According to current social justice theory being a white male, especially a heterosexual white male, is a privilege you need to be ashamed of.

It's more likely they were looking to get their money back in any case, but now they've got a possible legal angle to invalidate the contracts. I wonder what the smallprint says.

People don't care about "professional dignity", they care about feeding their children and paying their mortgages.

Probably these guys didn't get into this industry just to waste money

People go into business to make money. If they can do it providing a bullshit product that's fucking useless to government for huge skips full of cash, they will.

What do they care? They're getting tax payers money to design it, tax payers money to build it and they'll get tax payers money to run and maintain it. They'll even get a subsidy for the pathetic amounts of electricity they do finally manage to generate. Funded by bill payers (also tax payers). The whole project is a massive waste of money. But we should not be surprised. The first thing the Scottish Executive did when it was created, was spend £500,000,000 building itself some offices.

No, they want something called equality of outcome. That is to say, I should not be discriminated against because I'm a complete fucking retard and I've just been denied the job Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. Unless I'm a white male, in which case discriminate away.

The climate is not something that you can wait for particle physics style 5-sigma certainty on

Yes, yes it is. The most relevant observation so far is that there's been no statistically significant warming for the past 18 years. The reason it's the only observation you should concern yourself with is because the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere has continued to climb. This does tend to falsify the hypothesis that CO2 is a significant driver of climate.

There's a considerable opportunity cost to spending trillions of dollars on a problem that you have no control over anyway (natural variation).

But you did imply there was some kind of exploitation going on:

many sherpas have died on Mt. Everest this year because rich people wanted to "stand on top of the world"

The answer is zero.

Science is not a "political decision"

How extremely naive of you.

No actually, you couldn't be more wrong. There are a lot of Sherpas making a lot of money taking rich people to Mt. Everest. They do it because they choose to do so. Nobody has forced them to. They're not dying because of a rich person's ego, they're dying because it's dangerous work. Nobody forces them to do it.

No. The subtext is he just doesn't like wealthy people. So anything wealthy people do is by definition wrong.

OK, I don't want to be critical because I like to see a diverse ecosystem in software with lots of developers all working on different ideas. Some will be a success. But as a developer myself I think if you can't explain the problem this is a solution for, it's going to be hard to persuade people they should use it. Of course coding something just for the pleasure you get from doing so is also a kind-of justification in itself.

Good effort but I really don't see the point. What you have here is a scripting language sitting on top of a 3D engine. It would be more useful to produce a rich interface to a 3D engine that could be used by existing scripting languages, like JS, than to create a whole different one.

IANAP but haven't they just constrained the distribution of probability somehow? I mean how it's distributed in space. Don't we do this every morning when we put our pants on?

No I don't think it's about ethics in journalism. It's partly about that and indeed corruption in journalism is one of the things that's annoyed me most about it, especially game promotions masquerading as reviews but it's not exclusively about that. Christina Sommers articulates it far better than I can. You can wear an "I'm a feminist!" t-shirt and affect a slightly desperate look walking down the street if you want of course.