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!

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.

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.

If you're trying to determine what the file type of a file is from an extension on the end of its name, you're engaging in industrial archaelology, not computer use. You can rename any file to have any 'extension'; consequently this idea is completely broken. The idea that you deal with this misfeature by hiding it just compounds the error.

The Web is in the mess it now is because Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Netscape, back in the day) has gone through so many iterations of deliberately trying to create subtly incompatible variants of HTML. Creating a browser which is backwards compatible with that mess simply perpetuates the mess. The new browser should simply refuse to render non-conforming legacy pages at all - that would force web site owners to clean up their act in short order.

Not actually true. Ultra-orthodox Jews do not (yet) have to serve in the army.

<sarcasm>After all, the ultra-orthodox never provoke any trouble with the Palestinians, so why should they contribute to defence?</sarcasm>

Speaking as someone who's been following this story as it developed, it seems to me that the data that has been 'lost' is data the high heid yins of Scotland's police were very eager to lose. They'd been acting beyond their remit - and probably beyond the law - and they knew it.

So I suspect someone with scrambled egg on their hat took that programmer into a quiet room and said 'you will make an unfortunate error this afternoon, or we'll be sending the boys round'. I'm pretty sure the government suspect the same.

Heads will, I suspect, roll - and I don't think they will be the heads of programmers.