Let me be the first to say that this sounds awesome, and I have a very strong urge to attempt to try and enter the sixth grade again! I can't tell you how much I would have loved to have had the opportunity to be so fully engaged in grade school.

Basically 90% of my public school education consisted of insufferable lectures with a worksheet at the end, and maybe if you're lucky a paper to discuss. Not until I got to the very end of high school did I get to engage in anything that wasn't essentially passive rote learning. Even the dual-enrollment/AP stuff I took relied soley on often dry discussion though, and had nothing on the proposed pedagogical model put forward by Q2L.

I'm sure that my public school education is somewhat representative of the majority experience. I'm sure there is a lot of collective envy with stuff like this:

A core goal of our pedagogy is to help students learn to reason about their world. Systemic reasoning, or the ability to see the world in terms of the many interrelated systems that make it up--from biological to political to technological and social--supports students in meeting this goal.Enduring understandings include:

1. Understanding of feedback dynamics (i.e., reinforcing and balancing feedback loops): understanding that small level changes can affect macro-level processes.
2. Understanding of system dynamics: understanding that multiple (i.e. dynamic) relationships within a system.
3. Understanding hidden dimensions of a system: understanding that modifications to system elements can lead to changes that are not easily recognizable within a system.
4. Understanding of the quality of relationships within a system: understanding when a system is working or not working at optimal levels.
5. Homological understanding: understanding that similar system dynamics can exist in other systems that may appear to be entirely different.

I would kill to be able to go back in time and have an education under people pushing such an enlightened philosophy.

While it may be good science, it is probably a very bad for the journalism business, and really would make things terribly inconvenient. A large enough section of the population is not at all interested in reading articles that take the time to painstakingly prove each assertion made in an article, and for the most part this is for good reason. Good journalism is about taking complex ideas from many disciplines and distilling them into consumable, simpler ideas for the masses. There are many who would describe this as "dumbing things down" and hate the impurity of it. The fact of the matter is that we can't all be purists about everything. The point of journalism is not to make everyone experts about everything that gets reported on, but rather just to offer primers and spark interest. Holding journalists to such high expectations is idealistic, and ultimately unfeasible. Sometimes they have to deal in broad strokes. As for the situation with libel law in Great Britain, as long as it's true in my book it's not libel. If your business or reputation can't stand up to the facts, then you need to change business or remake your repuation.

That is like inventing a new car that won't run on current roads.

Umm - that doesn't even make sense.

An airconditioner cannot effectively 'cool' per se, it merely move heat around from inside a room to outside the room. Whereas of it's pretty easy to convert electrical energy to heat. Accordingly, the efficiency rating of cooling an area below the outside temperature is *always* worse (A *lot* worse IIRC but I don't have the numbers at my fingertips) than heating the same area above the outside temperature. Talk to someone that works in air conditioning.

Pug

The short and sweet solution is to buy it on a credit card, print out the EULA, highlight the pertinent part, mail it to your CC company, and then have them charge back the OEM cost of Windows. You'll have to prove you contacted customer service, but that's typically not hard, and just notify them you're going to do a chargeback for the cost of the OEM windows install. I doubt they'll balk much about it; there's not much they can do once the laptop has delivered.

You realize when you say things like a mafia run state would be a "libertarian utopia," you are no better than the people that yell about Obama "turning America socialist/communist," and you're only a step above the ones that paint Hitler mustaches on his portrait. Don't promote insipid straw men.

As soon as people who write free software can band together and field something like Microsoft's R&D division I'm sure the U of W will consider it. It wasn't just software Microsoft contributed it was the enormous freaking brains that wrote the software. Smart people can make money with their smarts. Most choose to do so. Many go to work for MS because they pay their researchers extremely well. You can blather on all you want about how evil Microsoft is (which isn't possible as corporations are amoral by definition), but you have to acknowledge the costs they absorbed in helping this project. Evil doesn't usually go with altruism. Maybe IBM or RedHat could offer the same level of support. It's not Microsoft's fault that they can't, won't, or didn't.

None of the current options are going to give you better bandwidth than simply loading up the RV with backup tapes and taking them with you...

No, it's automatically deducted by direct debit.

GPS is not a perfect solution either. I have used several different models including the Pharos GPS with Streets and Trips. They often jump temporarily to another state or place on the globe and then after a few minutes jump back. So are we going to be able to challenge the 3000 mile trip we supposedly took on our way to grocery store? I have an idea just give me a check for 150million and I'll tell them it won't work.

It sounds like they're not on vacation: they live in their RV full-time, and do their work from there.

Actually, home ownership for all is a terrible idea. Not everyone needs to be a home owner, per se. Obviously, everyone needs housing, just not to own a house. Very high rates of home ownership have been consistently shown to be correlated with high rates of unemployment. A house is a tremendous fixed cost, and one of those costs is ones mobility as a worker. If your homeowner there is a tremendous disincentive to move to find a job. When recessions hit, this disincentive pushes unemployment higher and causes the recession to deepen and last longer. Home ownership for everyone is not only unaffordable, but it is dangerous economically. A mobile and flexible labor force is important for any economy.

Now to what extent did things like the CRA actually create this crisis is a whole other story. Government pushed home ownership certainly contributed, but it went hand in hand with a basically industry wide lapse of reason when it came to assessing risk in the financial sector.

Well, ideally the Bolivian government would negotiate the best price they could for selling off the lithium to foreign firms that hold a comparative advantage in producing batteries. If foreigners had to buy lithium batteries from Bolivia that were much higher priced due to Bolivia's high cost of producing batteries en masse would depress demand for the lithium in the first place, leaving Bolivia no better off. The best thing for Bolivia to do is to negotiate the best trade deal possible and take the gain from that deal and invest it in infrastructure and education making the Bolivian economy that much more sustainable.

Have you been to West Virginia? It's dirt poor now. They have both poverty and environmental destruction. People want to act like there is a constant negative association between the two, when there is none. I wouldn't advocate a complete end to coal mining like some I know. Just from observation the whole practice could be a lot saner.

Morales has no intention of leaving the lithium on the ground. He has example after example of resource rich developing country gaining no benefit from allowing foreign firms come and extract said resources. That lithium is a Bolivian resource and Morales government has every right to negotiate the best price he can for the Bolivian people, and to keep the extraction process from causing negative externalities. Practicing sound economics does not mean giving into to corporate imperialism.