Your "we can never be completely sure" argument isn't the one that motivates creationists, and you know it. Yes, of course it's possible that evolutionary theory is wrong. It's possible that anything we think we know about how the universe works is wrong. Acknowledging this basic fact is required for any kind of scientific inquiry. But creationists are completely sure that their explanation is right, and they will continue to be sure of this no matter how much evidence accumulates against their position. By invoking "the idea of evolution as a religion," you're arguing against a straw man; the beliefs based on faith rather than science are entirely on one side of this argument, and it's not the side of evolutionary biology.

There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the ancient desert nomads who told and retold the collection of folktales which eventually got written down as the Book of Genesis meant anything at all other than the literal meaning of the word "day." The Hebrew "yom" has exactly the same meaning as the English "day," and while it can be used poetically to indicate other periods of time ("in those days," "a day will come," etc.) there is nothing in Genesis to indicate such a usage.

... "I hope you're right. I really do." But we know how that worked out.

Leakey is being wildly optimistic. The evidence for evolution is already overwhelming (and no, "intelligent design" is not required.) There is a large and noisy group of people who have made it very plain that they will not accept this evidence. It's an ideological issue for them, not a scientific one. And they will continue to maintain this position in the face of any new evidence that is presented to them. There's no way to win them over with appeals to logic. The only solution, AFAICT, is to continue to shower them with the mockery they so richly deserve, and hope that they're driven back to the lunatic fringe where they belong.

All true. But at least O'Reilly has been doing something other than complaining that they can't compete!

MuseScore and MusicXML (or mXML) are fantastic projects and wonderfully useful products. I use both all the time and donate cash on a regular basis. I've used them for professional, high-end projects and for little personal projects that will never go beyond my four walls. mXML is yet another open source project that was just so smart, so good that all the the big proprietary music editor developers had to incorporate it into their own products, because none of them had been able to come up with a flexible, portable, rich music language or format of their own.

If anyone who has contributed to either of these is around here, you need to stand up and get a little round of applause.

I learned about mXML and MuseScore when I was searching online for lead sheets to some jazz standards to learn on my chromatic harmonica, and stumbled upon wikifonia (also a very worthy project). It is a shame that wikifonia is having such trouble staying up lately. I'm sure they're getting the full scorched-earth treatment from music publishers, who have so badly failed at making any good use of new technologies.

And now its the labor union thugs doing terrorizing...for the people of course.

Citation, asshole.

Now if only that quote had come from the Attorney General, instead of Electronic Frontiers Australia...

I've a suspicion that some of those aren't independent variables. It would be interesting to know how they connect, because then instead of having to get depressed, you'd know why the rest of government was so flawed on such a consistent basis and what was actually needed in the way of reform. Discovery is only depressing if you never do anything with it.

You pay twice. You pay the interest on the loan AND you pay for being in a higher tax bracket. On top of that, since there's two groups collecting these taxes, you're paying double the overhead.

The correct thing would be to determine how much the educational system alters the economy, adjust the higher tax brackets accordingly, abolish loans and re-establish the grant system. You'd end up paying less (since you pay for fewer staff to collect the money), the system becomes simpler (one point of collection, not two) and universities no longer inflate prices to give the illusion of being better (which is a perverse consequence of supply-side economics) but rather would need to charge according to impact.