The optimist's viewpoint is that 60% of American's *do* believe in evolution.

There's a big difference between people who are capable of doing things "by the book" making an informed decision not to do so, and people deciding to do things in an ad hoc manner because they can't master the "by the book" method.

Every successful project, in my opinion, requires both discipline and risk taking; the art is knowing how much of each the project you are currently managing needs. Every project should have a bit of a stretch built into it, otherwise people get sloppy because they've become complacent. But *too* much risk, and they get sloppy because marginal additions to risk become meaningless to them.

You want control and measurement and all that rational stuff, but developers aren't automatons. They need motivation to care about those things; if they're just going through the motions a formal methodology becomes so much dead weight. So excitement, challenge, novelty, even a whiff of fear can be healthy things. But not chaos, impossibility ,blue-sky goals and outright terror. An excessive dose of medicine is poison.

I expect that they object to being viewed as persons of intrinsically lesser capability.

It's wrong, although not malicious, to say "deaf people are vulnerable," because vulnerability is not a permanent attribute; it's an ephemeral state that can usually be engineered out of the environment. A level crossing with only a crossbuck sign can be fitted with flashing lights.

Sure, as long as you start a program and let it run all by itself without touching anything. As soon as you introduce human input, the system may still be deterministic, but the output of the program is in effect random because the behavior of the operator cannot be predicted. The kind of "knowledge and the ability to comprehend that knowledge" that you describe is known as omniscience, and most IDEs currently don't support it.

Well, seems like apples and oranges to me. AJAX is not a data representation model, it's a communication model. If you have to, say, obtain data from a server to repopulate an HTML table in response to a user action, JSON fits the bill, because you need only the most rudimentary semantics. But that doesn't mean JSON can replace XML for every purpose, e.g. something like Open Document Format. So you might well do a lot of AJAXy stuff with JSON to the browser, but do a lot of DOM manipulation stuff on the server side.

Not every tool has to work equally well for every task.