I'd say that for a player new to WoW 10 gold at level 20 might seem like a lot.
For an experienced player leveling an alt (even without heirloom items or support from a level capped character or a guild) it's not hard to make a lot more than that if you know what you're doing (mining + herbalism or mining + skinning, as it turns out most level-capped characters can't be bothered mining copper ore and would rather pay 20+ gold per stack for it).
Now, back in "vanilla" it was a different story, I remember trying to purchase the riding skill and my first mount at level 40, I started saving up gold around level 35 and still couldn't afford it until level 42, and this was normal because back then 100 gold was peanuts. But there is some serious inflation. My "main" (not that I play all that much these days) has two maxed-out crafting skills and is able to craft a number of items that require around 2,000g worth of materials but the items sell for 4,000+ gold. So yes, in a single day just by going to the auction house and buying materials and then crafting a bunch of items I sell I can make tens of thousands of gold. But I rarely have more than 10,000 gold or so (unless I'm looking to purchase some rare and expensive item).
I would assume it is because it adds a bunch of complexity to the user interface together with what is basically a feature the vast majority of users simply won't use.
So you can turn it on but it defaults to being turned off. A reasonable compromise.
I think you miss the point of a college education - the purpose of college is to ground you in many topics, so that you'll me well educated, and to prepare you for a lifetime of learning.
This is a fairly american view of the purpose of college/university education. Here in Europe that's generally what the equivalent of high school is for. College/University studies are specialization in a very specific direction which are supposed to not just give you deeper knowledge of the subject but also prepare you for further studies and research should you choose to go in that direction.
I suspect it's because the part of the war that most people support ending is the part about marijuana. Most people really don't care if heroin, cocaine or amphetamine are illegal. It's also a big step toward saner drug laws.
The kids spend 38 weeks a year at school, maybe doing an hour ICT a week. Knock Tic-Tac-Toe out in 38 hours? I think not.
Depends on at what age we're talking about, when I was in HS we did Tic-Tac-Toe with a primitive "AI" that essentially tried to play a perfect game with a "fudge factor" that determined the probability of it making a mistake. This was the first project we had for the first programming course and took nowhere near 38 hours.
Of course, for most younger kids (say, grades 1 through 7 or so) who aren't interested in programming in the first place it's going to be hard to get anything done in 38 hours, they won't even care, to them it's just a matter of getting a passing grade and moving along to more fun things.
Maybe not all managers that treat people as "cogs" do so in the same fashion?
This is probably the answer to why it works for Google.
I suspect they at least don't constantly drive their employees to the limits of what they can handle (not in terms of task difficulty but in terms of weird work hours, contradicting orders and similar shenanigans), they probably pay them quite well and I doubt they just yank people straight out of one project and into another and then track their progress on that project using seemingly random and useless metrics with the expectation that they should perform at 100% the moment they start on the new project...
By comparison, if you work as a burger flipper, low-level IT guy at some bank or simply as a tech support monkey for $15/hr chances are that's exactly how you'll be treated. That's when the "cog" begins to rebel against the system and eventually quits (of course, a manager at the call center I worked at for a while after college once drunkenly stated that 100+% yearly employee turnover was good since it kept the pay down, it's all part of the business plan for these people, take fresh grads in, make them perform jobs a somewhat housebroken monkey could do with threats of firing for doing anything that's not in the script, wait for the frustration to set in as the kids wonder what the point of their CS degree is when all they do is tell people to restart ADSL modems and then watch the average salary stay low because almost all of them burn out and leave the job within a year, bitter and cynical).
IMHO you're sort of right and you're sort of wrong.
You're right in the sense that from the point of view of the backend systems and the software client online IMs and offline IMs aren't identical (although with many protocols they do travel through the same server since the protocols themselves aren't p2p).
You're wrong in the sense that from the user's point of view email and offline IMs in clients such as MSN Live are not the same. They are also unlikely to be the same from a technical point of view since the IMs exist in the IM system, they are merely stored server-side when the client they are intended for is offline, the client can then request them or have them included in some form of logon status message from the server. The emails on the other hand most likely exist on an email server that primarily communicates with the rest of the world through SMTP, IMAP, POP3, various SOAP web services or direct database access from the server-side bits of some web client.
Now, could you quite easily build a platform for both IMs and emails where the "offline IM messages" are little more than emails with modified headers, perhaps even invisible to the user when accessing the "mail client" side of the platform or sorted as IMs when viewed in some unified UI. You could even build the whole IM system around a mail server backend. But that isn't how it works and it seems a lot more cumbersome than to use a protocol more suited for instant messaging.
You also have to keep in mind that in just about every IM client offline messages are displayed as regular conversations (sometimes with a small note about them being offline messages). The implementation used by MS for hotmail/live mail in MSN Live simply alerted the user to the fact that there were new emails available. These days I'm pretty sure they've got proper offline messages (I don't know how they're implemented on the backend but from a user interface POV that doesn't matter because in that sense they differ from a note at the top of your contact list telling you that you have unread emails).
Well, the main difference between IM and email for most people is that IM is more suitable to realtime conversations. Most people I meet don't check their (personal) email more than maybe once or twice per day but they do get keep their IM clients online whenever they're at their computer (and get instant alerts when they receive messages). Also, since realtime conversations take place in the client it can be good to follow them up in the same medium rather than send an email just because your friend happened to go offline for an hour or two.
Ah, but the email integration only worked if you were using Hotmail/Live, any other email account and it didn't work. Eventually the buckled and added offline messaging though.
And I don't really see it as a clone of email, it's still just IM messages except they are cached on the server so when the user that received an offline message logs on again the client fetches the messages and displays them to the user in a regular conversation window. IIRC ICQ also let those who had set their online status to invisible gets "offline" messages immediately but the person sending them would see it as an offline message.
I'm not saying "classical" communism is workable in real life (certain anarchist twists of it have shown themselves to function on a smaller scale but to my knowledge not on a national or international scale), I'm saying that just because someone calls something communism doesn't make it communism no matter how many of your friends and relatives were killed by them. By the same logic all germans are racially pure übermensch and Pinochet's regime was "liberal", because that's how they described themselves at the time.
Now, the eastern-european countries that called themselves communists did use a lot of elements from communism but they also failed to implement a lot of things so in the end it just became an oligarchy with a politic and military elite ruling the people (under the guise of "the dictatorship of the proletariat").
As for China, these days they're knee-deep in the free market and the way the treat dissidents is very close to how fascists like to treat dissidents (not to mention that this is part of the fascist ideology, criticism of the leaders is considered a Bad Thing(tm) under proper fascism, by the reasoning that there is no need for democracy if you have strong leaders).
That's a separate service (e-mail). ICQ allowed you to send messages that would be cached by the IM servers and delivered when the person you were talking to came online again.
It's not nitpicking, he was using his claimed personal experience with a corrupt and flawed regime that in turn claimed to be based on an ideology to back up his claim that the ideology at hand represents those things which the regime represented even though it is common knowledge that the ideology does not represent these things.
You mean, communism was EVER about "protecting workers rights"? Uhm sorry but this myth has been dispelled in November 1917.
You should probably take a look at what communism is, as in, the proper definition of communism, not the attempts at practical implementations of derivatives (leninism, stalinism, maoism et al).
If you, unlike me, were lucky enough to not live in a communist country and didn't have half of the family murdered for, say, having a title "senior worker"[1], please read Animal Farm or 1984, these are pretty accurate descriptions.
That doesn't really sound like communism to me. Besides, Animal Farm was not a critique of the ideology, it was a critique of the aforementioned implementations and their totalitarianism, Orwell himself was a socialist.
Finally, look at how little things like MSPaint and [...]
Of course, MS Paint may just have been one of the least useful pieces of graphics software seen this side of the year 2000. Considering the version that shipped with both XP and Vista was basically the same version that shipped with Windows 3.x (with a few minor tweaks to things like file format support) I'd put it this way: Back in the days of Windows being installed on top of DOS (that is, not Win9x-style combined install but one, then the other) it was somewhat useful for those who didn't have other graphics software on their computers. By the time XP and then Vista was released it was completely useless (yes, I've seen the videos of people creating some fairly amazing things using MS Paint but they're still using an incredibly blunt tool and a large part of the point of those videos is the "OMG! He did THAT in Paint?!").
Just saying, MS Paint isn't a good example of software that's remained unchanged because it hasn't needed changes, it's more an example of something that's just sort of kept existing even though no one has used it for anything useful in ages. Besides, didn't they finally overhaul it, a bit, for Windows 7?
FIRST OF ALL: I'm not saying XMPP/Jabber is a failure. However...
Google Talk? Really? Just because it's installed by default does not mean it is popular. When I look at everyone I know they running: MSN Messenger (most), Skype (a lot), Facebook chat (also most), IRC (a few), ICQ (just a few who refuse to let go). Google Talk? No one I know is using it.
Now, this is of course anecdotal but I do have friends in other places than just where I live, across Europe, Canada, the US, Australia. And no one is using Google Talk (at least not to the extent that they've ever mentioned it). In my eyes that makes it a failure.
Well, if things played out anything like they did here in Sweden then all your contacts were on ICQ (the early adopters, the geeks, those with some basic computer skills), then MS started pushing MSN Messenger (or Live Messenger or whatever they've named it these days, most people just call it "MSN"), all the non-tech savvy people (including a lot of girls) went "OMG! Instant messages to my friends? over the internet? Wow! That's so cool and new and never done before!". Then suddenly those using ICQ who desperately tried to get their friends to use ICQ instead ("Come on, it's got offline messages!" (Yes, MSN finally got that a few years ago but for a very long time it did not have it)) found themselves using MSN Messenger as well.
Luckily these days there are plenty of multi-protocol IM clients....
So? "Geek" is a common term to describe, well, geeks. So to use the term "geek" as part of the name of a company or service that gives tech support to end users makes a lot of sense and I just don't see how it can be a protected term.
Except in cases where the jury can clearly see you're guilty and ignores legal technicalities that should, in theory, result in a verdict of not guilty even though they shouldn't.
Or cases where the judge is unreliable and you don't trust him not to further either his own agenda or the agenda one or more of his country club buddies has and give a guilty verdict even though he knows you're innocent...
I think a better way to think of it is that entertainment is a lot more easily accessible these days.
50 years ago if you were going on a long bus trip and wanted entertainment you could either bring a stack of comics or you could bring a good book.
Today you can bring your e-book reader, your iPad (3G of course), your netbook (3G of course), your cellphone (3G/4G of course) and many other gadgets that allow you to be entertained with minimal effort.
Even 30 years ago you really didn't have that many options for entertainment while on a bus or a train. 20 years ago there were walkmans and CD players but even those were a lot more limited than today's gadgets.
Then there's the whole thing where if you have never read a book outside of class you aren't likely to pick one up for fun while older people are more likely to have had exposure to books as a form of entertainment without having a teacher yelling at them to write at least 500 words about how the book made them feel...
*Please insert rant about teh intarwebz being all merrkin and nothing more advanced than toilet paper ever being invented outside the US*
Yes, I'm being an ass, but you know that without this comment the above would be true or at the very least some asshat would post a comment about/. being an american site and herp derp derp (as the/b/ crowd would put it).
That's mostly something that goes on between fans, there's rarely much property damage (not counting thing that they use to bludgeon each other with, but my point is that 90% of that violence is just them beating each other, the last 10% being a mix of property damage, innocent bystanders getting beat up and cops getting attacked for trying to make them stop fighting).
Still is far from tolerated, especially since a lot of the "hardcore" firm members are also involved in a lot of other crime.
I find Git conceptually interesting but it took me a while to grasp the beauty of it, mainly because everyone I knew who I asked to explain it to me would point me to various "explanations" of Git which were huge swaths of text and graphs that described all the nitty-gritty technical details but skipped basic "big picture" explanations of it. So I pretty much came away from it knowing as much as I did before reading the "guides", that it was some form of decentralized VCS...
Eventually I took it upon myself to read up on it a bit more and began to see the usefulness of it although I have found an alarming number of guides and explanations of Git that deal with the question of how to set up your own "central" Git repository for all your code (pretty popular with geeks who, like myself, have a home server with redundant storage and regular backups) with "You're not supposed to do that! AAAGH YOU JUST DON'T GET IT!!11".
I didn't want to call you a libertarian fruitcake but honestly, you seem confused.
In any parliamentary democracy the state is, at least technically, an agent of the people appointed by the people to run the affairs of the people on a national and international level.
Thus if the people support a ban on homeschooling then they are likely to support politicians who also support a ban on homeschooling.
Also, "violent collectivist" and a little rant about owning "a quotal share in other people's children and their property". Is the violent collectivist bit about how you hate taxes? Because if so I've heard the full version of that disjointed rant more than once from impressionable freshman economics students...
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, I meant "...back then 100 gold wasn't peanuts."
I'd say that for a player new to WoW 10 gold at level 20 might seem like a lot.
For an experienced player leveling an alt (even without heirloom items or support from a level capped character or a guild) it's not hard to make a lot more than that if you know what you're doing (mining + herbalism or mining + skinning, as it turns out most level-capped characters can't be bothered mining copper ore and would rather pay 20+ gold per stack for it).
Now, back in "vanilla" it was a different story, I remember trying to purchase the riding skill and my first mount at level 40, I started saving up gold around level 35 and still couldn't afford it until level 42, and this was normal because back then 100 gold was peanuts. But there is some serious inflation. My "main" (not that I play all that much these days) has two maxed-out crafting skills and is able to craft a number of items that require around 2,000g worth of materials but the items sell for 4,000+ gold. So yes, in a single day just by going to the auction house and buying materials and then crafting a bunch of items I sell I can make tens of thousands of gold. But I rarely have more than 10,000 gold or so (unless I'm looking to purchase some rare and expensive item).
I would assume it is because it adds a bunch of complexity to the user interface together with what is basically a feature the vast majority of users simply won't use.
So you can turn it on but it defaults to being turned off. A reasonable compromise.
I think you miss the point of a college education - the purpose of college is to ground you in many topics, so that you'll me well educated, and to prepare you for a lifetime of learning.
This is a fairly american view of the purpose of college/university education. Here in Europe that's generally what the equivalent of high school is for. College/University studies are specialization in a very specific direction which are supposed to not just give you deeper knowledge of the subject but also prepare you for further studies and research should you choose to go in that direction.
I suspect it's because the part of the war that most people support ending is the part about marijuana. Most people really don't care if heroin, cocaine or amphetamine are illegal. It's also a big step toward saner drug laws.
The kids spend 38 weeks a year at school, maybe doing an hour ICT a week. Knock Tic-Tac-Toe out in 38 hours? I think not.
Depends on at what age we're talking about, when I was in HS we did Tic-Tac-Toe with a primitive "AI" that essentially tried to play a perfect game with a "fudge factor" that determined the probability of it making a mistake. This was the first project we had for the first programming course and took nowhere near 38 hours.
Of course, for most younger kids (say, grades 1 through 7 or so) who aren't interested in programming in the first place it's going to be hard to get anything done in 38 hours, they won't even care, to them it's just a matter of getting a passing grade and moving along to more fun things.
Maybe not all managers that treat people as "cogs" do so in the same fashion?
This is probably the answer to why it works for Google.
I suspect they at least don't constantly drive their employees to the limits of what they can handle (not in terms of task difficulty but in terms of weird work hours, contradicting orders and similar shenanigans), they probably pay them quite well and I doubt they just yank people straight out of one project and into another and then track their progress on that project using seemingly random and useless metrics with the expectation that they should perform at 100% the moment they start on the new project...
By comparison, if you work as a burger flipper, low-level IT guy at some bank or simply as a tech support monkey for $15/hr chances are that's exactly how you'll be treated. That's when the "cog" begins to rebel against the system and eventually quits (of course, a manager at the call center I worked at for a while after college once drunkenly stated that 100+% yearly employee turnover was good since it kept the pay down, it's all part of the business plan for these people, take fresh grads in, make them perform jobs a somewhat housebroken monkey could do with threats of firing for doing anything that's not in the script, wait for the frustration to set in as the kids wonder what the point of their CS degree is when all they do is tell people to restart ADSL modems and then watch the average salary stay low because almost all of them burn out and leave the job within a year, bitter and cynical).
IMHO you're sort of right and you're sort of wrong.
You're right in the sense that from the point of view of the backend systems and the software client online IMs and offline IMs aren't identical (although with many protocols they do travel through the same server since the protocols themselves aren't p2p).
You're wrong in the sense that from the user's point of view email and offline IMs in clients such as MSN Live are not the same. They are also unlikely to be the same from a technical point of view since the IMs exist in the IM system, they are merely stored server-side when the client they are intended for is offline, the client can then request them or have them included in some form of logon status message from the server. The emails on the other hand most likely exist on an email server that primarily communicates with the rest of the world through SMTP, IMAP, POP3, various SOAP web services or direct database access from the server-side bits of some web client.
Now, could you quite easily build a platform for both IMs and emails where the "offline IM messages" are little more than emails with modified headers, perhaps even invisible to the user when accessing the "mail client" side of the platform or sorted as IMs when viewed in some unified UI. You could even build the whole IM system around a mail server backend. But that isn't how it works and it seems a lot more cumbersome than to use a protocol more suited for instant messaging.
You also have to keep in mind that in just about every IM client offline messages are displayed as regular conversations (sometimes with a small note about them being offline messages). The implementation used by MS for hotmail/live mail in MSN Live simply alerted the user to the fact that there were new emails available. These days I'm pretty sure they've got proper offline messages (I don't know how they're implemented on the backend but from a user interface POV that doesn't matter because in that sense they differ from a note at the top of your contact list telling you that you have unread emails).
Well, the main difference between IM and email for most people is that IM is more suitable to realtime conversations. Most people I meet don't check their (personal) email more than maybe once or twice per day but they do get keep their IM clients online whenever they're at their computer (and get instant alerts when they receive messages). Also, since realtime conversations take place in the client it can be good to follow them up in the same medium rather than send an email just because your friend happened to go offline for an hour or two.
Ah, but the email integration only worked if you were using Hotmail/Live, any other email account and it didn't work. Eventually the buckled and added offline messaging though.
And I don't really see it as a clone of email, it's still just IM messages except they are cached on the server so when the user that received an offline message logs on again the client fetches the messages and displays them to the user in a regular conversation window. IIRC ICQ also let those who had set their online status to invisible gets "offline" messages immediately but the person sending them would see it as an offline message.
I'm not saying "classical" communism is workable in real life (certain anarchist twists of it have shown themselves to function on a smaller scale but to my knowledge not on a national or international scale), I'm saying that just because someone calls something communism doesn't make it communism no matter how many of your friends and relatives were killed by them. By the same logic all germans are racially pure übermensch and Pinochet's regime was "liberal", because that's how they described themselves at the time.
Now, the eastern-european countries that called themselves communists did use a lot of elements from communism but they also failed to implement a lot of things so in the end it just became an oligarchy with a politic and military elite ruling the people (under the guise of "the dictatorship of the proletariat").
As for China, these days they're knee-deep in the free market and the way the treat dissidents is very close to how fascists like to treat dissidents (not to mention that this is part of the fascist ideology, criticism of the leaders is considered a Bad Thing(tm) under proper fascism, by the reasoning that there is no need for democracy if you have strong leaders).
That's a separate service (e-mail). ICQ allowed you to send messages that would be cached by the IM servers and delivered when the person you were talking to came online again.
It's not nitpicking, he was using his claimed personal experience with a corrupt and flawed regime that in turn claimed to be based on an ideology to back up his claim that the ideology at hand represents those things which the regime represented even though it is common knowledge that the ideology does not represent these things.
You mean, communism was EVER about "protecting workers rights"? Uhm sorry but this myth has been dispelled in November 1917.
You should probably take a look at what communism is, as in, the proper definition of communism, not the attempts at practical implementations of derivatives (leninism, stalinism, maoism et al).
If you, unlike me, were lucky enough to not live in a communist country and didn't have half of the family murdered for, say, having a title "senior worker"[1], please read Animal Farm or 1984, these are pretty accurate descriptions.
That doesn't really sound like communism to me. Besides, Animal Farm was not a critique of the ideology, it was a critique of the aforementioned implementations and their totalitarianism, Orwell himself was a socialist.
Finally, look at how little things like MSPaint and [...]
Of course, MS Paint may just have been one of the least useful pieces of graphics software seen this side of the year 2000. Considering the version that shipped with both XP and Vista was basically the same version that shipped with Windows 3.x (with a few minor tweaks to things like file format support) I'd put it this way: Back in the days of Windows being installed on top of DOS (that is, not Win9x-style combined install but one, then the other) it was somewhat useful for those who didn't have other graphics software on their computers. By the time XP and then Vista was released it was completely useless (yes, I've seen the videos of people creating some fairly amazing things using MS Paint but they're still using an incredibly blunt tool and a large part of the point of those videos is the "OMG! He did THAT in Paint?!").
Just saying, MS Paint isn't a good example of software that's remained unchanged because it hasn't needed changes, it's more an example of something that's just sort of kept existing even though no one has used it for anything useful in ages. Besides, didn't they finally overhaul it, a bit, for Windows 7?
FIRST OF ALL: I'm not saying XMPP/Jabber is a failure. However...
Google Talk? Really? Just because it's installed by default does not mean it is popular. When I look at everyone I know they running: MSN Messenger (most), Skype (a lot), Facebook chat (also most), IRC (a few), ICQ (just a few who refuse to let go). Google Talk? No one I know is using it.
Now, this is of course anecdotal but I do have friends in other places than just where I live, across Europe, Canada, the US, Australia. And no one is using Google Talk (at least not to the extent that they've ever mentioned it). In my eyes that makes it a failure.
Well, if things played out anything like they did here in Sweden then all your contacts were on ICQ (the early adopters, the geeks, those with some basic computer skills), then MS started pushing MSN Messenger (or Live Messenger or whatever they've named it these days, most people just call it "MSN"), all the non-tech savvy people (including a lot of girls) went "OMG! Instant messages to my friends? over the internet? Wow! That's so cool and new and never done before!". Then suddenly those using ICQ who desperately tried to get their friends to use ICQ instead ("Come on, it's got offline messages!" (Yes, MSN finally got that a few years ago but for a very long time it did not have it)) found themselves using MSN Messenger as well.
Luckily these days there are plenty of multi-protocol IM clients....
So? "Geek" is a common term to describe, well, geeks. So to use the term "geek" as part of the name of a company or service that gives tech support to end users makes a lot of sense and I just don't see how it can be a protected term.
Except in cases where the jury can clearly see you're guilty and ignores legal technicalities that should, in theory, result in a verdict of not guilty even though they shouldn't.
Or cases where the judge is unreliable and you don't trust him not to further either his own agenda or the agenda one or more of his country club buddies has and give a guilty verdict even though he knows you're innocent...
I think a better way to think of it is that entertainment is a lot more easily accessible these days.
50 years ago if you were going on a long bus trip and wanted entertainment you could either bring a stack of comics or you could bring a good book.
Today you can bring your e-book reader, your iPad (3G of course), your netbook (3G of course), your cellphone (3G/4G of course) and many other gadgets that allow you to be entertained with minimal effort.
Even 30 years ago you really didn't have that many options for entertainment while on a bus or a train. 20 years ago there were walkmans and CD players but even those were a lot more limited than today's gadgets.
Then there's the whole thing where if you have never read a book outside of class you aren't likely to pick one up for fun while older people are more likely to have had exposure to books as a form of entertainment without having a teacher yelling at them to write at least 500 words about how the book made them feel...
*Please insert rant about teh intarwebz being all merrkin and nothing more advanced than toilet paper ever being invented outside the US*
Yes, I'm being an ass, but you know that without this comment the above would be true or at the very least some asshat would post a comment about /. being an american site and herp derp derp (as the /b/ crowd would put it).
No one, we create a ".airline" and a ".plumbing" TLD.
That's mostly something that goes on between fans, there's rarely much property damage (not counting thing that they use to bludgeon each other with, but my point is that 90% of that violence is just them beating each other, the last 10% being a mix of property damage, innocent bystanders getting beat up and cops getting attacked for trying to make them stop fighting).
Still is far from tolerated, especially since a lot of the "hardcore" firm members are also involved in a lot of other crime.
I find Git conceptually interesting but it took me a while to grasp the beauty of it, mainly because everyone I knew who I asked to explain it to me would point me to various "explanations" of Git which were huge swaths of text and graphs that described all the nitty-gritty technical details but skipped basic "big picture" explanations of it. So I pretty much came away from it knowing as much as I did before reading the "guides", that it was some form of decentralized VCS...
Eventually I took it upon myself to read up on it a bit more and began to see the usefulness of it although I have found an alarming number of guides and explanations of Git that deal with the question of how to set up your own "central" Git repository for all your code (pretty popular with geeks who, like myself, have a home server with redundant storage and regular backups) with "You're not supposed to do that! AAAGH YOU JUST DON'T GET IT!!11".
I didn't want to call you a libertarian fruitcake but honestly, you seem confused.
In any parliamentary democracy the state is, at least technically, an agent of the people appointed by the people to run the affairs of the people on a national and international level.
Thus if the people support a ban on homeschooling then they are likely to support politicians who also support a ban on homeschooling.
Also, "violent collectivist" and a little rant about owning "a quotal share in other people's children and their property". Is the violent collectivist bit about how you hate taxes? Because if so I've heard the full version of that disjointed rant more than once from impressionable freshman economics students...