Thank you. We homeschooled our kids because the literacy rate at the one they went to was less than 50%. We're not religious nuts - no insult to my friends who are, because the vast majority of religious people are kind and decent - we were people with no choice. In a way home schoolers are like refugees coming here for a better life, except we're refugees from a mind-destroying school system, looking for the same thing, but one we have to make ourselves. I've known a lot of people who have done the same. Some are religious - and please don't flame me, but not okay to be prejudiced against religious people just because you need someone to be better than - but most aren't. Most kids do well, but some don't, like in public schools where some kids do well and most don't. There was a case recently where a family from Germany asked for political asylum in Canada, because the state was threatening to take their students away under an anti-home schooling law signed into being by one Adolf Hitler. It saddens me that so many childless people hate home schooling for no reason. I used to think that our society valued differences and variety. I now suspect that our detestable public schools are doing away with that as they've destroyed the love of learning and the freedom to think. My kids, by the way, are much more socialized than kids in the school system, because home schoolers get together all the time to actually talk and socialize.

The last report I saw on this idea said it couldn't be made to work without a massive subsidy. It seems unlikely that you can put up a tall building and supply lights and water and compete with someone who bought a chunk of land and uses the sun and rain. Even a big greenhouse must be substantially cheaper.

This is very stupid. I keep reading comments about the mechanistic clockwork universe. Nobody has believed that since quantum mechanics was invented over a hundred years ago. It's exactly the same as saying God had our lives planned from the second he created the universe. Our minds very obviously work on quantum principles. The behavior of matter at the quantum level is not predictable even in theory. We are not predictable, so we have free will. People are hemmed in by circumstances and instincts, but we are self-aware and intelligent, and we have free will. We know we have free will. We're conscious. It's not an illusion. There's something wrong with people who go to great lengths to say this. Really it's up there with the people who say we're not conscious and it's a trick our minds play on us. People who are educated enough to know this crap but too dumb to really think about it come up with this sort of thing. They're like musicians who suddenly have a ton of money and are famous and just can't deal with it - people who are out of their depth in their chosen profession. Evolution made us all think we have free will just so it's ... because ... Did I say this is really dumb?

Someone said, recently, "What do you call a failed insurrection where nobody is punished?" "A rehearsal." But government is the same. It's all just a series of rehearsals for a totalitarian state. I'd go further. Any law has a test built into it, which will determine if it had the desired effect. At the end of a year if a law doesn't pass the test, the people affected are let out of jail and replaced with the men who signed it. You can't have responsible government if nobody has to be responsible.

Thank you. Last time I voted in a Canadian election I had to show ID. This is because the biggest collection of half-witted scum outside soviet Russia weren't sure I could be trusted. For the previous century your word was good enough. Now there has to be, in the absence of evidence that it's necessary, security.

It's worth a bit more effort to be a bit more civilized.

A few points: - The horses win more often than the people, but they don't typically win by more than about ten minutes. Horses can't gallop for hours, except in movies. The famous stagecoaches were just that - they ran in stages, with fresh horses at every stage. I imagine they were quite expensive. - It's not like competing against horses is taking on nature. In this case it is, humorously, backwards - the people are natural creatures, taking on horses, which have been selectively bred just to run. A horse is a fragile and temperamental creature, having been selectively bred for centuries. Without people to take care of them they'd either become extinct or rapidly evolve into something more practical. - So maybe we should pit humans against something that evolved naturally to run, which it appears we did.

Thanks for posting this. There are a lot of people who don't get the concept of rights, and sometimes I think there are a lot who really don't want them. For some people the idea of a society where there are no underlying principles and everything is decided based on what would be popular at that moment is very warm and fuzzy. Perhaps this is because that's the way governments operate when they're not constrained by a strong understanding of rights. That it doesn't work is lost on a lot of those who think that having a decent, comfortable existence is something to be ashamed of. I think the problem is that to understand rights you have to admit that the world is not what you thought, that there is no benevolent government that will take over for the benevolent god who didn't take care of you, and that you have to occasionally think.

Why does research always have to be done to cure diseases? Have we stopped doing research just because it would be nice to know this, because we might be able to do things we haven't dreamed of yet? 'Curing disease' is the reporting version of fighting terrorists and stopping kiddy porn - filler because you can't think of anything real to say. Surely understanding how our brains work is one of the most interesting things we can do, isn't that good enough?

Is there any provision in American law that allows the government to sign secret treaties? I understand that they aren't expressly authorized to give up the authority given them by the people to another government, and that only a madman would think they could place their citizens under the control of a government they didn't elect, and thus that this is logically wrong, but is there even a spurious justification for it? How can you possibly have justice when your government is negotiating treaties you aren't allowed to see? How can the machinery of justice function when you can't know the laws? How can a person know what actions are forbidden, how can a lawyer defend them, how can people know which rights they no longer have, how can the police know who to imprison? Does any of this make any sense either from the viewpoint of a human being living in a society made for human beings, or from the point of view of a single cog in a machine that can't be understood and can't possibly function?

It's not a question of whether it's reasonable for them to do this, it's whether you should have to put up with it. People now have a desperate yearning to believe that things are normal and get on with their lives, so they post all sorts of reasons why this is reasonable and good. It doesn't sound reasonable and good to me - if nothing else it will lead to both sides being ready for the next step later. The time hasn't come yet when this kind of thing will make your life intolerable. Will it lead to that? You have to decide. If there's a way around this, or to screw the system so it doesn't work or the people doing it regret it, I'd use it. I have yet to be fingerprinted, even by a totally safe system. And anyone who reads /. should know that there is no totally safe system, no matter how calm and reassuring that kool aid looks.