannot make up their own facts, which they habitually do. That makes thier opinions suspect.

Having worked in a company that makes Ethernet adapters that implements IPsec offload, I can tell you EXACTLY what's holding up encryption across the network: Cisco and possibly a few other network hardware vendors. The problem is that they can't see into encrypted traffic, and they want to "own the network". If they can't see into the traffic for deep packet inspection, route optimization, traffic steering, etc. all their fancy hardware becomes pretty neigh useless. And encrypted traffic cannot be viewed by "lumps in the network". And these "lump makers" are, unfortunately, influential enough to make commercial implementation difficult by others. In fact, the best, most effective encryption is done as high up the stack as possible so as to protect the traffic from as many lower layers as possible. And, if you study the problem carefully, you'll see that you actually need encryption at several layers to properly protect the entire attack surface. But you either have to do this cleverly with existing protocols - possibly getting into vendor-specific solutions that would need to be standardized, - or create new protocols. Just applying SSL/TLS to everything is not the answer. As I said, solutions exist even at some large companies that could bring them to market inspite of Cisco. But to bring them to market, there needs to be some market pull from the user community for effective cross-network encryption, which, so far, does not exist.

I spend a year studying for my computer science degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara at the University College of Wales in Aberystwith. It was one of the best years of my life, and, in addition to leaning a lot about the subject, I learned about it from a non-US-centric point of view, which was quite interesting. I also learned a lot about the local culture (Aberystwith had a non-university population of about 15,000 and 41 pubs) and made some life-long friends. If an opportunity to study abroad lands in your lap, you'd be a fool not to grab it with both hands and squeeze all you can out of it. You will be learning computer science for the rest of your career, but you don't get many chances to live in a student community in another country.

I'll keep this short. Firstly, "basic reasoning skills" as a bar is, as you seem to agree, arbitrary and difficult to define. Age, on the other hand, is objective and is based on our legal traditions going back centuries. It is also the basis of a legal definition of adulthood implying enforceabilty of contracts, legal liability, etc. While I agree there are a lot of 18-year-olds who don't have much judgement, they can at least put thier lives on the line in defense of the country in the military, and that carries some weight. To get back to basic reasoning skills, I can easily make an argument that the most erudite, educated, accomplished person who does not agree with me does not posess "basic reasoning skills". I might, were I in power, disqualify you. And you might disqualify me. What you seem to be arguing for is the establishment of something along the lines of, if not Plato's philosopher kings, at least political participation by those who some authority has deemed up to the task. The problem I have is that I wouldn't trust anyone to make that selection. You shouldn't either.