To the original poster...

I would never suggest or try to talk somebody into doing something that violates his or her ethics. If you aim to live as a 100% pacifist, that's your own choice and your own beliefs. If I may offer a point that I think is worth considering, I image that in your extended network of friends and family, you probably have some loved one serving in our armed forces. Having the best technology at their disposal only betters the chance that conflict ends expediently and our military personnel come come safe.

On the medical side, the only way you can truly avoid making any contribution to animal testing is not participate the health care industry at all (which the new health care law will not permit you to do unless SCOTUS strikes down the individual mandate) and consume no product that requires FDA approval. Unless you're minimally abstaining from those things, you're not contributing to animal testing any less by not writing source code for a biotech company.

My reply...

Many (myself included), do not see the theory of evolution and and the bible in conflict with one another. My education has lead me to subscribe to the theory of evolution, and my faith has lead me to accept that God exists. For example, I don't really believe God created the Earth in six days and "rested" on the seventh. I think, like many other parts of the Bible, it serves as an analogy to simplify what would be a complex idea for people of times when education and common knowledge of science did not exist. My faith is not science, so it would be out of place to make it part of a science class. But those are just my opinions, there are others, and I'm able to respect them. I think my high school science teachers took the best route of saying that in the classroom we're studying science, which is an investigative process, and if you're going to truly exercise the scientific method, you must be willing to challenge what you already believe.

On to climate change, the data, climate simulation models, and research methodologies have been largely kept behind closed doors. Only those who indicated they are part of the club that subscribes to the notion that humankind is causing climate chance get full access to such information. Whistleblowers have given us some insight into those methods, and that has revealed sloppy and conclusion driven efforts. None of the findings have undergone a truly open and Independent Verification and Validation process. This isn't science, and it's not consensus. Teaching students something that the scientific community has yet to truly validate is not responsible, and if we're going to allow it to be present in the classroom, then we should insist upon the presentation of the counter-arguments. True science embraces the contributions of dissenters, even from the other side because it often helps them refine what they believe. That is, after all, responsible and ethical science.

I think it is news that somebody is gaining notoriety on the topic of getting more engineers and scientists into politics for several reasons.

First, our legislators are far too populated with lawyers. That's why we live in regulatory world that only lawyers can understand. Ask anyone who wants to begin a startup. He/she has to practically become an legal expert in several areas almost to a point that leaves insufficient time to do the actual work of the business. Thinking back to their startup days, the founders of Home Depot, Best Buy, and Staples all say they could not have started those businesses in today's regulatory climate.

Second, I think engineers and scientists are less likely to make themselves into career politicians. I think they would more likely serve as representatives, keep some small part of the technical and scientific life going on the side, and finally return to private life as the framers of our governmental system originally envisioned. That would mean less legislators who want to make a career out of repetitively trying to find problems to fix, fixing them, and breeding a slew of new problems in the process.

Lastly, engineers and scientists think in ways that others don't. They approach problem solving in ways others don't. Our founders created the representative system we have today to make sure the legislators represented a broad sample set of the population across locales and professions. When our government capped the number of representatives in the House to 435, that to some extent maintained the sampling across locales, but it has vastly eroded the sampling across professions.

I hope this effort is successful, because we all would benefit with engineers and scientists involved in public policy formation, especially in an age where the discussion of governmental restraint is all too rare.

I think it's interesting to draw the comparison between the Wi-Fi data harvesting to the News of the World --a Murdock owned news media outlet-- hacking controversy. The two aren't apples to apples comparisons, but at a basic level they both have the similarity of large companies accessing information for which they did not have authorization. Many have called for an outright boycott of Murdoch media, even in some cases a ban thereof. On the other hand, while we've seen a lot of criticism of Google's actions, we haven't seen the same volume of public outcry of boycotting Google or restricting the operations of Google enterprises. Most of the action discussed enters the realm of penalties and fines. I wonder if two forces are at play here. One, have too many become so dependent upon Google that they hesitate to support any action that would make Google services unavailable? Two, has intense dislike of Murchoch media reached a level where the application of a different standard is acceptable to many? Full disclosure, I'm a user of gmail and a viewer of Fox News, not exclusively thereof for either.

Boost is generally the R&D cutting edge of C++. As mentioned in other posts, it generally serves as the testing ground for what becomes part of the C++ ISO. You can see much of this in C++11. Some of the boost developers actually sit on the standards committee. In my professional work, Boost has provided some very vital functionality that my teammates and I didn't have to create, but could simply use. And in all cases it worked very well for us and continues to do so. Do you have specific reasons for describing it as an unholy mess? If you have encountered genuine pitfalls with the libraries, would you share that info?

You forgot one caveat: strip clubs now have to affix digital card readers to their employee's legs. "Please hold still, miss." :-)