No, they're not. At least, children in general don't enjoy the full rights of a legal adult person. Traditionally children were viewed as property of the parents, and in many senses that's still true. Read 'adult chimpanzees' if you must.
I agree we should be able to give evolution the middle finger. But I disagree we can do so in any effective way in the timespan of 5 years, unless we somehow hit the Singularity by then. You overestimate man's intelligence and strength of will. I mean in general, let alone people with IQs in the 80s. Until we actually have either the knowledge and technology to do genetic engineering or mind uploading so that we can make modifications against living human mind architectures, or as a longer-term solution the sustained political will to do eugenics (the kind where we don't kill everyone impure or force people not to have sex, just the normal kind we do with every other plant and animal species besides humans where we restrict what breeding outcomes are available), we will remain slaves to our adaptions, with the most intelligent and self-reflecting among us only slightly more able to control themselves. From a predictive standpoint, knowing through evolution what is can tell us that, barring eugenics in some form or another, there's no way we can get to what ought to be for certain values of what ought to be, and so many attempts by liberal-minded people predictably fail while wasting resources and upsetting the social order. The best we can do now is take what is and align the incentives for the greatest amount of people so that things can be relatively stable and peaceful until we get to the point we can truly give evolution the middle finger. When I look at the culture that kick started the industrial revolution through a liberal lens, I see a lot of evil people with a twisted social order. But from a non-liberal lens, I see order, order instead of chaos (the inverse of what I see when I look at the typical results of liberal interventions through a non-liberal lens) and I see aligned incentives, and I wonder if that sort of society is what it's going to take to get to the Singularity.
Good points, but who said it had to be done in 5 years?
I was thinking more like 50 years, or maybe even 250 years. Without some sort of eugenics or singularity as you said, it will take a long time and a lot of effort to work around a psychological trait that has been ingrained in us for thousands of years. This is exactly the kind of progress that takes place most effectively at funerals.
While this is sort of true, this attitude contributes to the problem another commenter mentioned about how working with FPGAs is like taking a trip to the 70s. There's no reason you can't use a full-fledged programming language like Python to specify your hardware with the strict HDL subset at the RT Level, then use the full language's power to test it off-FPGA, and use all the software tooling around your full language to make the whole experience as pleasant as possible. In fact, that's the approach of MyHDL: http://www.myhdl.org/
It's worth mentioning that the guy did this for himself due to severe RSI in the hands, but there was another talk on using a stenographic keyboard to program and I remember this guy stood up and said he wished he'd known about it earlier as it's another approach for people who suffer from RSI since there's less typing.
It's really easy to memorize if your teacher presents it to the tune of pop goes the weasel... Whether it's worthwhile to memorize or not, use a computer or not, the valuable conceptual struggle teachers need to focus in on is in what the answer means, and when to apply it, not in deriving the formula, though that can be a useful struggle if you doubt the power of proof or the rules of algebraic manipulation.
The problem with "survival of the fittest" is that people don't understand that "fitness" is a technical term in evolutionary biology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_%28biology%29 And once you understand the technical meaning.. the phrase is really close to being a tautology.
