Says the person who's never tried actually reading a sophisticated comic? Hate to break it to you, but not everything is Superman. And if you want a major culture that doesn't bat an eyelash at adults reading comics, and where in fact the majority of comics are probably written FOR adults, you might want to look into a little place called Japan.

Getting my nerd-pedantry quota in for the day, the number form of that word is spelled: GOOGOL

I used one until mine broke for no reason recently (another story), and I can say that in terms of being an actual [b]tool[/b] (what most people think of when they hear "useful") I would rate it somewhere behind every single other modern smartphone I've used (G3 and Pre). Having recently switched over to a Pre, there's absolutely no way I'd go back to a phone that can't multitask.

So if you want to talk about efficient operation, talk about the fact that you can't work on all those apps at the same time, and swap between them at will. Reading an email and want to check your calendar and then look at a map to see if you can make an invitation, then reply to the email, go back to the map, copy the address, and stick it into your calendar which is still open to the date in question? Good luck doing that pleasantly on an iPhone. I truly had no appreciation how HORRIBLE the iPhone is at that sort of thing until I got a Pre. As an actual tool for getting things done, I'd say the iPhone is anything but efficient for all but the simplest of tasks. The magic of Apple is that they're actually able to make us think otherwise...

We're talking about intelligence, not consciousness. We don't have to make them think the SAME WAY as we do, we just need to make them think to the SAME EFFECT.

Random House seems to think stentorious originated about 5 centuries ago, and actually slightly BEFORE the origin they give for stentorian. Whether those exact dates are right, you must be pretty old to consider anything in that region a neologism...

C++ isn't a nice to write in as Objective C

That's an odd claim to try to make, considering they're so closely related. Have you actually used both enough to gain some level of mastery? Because I have, and the difference is, in my opinion, more a matter of preference than between any other two languages I can think of. One thing I will say, though, is I find Objective-C syntax absolutely horrendous to read compared to C++.

"Poverty" as it's generally discussed in the United States is a political term that bears more or less no relation whatsoever to the meaning of the term when used in any other context. You may as well be having a totally different discussion.

In other words, this is a problem with language that Wittgenstein shed some light on.

The massive homeless population of my city begs to differ... Do they have it quite as bad as those in abject poverty in, say, Africa? Probably not, but I'm not harboring any illusions that it doesn't amount to abject poverty.

Um, no it's not... the only "switch" on the iPhone is the silent/ring mode switch... at least going by any definition of "switch" I'm familiar with.

You have clearly not fully considered what you are saying, so I will enlighten you. Agnosticism is a position. In short, it is the position that there simply isn't enough available information to make a decision. It is, if I may be so bold, the only rational position on the matter. The agnostic position is (or at least should be when fully considered), "I have examined the evidence for both sides and find both sides lacking."

Or are you claiming to have definitive evidence one way or another? No? Well, there's an old saying to which you should take heed: "Whereof one does not know, thereof one should not speak." I hate to break it to you, but before you go around calling people cowards, you'd really be best served knowing what the hell you're talking about.

In picking a side and standing with it just for the sake of doing so, all you're serving is the worst kind of ignorance; I sure hope nobody follows your advice.

I hate to break it to you, but most people would call a month of marathon gaming getting to level 80 "a long, boring solo grind."

A deprecated feature.

Thanks nature, but we can keep things moving along on our own from now on...

I've honestly always thought Trojan was possibly the most brilliantly named product of all time.

To be honest, I thoroughly disagree with you, because I DID HAVE just such a teacher. She wasn't some kind of superwoman either, she was just very competent at math (no advanced degrees, but good enough to teach basic calculus, algebra, and geometry in a way that made pretty much all the students at my school respect her). More importantly, she was passionate about giving students a fundamental understanding of the subject matter. She didn't want to just cross her T's and dot her I's and be done with it, she wanted us to learn what it was all about. She was a hard teacher, but she was almost remarkable in that nearly the entire student body had a great deal of respect for her.

I think the author's whole POINT was that it's claims like yours--that this is some kind of unreasonable expectation--that are entirely the problem with the situation we have. The simple fact is, it is not unreasonable. My personal experience has shown me that there ARE such teachers out there; mine as well as others I've known.

My own personal take is that our society simply doesn't give educators the respect they deserve. There's very little motivation for the kind of intelligent, competent, passionate people to go into to lower tiers of the world of education. We pay them peanuts and there's not nearly the kind of appreciation and respect out there for them to want to do those jobs. I happened to go to a private Catholic school, where neither of those things are true, and let me tell you the difference was obvious.

Because humans evolved needing to hold onto acrylic glass? Can anybody name ONE natural substance even remotely like acrylic glass? Come back with a model of how fingerprints affect friction on substances like plant material or rock, then maybe this will be credible...