"I'm pretty sure no one wants someone else to be able to load that kind of crap on their phones, but if you can do it, they can do it, too."

Somebody should invent passwords!

"Heavens forbid that the best candidates are picked! Oh the horror!"

Evidently you aren't particularly bright. Only 1 women was hired for 1,231 men. That is indisputable Prima Facia evidence that picking the best candidate is exactly what couldn't possibly have happened, your absurd implication that all women are incompetent not withstanding..

"is something else picking them off earlier in the production chain such that Facebook's hiring is simply an accurate representation of the candidates it has to work with?'"

You are kidding right? Do you really question if it might be true that only 1 in 1,231 candidates would be qualified women? Seriously?

"I went to school to speak with my daughter's teacher when she was in the third grade and struggling."

Well there is your problem right there. If your daughter's teacher is in the third grade and struggling, then you need to find a different teacher for your daughter!

"Then that is the problem. A window trying to draw should be the highest possible priority on desktop workstation and should not be treated like other processes."

Clearly, you prefer your systems to crawl to a halt! Bravo sir!

" If I attempt to migrate to 'window manager x', not only do I need to spend my own time doing it but I will be almost assured of running into issues here and there that may not be insurmountable but will take even more of my valuable time.

I'm confused. What makes your system so special? I mean every application I know runs fine with KDE, Gnome, LXDE, fvwm2, Fluxbox, Blackbox, etc. What makes yours so WM-Centric?

"The linux laptop I use comes pre-built and unfortunately I don't have the flexibility to modify it in that way. I'm stuck with Gnome and whatever scheduler the OS comes with."

What distribution could you possibly be using that doesn't allow you the flexibility to modify it? Or do you not have root access?

" If there are schedulers that are much better, I would question why the particular distro I am using wouldn't just pick the one that works better."

That statement makes it seem pretty evident that you have but a vague understanding of Linux distributions, esp. wrt the one you are using.

"In my experience, Linux desktop response suffers"

You hit the nail on the head, but I don't think you realize it. It is your experience,or more accurately lack thereof, that has you complaining about poor response rather than tweaking your system to perform properly.

"As somebody who crunches numbers all day, trying to pass off results from extremely narrow polls as defining "the face of America" drives me nuts."

Well, consider yourself to have arrived at your destination then!

" Are there too many innocent behind bars?"

You are close. There are too many innocent of any crime with an actual victim in prison. Perhaps you forgot, but here in the US most places still lock people up if they are discovered having a good time and enjoying the day, bothering nobody, smoking a joint.