My father, an early pioneer of automated teaching (and a teacher himself) once told me that computers would soon replace teachers and, he added, not long after that they would replace the students too.

As we all know, no *true scotsman* would believe in anything that leads to monopolism and vulture capitalism.

This is not true in my experience. I sent a leaded glass piece through the luggage scanner recently. It showed up on the monitor as a large black disc. I had to remove it from the luggage so they could rescan the bag.

"Additionally, the government would not authorize us to separate NSLs from other government data requests or to express the NSLs that we have received, if any, as a range from 0 to 1,000" If they're not allowed to say that it's in that range, presumably it must lie outside that range.

Not calling everyone born before 1980 "old people" might be a good start...

They are certainly not less worthy of being represented by the same government. But the top 1% is vastly over-represented in our government. Setting aside the fact that their proportion in Congress is ten times greater than in the general population, the very rich are essentially able to pour unlimited funds into elections.

Naturally. What other kind of ammunition should one use against scientists and environmental groups?

Seriously?

Absolutely right!

I'd like to echo this point. The issue is not statism, but corporatism. This has a lot to do with essentially unfettered influence of corporate money in politics. Our politicians (especially at the national level) spend a good deal of their energy fundraising, as it's often the candidate with the most money that wins. So our politicians need to solicit corporate backing: they basically have no hope of getting elected into high office without it. Hence, they have a powerful incentive to pander to moneyed interests rather than the people that they actually represent.

This is not an issue of left or right. It is something fundamentally wrong with the American political system. Fix it, and the politicians regardless of their political affiliations will be answerable to the people again and not the corporations: they will work for us.

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