By "improve the lives of their fellow man", I assume you mean increase the wealth of shareholders in the corporation that sells the water, and let the tax payers foot the bill for whatever long-term problem arises from the techniques used, like we've done with every other natural resource out there.

Wait, so the cause of flooding is lack of dams? Changes in rainfall patterns and cutting down trees has nothing to do with it? Forest fires are caused by lack of timbering, not misuse of fire suppression that builds up fuel? Who knew?

So in your reality, there were no civilians in Pyongyang and Hanoi? Or World War 2 ended in the 1970s?

So they were doing something like what AIPAC does today, with widespread support from both political parties?

Here's an article about how thousands of years of plant selection for size/sweetness has bred out key nutrients from crops compared to their wild ancestors:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&gwh=C55932C623A00AD8AD823E3855A54699

The Black Book of Communism is propaganda. Which is not to say terrible things didn't happen in the USSR, but it's worth noting there are more people in prison in the US today that there were in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. I think it's also worth noting there is no "Black Book of Capitalism"; if there were, it would put the USSR's crimes to shame.

The early industrialization of Britain and what became the USA would not have been possible without genocidal colonialism and slavery. Famine and mass drug addiction were tools of the British Empire which made modern capitalism possible.

By your standard, capitalism has never existed then, because governments have always interfered in labor markets to make capitalism work. The English state forced peasants off their land and to the point of starvation to make them work in factories, and conquered India to crush local cotton manufacturing make markets for its cotton mills, forced China to allow imports of opium, etc. Early American capitalism required slavery to produce the raw materials for export and English cotton mills that were the foundation for northern industry and banking, as well as constant western land grabs through the state's military to be viable. Tell me when capitalism has ever prospered without a strong state to do its dirty work?

You say "Also, the claim that waste from coal plants is as dangerous as that from nuclear plants is simply ridiculous."

Now, there are some client scientists who argue that pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere could lead to environmental catastrophe (such as an anoxic event) which could lead to our extinction, along with pretty much every other oxygen breathing species.

I have no idea how realistic or likely that is, but I don't see any meaningful slowdown of CO2 emissions on a global scale, so we're likely to find out. It would be ironic if a dozen or so Chernobyl-scale disasters turn out to be nothing compared the long-term impact of fossil fuel waste.

There is a big difference between belonings and means of production. Under capitalism, very few people own means of production (factories, businesses, etc.) and those who are concentrated in large corporations. And if you think of your computer as a tiny means of production, look how much ownership is slowly being taking away by being locked into platforms and walled gardens. If you have a Chromebook, who owns your data? You or Google?

It is a crime to lie to a Federal Agent, which is why you say nothing to them. In her case her lawyer said something inaccurate (IIRC) which resulted in the charges. The lesson is clear: don't say anything to feds, ever.

While lying in court is also a crime, it's pretty hard to make a perjury charge stick to vague "I don't remembers", unlike making specific statements to a fed, which can be found to contain small inaccuracies leading to prosecution and prison time.

Perhaps regulatory capture would have required that the last line of defense against a meltdown, the backup diesel generators, should not have been in the basement of a plant located in a tsunami zone?

I bought the $199 Acer chromebook, and threw Chrubuntu on it. It runs quite well, even Skype works haflway decently on it, and in a pinch I can do real work on it.

How much of readability is the fault of the language vs the developer? Cut-n-paste coding is the bane of any language.

As a perl programmer, I sometimes ask, what can python or ruby do that perl can't?

MVC web framework like Rails or Django? Catalyst, Mojolicious, etc. PSGI has taken a lot of pain out of deployment of apps.

Good, modern object system? Moose.

GUI stuff? There's Wx and Qt interfaces.

OK, embedding C looks much easier in python, but I've never needed that.

If all the CPAN stuff would just work with other languages, I'd be more willing to switch. Javascript seems to be where all the web stuff is heading anyway.

In the 80s when I was in high school, before anyone outside of a few universities had heard of the internet, I could go into a place called a "gun store" and buy any one of a number of 9mm handguns (including early Glocks), and even 30 round magazines. There were places called "newsstands" that sold magazines (the non-bullet holding ones) that described these items in great detail. Good times.

Lots of cops like to brag that they never had to shoot anyone in their years on the police force. The point being guns can server as a deterrent to violence. So unless you want to have police absolutely everywhere (which is where we are heading anyway as a society), maybe the deterrent factor is a valid, rational consideration?