I prefer to shop locally when possible (and I mean locally owned and operated) because more money stays in the local economy, which in turn means more variety in locally available goods and services. It may cost me a little bit more, but I do benefit by having more options in my own backyard. It may not be worth it to you, but it is to me and a large number of other people.

Then I'd love to trade lives with you. That's exactly the religious mindset I was inundated with growing up, and it's what my sister's teaching her kids.

I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. Is your point that it's just as rational to constantly change views of superhuman beings in order to hold on to religious beliefs (I've never seen Satan described as more than a tempter -- there's certainly no indication that God gave him such power of creation to physically affect physics, geology, biology, etc in such a way to make the universe appear much older than 6000 years old) than to accept such evidence as face value? If so, I think we have different views of rationality.

Because there's nothing more that kids love more than history lessons. Seriously, most kids have access to a computer these days. Those with the interest and aptitude will find themselves in the industry or academia, more likely through gaming than through history.

And the rest of the note says that the delta between commercial and LGPL versions is not desired on their part and they want to get the changes into the LGPL version by the next point release. Hopefully in the process they'll better streamline the process so the two versions stay in sync, but nothing seems to suggest that they're trying to deliberately differentiate the two; in fact, the post referenced says just the opposite.

More people are living in urban areas, and urban zones that don't currently warrant a rail system one day will. We may not be retro-fitting current cities, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore new transportation items for developing cities.

Like it or not, the states are not independent. From agriculture to technology, California (really, the whole west coast) and its resources are important to the whole nation. As long as interstate commerce exists, it's in the country's best interest to what it can to safeguard every state and its citizens against natural disaster. Not to mention the fact that the US has federal installations all over (such as military bases), so monitoring programs really are a national concern.

So many libraries exist to help with flaws/lack of functionality in vanilla JS. Perhaps the libraries that come out-of-the-box with Dart get rid of the need for such libraries (though it will probably have its own issues, thus resulting in Dart-specific libraries). And again, the libraries won't suddenly become unusable, as Javascript engines will still exist to utilize them.

The whole point of the "type" attribute in the script tag is that a browser can support multiple scripting languages. The introduction of Dart wouldn't necessitate dropping JS for the browser, but if other browsers implemented it (or Google created extensions for other browsers), it would provide an alternative.

I must have skipped Bible class the day they covered the passages with those events.