I don't need a religious text telling me that I need to cook pork better than beef.
And if you think that people in the wilderness get their knowledge from religious teachings your sadly mistaken, just like the Bible doesn't tell you not to put your hand in the fire, your parents/community are more than capable enough to teach young people how to survive.
In the best case religious text can teach you about spiritual things, you know, the things that don't immediately have to do with survival so you need special people to remember and teach it. But on mundane questions it's almost always hopelessly out of date.

In the same way it could be said that religion predicts pretty well if you're ever going to strap bombs to your body and blow yourself up in a crowded public place.
Personally I have the feeling that an invisible being checking what you're doing have exactly ZERO effect because if that was right it could be shown statistically that many more atheists commit crimes than religious people and that's just not the case.

Sorry, but most prohibitions in religious texts are entirely without value. Even if they were valid once, the world changes, religious texts do not. So stuff that was once dangerous to eat might be perfectly safe now and you can't update the Bible/Koran/etc to include stuff that is dangerous today.
And in any case people have been surviving perfectly without the written word, that is what local healers and shamans were for (and for the Bible/Koran being more correct/useful than those local people see my previous sentence) and at least they are able to change to the changing circumstances in the world, they can (and do) learn and adapt.

It's because cords to ring a bell (even if it's electronic at the very end of the cord) harkens back to the days of horse driven trams!

It just shows that if there is so little money invested in the public transport system that they start cutting back on the small expenses like a cord instead of just a bunch of simple buttons (which is what I am used to see).

It also means that you can't easily have different kinds of stop signals. Or at different hights. In several European countries for example they will have buttons at a height where people in a wheelchair can reach them. For the same people (or a parent with a baby in a stroller) there is a button they can use to ask to lower the bus or a ramp so they can get off (more easily), depending on the type of bus.

You "pull the cord"? Please tell me that was a figure of speech because otherwise your public transport is in worse shape than I thought! :)

should learn to proof-read before hitting submit *sigh*

I don't think it has to do with age, but seeing a use for it. I know many wonder "what for"? But besides the fact that many said the same when mobile phones started becoming popular, nowadays you're somewhat "special" if you don't have one yourself.

For myself I knew I wanted something like a tablet when many years ago I saw the firt laptop "convertables": you could turn the screen 180 degrees and let y lie flush against the keybaord and it would turn into a "pen computer". I saw it and thought: "wow! now if they would only loose the keyboard and make it much much tinner it would be perfect". Tablets are coming pretty close to that "vision" I had.

I know several people already who are seriously considering getting rid of their PC, thinking it way to clunky, unwieldy and difficult to use for the few things they use it for.

Dunno, Apple products are pretty popular in many parts of the world where Apple Stores are non-existent or few and far between (I think Spain has 2 in the entire country? And the one I've seen was a complete let-down, nothing like the stories I heard). So I really doubt Apple Stores have much to do with it.

Maybe, but it works the other way around too. Just some weeks ago I was sent some Haskell code (has the same indentation is significant philosophy as Python) but in the copy & paste the indentation had gone completely off.... there was no way I could decipher the code anymore. With most other languages you can either still read it without problems or restore (your personal favorite) indentation without any problems.

I'd say because, in general, Java is NOT cookie cutter technology. One of the big complaints coming out of the .NET camp is that Java just has too many options, that you'll spend more time deciding which technology, library or framework to use than doing actual work.

So in a way I agree with what he says, because from experience I can say that I have met my share of .NET developers who think that a Web Service is that option that appears on the menu of Visual Studio and have no idea how all of it works or how to make it behave differently from the given defaults.

Now, you'll find brilliant people doing .NET and useless ones doing Java, but the moment they put on their CV that they know how to handle a certain technology I can be more or less sure that the Java developer at least read the documentation because most likely there wasn't a button for it on the menu of his/her IDE.

I think you underestimate how far we are already on our way to make our planet uninhabitable (meaning: for humans who want to keep their current lifestiles). You keep talking about potential problems with nuclear reactors, while if they would all explode tomorrow 90% of the world would still be habitable. On the other hand we've been filling the airs and the seas with so much rubbish that slowly but surely we're poisioning ourselves.
Now, of course I'm not suggesting we should just ignore problems associated with these kind of reactors, but we have too keep the perspective that we're doing massive damage all over the world and most people don't lose a minute's sleep over it, while on the other hand buying iodine pills because of a reactor that's thousands of miles away.
Human nature indeed, but nature also gave us the capacity to learn.

Aknowledging human nature should be the first step towards rationalizing about our fears and being able to put them in perspective to the bigger problems that are still there. And for long-lasting damage... I think cars have already caused much more damage to our environment and our health than 10 Tchernobyls ever will.

100% security does not exist. Car, trains, boats, planes, all have calculated risks of grave/fatal accidents and yet year after year we all accept the possibilities of dying in one of them that are way higher than being affected (let alone killed) by a nuclear accident.

I had to look this up just to be sure you haden't put a decimal point in the wrong place somewhere. Truly mind-boggling!

In what other part of the world would that be if not so close to the place where democracy was invented? ;)