I can't believe you made this point without linking to the legendary story of Mel. Here is a story where simply getting the punchline requires an order of magnitude more understanding than the poster manifests. Tell me how to use an integer overflow to bound a loop in LabView, and I'll believe that graphical programming is the wave of the future.

So you're saying ... you can choose pain, pain, death, and pain, but that's not got much pain it it?

Emacs is still probably the smallest footprint operating system with a builtin editor function, but it still sucks.

HP is doing fine, except for being strapped with the stupid names "Agilent" and "Keysight." But that beached whale corpse of a mediocre PC vendor that they wisely dumped has been in a nosedive since day one.

A strawman? Do you mean the character that has a diploma but no brain? Yes, it is rather apt. Perhaps you're not he in real life; I don't know you personally. It's possible you only play him on Slashdot. All I have to work from is what you've said here. And here on Slashdot, your line of argument consists entirely of four ad hominem attacks, two of which are directed at my charitable contributions (huh?), and one of which you lobbed, ironically, to accuse me of having a persecution complex. All because I criticized not evolutionary science itself, but the didactic and unimaginative way that we teach it. If your purpose was to caricature the insecure, hypersensitive, militant fundamentalist secular humanist (who is essentially the same person as the insecure, hypersensitive, militant fundamentalist Christian), you have done an admirable job.

Just---wow. Your didactic, "us vs. them" attitude is exactly what is broken with our society, from local politics to global conflicts. You (blindly) believe in "Science," so anybody who believes in God, by definition, does not. Anybody who is not exactly like you is automatically the Enemy, is clearly motivated by personal animus against you individually, and must be attacked at all costs, with disinformation and outright lies if necessary, even as you admit your own ignorance. You are exactly what I was talking about. You are the problem. "Evolution" is so sacrosanct to you that anybody who dares to suggest that it has limitations as a theory---even somebody who at the same time says it's the best theory we have available right now---is a heretic and should be stoned. If everybody thought like you, we would still be teaching that the universe revolves around the earth, because the Bible obviously says so, and to even examine the question further is tantamount to blasphemy. Have you even read On the Origin of Species, or do you just blindly worship Darwin based on what somebody else told you, like the many Christians who blindly worship God based on what somebody told them the Bible says?

I know, look how much we hate poor people. Your research skills are not a credit to you. And since you have appointed yourself the judge of 15 million people's charitable tendencies, I'm curious, how much did you personally give to charity last year?

HOLY FREAKING CRAP I JUST SPENT TWO LONGISH POSTS SAYING THE EXACT FREAKING OPPOSITE!

His mother was a TRS80, you insensitive clod!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I said that. I was talking about the untestable "theory" that kids leave their biology classes believing, namely that there is a clean, clear, indisputable line from the Big Bang to earth to proteins to abiogenesis to multi-celled water-based life to apes to humans, and it's all part of a single, well-tested formula that cannot be questioned or examined.

As far as what motivates me, I'm Mormon. I believe in God. I also believe that "evolution" (such as it is) is the best theory we have for how different species arise. My brother, who is also Mormon, got a Masters in Evolutionary Biology at the very-Mormon BYU. His thesis was all about mutating viruses to make them do useful things like form pharmaceutical compounds. He now teaches high school biology in a small Texas town and wants to slap the dumb kids who say, "Can I skip the chapter on evolution, because I don't believe in it?" I'm not attacking evolution, though you seem to think that any acknowledgement of its limitations is tantamount to an attack. My point is that many science teachers teach it as though it is some kind of fixed, unalterable Truth, which is just as destructive to inquiry as teaching kids "Don't ask questions or you're going to hell." My faith does not willfully blind me to inquiry and investigation. Why should my scientific education do so?

Really, this is a criticism of the education system as a whole. It's about regurgitating some official policy line doled out by teachers. It has very little to do with meaningful learning.

That's fine, as long as you realize that there are limits to how provable evolutionary science is under the classical "hypothesis-test-theory" scientific method we are teaching the kids. "Evolution" is not a single, clean, well-tested theory like "universal gravitation." It's a broad field of inquiry. We can do some predictable tests on either end (we can predictably mutate viruses, and predictably breed larger animals). But as far as I'm aware, we've never so much as synthesized even a single-celled organism from "primordial soup," much less grown it into a donkey by applying some well-tested formula.

For contrast, relativity is a theory that we can test, and although it has limits, we can predictably use it to do useful things like calibrating our GPS satellites. We can't do that with protozoa-to-mammal evolutionary theory, and we shouldn't be afraid to admit that it has gaps and limitations. Teach evolution, but teach it for what it is: a best-available composite model compiled from an entire field of investigations and discoveries, with lots of "we suspects" and "we're not sures." If we teach children to believe in the "Gospel of Evolution," like it's some kind of unerring, unassailable single Truth, handed down in its pure and unalterable form by the Gods of Science, then we are cutting off honest inquiry just as surely as a preacher who tells them that they will definitely burn in hell if they don't confess that the universe was conjured out of nothing exactly 6,000 years ago.

The Old Testament doesn't go into the creation of species either. It says that God made animals. It doesn't say how.

You keep arguing that Snowden clearly broke the law. Yeah, I agree. But that says nothing about whether what he did was right. Not everything lawful action is good, and not every unlawful action is evil. A government illegally or unethically spying on its citizens is certain to deem its actions legal by its own fiat. That doesn't make the spying right.

That's a neat tautology you've constructed. "It was illegal for Snowden to reveal PRISM, because the people running PRISM deemed it illegal to reveal PRISM.

And Wyden's stunt doesn't affect the ethical question. Assuming the article is true and Wyden was fully briefed on PRISM before the hearing, that just makes him complicit with General Clapper in conspiring to violate the Constitution.

No, not every single cop everywhere carries specifically a Glock 17. But a numerical majority of them do carry Glocks, which was the point I made first ("They carry Glocks" is a fair generalization when it applies to well over 50% of police). Then I gave an example of a specific Glock that many of them carry, and used that to illustrate the fact that your typical cop is packing a lot more than just six rounds. When was the last time you saw a cop carrying a six-round service revolver (even if some of them theoretically can if they want to)? Are you asserting that a significant number of them still do? Maybe your experience is different from mine, but none of the cops I see in 2014 are carrying a .38 Special.