I cruised a large sailboat for a few years in the Paciifc and the Atlantic. We met a lot of kids who were being "sea schooled" using one of the fine correspondence schools that caters to cruisers. These were happy, well adjusted, kids whose basic education included multiple cultures and languages, a deep sense of responsibility as crew, and plenty of socialization experiences.

Many of these cruisers "swallowed the anchor" eventually and put their kids in public schools to meet the various state qualifications for university entry. According to the teachers in the San Diego public school system that I spoke to, these kids were usually a grade or two ahead and far more mature that their peers in age.

This is different from some parents that are sheltering their kids from protective or religious reasons, but it points to the fact that the quality of home schooling depends on the parents, the kids, and the actual curriculum. Generalities will be misleading.

I had the freeze bug in a VM system on a Mac running Parallels. I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04 from Parallels and could not get around it. Then I downloaded directly from Canonical and it worked just find. I assumed it was a bad download from Parallels, but perhaps it is more subtle. The virtual machine has the same vulnerabilities - is that a clue?

That's not science, its a wrestling match.

Mod this up.

Warmists are mostly political and much of the "science" published consists of projections and cherry-picked data. The outcome is not any kind of climate science but a big push for a new, and onerous tax on energy at all levels. I have yet to see:
1. A climate model that includes taxes
2. A warmist posting for baseline energy sources such as thorium reactors or LFTR's.
3. Local use of local power sources, as opposed to huge grid projects
4. A warmist decrying the waste of resources and the dangers of "smart" meters

Sure.
I lost my watch down the street, but the light is better under the lamp-post.

Wrong. The specialty channels will multiply and get delivery by streaming. Broadcast cable is for broadcast, which means popular.

Unbundling the various entertainment packages is not what I want. I want the internet connection and to hell with the entertainment. There are only a very few programs I watch and the rest is just crap and profit redistribution.

If the cable monopoly is broken (Comcast and TWM in my area) there is sufficient competition to deliver entertainment to picky people for a reasonable price.

Every capable passenger should have an airline-approved gun with airline-approved ammo, and be forced to fire anything they brought with them into a test cabinet at the airport to make sure it is the right stuff. It should be small caliber, FMJ, subsonic. It should be carried openly where it can be accessible.

This will cause would-be terrorists to stick to external methods, like missiles.

Think of the money and hassle we would save over the TSA.

Hmmm. there is a lot more noise in the global temperature data than there is the atmospheric concentration of CO2.

I did not find them communistic, fluffy or lovely. More like porcupines with adamantine quills.. The Culture is innately competitive and meddlesome. Wage-slave rituals are no longer applicable because resources are almost unlimited. the former is a plausible outcome of the latter, which is also plausible given the Culture's technology.

Well..they are in space. So is Earth.

A good writer invents interesting characters and lets them interact. A good SF writer invents whole worlds and plants the characters in it. All the excuses about character-driven stories are just that - excuses, often by authors who don't understand enough about science to carry a good SF world line, and who can't do the research to find a good SF "hook" and make it work. Look up SF or go into a book store and you will see Star Trek, Star Wars and other space operas.
Clarke's "Childhood's End", or Niven's "Ringworld" are real SF. "Blood Music", "Neutron Star" are about worlds that are scientifically plausible but far from human. There are too few like that.

I write SF, and I know, first hand, how hard it is match that standard.

Look at Kay Kenyon, "Bright of Sky" and sequels, look at Iaian Banks "culture" series. I won't tout my stuff here, but you can reply and get references.

Population statistics show that a culture where there is a somewhat inflexible elite class with a great deal more resources than the commoner class does not survive when the fitness landscape gets rugged and the carrying capacity of the environment gets tight. This type of culture has a population implosion and a pretty good possibility of extinction. (ref, the "HANDY" model).

I seems to me that a selfish model leads to just such a state and it will eventually collapse. The article does not deal with such issues as the environment or the establishment of elites.

I was drafted into becoming a coder when the IT department at a huge company failed to come up with a working payroll system in time to pay 500 people. I wrote it in a week.

I've had to learn over 20 languages, from Cobol to Lisp to GPSS to ADA to C. I've worked on operating systems, compilers, real-time systems and IT. Now I'm learning Python, Django and writing an IOS app.

Oh, yeah, I'm 72 years old. No certs - they didn't exist and I never got any. Anyone want to challenge my credentials?

I spent years working on AI. It was the wrong problem. Elon may be right that AI could be a hazard, but artificial intelligence is not nearly as big a problem as natural stupidity.

The GEICO gecko evolved speech with a strange pseudo-Brit accent in just about that length of time. I hear he is mated to a female, Elizardbreath. But he has a reptile disfunction...