We may have the worst politics this side of the Prime Meridian, but spend a day on the white sands of Longbeach or Santa Monica and you will be ashamed your local girls don't look as good in a bikini.

Not really. Fake tits are highly overrated.

I got along basically with all the groups in HS...the rich kids, the jocks, the stoners...

Bueller?

..."use smart pointers" (read: implement a reference-counting garbage collector myself, because that's what smart pointers are)...

No, smart pointers take care of the reference-counting garbage for you behind the scenes, actually. You're thinking of Objective-C.

Of course the second it actually works the greens will be dead set against it. Gotta be some obscure critter living out in that desert ya know,

Just market it as a power generator and Archimedes Bug Zapper.

You don't think you'd be able to get a better-paying job with the knowledge you've acquired? You're doing too much to not be well-compensated for it.

This is easily the best post on the topic I've seen so far here. Have to read through it a few more times to understand it all, honestly.

I remember hearing about the AKS algorithm back when I was a grad student. Amazing stuff.

You could (in theory at least) write a program that took a set of axioms and a hypothesis, and it could tell you reasonably quickly whether the hypothesis was something that could be proven using those set of axioms.

No actually, no program can do that.

Right. But it is known to be in NP. So proving P=NP would prove that RSA could be cracked quickly. But proving P!=NP would not prove that RSA cannot be cracked quickly.

Can anyone explain what all the fuss is about ?

Seriously? Cultivate a sense of intellectual curiosity and look back at that question. The point when you've already answered it for yourself.

Undiluted evil is a serial killer like Jeffrey Dahmer.

Nonsense. The damage that a single serial killer does is laughably tiny in comparison to some delusional figure who is convinced they are doing the "right thing". Hell, Dahmer actually knew he was a monster, couldn't control his sick compulsions and felt bad about the things he did. Compare that to bin Laden who showed no remorse for his crimes against humanity and caused the deaths of thousands.

I realize it's in Swedish. The phrase is repeated many times by a Swedish character from a Danish show called Riget (or, The Kingdom in Danish). But I've always heard it translated as "Danish scum!"

Hmmm. Probably after that whole scientific method got going. The empirical beats the snot out of philosophical wankery.

Um, empiricism is great. But it only helps when you have a sense of what possible hypotheses there are for a given problem, what tests you should make for each hypothesis, where to look for answers when none of them pan out, etc. This is all classic scientific method of course, but in order to do it properly requires some depth of thought. The kind of thing that philosophy covers.

Consciousness is an illusion.

A meaningless statement. In order for something to be considered an illusion you must consider the possibility that something can be deceived. And in order for that something to be deceived, it must be conscious.