Yes, it is legal to require you relinquish rights to partake in a voluntary activity, such as purchasing Windows 8.

Mod parent up.

I burn carbon for heating every winter, from a 100% renewable, scalable, naturally-occurring energy source. TREES.

Yep. Every year I axe a tree or two on my property, chop them, and set the wood out to season for the following year. For every tree I cut down, I plant 10-20 oak saplings in pasture land I am not using. I figure I'll cut down 30-40 trees on my property for heat before I expire, leaving behind a veritable forest in my wake.

I think you need to take a Valium and go seek out some of those fact-based papers you speak of, because you've obviously chosen to guzzle the scaremongering religious koolaid from the climate change FUD camp.

You do not need gadgets to grill.

You need two things:

1) Meat
2) Heat

WTF. I seriously hope there is never a breakdown of civilization because today's tech-dependent freak parade would never be able to survive.

I have a 5x10' storage unit at the local storage unit place. Stuff I put in there is stuff I never, ever really need to access, but nonetheless do not want to throw away.

Why would I use expensive SSD devices for storage? If there's data I never ever need to access, it's going onto proper storage media, like a hard drive.

If it's stuff I need ready access to, sure, it can go on SSD, but that's not storage. It's caching.

If you are very concerned with your privacy, it MUST be because you are up to something illegal.

If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide.

And so on... scary, Orwellian shit going on these days.

Moral of the story: If you don't want to get assessed a huge penalty for stealing music, then DON'T FUCKING STEAL MUSIC.

The difference is that 1 + _ = 2 is taught as "magic," where you just "know" that 1 + 1 = 2. It's rote memorization of addition tables.

1 + x = 2, subtracting 1 from both sides to get x = 1, is algebra, where the pupil knows what they are doing instead of simply recalling that 1 + 1 = 2 .

What is sad is that algebra is incredibly simple to teach and learn, and the average 6 year old possesses the cognitive faculties required to become proficient in it.

At my old high school, athletic coaches make more than the teachers, and administrators make way more than everyone else.

My wife is in school at Clemson University finishing her degree, and we recently found the website where SC lists what it pays people there. On the first page, there are probably about a dozen athletic coaches making $245,000 per year (and we can't forget football coach Dabo Swinney, who costs the State over $2M/year in total, and gets two brand new cars every year - despite the fact that the football program doesn't make one red cent in profit for the State). Most professors make between $90K and $125K.

We have really fucked up priorities when it comes to HOW we spend our education dollars.

I think one of our biggest spending missteps is that we pour so much money into trying to make all students the same, when it becomes very clear by the age of about 6 what the kid is going to be when he/she grows up. I was taking apart the Atari and asking for a 200-in-1 electronic project kit for Christmas when I was 4. I went to a Montessori school in New York City until I was about 8, and they encouraged me to pursue those interests, but then my parents traded the private school tuition for a new life upstate, and I started going to public school, which could not understand that I already knew math on what was their 11th grade level.

Those idiots forced me to spend half my school time on arts and crafts, home economics, and other stuff that I had zero interest in, and it was a waste of my time and theirs.

We need to put a system in place to identify where kids are going at a young age and put them into schools that allow them to pursue those interests. The people who currently control our education system seem hell-bent on stamping out a bunch of identical automatons, and it's just wrong.

I started teaching myself Fortran in 7th grade when I got my Ham Radio license and heard that it was the program of choice for modeling Antennas. Of course, I was not aware of this whole calculus thing, so I couldn't actually write my first antenna modeling program until 8th grade after my dad taught me calculus over the summer.

Math is another subject we seriously need to accelerate. High School just doesn't teach enough Math, even in AP. High school graduates pursuing STEM degrees need to have a firm grasp of Vector Calculus and Differential Equations by the time they get to college. Too many entry level classes are non-calculus based because of this problem, and are therefore a waste of time.

We can do better.