There's a different between trust and faith. I trust scientists because I can go over their data and validate their conclusions. I could even (theoretically) perform the same experiments to see if I get the same data. Believing the Bible or my priest or my religious grandma requires blind faith, because there is no data to analyse, and there are no experiments to repeat.

Man, this dog turd tastes aweful, let me try this cat turd.

We want to stir the brains of geniuses! But don't you dare learn about evolution in school!

How do you produce the zinc oxide powder? How do you produce the cylindrical structure? Not trolling, genuinly asking. If someone with more metallurgical knowledge than me tells me zinc oxide is common and easy to mine, I'll believe it. But it's a question we must ask.

From the TFA:

The former.

You mean like "In God we trust"?

Unless you want to teach GNOME, or KDE, or Unity, or Cinnamon, start them off with a command line-only Linux install. At that level, all distros are essentially identical except for package management. And even there, the two big ones, apt and rpm, are different only in their syntax.

FBI: I'm going to harm this child unless you give me Bob's information.
Facebook: I don't think that's how you're supposed to interpret our guidelines...

"Real work" is not helped by "exposing the OS complexity."

Physical textbooks lack:

• portability - Fair enough
• durability - No. Show me an iPad that can survive being run over by a car and then getting soaked.
• accessibility - What does that even mean when you're talking about books?
• consistent quality - Putting them on iPads isn't going to fix this.
• interactivity - Fair enough again. But is this needed?
• and searchability - Ever heard of an index?

What Apple has really done is taken a cornered market (students being forced to buy new editions every year) and changed the entity doing the cornering from something students hate (publishers) to something students blindly adore (Apple).

I have family in Russia. One of them told me about their colleague, a woman who's responsible for signing the ballot count. The votes are counted, the Communist Party is a clear winner in that riding, and she signs. Someone from United Russia then brings her a different paper, with the count modified to make United Russia (Putin's party) win. She says "I can't sign this, this is fraud." "Sign it." "No, I can't." "Sign it or you'll lose your job." Her meager salary is already not enough to live on, she can't afford to lose it. So she signs.

No.

Their products have to come out of somewhere...

This, bizarrely, reminds me of an article on feminism, and how, having won the major gender inequality battles, they're starting to pick silly fights where a rational person would see no fight to pick.

I think something similar is happening here, and with Ubuntu's Unity and maybe GNOME 3 as well. Having achieved a big chunk of what they set out to achieve, they start looking for the next big goal, but there's no next big goal to be found, so they just invent something utterly ridiculous. The file system is fine, just leave it be. All the newbies need to know about is their home directory, and those who need to know about the entire file system are perfectly fine with how it's currently laid out.

I don't understand, could you provide a car analogy?