States rights won't survive gay marriage.

Every software developer should have their own company, even if it's just a company of one. Nothing teaches you how to be a better employee than being a boss, even of just yourself. You should have your own company in parallel with your day job until you can support yourself fully.

Virtually everything important I've learned about how to deliver working code came first from working on an outside project, which I then perfected by applying those techniques as part of a project at work. Everything important I've learned about what people are really like -- the good, bad, and the ugly -- was formed in the same way: in my outside "company" first, then finished within the context of my employer.

The big takeaway about business I learned is that a good business is a stool with three legs: one leg is sales, the other is operations/development, and the third is administrative/executive. Every one of those legs are equally important, the company is only as strong as the weakest leg, and if any one leg is failing badly, it is only a matter of time before the company will fail.

Great advice. In picking what is both "basic and essential" I simply look at dependencies, using two perspectives: first, gating dependency -- what, if it doesn't work, would prevent other things from working -- then, structural dependency -- what is the thing that other things are built on.

First satisfy yourself that there are several approaches to meeting the gating dependencies, this will actually give you the best all-around sense of what the design of your application will likely become. Then, start from the bottom of the structural dependencies and work you way up. Happily, in most languages you'll find that library support is strongest at the bottom, so your useful level of work will proceed very quickly, and you will be satisfying all the gating dependencies early in the process.

Done like this, it gets increasingly easier to call in extra hands to help with the work, because what remains is more obvious/common.

To a believer, evolution doesn't "undermine" the idea of divine creation, it is just a wrong-headed idea. When you present them with facts and they dispute with you, they aren't being "neurotic" or "irrational", they just don't agree with you. That you describe this as "profound intellectual dishonesty" and their arguments as "obvious defiance of objective reality" shows that you are simply prejudiced.

God's existence cannot be objectively proven one way or another, not because God is lacking, or we are lacking, but because by definition you can't use the intellectual tools of science to operate on a philosophical conclusion. If I say the world was created because God loves us, one cannot apply the scientific method to test the truth or falsity of such a claim. There is no test you can devise, nothing to measure, it is an opinion.

Philosophical opinions are not illegitimate, they are simply not able to be objectively proved. Opinion may be informed by science, for example, to look around at the universe we see, one might understandably conclude that it was made by God, and point to many objective facts in support of that conclusion. But the central opinion itself cannot be disproved by them.

Very close! To correct one line of reasoning, however, it is a mistake to think that evolution "threatens" the doctrine of creation. The Bible can't become "fuzzy", it is the revealed truth, and people who don't believe are simply blinded to it. To rail against God isn't an "existential threat to civilization", it's simply a wrong path being taken. If society becomes less Christianized, it won't cause them to "lose all spiritual direction", it will cause society to lose that direction.

Pretty good advice. There are actually quite a few capital investments that produce a profit for individuals: housing that is appreciating in value (not that hard to come by, there are deals out there), higher education at public universities, and starting your own internet-based business, to name a few. For most people, though, you're absolutely correct that paying down debt should be job #1. Use the snowball method, you'll be amazed at how quickly it works.

This would all be much easier if the NSA would simply set up automatic transfers from our bank accounts to the Treasury so the feds can just take what they need.

It's called customer service.

I've got an Acer Chromebook running Crouton and XFCE4. Best little devbox I ever had, especially for $199 bucks. It used to be that you had to give up verified boot (and the automatic patching that implies), but no longer.

"Better models are needed before exceptional events can be reliably linked to global warming." Nature

The cause of climate change is also not really under dispute either. We only care about catastrophic anthropocentric climate change. And even within that category, we should only really care about things we can realistically and economically do. For example, Australia apparently has a huge carbon tax that will have an impact on the climate so small, it cannot even be measured.

We need to make dirt-simple to encrypt messages and files, then start spreading the word to your personal support circle (you know, the people who rely on you to keep things running for them) that "everybody encrypts these days". If you see an unencrypted message or file, say, "ugh, don't touch that, that's like spam". We engineers have a lot of influence on the ground, where it is hardest for any government to interfere.

It will be an order of magnitude easier to overrun government's spying capabilities than it will be to thwart them.

... is make it more difficult for the government to spy on us, right? How may more people have to start routinely encrypting email before it gets so computationally expensive that bulk searches are no longer worth the effort?

One of the things I like about Sphinx is that it has a just one file per chapter, and every one has a table of contents and links to other chapters. So, even if you land on a page from a search, you still have your navigation.

His argument is that a lot of people just produce reference materials and claim they've "documented" the system. Proper documentation needs both tutorial AND reference.

He didn't say "experts need to be taught", he said, "teach someone to become an expert." Big difference.