I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. Is your point that it's just as rational to constantly change views of superhuman beings in order to hold on to religious beliefs (I've never seen Satan described as more than a tempter -- there's certainly no indication that God gave him such power of creation to physically affect physics, geology, biology, etc in such a way to make the universe appear much older than 6000 years old) than to accept such evidence as face value? If so, I think we have different views of rationality.

Because there's nothing more that kids love more than history lessons. Seriously, most kids have access to a computer these days. Those with the interest and aptitude will find themselves in the industry or academia, more likely through gaming than through history.

And the rest of the note says that the delta between commercial and LGPL versions is not desired on their part and they want to get the changes into the LGPL version by the next point release. Hopefully in the process they'll better streamline the process so the two versions stay in sync, but nothing seems to suggest that they're trying to deliberately differentiate the two; in fact, the post referenced says just the opposite.

More people are living in urban areas, and urban zones that don't currently warrant a rail system one day will. We may not be retro-fitting current cities, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore new transportation items for developing cities.

Like it or not, the states are not independent. From agriculture to technology, California (really, the whole west coast) and its resources are important to the whole nation. As long as interstate commerce exists, it's in the country's best interest to what it can to safeguard every state and its citizens against natural disaster. Not to mention the fact that the US has federal installations all over (such as military bases), so monitoring programs really are a national concern.

So many libraries exist to help with flaws/lack of functionality in vanilla JS. Perhaps the libraries that come out-of-the-box with Dart get rid of the need for such libraries (though it will probably have its own issues, thus resulting in Dart-specific libraries). And again, the libraries won't suddenly become unusable, as Javascript engines will still exist to utilize them.

The whole point of the "type" attribute in the script tag is that a browser can support multiple scripting languages. The introduction of Dart wouldn't necessitate dropping JS for the browser, but if other browsers implemented it (or Google created extensions for other browsers), it would provide an alternative.

I must have skipped Bible class the day they covered the passages with those events.

PLoS ONE has a high impact factor, and it's gotten there very quickly. In one year it jumped from #25 to #12 in biology journals. And some people publish there because they prefer its business model and want to support openness.

Much of the excitement in football (as in all sports) comes from watching humans with tremendous talent who spend a huge amount of time developing that talent. Like any other sport, strategy is important. But the strategy is partially built around the strengths and weaknesses of the actual humans who make up the team, as well as those of the members of the opposing team. I'm not a huge football fan, but I recognize the difference between multiplying a fairly arbitrary number representing "will" or "skill" by the random roll of a die and a team of people who are fatigued, injured, and withstanding adverse weather conditions, pushing themselves to the utmost limit not only for themselves, but for their team and the millions of people cheering them on towards victory.

When I'm designing a solution, I don't ask if it works, I was if it works well. Is it secure? Is it scalable? What are the risks associated with it? Is it full of kludges that make bad implementations easy? What do I do if a user decides she doesn't trust that functionality and turns it off? And the point of the article wasn't to say that people shouldn't use cookies when developing web site or applications. Rather, it's an examination of how a sub-optimal solution came to be so that perhaps other people can avoid similar pitfalls in the future.

That's not exactly true. While modern printer touchpads have helped out with the situation, push-button systems, generally speaking, aren't as efficient for creating a UI control systems for complex machines. Every time I use one it feels like a kludge, overextending the button interface. On the other hand, a rich widget toolkit (if you have a good UI designer) really can make the overall experience quicker and easier. Not to mention the fact that it would be fairly trivial to set up multiple levels of interfaces exposing on the necessary commands to different classes of users. I consider this more of an evolution of the current printer touch interface than a revolution in printing, but I at least like the concept (can't comment on the implementation since I haven't seen it).

Or perhaps we shouldn't just rely on reciting a litany of facts in hope of winning an argument. Rather, engage in a debate using questions that guide the other person into applying their own logic to the dicussion so that they reach their own reasonably sound conclusion. Don't try to win an argument, let the other person win your argument for you.

I think you're conflating a solitary nature with social ineptitude. It sounds like you do fine in social situations but prefer alone time. When I think of social ineptitude, I picture people who can't recognize social cues, respond appropriately to a social situation, lack of ability to help defuse a potentially volatile situation, etc. This is what can be a problem. Simply liking activities that are more solo or preferring large amounts of alone time aren't in the same category, in my opinion.