It seems to have been born in some deranged xml-lovers wet dream in which ... structure is kept separate from presentation

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I added a new element type for typographical examples for my book on LaTeX, and it only took a few minutes

Wait a second... you're writing a book on LaTeX using DocBook?

Does not compute...

Shouldn't you be using LaTeX to write a book on LaTeX?

4. I 'hire' (read: give the honor of doing my research) master's students to run my experiments / write code.
5. I 'hire' (read: give the honor of doing my research) phd students to draw conclusions on those experiments

Whenever I helped my professor with his research, I always shared co-author credit on his publications, hence no plagiarism. I would imagine this is standard practice throughout the world.

"with it's clueless and campy marketing style" --> " with its clueless and campy marketing style"

Mr. Montalban was probably the most significant Latino in Star Trek.

I assume you're referring to the characters, not the actors, since you cite Chekov as a Russian. Khan was not Latino; he was a Sikh from northern India.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Khan_Noonien_Singh

Otherwise, you're simply wrong. There is a developer release of 1.6 for 64-bit Intel, but that's not 1.6 for Mac OS X by any stretch.

No, he's right. Apple has officially released Java 1.6 for OS X to all users. It's not a developer-only release.

You won't even find any mention of 1.6 on the Apple Java site unless you really dig around.

Dig around? It's right there on the page you linked to!

Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 2 delivers improved reliability and compatibility for Java SE 6

All such software must deal with one 23 hour day an one 25 hour day each year.

I don't know of any software for which this is a problem. The standard practice is to keep track of time in UTC, where there's no concept of Daylight Saving Time. Dealing with a DST change is equivalent to and no more difficult than a time zone change.