Importance here is largely dependent on context. The theory of Evolution, for instance, may or may not be terribly important or even remotely interesting to a physicist (although many of the concepts may be shared, like that of self-organization). However, to a biologist, it is very important; in fact, to remove it is to castrate the biological community at large.

I suppose it depends on why you're not teaching it. If you're not teaching it because you're teaching a theory that has superseded it, then of course it's not abuse. Of course, the thing to remember here is that Special Relativity largely encapsulates the body of work that Newton built his theory of motion on. This isn't to say that Newton doesn't have a place in the classroom, because it is readily derived from Special Relativity. What I am saying is that when we teach children science, we should teach them what is supported by evidence. Now, if someone were proposing to remove Newton's laws of motion from the cirriculuum because they had ideological problems with it (even though it is demonstrable and yields reasonably accurate predictions in context), I might not be inclined to call that abuse as such, but I would certainly call it negligence. I do not feel that we should be teaching our children to retreat into uncomfortable falsehoods because the truth offends us or makes us uncomfortable.

As I just said, it depends on context, but the problem with that argument is that you could make that argument about virtually any theory in science, including Newtonian mechanics. I have always thought that one of the best ways to teach science is through its applications. The Theory of Evolution is an excellent example of this because of its predictive power and because it is supported well by disciplines outside of itself. If we are to remove a single teching out of the cirriculuum, why should we remove one that is recognized as one of the single-most useful tools within it's domain?

Well, of course both sides are (at least to some degree) interested in education! I have no doubt that there are creationists who feel that it is within their children's best interests to learn creationism, despite however much I might disagree with it. Likewise, evolutionary biologists are interested in education because today's students will one day be their progeny, and without a well-rounded rounded education, science as whole would suffer a serious setback. The trouble happens because creationism has no basis in science; aside from the fact that it deals with question that science cannot answer, it doesn't make many predictions, and the few it does happen to contradict the evidence we've found to this point. While I won't dispute that politics enters the equation somewhere along the line, to say that education has nothing to do with it is disingenous.

While I can agree that we need to fix science education, I cannot agree with your latter sentiment, because part of fixing science education is through teaching science. I might agree with you about not teaching a hypothesis with little support, but in this case, we're talking about a tool that domain experts use daily. If the Theory of Evolution is not one of the clearest textbook examples of science at work, then I'm not sure what is.

In order to address the kind of ROM programmer you need, it's helpful to know what you're looking for. Are you looking for a universal programmer, or are you willing to buy a ROM programmer that might only cover a certain class of PROMs? If you can peg down your requirements, that could potentially open a lot of opportunities up to you that you might not normally consider. It might even be possible to leverage the work of other hobbyists and roll your own, perhaps something like this. You might also be able to get a good deal on such a device through surplus.

I have a Xeltek Superpro universal programmer that I bought a few years ago for about $500. (I know, not quite within your $300 upper bound) It was an alright investment, I guess, but I haven't really used it much. At the time I bought it, it appeared that there were only Windows drivers for it, and I didn't really have the time to write my own drivers for it at that point. The few times I did use it, however, it was a decent device. If you could find something like that within your price range, it might be worth your consideration.

The fact that the CLI is standardized is a potentially compelling reason to use .NET. The C# language is also standardized. In fact, these standards are available at no cost. This is an incredible advantage; if, for some reason or another, you find your .NET vendor to be inadequate, you can move to another vendor with minimal overhead. While there is no question in my mind that Microsoft's implementation of .NET the most commonly used .NET implementation out there, the fact that there is already a competing vendor here is a good sign. This, of course, requires that you resist the urge to use implementation-dependent features in your project. A sufficiently abstract design should mitigate this problem when those features are required.

Why should you use .NET? Maybe there's no good reason to do so. If you're a programmer, you have to decide whether or not that is actually the case. You can make that decision however you like, for whatever reasons you like. There are many objective reasons one might pick not to use .NET, including the possible cost of training your development team to use it. With that in mind, programming is an engineering task. At the end of the day, things like .NET are only tools, and a failure to properly perform research is foolish at best. .NET, at least in its standardized capacity, is no more of a "Microsoft thing" than C++ is a "Bell Labs thing". I do not see that you have to give Microsoft any money or endorsement to make use of .NET as a programmer.

Origin's motto was "We Create Worlds." I think EA's might as well be "We Destroy Them." The Ultima series was so masterfully crafted that I have shown it to hardcore Final Fantasy fans and have watched their jaws drop in pure amazement. I am not sure what others think about this, but I have noticed that just about every franchise that EA got ahold of due to acquisition has been adulterated in some of the most bizarre ways. I'm no longer surprised that even franchises acquired from Maxis are no longer worth keeping up with. Naturally there will be independent developers who will always fill the gap, but it is never good to see an astounding series go down the drain. I can only hope that gems such as Ultima are rediscovered by gamers and that they will begin to demand the kind of top-notch quality we expected in the 80s and early 90s.