It actually doesn't matter whether it's man made or not. If our cities and our farmland are going to be flooded and rendered unusable, we have to respond. Climate change could be 100% down to aliens from the Planet Bolg, and we'd still have to take action. Pretending it isn't happening, or claiming it's not our fault, is not adult behaviour.

The overwhelming majority of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to die - not directly of global warming, but of the war, pestilence, famine and general destruction which will ensue when coastal cities flood, the area of agricultural land (much of which, globally, is also low lying) reduces, and the temperate bands move towards the poles.

Not everyone will die, no. And probably the big die-off won't happen in the lifetime of anyone now alive. But if we don't halt global warming soon, the population of the Earth is going to fall very sharply, probably by an order of magnitude.

Solar works effectively every day of the year in Scotland, which is a lot cloudier and a lot further north than Florida. It's simply inconceivable that it doesn't work a whole lot better in Florida.

And prefer it to Unity, which I also use a little. The reasons I like it are:

• It's platform agnostic.
• It plays nice with Java and other JVM languages, including Clojure in which my AI is written
• It's open source, and since if I ever get to a place where I've a releasable game I'll want to release open source that matters.

What do you need from your community? Is it feedback? Is it actual engagement (like, do you want people to take responsibility for particular bits of functionality?) It is money? Frankly I'd be happy to subscribe maybe US$100/year to help fund the development of jMonkeyEngine, provided it keeps developing and stays open source.

jMonkeyEngine has been around for years, and is pretty good. It's the engine I use for choice - and yes, I do also have Unity. If you don't know anything about game engines, don't post your ignorance!

On the flip side of that, business property should be taxed on property's actual value, because it is actively making money using that property, so the business should be able to recover the difference in value through the use of the property. If it can't, then that business isn't making effective use of a scarce resource (commercially zoned real estate) and should make way for a business that will.

That's what bugs me about California's Prop 13. People get stuck in their homes and can't afford to move closer to their jobs because they'd take a huge property tax hit, but businesses just lease from land management companies that own properties forever (literally, because businesses don't ever really die), thus artificially deflating their costs and encouraging businesses to locate themselves in places where housing is most expensive rather than in the suburbs where most of their employees live. All of these factors put serious strain on the highway system, on workers, etc.

And rental housing units have artificially deflated rent because they aren't subject to property tax increases based on the value of the property, thus making it harder and harder for people to justify buying homes. As a result, whenever there's a recession, the housing market falls significantly faster in California than the national average.

If you ask me, property tax should be limited to property that is used commercially, either for a business (not including small businesses run by an individual within his or her home) or for rental purposes, and should be eliminated entirely for personal residences (or at least for your primary residence). This would go a long way towards fixing a lot of problems with one simple law change.

That's certainly true in many states. We used to take advantage of that law by buying expensive things at a discount from stores in Kentucky right before the end of the year; if they had those products on their books on January 1, they had to pay tax on them, so they had an added incentive to sell them. Thus, they were willing to take a little bit less money for them, because they knew they'd get that much less if they sold them a week later anyway.

In declarative languages instructions are not executed in order (indeed, modern compilers frequently reorder instructions and, as we progressively move away from Von Neumann architectures, very few computing environments will guarantee instructions are executed in order). In functional languages variables cannot change. If those are the ideas you've internalised about software, you aren't going to go very far.

BASIC is just the ultimate bad language. Like King John, it has no redeeming features.

That's what they told me when I was at school. I'll be sixty this year. I don't see programming becoming obsolete any time soon.

BASIC is a really, really bad language to teach anything about computing. If you want to equip them for the world of work, go for Java or C# (which are more or less the same, from a learner's point of view, and neither is hard). If you want to teach a deep understanding of algorithms and how computers work, Clojure or Scheme would be good choices.

What horrible department were you in? That doesn't sound like any department I encountered. Well, I'm not sure about the IT folks.

I thought Apple had already done this. Their cafeteria workers have been employees since the late 90s, give or take, and the folks who sit at the front desk are also employees. I had always assumed the security guards were as well, but apparently not.

I currently work for a small (50 employees) engineering company. One person in my present team's weekly standup is in Montreal, Canada. Three are in New York, USA. Three are in London, England. The rest are in Glasgow, Scotland. In my last job, with a major international bank, one standup member was in Chennai, India; three in Geneva, Switzerland. One in London, England. And the rest in Glasgow. In the real world 'everyone in one room' just isn't going to happen.

I imagine, using standard journalists' practice, the Guardian phoned up the NSA and said 'we've found this in your documents. Would you like to comment?' That's what professional journalists do.