These are difficult questions, but ones I think we must face. People call it "playing God" when we tinker with genes, but are we not already playing God every time modern medicine saves a life, or modern agriculture feeds the hungry? By all rights of nature, a significant percentage of our population shouldn't be here. I include myself in that; I'm so nearsighted that I wouldn't last a day in the jungle. And I'm going to pass my defective genes to my offspring. Sooner or later, we're going to have to deal with this.

We didn't invent economics, we discovered it. We don't get to choose what its implications are; we only get to choose what we do with the knowledge. The real "human sacrifice" is in choosing not to know or pursue the optimal solution to minimizing human suffering.

...which was their own money in the first place, until the Feds taxed it and then made them jump through hoops to get it back.

They were writing it in Ada and targeting Windows NT 4.

My productivity increased dramatically when I started using Eclipse instead of jEdit, and I don't even use most of Eclipse's features. Code completion alone saves a huge amount of time that would otherwise be spent typing long identifiers or looking up identifiers I can't quite remember. And yes, a large part of Java development is navigating around a project. For that, Eclipse's package explorer and outline view are a vast improvement on a general-purpose file manager and text editor.

"Skills specific to career choice can be picked up later at places designed for that" -- This attitude is why degree inflation is rampant. High schools should strive to provide skills for careers for which high school is sufficient.

I expected this to be about some creationist raving about science classes from the pit of hell. But he raises a good point. What are the relevant classes that high schools should be teaching today? Is chemistry one of them? Chemistry is relevant to me because I'm curious about amateur rocketry... but I've never used it in any of my jobs, and I have a hard time imagining what use most people would ever have for it.

"If asteroidal materials that have fallen to Earth are not minerals, it stands to reason that asteroidal materials in space are not minerals, either."

Only as far as it stands to reason that the US can claim jurisdiction in space.

If you're looking at Messier objects, the sky is clear and you should have seen the aircraft's navigation lights.

The main problem is that it would take billions of years to make a gram.

Red Hat -> Mandrake -> Linux From Scratch -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint.

I'm sure you've heard of the analogy of the universe being a stretched and distorted rubber sheet, right? For a moment, just think in one dimension instead of two - a piece of elastic. Put two sets of marks on that piece of elastic, one set 5 cm apart and one set 10 cm apart. Now, over the course of one second, stretch the elastic to twice its original length. The marks that were 5 cm apart are now 10 cm apart, and so moved apart at 5 cm/s. The marks that started 10 cm apart moved apart at 10 cm/s. Put the marks far enough apart on a long enough piece of elastic, and they'll be moving apart faster than the speed of light. A photon from one will never reach the other.

http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/8239/vulcanships.jpg

That's not what Democrats think. We know that people like Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch are diabolical geniuses. It's Republican voters who are stupid.

The biggest reason the mean age at death has increased so dramatically is because of the decrease in infant and child mortality. The mean age at death of people who survived past their 10th birthday has only increased by about 5 years.