To quote George Washington "They [Political Parties] serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party" http://tinyurl.com/3o757q. The two party system in the US encourages people to not be informed voters, but to tow the line for whatever party they have supported in the past. It discourages real discourse in this country because the voters already 'know' who they are going to vote for before the candidates are announced. And it promotes divisiveness and hatred where there are no real cause for such emotions.

There would be large swaths of history that would be unexplainable without looking at religious doctrine. Try to explain the Crusades or the Nicene Council with no mention of religious doctrine and you have no explanation for those events. Is it necessary to read all of the Roman Catholic Canon laws, no, but so much of human history has been preserved by, and written by religious gatekeepers (monks, Egyptian priests etc...) that no clear picture of human history could be presented without pieces of religious doctrine showing up.

I want to say Waking Life http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243017/ did but the whole point of that movie was to manipulate you into thinking. So I am going to go with Blood Diamond as it really got me thinking about America's need to consume and how that affects our relationship with the world. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450259/

To sum up what FairTest http://tinyurl.com/5d9vqk says about this issue is that they are not Objective because they are written by Subjective human beings. They don't encourage the teaching of thinking as much as the teaching of facts to memorize, and they don't take into account special needs children.

Obnoxious: If I have to hear the phrase Web 3.0 one more time...

If there is a God why wouldn't he use the Occum's Razor approach and create life the simplest way possible using natural selection. Now if the question was is there a conflict between believing the bible and evolution yes there is but I would like to think that if there is a God he would do things the simple way, instead of trying to design 40 million creates that could co-exists together from scratch.

It depends on what Microsoft does with it's next release. Windows right now is bloated, trying to support decades old technology and design patterns. The reason OS X still exists and is on the rise is because Apple basically started fresh with OS X (ok to be truthful all OS X is neXt, but fresh when compared to Old World macs), and in doing so allowed it to shed off all those old ideas and stop having to support bad design principles. Granted part of the reason they were able to do this and Microsoft wasn't was because they didn't have the enterprise install bass that Microsoft does, but that doesn't change the fact that it puts Apple in a better position now. So unless Microsoft has plans to radically change what they are doing now in comparison to Windows 7, they are going to be stuck in the same boat as they are now with Vista (Released late, bloated and full of inconsistencies). This doesn't even take into account the fact that Microsoft is rumored to make 7 modeler, which could serious hurt them where they are strongest, businesses. At this moment the brighter future looks for Apple, and I don't see that changing.