As for the sound it makes it is actually kinda pretty. Kinda a mix between a trumpet and a french horn.
Now see, that's why I'm not buying it.
The researchers are basically saying "Hey, there was an ancient instrument, that was practical to manufacture as far back as Rome, and sounded pretty, kinda a mix between a trumpet and a french horn, and that even Bach wrote music for, and it COMPLETELY VANISHED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH."
No, I'm sorry, the world doesn't work that way. Things completely vanish if they SUCK. This thing probably did NOT sound "pretty", or there would still be a few around. These guys kept tweaking their software until it sounded "pretty", because that what us moderns want, not because that's how an ancient Roman instrument must've sounded.
So when is Cynicism getting added to an ever expanding list of mental disorders that one more pill can set right?
Yes, but what if they really do have a pill that can correct this condition?
Introspect carefully, and tell us whether you object to brain management chemicals in principle. Quite a few people -- mostly those who, I suspect, have brains properly calibrated for present conditions -- do make such objections.
In the very clever book "Virus of the Mind", the author defines an "association meme" as a social idea about how one thing goes with another. Examples of association memes include: "Cereal is for breakfast", "Muffins are for breakfast", and "Chocolate cake is not for breakfast". Merchants wishing to sell chocolate cake for breakfast (including Starbucks) must work within these memes, which is why they bake their product into a muffin shape. Quite a clever little manipulation.
Turning now to the summary:
Micheal Lynton, the guy who said 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.' has posted an editorial at the Huffington Post titled Guardrails for the Internet, in which he defends his comment, and suggests that just as the interstate system needs guardrails, so too does the information superhighway.
To extend "Virus of the Mind"'s ideas, guardrails are an association meme. We associate them with benevolence, with keeping us safe, and with an obvious danger. Lynton is invoking that meme, muffin style, to manipulate us into accepting something we otherwise would reject. The chocolate cake he is selling for breakfast should properly invoke the meme of a school principle, but if it did, nobody would accept it.
I will contribute a dollar to any charity raising money to put Lynton onto a ship and dump him onto a deserted island, never to return. Let's see how he, a professional influencer who, in influencing the movements of billions of dollars, has never produced so much as a grain of wheat, fares alone.
Start with all the places prostitution is legal in one form or another. Like, Rhode Island, for example. Or Canada. Or most countries in Europe. All these places have the exact same set of marital problems as all the uptight places do.
Straw man. I didn't say anything about marital problems. And anyway you are lying about being in possession of such data.
Then look at SE asia - notorious for the cheap and easy sex trade which, while illegal, is pretty much condoned in countries like Thailand and the Philippines where it is also regulated and flourishes. So, if your theory about "lowering the asking price" were correct, with all the cheap sex available in SE asia even the "good girls" would be extreme sluts.
Possibly. All I proposed was that female partners would be willing to do more for any given quantity of resources committed (e.g. dates, gifts). We don't, and probably can never, have empirical data on this... but I do sense that American women seem pretty expensive.
While non-prostitutes in those countries aren't known for being "cold fish," they certainly have a lot of what most westerners would consider "old fashioned values" like being chaperoned on your first few dates.
Are those the values of the women in question, or are they the values of their fathers who are trying to jack their price back up?
Many people have protested the Iraq War. And with good reason. It is almost wholly a bad war to have started without a plausible benefit for the American people. In fact, the only thing it has done is to deplete our treasure and kill many of our fine soldiers (not to mention many many of innocent Iraqis). Undertaking the war in Iraq is an act against our beloved American countrymen.
Other than the oil. The war got the taps going again, and they now provide about 2.5% of the world's consumption, though that could rise as high as 10%.
Perhaps you do not assign any value to that, but the free market sure does. The cost of energy redounds in the cost of everything else, which means that our (everyone's) net quality of life is a function of it.
This is especially relevant becuase the demand curve for oil is highly inelastic. Do you know what that means re: amount supplied? A 2% increase in supply is a very big deal when the demand curve is nearly flat.
Wow. This is probably the most outrageous things I've ever read on Slashdot.
The outrage prevents a rational discourse on the subject, which keeps hidden the real reason (anti-competition) for outlawing it. If we could talk as rationally about sexual services as we do about, say, vehicle maintenance services, then we might be able to create a more efficient society. ('efficient' = creates more safety, comfort, pleasure, and joy for a given amount of resources consumed.)
Back in the farming days when marriage was an economic necessity, there was an argument to be made for shielding it from damaging temptations... but all of that is becoming obsolete now, at least for the middle and upper classes. Maybe the lower class still needs a ban on prostitution, though, because the lower class still needs marriage in order to afford a family.
That said, you're probably right, but if you want to evaluate things using free market principles, you'll have to address the issues of monopoly power (the wife) and imperfect information (promises from a mistress you haven't yet slept with), among others.
Wives don't have monopoly power, because they are not the only suppliers. What they have right now is a legal barrier to entry, of the sort that telco CEOs can only dream about.
As far as mistresses are concerned, that has always been an issue and it does not change upon legalization.
I still don't understand why prostitution is illegal. Regulate it, slap a sin tax on it. You create jobs(referring to the oversight of the industry), and you help prevent the spread of disease by enforcing health standards, crime is cut down and the Police can go take care of violent crimes. But most importantly we'll stop hearing about this Craiglist BS.
Prostitution cannot be made legal after womens' suffrage. Women dislike the competition, and because they vote in greater numbers than men, they will never allow prostitution to be legalized.
When people complain that "prostitution cheapens women", they are exactly correct. Prostitution lowers the asking price for sexual services, which means that its legalization will increase what your female partner will be willing to do with you in bed. (Just look at all the direct and indirect costs of sex right now: dates, courtship, relationship, etc. etc. etc.)
That being they are being manufactured in a country with historically poor quailty control and an incentive to cut corners whenever possible.
An added complication is the urgent business directive to change the battery geometry once a year. You know, move the pins over a quarter-inch or so, or change the size of the power jack by a millimeter, or move the cells around. Just enough change to obsolete all currently-owned batteries, wall warts, and car adapters.
This is the 4th recall of batteries by HP in 5 years... You would think, okay maybe the first is a fluke, everyone screws up sometimes. The second time, you get a bit worried, but four times? I think someone in HP needs to work out how much each of these recalls is costing them per year, maybe those figures will convince them that manufacturing them to a higher standard wouldn't be a bad idea.
Why in the world would you assume that they haven't already performed exactly that calculation?
On a less cynical note, high-density lithium-polymer batteries is a very tricky business... doing it en masse doubly so.
You chose an interpretation of my comments that allowed you to criticize me, congratulations.
When I said a "Bernoulli wing that can accomplish the same thing as [AOA]" I meant it literally. Have you ever calculated how much hump would be required to fly without AOA? And how would that wing perform in other areas of the flight envelope?
We are perfectly aware that aircraft have asymmetrical wings, but they do so primarily to prevent separation. Whether this also creates Bernoulli lift is not a design goal.
You're both right. For every conscientious person, there's an asshole that follows his animal instinct to perpetually consume as much as he possibly can.
It's not an asshole instinct, it's a mating instinct.
Women control the womb-space, which means they set the terms of behavior that will be rewarded with mating opportunities. Western women presently pass out such rewards based in large part upon status -- or more precisely: upon status displays. Big ridiculous cars are an approved status display, which means they increase their owners' mating opportunities, which means people buy them.
Still, the wing generally isn't giving you quite enough lift to keep you up when you fly with the nose completely flat. You MUST have some sledding angle against the oncoming airstream to maintain altitude.
No airplane seeking to maintain altitude flies with the nose completely flat; the nose is always pitched slightly upward in order to shove air downward with the wings. At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot.
You could make a Bernoulli wing to accomplish the same thing, but then it would interfere at other angles of attack. In particular, a pronounced hump on the top of the wing would make the wing more prone to airflow separation and stalling.
This "five senses" garbage is a favorite example of mine for illustrating how everyone, everywhere, including textbooks, can be obviously mistaken about something 'factual'.
Our sixth sense is accelleration, and the sense organ responsible for this is the semicircular canals in our inner ear. It's how we know where 'down' is, and life would be difficult without this sense. Our seventh sense is proprioception, derived from muscle feedback all over the body.
These qualify as 'senses' because they convert environmental information directly into sensations.
Now, while we're on the subject of ubiquitous factual errors, let's talk about how flat- and symmetric-winged aircraft can fly without any help from the Bernoulli effect.
The obvious thing to do is let a court sort it out. That is, after all, what they are for. Just because it's on the internet doesn't change anything, it's a simple case of libel.
Good answer. Quick one, too. But you should rewrite it, reiterating your basic insight in a few meanderingly different ways, clearly in love with your own inflated prose, so that it will match the article.
Because war is a serious event in which people die (for better or worse). We shouldn't let the fantasy of a video game with unlimited continues diminish the value of those who put their life on the line.
Actually wargames (particularly CounterStrike) have taught me just how easy it is to get killed in a military action. Videogames dispelled my earlier fantasy of the lone invincible commando -- viz: Schwarzenegger in 'Commando', or Stallone as Rambo. Videgames taught me how ridiculously dangerous a gunfight really is, and how quick, how terribly quick, death comes when guns are involved.
Of course not all games do that. 'Airborne Ranger' fed the myth, but then, Airborne Ranger as not an accurate simulation. It's the really accurate games that make you realize that it's a deadly business. Ironic that those are the games people select for their public tantrums.
It was also important that we won the war in a manner that didn't turn the entire population against us. Of course, the warfare techniques used by the Viet Cong and Iraqi insurgency seem to have been designed to drag as many civilians into the conflict as possible.
After WWII, there were similar guerilla actions in Germany, and a similar "mopping up" action that dragged on for a while. The difference between that and Iraq was that the moppers-up were under no scrutiny and were told to do whatever it takes to sort it out. They were allowed to be as ugly as war. We do not grant our soldiers similar liberty nowadays because we no longer have that kind of willpower.
Nietzsche put his finger on it when he noticed that peaceful societies eventually get swamped with pity, and are unable to be harsh or to even look upon suffering. He called it "the imperative of herd timidity: 'we want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!'" (Natural History of Morals number 201).
As to the trillion dollar adjustments, had America followed Nixon/Ford/Carters lead back in the 70's, and pushed for being off oil/coal, we would not be in Iraq, likely not be in afghanistan, and not have the exchange deficit that we have. The vast majority of the wests security and economic issues can be tied DIRECTLY to our being dependent on the same price fuel that other countries are on.
You understand that there is no energy source that behaves differently than what you decry about oil and coal?
If we moved en masse to fission, for example, then uranium mines and spent-fuel reprocessors would become the new OPEC. If we made a serious move to wind/solar, then solar-panel fabs and battery chemicals and wind corridors would become the new OPEC. (E.g. Bolivia's recent moves regarding its lithium deposits.)
What do you think is going to happen now? Either scientists will ignore this data or they will incorporate it into their models... wanna bet they incorporate it?
Wanna bet CO2 still warms the atmosphere after they incorporate the new ocean current data? We won't know for sure until they incorporate the new data, but I'll take that bet.
That's all well and good, and as it should be. The ONLY problem here, is that some folks want to make trillion-dollar adjustments to industry all over the world based on these models which are still in such a preliminary state.
(The trillion-dollar adjustments involve increasing everyone's cost of living in order to internalize costs that may not actually be negative externalities, and include the imposition of a very expensive administrative layer atop everything carbon-related.)
"I have been ripping all my movies and TV shows for easy viewing through a media PC. Because I would rather not rip everything again I'm looking for a simple backup solution. I'm considering a hard drive dock and several internal hard drives to use as 'disks' to back things up every once in a while but I don't know what the best way to store internal drives would be in the meantime."
If you take the plunge, be sure to join a homeschool association for your state. They will know about the laws you'll be subject to, and they'll know where all the bookstores and daycamps and the like are. Your kids will meet a lot of other sharp kids at those camps; my 10-year-old is in a Lego Robotics daycamp where, at long last, he is surrounded with other kids on his level.
I'm lucky that I live in Texas, where the laws about homeschooling are minimal, thanks to the religious nutjobbery here in the South. In other states you may have to keep a lot of records, or give them standardized tests, or whatnot.
In any case, if you've thought this much about homeschooling, then you can do it. After a month, you'll laugh at your earlier apprehension over it. Nor do you need to devote eight hours a day to it, because your lessons will be intense and fast-moving. After just a few hours of you in front of a whiteboard, they'll be full up for the day. (Public school lasts all day not because of the amount of education being given, but due to the necessity to babysit the kids while the parents are at work.)
And you don't have to do it forever. Even if you can only swing it for a year, that one year will be HUGE for them, and will lead them to rediscover the pleasures of the understanding. They, and you, will remember it forever.
Where do your kids stay when you're out? You said telecommuting, so I guess you work from home, but surely you must be present at sometime to meeting/travel...
Most of my work happens from 7am to 10am, while the kids are sleeping and breakfasting, and from 4pm until the evening, while the kids are in martial arts and scouts and with my ex. We also have 30-minute breaks throughout the day for touch-typing practice or reading assignments or what-not, and I get a bit of work and email done at those times.
How do your kids learn socialization skills?
Another poster mentioned the obvious places. My kids also attend martial arts, and we live on a cul-de-sac that is constantly full of kids anyway. They seem to get their fill, as far as I can tell.
As an aside, I challenge you to define for yourself exactly what 'socialization' means. That ugly exercise may lead you, as it led me, to see that not all socialization venues are created equal.
How are your kids exposed to multiple points of view? Although you can try to do so, probably you'll be very much biased to your point of view.
For quite a few topics, the 'alternative' points of view are false and harmful. But you're right, it's hard for me to see where the alternate points of view will be valuable. For that they have my ex, who has a completely different worldview from me, and all the exposure to books and wikipedia and such that class leads them to. In any case, they can look forward to entirely too much "here are the other points of view and all are equally valid and invalid!!!11!" rubbish in public high-school and college.
How do you deal with subjects that either are taught too dim in school or that have greatly evolved since then? (Genetics come to mind)
I do my own research -- usually the day before. I just read and read and make notes for the next day's lesson. In the middle of lecturing we are very often googling things anyway, whenever I can't answer something... and that itself is a powerful lesson that an omniscient teacher would not be able to convey.
I'm with ya. I endured public education through high school, and it taught me that education = boredom. And who knows how many false but socially useful ideas they installed in me. (e.g. grading on a curve = you lose if people are better than you = life is a zero sum game = nasty false idea)
I sent my sons to private school until they were 8 and 10. I tried montessori and also an elite Lutheran school (despite its religiousness). This past year I switched my job to telecommuting and now I home-school them. They absorb the information like sponges, because kids these days have highly active minds due to the ocean of data that we all live in.
This month is the end of our first year doing this. I didn't think I could do it, but I did, and it's not hard any more. We've covered sociology/history from the African jungle through the Macedonian empire, physics (all the basics), and information theory (including basic algol programming in C++/C#). I picked those topics because they actually dovetail at many interesting points... and I enjoy them enough to teach them passionately.
My ex, who is of a different mind, teaches math, reading comprehension, writing, and biology. It's an excellent division of labor. And now my kids routinely ask me if we can learn about a certain topic in school tomorrow (last request was to learn how escalators work).
I used to think homeschoolers were all religious nutjobs. In fact most of them are (the curricula sold at homeschool bookstores can only be described as 'wacky'), but homeschool can be as rational as the parents are. If I can do it, so can you. You'll have to study to do it, but that's not a bad thing.
Now I look back on public school and it just seems like an impossible job: mass education that must proceed at the pace of the slowest child in the room, run by unionized teachers who reject performance criteria and do not care about your kids anyway, teaching a publicly approved curriculum where 'public' = a bunch of envirous religious dolts. Completely impossible. But we can opt out.
Yes, it is negligent. The fact that more people weren't burned doesn't change the fact that they were taking an unjustifable risk.
When 23,999,999 average idiots are able to successfully handle your retail procedure, it is hard to justify incurring other problems in order to make safe that final idiot. The 190-degree serving temperature is not accidental or arbitrary; abandoning it has costs too.
You can define 'negligent' any way you wish. Under your current definition where 'negligent' means "creating a risk above 0.0000001", you are negligent in countless ways by the time you've made it to the office in the morning. I suppose you can run with this idea if you like, but it's not useful. A useful definition of negligent will single out those actions which create risks that are cost-effective to eliminate.
So, to use your logic just a bit further, it would be OK for McDonalds to serve coffee far too hot to be safe, if only it was an industry standard?
Yes, because if it that was for some reason the standard, then we'd have the processes in place (mentally and commercially) to deal with it. Plaintiff's whole argument was that McDonald's was doing something unusual. (Though at a coffee complaint rate of 1 in 24 million, this is a very very hard claim to advance.)
That said, your objection is silly because such a thing could never become the standard in a retail industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Now see, that's why I'm not buying it.
The researchers are basically saying "Hey, there was an ancient instrument, that was practical to manufacture as far back as Rome, and sounded pretty, kinda a mix between a trumpet and a french horn, and that even Bach wrote music for, and it COMPLETELY VANISHED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH."
No, I'm sorry, the world doesn't work that way. Things completely vanish if they SUCK. This thing probably did NOT sound "pretty", or there would still be a few around. These guys kept tweaking their software until it sounded "pretty", because that what us moderns want, not because that's how an ancient Roman instrument must've sounded.
Yes, but what if they really do have a pill that can correct this condition?
Introspect carefully, and tell us whether you object to brain management chemicals in principle. Quite a few people -- mostly those who, I suspect, have brains properly calibrated for present conditions -- do make such objections.
In the very clever book "Virus of the Mind", the author defines an "association meme" as a social idea about how one thing goes with another. Examples of association memes include: "Cereal is for breakfast", "Muffins are for breakfast", and "Chocolate cake is not for breakfast". Merchants wishing to sell chocolate cake for breakfast (including Starbucks) must work within these memes, which is why they bake their product into a muffin shape. Quite a clever little manipulation.
Turning now to the summary:
To extend "Virus of the Mind"'s ideas, guardrails are an association meme. We associate them with benevolence, with keeping us safe, and with an obvious danger. Lynton is invoking that meme, muffin style, to manipulate us into accepting something we otherwise would reject. The chocolate cake he is selling for breakfast should properly invoke the meme of a school principle, but if it did, nobody would accept it.
I will contribute a dollar to any charity raising money to put Lynton onto a ship and dump him onto a deserted island, never to return. Let's see how he, a professional influencer who, in influencing the movements of billions of dollars, has never produced so much as a grain of wheat, fares alone.
It just occurred to me, we've never had a completely successful test of this equipment.
Straw man. I didn't say anything about marital problems. And anyway you are lying about being in possession of such data.
Possibly. All I proposed was that female partners would be willing to do more for any given quantity of resources committed (e.g. dates, gifts). We don't, and probably can never, have empirical data on this... but I do sense that American women seem pretty expensive.
Are those the values of the women in question, or are they the values of their fathers who are trying to jack their price back up?
Other than the oil. The war got the taps going again, and they now provide about 2.5% of the world's consumption, though that could rise as high as 10%.
Perhaps you do not assign any value to that, but the free market sure does. The cost of energy redounds in the cost of everything else, which means that our (everyone's) net quality of life is a function of it.
This is especially relevant becuase the demand curve for oil is highly inelastic. Do you know what that means re: amount supplied? A 2% increase in supply is a very big deal when the demand curve is nearly flat.
The outrage prevents a rational discourse on the subject, which keeps hidden the real reason (anti-competition) for outlawing it. If we could talk as rationally about sexual services as we do about, say, vehicle maintenance services, then we might be able to create a more efficient society. ('efficient' = creates more safety, comfort, pleasure, and joy for a given amount of resources consumed.)
Back in the farming days when marriage was an economic necessity, there was an argument to be made for shielding it from damaging temptations... but all of that is becoming obsolete now, at least for the middle and upper classes. Maybe the lower class still needs a ban on prostitution, though, because the lower class still needs marriage in order to afford a family.
Wives don't have monopoly power, because they are not the only suppliers. What they have right now is a legal barrier to entry, of the sort that telco CEOs can only dream about.
As far as mistresses are concerned, that has always been an issue and it does not change upon legalization.
Prostitution cannot be made legal after womens' suffrage. Women dislike the competition, and because they vote in greater numbers than men, they will never allow prostitution to be legalized.
When people complain that "prostitution cheapens women", they are exactly correct. Prostitution lowers the asking price for sexual services, which means that its legalization will increase what your female partner will be willing to do with you in bed. (Just look at all the direct and indirect costs of sex right now: dates, courtship, relationship, etc. etc. etc.)
An added complication is the urgent business directive to change the battery geometry once a year. You know, move the pins over a quarter-inch or so, or change the size of the power jack by a millimeter, or move the cells around. Just enough change to obsolete all currently-owned batteries, wall warts, and car adapters.
Why in the world would you assume that they haven't already performed exactly that calculation?
On a less cynical note, high-density lithium-polymer batteries is a very tricky business... doing it en masse doubly so.
You chose an interpretation of my comments that allowed you to criticize me, congratulations.
When I said a "Bernoulli wing that can accomplish the same thing as [AOA]" I meant it literally. Have you ever calculated how much hump would be required to fly without AOA? And how would that wing perform in other areas of the flight envelope?
We are perfectly aware that aircraft have asymmetrical wings, but they do so primarily to prevent separation. Whether this also creates Bernoulli lift is not a design goal.
It's not an asshole instinct, it's a mating instinct.
Women control the womb-space, which means they set the terms of behavior that will be rewarded with mating opportunities. Western women presently pass out such rewards based in large part upon status -- or more precisely: upon status displays. Big ridiculous cars are an approved status display, which means they increase their owners' mating opportunities, which means people buy them.
No airplane seeking to maintain altitude flies with the nose completely flat; the nose is always pitched slightly upward in order to shove air downward with the wings. At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot.
You could make a Bernoulli wing to accomplish the same thing, but then it would interfere at other angles of attack. In particular, a pronounced hump on the top of the wing would make the wing more prone to airflow separation and stalling.
This "five senses" garbage is a favorite example of mine for illustrating how everyone, everywhere, including textbooks, can be obviously mistaken about something 'factual'.
Our sixth sense is accelleration, and the sense organ responsible for this is the semicircular canals in our inner ear. It's how we know where 'down' is, and life would be difficult without this sense. Our seventh sense is proprioception, derived from muscle feedback all over the body.
These qualify as 'senses' because they convert environmental information directly into sensations.
Now, while we're on the subject of ubiquitous factual errors, let's talk about how flat- and symmetric-winged aircraft can fly without any help from the Bernoulli effect.
Good answer. Quick one, too. But you should rewrite it, reiterating your basic insight in a few meanderingly different ways, clearly in love with your own inflated prose, so that it will match the article.
Actually wargames (particularly CounterStrike) have taught me just how easy it is to get killed in a military action. Videogames dispelled my earlier fantasy of the lone invincible commando -- viz: Schwarzenegger in 'Commando', or Stallone as Rambo. Videgames taught me how ridiculously dangerous a gunfight really is, and how quick, how terribly quick, death comes when guns are involved.
Of course not all games do that. 'Airborne Ranger' fed the myth, but then, Airborne Ranger as not an accurate simulation. It's the really accurate games that make you realize that it's a deadly business. Ironic that those are the games people select for their public tantrums.
After WWII, there were similar guerilla actions in Germany, and a similar "mopping up" action that dragged on for a while. The difference between that and Iraq was that the moppers-up were under no scrutiny and were told to do whatever it takes to sort it out. They were allowed to be as ugly as war. We do not grant our soldiers similar liberty nowadays because we no longer have that kind of willpower.
Nietzsche put his finger on it when he noticed that peaceful societies eventually get swamped with pity, and are unable to be harsh or to even look upon suffering. He called it "the imperative of herd timidity: 'we want that some day there should be nothing any more to be afraid of!'" (Natural History of Morals number 201).
You understand that there is no energy source that behaves differently than what you decry about oil and coal?
If we moved en masse to fission, for example, then uranium mines and spent-fuel reprocessors would become the new OPEC. If we made a serious move to wind/solar, then solar-panel fabs and battery chemicals and wind corridors would become the new OPEC. (E.g. Bolivia's recent moves regarding its lithium deposits.)
That's all well and good, and as it should be. The ONLY problem here, is that some folks want to make trillion-dollar adjustments to industry all over the world based on these models which are still in such a preliminary state.
(The trillion-dollar adjustments involve increasing everyone's cost of living in order to internalize costs that may not actually be negative externalities, and include the imposition of a very expensive administrative layer atop everything carbon-related.)
Well, you could store them internally.
Thank you for chiming in.
If you take the plunge, be sure to join a homeschool association for your state. They will know about the laws you'll be subject to, and they'll know where all the bookstores and daycamps and the like are. Your kids will meet a lot of other sharp kids at those camps; my 10-year-old is in a Lego Robotics daycamp where, at long last, he is surrounded with other kids on his level.
I'm lucky that I live in Texas, where the laws about homeschooling are minimal, thanks to the religious nutjobbery here in the South. In other states you may have to keep a lot of records, or give them standardized tests, or whatnot.
In any case, if you've thought this much about homeschooling, then you can do it. After a month, you'll laugh at your earlier apprehension over it. Nor do you need to devote eight hours a day to it, because your lessons will be intense and fast-moving. After just a few hours of you in front of a whiteboard, they'll be full up for the day. (Public school lasts all day not because of the amount of education being given, but due to the necessity to babysit the kids while the parents are at work.)
And you don't have to do it forever. Even if you can only swing it for a year, that one year will be HUGE for them, and will lead them to rediscover the pleasures of the understanding. They, and you, will remember it forever.
Most of my work happens from 7am to 10am, while the kids are sleeping and breakfasting, and from 4pm until the evening, while the kids are in martial arts and scouts and with my ex. We also have 30-minute breaks throughout the day for touch-typing practice or reading assignments or what-not, and I get a bit of work and email done at those times.
Another poster mentioned the obvious places. My kids also attend martial arts, and we live on a cul-de-sac that is constantly full of kids anyway. They seem to get their fill, as far as I can tell.
As an aside, I challenge you to define for yourself exactly what 'socialization' means. That ugly exercise may lead you, as it led me, to see that not all socialization venues are created equal.
For quite a few topics, the 'alternative' points of view are false and harmful. But you're right, it's hard for me to see where the alternate points of view will be valuable. For that they have my ex, who has a completely different worldview from me, and all the exposure to books and wikipedia and such that class leads them to. In any case, they can look forward to entirely too much "here are the other points of view and all are equally valid and invalid!!!11!" rubbish in public high-school and college.
I do my own research -- usually the day before. I just read and read and make notes for the next day's lesson. In the middle of lecturing we are very often googling things anyway, whenever I can't answer something... and that itself is a powerful lesson that an omniscient teacher would not be able to convey.
I'm with ya. I endured public education through high school, and it taught me that education = boredom. And who knows how many false but socially useful ideas they installed in me. (e.g. grading on a curve = you lose if people are better than you = life is a zero sum game = nasty false idea)
I sent my sons to private school until they were 8 and 10. I tried montessori and also an elite Lutheran school (despite its religiousness). This past year I switched my job to telecommuting and now I home-school them. They absorb the information like sponges, because kids these days have highly active minds due to the ocean of data that we all live in.
This month is the end of our first year doing this. I didn't think I could do it, but I did, and it's not hard any more. We've covered sociology/history from the African jungle through the Macedonian empire, physics (all the basics), and information theory (including basic algol programming in C++/C#). I picked those topics because they actually dovetail at many interesting points... and I enjoy them enough to teach them passionately.
My ex, who is of a different mind, teaches math, reading comprehension, writing, and biology. It's an excellent division of labor. And now my kids routinely ask me if we can learn about a certain topic in school tomorrow (last request was to learn how escalators work).
I used to think homeschoolers were all religious nutjobs. In fact most of them are (the curricula sold at homeschool bookstores can only be described as 'wacky'), but homeschool can be as rational as the parents are. If I can do it, so can you. You'll have to study to do it, but that's not a bad thing.
Now I look back on public school and it just seems like an impossible job: mass education that must proceed at the pace of the slowest child in the room, run by unionized teachers who reject performance criteria and do not care about your kids anyway, teaching a publicly approved curriculum where 'public' = a bunch of envirous religious dolts. Completely impossible. But we can opt out.
When 23,999,999 average idiots are able to successfully handle your retail procedure, it is hard to justify incurring other problems in order to make safe that final idiot. The 190-degree serving temperature is not accidental or arbitrary; abandoning it has costs too.
You can define 'negligent' any way you wish. Under your current definition where 'negligent' means "creating a risk above 0.0000001", you are negligent in countless ways by the time you've made it to the office in the morning. I suppose you can run with this idea if you like, but it's not useful. A useful definition of negligent will single out those actions which create risks that are cost-effective to eliminate.
Yes, because if it that was for some reason the standard, then we'd have the processes in place (mentally and commercially) to deal with it. Plaintiff's whole argument was that McDonald's was doing something unusual. (Though at a coffee complaint rate of 1 in 24 million, this is a very very hard claim to advance.)
That said, your objection is silly because such a thing could never become the standard in a retail industry.