Joe. For Python, C++, bash, and in days of wretched drudgery for which Larry Wall will surely answer for one day, Perl.

Ever since the days of Slackware CDs and the Linux 0.98 kernel, I have happily used joe, a Wordstar-like editor with features and size comparable to vim. It's carried me through maintaining 80,000 line C++ codebases and I do my Python work in it quite happily. There are plenty of macro and regex capabilities, block text marking, everything I need without the weight of an IDE.

There hasn't been a single vi or emacs proponent that could do anything in their editor of choice that I couldn't do, and probably quicker. It goes like this: "But it's installed by default on Solaris!" I get my editor with a quick compile, and I know enough vi and nano to get there. It's super fast to install it on any modern Linux distro. "But it'll work when the terminal settings break!" Not a reason to select an editor for heavy coding. "But you have to make sure you have got properly formatted EOL characters and manage your spaces!" I do it just as well as they do; we're not talking about Windows Notepad here. "But more people use it!" Pike off, imaginary objectors.

If it works and meets spec, you use the tools you get the best results in.

Ummm - they did. In the time between Colin Powell's UN address and the State of the Union address by President Bush, I was able to read links on foreign media where MI6 was warning the CIA and the CIA was passing the warning upward. That's "the facts fixed around the policy" for you: only a tiny minority of the USA's population knew as Bush spoke that he was deliberately using hoaxed information as a pretext for an unjustified war.

Similarly, "full" transcripts of Hans Blix's testimony to the UN about the findings of weapons inspectors in Iraq were carried on CNN and the BBC - but the BBC's was the one actually full. The rest of the world got to see the entire thing; most of the US public had omitted from its media all the most convincing evidence that WMDs in Iraq were a fiction, and no cause for war.

Don't let someone cover their ass at Langley or in DC. The falsification of evidence started from the top.

I don't really find Fermi's paradox to be at odds with the finding of exoplanets and the increasing intrigue around panspermia. We're pointing dishes at the heavens with SETI based on the idea that intelligent life necessarily acts the way our 20-21st century civilization would, and use radio to communicate.

Already, we're looking at quantum teleportation and entanglement and non-broadcast communications. We're already moving past the means of communication we expect other advanced civilizations to be communicating with. That wasn't the first assumption.

Other prior assumptions have included that we are the one intelligent species on this planet. Why, because we use tools? So do caledonian crows. Because we have organized warfare? Chimpanzees have been observed in the wild sharpening sticks and moving in formation. Because we have language? Humpback whales have callsigns at the beginning and end of their songs that will actually cause consternation amongst other humpbacks if spliced and played back around another's song. There's even evidence to suggest that dolphin's sonar is a form of visual language: they're literally sending ultrasound holograms to each other, which would explain why their brainstem has roughly twice the "bandwidth" ours does.

Slime mold solves mazes. Plants hooked up to electromagnetic sensors hooked up to MIDI synthesizer units can figure out how to play ordered music instead of send random signals, and even play in styles "by ear" - one anecdote I've heard has it that a group of them at Damanhur played ragas for two weeks after a classical Indian musician visited. Bees tell each other where to find the flowers. Ravens have a theory of mind.

There are many forms of intelligence, and we've been hung up on the fact that we have symbolic language and tell stories about the past, future, and fictional as a litmus for one form of it. We are just beginning to recognize the many degrees of intelligence living on Earth with us. The Inuit have a proverb: "Every animal knows something more than you do." There's some truth to that.

When we expect to find life out there that is necessarily a magnified form of 20th century Westerners, we're starting with what we know, but let's prepare for a huge level of diversity on the theme of life, and what kind of technology (if any) other life would actually use. I'm pretty sure it's out there, and IMHO, it's almost certainly going to surprise us in many ways when (if?) we finally run into it.

It's not that I like Ubuntu's moves to act more like Apple, or that I think that it's the best engineered, but Unity with the CompizConfig Settings Manager provide the look and feel and the configurability that I like. Changing up the keyboard bindings is the most significant. I say that having spent significant time on Gnome 2.x, KDE 3, Windowmaker in times long ago, and sampled the others along the way.

That said, the number one thing that I want is a consistent standard for custom keystrokes. That's simply necessary where people come from diverse backgrounds onto a platform like this; some have muscle memory for Mac, others for Windows, others something else, and maybe in the course of a day we're hopping amongst these platforms. Please, set a configurable single standard. I shouldn't have to redefine the key to switch a tab or fullscreen a window separately for Qt/GTK/individual apps or find it impossible to do so.

Until then, the Compiz grid extension with Unity is giving me more of what I want than the others.

CTRL-S still suspends scrolling on my terminal now just like it did in 1997 on Slackware. What nonsensical software is the author using?

A fork of OpenSSL which is stripping out support for VMS, Win16, and other ancient platforms by the *OpenBSD* group is making a bug more likely? It's supposed to make another Heartbleed twice as likely? This guy is completely full of shit. He has no idea what coding is, he just wants to hear himself talk. Give me 8:32 back!

It's almost like those cable and data monopolies stocked the government with their people so that the government would work for them and not the citizenry.

You know, like they talk about with that fancy "regulatory capture" thing.

That would be one interesting outcome - but in order to replicate, the bacteria needs these proteins that it won't get in nature. Take it outside the lab, and it won't last long. That has intriguing implications.

I would say that the tsunami that would result from an ocean impact would be broadly devastating, and damage a large number of dense urban areas. How much of the ocean's surface area is a serious risk, would you say?

But every bit of water we've got has been dinosaur piss and shit at some point.

I've been running Linux on my desktop more than any other OS since 1998, and only sometimes do I set up dual booting. Usually Wine or VMs are enough compatibility, and I would rather code on a Linux machine than Mac or Windows anyday.

It does matter, though, where life starts and evolution takes it. Life is unlikely to emerge initially from the conditions most hostile to it, but given enough of an incubator, it can get started and incrementally evolve through natural selection to survive wherever there is something to feed it. Given that, Viol8 could be right. The energy and nutrient input isn't immediately obvious. ...Unless the tidal motion supplies energy, and organic compounds are widely spread throughout the universe and are present in the materials the solar system was formed from.

I think marriage is medieval property-transferring bullshit, but I really don't agree with anyone who thinks only straight couples should be allowed a screw-up.

However, the NSA is already spying on everyone, so I think you'd be stupid to write off the leading open-source browser for a machine with anything of importance on it. Choose some goddamn battles! I'm going to put basic privacy from abusive power higher on my list.

Which country is crazier, the one defending its own bounds or the one going half-way around the world to attack it?

That's exactly why you should research this. A definitive aspect of aquaponics is that it includes a combination of nitrosomonas and nitrobacter bacteria which successfully convert ammonia and nitrites into nitrates which the plants consume. This means that the system takes a bit of time to ramp up to bring the fish, bacteria, and plants into balance, but once it is going, it is very low maintenance. There's a significant difference between this and the typical aquarium.

This kind of closed loop is definitely going to shake up agriculture in some form, not only because of its much smaller water consumption and higher density, but because the current state of agriculture is extremely oil-dependent for both its machinery and its fertilizer and pesticide production. Reducing that dependency is going to matter a great deal.