To paraphrase that to fit what Generic Joe will hear:
"You'll have to grin and bear it as you use an internet that wasn't written to use these standards, BUT, if you and lots of other people start using Opera then those websites will be written to comply with those standards and that'll be great!"

Not sure that's a terribly compelling argument to Generic Joe. Some will certainly go for it, willing to bite the bullet to advance humanity a little bit, but a lot of people just want to use the internet.

I love webstandards, and wish greatly that all browsers supported them well. But I just don't think that quote is factually true. If your browser adheres to webstandards that IE doesn't then it's quite possible/plausible that your browser will fail to deliver websites that look and function like you and the designer expected it to.

People "should" code to standards, but I just don't think that it's (yet) true that they DO.

My vote goes to hamthrax.

Just wait until you get that pink powder through the mail...

This assumes that the theatre staff are able to focus their projector properly. Most do a very good job of this. Some do not.

There are indeed references to major floods in many, though not all ancient cultures around the world.

The timing for them doesn't seem to match up though, they can have very wildly divergent dates.

The simplest explanation is that many different (smaller than global yet still huge to the primitive locals) catastrophic floods happened to people in ancient times, and they each made up their own mythologies about it.

Heck, If I were alive a few millenia ago I could have sat down and created a flood myth just through the judicious use of my creativity. If it was a good enough story it might have caught on, despite having no basis in historical fact.

A major issue with accepting evolution and an old age to the Earth for some is that it takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of The Fall.

If humans have been around in a recognizeable way for 100,000+ years and animals have been eating each other, disease rampant, etc, for billions of years before that... then the wonderful serenity of Eden where all things lived in harmony with each other wasn't true. And if Eden wasn't true, then perhaps mankind didn't fall from a state of grace and are in need of redemption? If we didn't fall, then Jesus' purported purpose on earth seems to be rather superfluous.

Some people can't accept that the stories in the bible are stories because having an omnipotent Dad who's looking out for you and will reward you after you die is extremely comforting to them. The Bible promises them that.
I have a university educated(in physics) friend who claims that yes, the Flood really happened. And Balaam? His donkey talked to him in plain Aramaic.

Reading that comment I'm not sure how much Dawkins you've read. It appears to make numerous claims that are not supported by his written work, nor public speeches.

Dawkins for one has said repeatedly that a belief in evolution is neither neccessary nor sufficient to be an atheist. His opinion is that a good understanding of evolution takes a good deal of wind out of the sails of the arguement from design(an arguement that powerfully influenced many thinkers over the years, leading people who quite likely would have been atheists to instead advocate a form of Deism).

You're right though that Dawkins is indeed intolerant of certain ways of thinking, I don't think he'd disagree with that. Nor would most of the New Atheists that you refer to. They tend to peacefully advocate that one should try one's best to make sure that one's beliefs are true. Beliefs that have no supporting evidence have aren't as likely to be true as beliefs that do have supporting evidence. "You don't have to like or even respect their beliefs, but you must respect the individual's right to believe what they choose." I am not sure where you've seen atheists arguing that we should make belief in Yahweh/Vishnu/Allah/FSM illegal. They tend agree that people have the right to believe whatever they want(up until those beliefs impinge on the rights of others). But that's not a sufficient arguement for saying that they shouldn't be trying to convince people to change their mind.

As Sam Harris tends to say, I do think that you should be allowed to think that Elvis is still alive. But I don't think that means I can't try to peacefully convince you that it's likely he's not. Particularly not if your beliefs in Elvis mean that you close your eyes to evidence in fields such as biology, while trying to keep others from seeing it. Sam does indeed advocate intolerance. Conversation intolerance I believe is the term he uses? In essense, we start using the same intolerance for religions beliefs that have insufficient evidence to support them that we use for people who believe that aliens from Pluto are controlling the president's mind.

Indeed, such commentary typically makes me rage or sigh with exasperation.

We already have medical interventions that can drastically change what a person acts like, thinks and feels.
We've had brain surgeries ranging from incredibly crude to fairly sophisticated, these affect the brains and hence the minds of patients.

As you said, we have psychoactive drugs that can change the activity(or even structure) of the brain, leading to changes in all sorts of stuff.
Hell, sitting down on a couch and talking about your life can have noticeable and significant changes in neurochemistry and we believe the structure of the brain(eg: changes in hippocampal neurogenesis).

If this is an ethical issue(and broadly speaking I think it is) then the development of this new technology isn't why we should be talking about it. It's the fact that we've been able to do this for millenia and have gotten steadily better and better at it. We should already have good answers to such topics because we've been doing it for ages.