If we continue burning coal at this rate, human life as we know it won't see 2100. Civilisation? Well, probably cockroaches will one day develop civilisation.

Actually, this is untrue. The world has never faced a technology which had the potential to take out the entire human ecosystem before. Fossil fuels certainly will become obsolete sooner or later - when 90% of the human population has died of starvation, they'll be obsolete. But it would be a much better thing if we could stop using them before we'd destroyed the atmospheric and ocean systems which we depend on for our survival.

OK, so, I'm a hero warrior with a really big battle axe. There's a flimsy door with a little lock on it...

Yes, locked doors can be useful and interesting parts of game puzzles, but make it believable, please! If your first person character is big, strong and well equipped, and you want to make it credible that he can't get through a door, the door also needs to be big, strong and well equipped.

Two things. Programmers are expensive, silicon is cheap. And really good low-level programmers (which I am not and don't claim to be) are (and deserve to be) very expensive indeed.

When you're writing a bit of code which is going to run on hundreds of thousands of processors all over the world (as OpenSSL is), the cost/benefit does move in low-level programmings favour. If you save just a few cycles on each of billions of operations on millions of processors, it's worth throwing resource at that optimisation. But OpenSSL (like the Linux kernel) is a special case. Most perfectly ordinary good programmers will write more cost-effective code using languages which don't require them (for example) to keep track of memory assignment.

Also, most human beings can't hold an effective map in their minds of the operating states of a moderately complex program. And people make mistakes - even the best of us.Software, by contrast, is very good at detail, repetitious, complex tasks like keeping track of what bit of memory has been assigned for what purpose, and noticing when nothing remaining in the system holds a pointer to that data. There are whole classes of programming error which good compilers will simply never make.

I was doing a post-accident audit on safety-critical (closed source) code a few years ago. The reason for the failure was that someone had used strcat to concatenate strings for an error message, where the strings being concatenated were stored in the data segment (yes, think about it for a moment). It cost millions of pounds worth of damage, and it was very lucky no-one died. If the software concerned had been written in (for example) Java, the accident wouldn't have happened. Yet the software had been written by a very senior C++ programmer, and had gone through four separate code reviews before being accepted into service - and all four had missed it.

Since it's intended for space walks, why the ${IMPRECATION} does it needs legs?

I was going to say 'why on Earth', but that's kind of the point. It's not going to be on Earth. It's going to be in zero-gravity, where legs are completely useless.

What, like this, you mean?

Given that the US is (as you correctly point out) among the most profligate and inefficient economies in the world, setting the tax so that it didn't affect the US would mean setting it so that it didn't affect anyone anywhere. which would be entirely pointless.

The babylonians and God's favourite people thought that pi=3. Hey, it's good enough for government work, and probably for fighting zombies.

Cut tree down, cut tree up, stack it in a shed for two years to dry, burn it, spread the resultant ash on the garden. That's processing, I suppose, And there's labour involved, which you might consider costly. But you don't need caustic chemicals, and the only high temperatures involved go to heating your house, which is what fuel is all about.

Why not go out and invent something actually useful?

Just keep banging the rocks together, guys.

In real capitalism, where the government doesn't prevent the development of monopolies, there is no competition to go to when you get fucked over.

I was just about to post an almost identical comment when I saw yours.

If Alabama does something completely ridiculous in its penal system no-one says that 'the US is doing this...' For US readers, it may be helpful for you to think of England as the UK's Alabama. In the south, and governed by ignorant, prejudiced and reactionary people.

And that's why he won't. The whole point is to avoid homogeneity, because homogeneity strangles progress and provides a single target for the spread of malware.

In my experience this is nonsense. I agree that maths is pretty universally badly taught - after all, if you're good at maths, your career choices are being a quant paid in millions, an engineer or computer scientist paid in hundreds of thousands, or a school teacher paid in a few tens of thousands. The market (and we know that the market is never wrong, don't we, children?) systematically selects people who are bad at maths to teach maths. The results are not surprising.

But maths isn't hard. Maths is very, very easy; it is a natural way to think about more or less everything. If you take the school teachers out of the way and let children get on and learn the physics of whatever it is that interests them (for me it was sailing boats, but it really doesn't matter - we live in a mathematical universe) from the books in their own time, they will be good at maths. I really don't believe anyone is born bad at maths; we're taught to be bad at maths.

What part of 'also did not take any alternative form of compensation (stock options, bonus, etc.) since 2003' do you not understand?

Steve Jobs reckoned he was rich enough. He was working for fun, not for money. Most good engineers are not especially money motivated. We like making things, and he did that. Well.