"Part of the goals of education is to make sure that it does not just take 100 fascists to run a fascist state relying on people "just following orders" because the alternative might involve a sacrifice of intellectual laziness."

Funny.
The goal of public education is to teach students to follow directions without questioning authority. Students are placed in an extremely authoritarian setting. Deviation from accepted norms in punishable. Schedules are rigid and inflexible. Students are often taught not to speak out of turn without requesting permission. They often aren't even allowed to use the restroom without permission from a figure of authority. "Just following orders" is the name of the game.

But that Linux kernel is at the complete mercy of the wireless carrier and the handset manufacturer. Not to mention the hundreds of app developers to whom you are willing to surrender systems level access in order to use their services. An open source kernel is useless when the rest of the infrastructure is being broadcast to the waiting world. Plus... getting the Linux kernel to load proprietary kernel modules is trivial. You don't think the Linux kernel on Android is already doing that?

Stallman's arguments are purely philosophical for most software users. Software as a service, aka "Cloud Computing" is becoming and has become a standard for most computer users... even if they don't recognize it. Free Software is not going to reverse that unless you find some way to pull yourself off the grid... no internet, no cellular service, no land line service, etc. The entire infrastructure is open to attack and running Free Software to interact with the rest of the world doesn't insulate you from most of those attack vectors.
The only answer that could possibly live up to the pipe dreams of RMS would be to completely recreate the entire infrastructure. Need a totally attack free cellphone? You'll need to use an OSS operating system running on open source hardware that you solder together yourself... and then you'll need an open service infrastructure that no one else can connect to... leaving the entire concept useless. What good is a cellphone that can't connect you to other users. The moment you have to hand off your data, even if its encrypted, to a second party you've lost control. It doesn't matter where you hand off control of the data... at the application level, the network level or to another user. At some point you loose control.
Sorry RMS... using wget to fetch web pages so you can read them in your email may work for you, but for most of us Free and Open Source Software are NOT ends but are rather the means to an end. Most of us are perfectly happy to give up control of our data sooner rather than later because using Cloud Services is simply more convenient and adds value. I don't plan on giving up my smartphone anytime soon and as long as I use it I'm allowing numerous parties to potentially access my information and communication. Thanks to my phone's built in GPS I'm letting Google (as well as a number of other App vendors) to know exactly where I am at all times. As a Gmail user I'm perfectly fine knowing that Google reads my mail and potentially shares that info with the Government. All these things (and so much more) are acceptable trade offs for most of us to have access to services we value.

"The irony of this is quite lost on them as they happily tuck into their pork sausages"

Not at all. Christians believe that Jesus was God incarnate. Since Jesus said, "Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?" and the Bible goes on to say "Thus he declared all foods clean." Christians have no scruples about digging into pork sausages, eating a cheeseburger or dining on shrimp. Why do people insist on pointing out that Christians violate Jewish theology without taking the time to understand the Christian Theology behind why they violate it?

When the question was brought before the Council of Jerusalem as described in the New Testament Book of Acts as to what portion of the Jewish Law Gentile converts to Christ were required to keep that council narrowed it down to just four things:

"For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well."

Here here!
Faith is not the absence of doubt and hosting doubt does not mean denying faith.

A bit prejudiced much?
I ask because you are prejudging Biblical Creationists. I am one and I don't have a problem discussing the theory of Evolution with people who disagree with creationism. I believe in Creation but I also don't believe that the Bible was intended to be a scientific textbook. There is plenty of room for my view of Creation to be wrong without necessitating that the spiritual truths of the Bible be wrong also.
I believe that Man was created in God's image... but the narrative in Genesis is rather short on specifics. The Genesis story is about redemptive history... not a primer on science or an exhaustive exposition of all of human history.
That said... in general you are right. Many of my fellow Christians become very hostile at the mere mention of evolution refusing to even hear the arguments in it's favor. Normally reasonable people suddenly shutdown intellectually on this question.

If we are going to split hairs... everything we think we know actually boils down to BELIEF. All of our observable evidence comes from observations on one tiny spot within the universe. We have yet to breach the surface of the available evidence that explains the universe and our place in it. However we have to function like those beliefs reflect reality. I believe that Einstein's theory of relativity is true... but even if I didn't believe it that doesn't make me fling off the planet. Gravity still keeps me tethered to the planet's surface. Maybe one day we'll discover a better theory than relativity... until then it's still the best we've got and so it's the theory that we should be teaching science students.

Theories that humanity was "seeded" by aliens are a non-theological example of Intelligent Design theory.
In their 1966 book "Intelligent Life in the Universe" I.S. Shklovski and Carl Sagan present a good case for scientists and historians to consider the possibility of early contact between life on Earth and extraterrestrials. Intelligent Design is not a concept that is owned part and parcel by creationists.

That said... I have a problem with teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. I'm a creationist... I believe the truth of the Bible. I also don't believe it is the job of government to indoctrinate students in religion. Mine or anyone else's.

There was a time where teaching students of science the theory of Spontaneous Generation was perfectly legitimate. It was "good science" based on the best information that was available at the time that the theory was still viable. Evolution is the best scientific theory that explains the evidence as we have it right now. And so it should be the theory taught to science students. Perhaps one day evidence may arise to discredit evolution but that day has not come. If parents want to teach their children alternate views they are welcome to do so via religious education, private education or homeschooling. Presenting alternate views that have little or no hard evidence is unwarranted.

Not confronting the evidence for Evolution is intellectual dishonesty at best and intellectual sloth at worst.

Android is very much Linux. It's just not GNU/Linux. All the GNU utilities that give Linux the functionality and feel of Unix have been stripped out and replaced by running Dalvik on top of the Kernal.

There was actually some discussion in the early days of the shuttle about burning the engines a little longer while the shuttle was still attached to an empty fuel tank. Those tanks could have been linked together, filled with an atmosphere and turned into a massive space station.

I don't think you understood what I was saying. I agree that the Shuttle was a failure from inception but... none of the shuttles ever achieved escape velocity. They only achieved orbital velocity.

Thanks for correcting that. Drives me crazy when people claim the ancients were so dull witted as to believe the world was flat.

1. I quit submitting news to Slashdot over a decade ago when I realized that stuff I submitted would just be rejected only to have the exact same story published weeks later submitted by someone else.
2. I don't use firehose. The frontpage wastes enough of my time so why would I want to be dragged into that monstrosity?

I don't think you've thought this through...

The purpose of SpaceShipTwo is to reach suborbital flight not to obtain escape velocity.
The purpose of the Space Shuttle was to reach low Earth orbit not to obtain escape velocity.
We did not loose Challenger or Columbia in a "dangerous, expensive and quite frankly stupid" endeavor to achieve escape velocity.
Even with your plan of extracting resources from the moon you still have to design and build your payloads on earth and that means traversing the atmosphere at some point during the mission. At least until we have more permanent manned facilities off earth that can perform their own manufacturing and fabrication.
That said... going to the moon makes lots of sense. We're funding billions of dollars sending probes to the Jovian moons and Mars why? Looking for life. That's a big gamble who's only reward right now is going to be to answer the philosophical question of whether or not man is alone in the universe. Yeah... it might pay off but then again it might not. For all we know we are sending probes out with all the wrong instruments for finding that life because we're assuming that life requires water and that it will be carbon based. That's a big assumption based only on limited data. We only know of one world where carbon based life exists and uses water as a solvent. Could be that most life in the universe is based on totally different molecular structures.

We've got a whole other world right here on our back porch. Why isn't the moon already crawling with rovers? Why aren't we prospecting it's surface for minerals and materials that humanity can use? Why aren't we exploring it's surface for caves that we can seal off and flood with a breathable atmosphere for building a permanent human settlement? If we can get full-on manufacturing and construction facilities operating on the moon we can build spacecraft that can visit the rest of the solar system using much less v then it does to send the same spacecraft from the surface of the Earth. From Earth you have to account for higher gravity and aerodynamics. From the moon... well heck, even the tiny little Apollo lunar module was capable of launching from the surface and achieving lunar orbit.

Apology not accepeted. We expect better from oyu!