"Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."

This is purest drivel. A culture is a set of shared behaviors, interests, and values that cause people to cluster together, or derive from them being so. Geekdom, hackerdom, tech, or whatever you want to call it is its own culture. It may be predominantly white male, but it is not the same thing as white male culture at large. If it was, we'd be more interested in football and reality TV and less interested in roleplaying games and Star Trek. Not to say that no geeks like the former and that all like the latter, but the percentages are very very different from mainstream. We have our own slang, places we tend to hang out (especially if you consider online "places"), entertainment interests, people we admire, people we hate, things we like to talk about, and so forth.

In fact, the very idea that someone's ethnicity defines their culture is itself racist. When I hang out with my black, Chinese, and Indian coworkers, we all have common ground due to us sharing the tech culture, rather than being pigeonholed into the cultures we were born in, staying there, and having to overcome barriers when we want to interact.

While the analogy does apply sometimes, when technology is being used to do evil, the software/hardware engineer usually isn't in a role equivalent to a doctor torturing a patient. The engineer isn't the one acting upon the person being done evil to. More typically, since most tech has a wide variety of uses, the engineer's role is much more akin to a developer of medical devices. A syringe can just as easily be used to inject antibiotics or cyanide, and it would be silly to claim that the person designing the syringes is morally responsible for how the things get used. Consider the case of Saeed Malekpour, who wrote some code for uploading images, and is in jail in Iran (and was almost executed) because that code got used on a porn site. (No, not claiming that porn sites are evil or anything like that, it was just the first "syringe maker will never know what gets injected" example that I thought of).

How will the troops live without lutefisk?

The problem with all of those is that there are a limited number of locales where they can work well, and all of them except for geothermal are transient. That means power storage, which means batteries, which means toxic chemical waste. It may or may not be as dangerous on a per-volume basis as nuclear waste (someone more knowledgeable than me would have to answer that), but there would certainly be a hell of a lot more of it.

I presume they mean the Holtzman Effect.

"Learn about this one weird bug that Verizon doesn't want you to know!"

In a fundamental sense, aren't all weapons used against chemicals? Well, except weapons used against energy beings, I guess.

I don't exactly smile when paying my property tax, but it's probably the one I dislike the least, especially when it comes to the funding of law-enforcement agencies. How well I view a given such agency is more or less inversely-proportional to how many people are within their jurisdiction. For instance, when I lived in California, my encounters (both when being stopped myself, and when I was a passenger in someone else's car who was being stopped) with the local suburb's PD or the county sheriffs were quite reasonable and understanding, while those with the California Highway Patrol were very negative. After moving to Vegas, the local vs. state quality difference has held true, though it's much less striking, and the Nevada Highway Patrol seem much nicer guys than the CHP -- but then, Nevada is a much smaller state than California, so that fits the "bigger = worse" pattern. As to the federal-level agencies like the DEA and the BATF, I'd disband almost all of them in an instant, and limit the FBI to providing support (fx. forensics) and coordination to more-local agencies.

Famous but probably-apocryphal conversation between a visiting German general and his Swiss counterpart, prior to WW2:

German: How many men are under your command?
Swiss: I can mobilize one million men in less than twenty-four hours.
German: What would happen if I marched five million men through that pass tomorrow?
Swiss: I would call up my men. Each man would fire five shots. Then I would send them home.

They were doing similar things even during WWII. JFK's older brother Joe Jr. was killed along with another crewman in a mishap with an explosives-loaded B-24 Liberator. They were supposed to get the plane airborne, arm it, then bail out, but the explosives (equivalent to about 14kt) went off prematurely.

Trusting government is generally a worse idea. Remind me again, was it Exxon or BP that was setting off above-ground nuclear explosions, a while back? Heck, mushroom clouds from the Nevada desert tests were such a common sight in Las Vegas that one of the casinos (the Stardust) had a sign partly inspired by them.

Yes, I would rather live longer and die from those things than to die earlier from malnutrition or related problems.

I'm sure having readily-available food has caused average weight to rise, but I'm skeptical about how much of a factor that is compared to reduction in exercise. Until quite recently (in the evolutionary and historical scheme of things), humans have had to burn a lot of calories just to stay alive -- food, shelter, and protection all required heavy exercise to acquire, produce, and/or maintain. Even after the advent of agriculture, the vast majority of the population spent their time doing manual labor to grow food, and the rest of the population tended to do manual labor that was just as intensive. Staying alive required you to plow a field, or chop wood, or haul stones, etc. Today, most of us here on Slashdot (and a lot of other people around us) gain our food, shelter, and protection by making little motions with our fingers, talking, and every so often moving a short distance within a building. We don't have to exercise to survive (in the day-to-day sense). Exercise is something we have to deliberately seek out.

Shorter version: I think the problem is more our lack of caloric output than our excessive caloric input.

Until human beings cease to be mortal, by definition something will be killing us in vast numbers. And unless those causes of death are evenly spread out, some things will always be glaring problems compared to everything else. All we can do is change what those things are, and hopefully make them happen later in life.

Or an inability on your part to back up your views with facts and logic. As close as I can tell, what you consider "tangential and irrelevant" is the questioning of your underlying assumptions. "Everyone knows X is true, therefore Y is true." "Err, X isn't true, for these reasons." "That's irrelevant, we're talking about Y."

That is itself a claim. Back it up, please.

Enjoy straining definitions to the point where they can cover anything you don't like, and enjoy begging the question. Also, enjoy apparently being unable to address any of my criticism of your views.