One should enjoy the fruits of their labor. And our taxation policies are progressive, so you never take home less money by earning more.

At the same time, those of us who are making a lot of money (I include myself) are being served extremely well by the current system and economic realities. The rich are getting richer. The poor and middle class are stagnating. It is not unreasonable to ask those who are benefitting most from the current system to pay the most to support it.

At most airports you have the option of mailing that little credit card tool with a knife in it back to yourself. But you probably got it for free at a trade show and would rather bitch about government abuses than pay 6 bucks to mail it to yourself.

Well, at least that's how I felt when the bastards took mine away.

More specifically, they'd be insane to ever have the file. It would mean sending it to them. Much smarter and more efficient to hash the file on your computer (ignore meta-tags) and match against the tag on their server. Done. They never have the file and never look at the incriminating bits.

This is why Apple thinks they can have all your music to you quickly instead of the weeks of upload time to get it to google. Because you don't upload it. They might still be uploading meta information that would be incriminating, but they would have to go out of their way to do so.

Correct, this is not a theory, like the theory of gravity.

It is an attempt to understand the steady increase in global temperatures over the years. There's plenty of refutable science at work. Researches uncover trending data of global temperatures. Other researchers could show problems in approach, or show data that disagrees.

Modelers make predictions of change over the course of years. The accuracy of their predictions speaks to the quality of the models.

Fundamentally, though we have a problem. It would be great if we had two planets. One where we toss as many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and another where we do everything the super enviro-crazy vegan wants us to do. Then a hundred years later, we compare temperatures. The problem is that we don't have spare planets to play with. So we have a relatively high stakes game where we work with models, and do a lot of falsify-able detailed science to help inform those models. Only in the models can we run the data for 100 or 1000 years quickly and without much consequence.

Oh, and anyone who would blame Bush for climate change is a nut job. Most of the damage done so far was done before his birth, while he was a child, or while he was a drunk and playboy. It's hard to blame him for any of that. But to argue only against the nut jobs is strawman bullshit. You're right though, czars aren't going to help. A carbon tax might (and might help balance budget or free money for other tax cuts). Helping China build cleaner coal plants might (and would be cheaper than retrofitting ours). But yeah, czars won't help much.

Wow...

Just because it's been cooler at your house for the last two years, does not mean the earth, as a whole, is not getting warmer in general.

It's perfectly plausible that the average temperature on the planet could rise significantly while a region, like Europe, gets colder. For instance, general warming could result in polar warming diminishing the northern ice caps (as we're seeing). Should those ice caps melt enough, the iceberg melting in the north atlantic would dramatically lesson since no glaciers would spawn them. The atlantic currents would be disrupted, lessening the gulf stream. Winds flowing over those warm waters would no longer carry that extra heat to Europe and slowly the weather in Paris starts to resemble Winnepeg (about the same latitude). The good news for Winnepeg is that it's likely to warm up a little.

That's climate change in a nutshell. General warming. Local cooling. Some areas get dryer. Others wetter. Very, very complicated interplay between systems makes predicting winners and losers extremely difficult.

And I swear, the next time there's a snowstorm and people use that as evidence that there isn't global warming, I'm going to punch someone in the face.

Or... our jobs are such that we visit our clients across the country. So I could spend every weekend driving and only be able to cover 20% of the country, or I can take a 10 minute pass through a security line twice a week. I'll take a ten minute inconveinance and let someone fly me somewhere in 4 hours rather than do a four day drive across the country - which would cost more money anyway.

Now, if you live on the East Coast, you might be able to travel to lots of people in a few hours. You might also be enough of a pretentious ass to think the whole country is on the east coast. For the rest of us, flying can be needed. For some of us, it's a regular thing that lets pay for things like food.

At the same time, the states compete with eachother by lowering their tax rates - so they're (almost all) broke. IF moving towards more renewable energy is a national goal, then this is perfectly appropriate. Energy can be moved (at cost) so parts of California may benifit as well and nationally we would benifit from this being a success that other plants could be modelled on. Likewise, if the east coast wants less air pollution, it may be equally effective for it to fund renewable energy upwind in the West where things like solar are viable than to try to build something like this in a much more cloudy area.

While built regionally, the benefits of this being a solar plant (rather than a coal one) could be national.

True enough from a developer's perspective. But I was trying to keep it simple for the lay person.

I firmly disagree. Passion is key. People who don't give a damn and people who don't enjoy coding tend to write crap. We try to hire for passion and smarts (knowing both are hard to interview for).

Passionate people given good processes and tools are ideal.

This is really the key insight of most Agile methodologies. Development should own the process and change it to suit their needs during regular retrospectives. The team (not the whining individual) should be able to say, "You know what, I think we're not getting bang for our buck out of this many unit tests, let's shift to 50% coverage." As long as that same team is taking ownership of the regression failures and making an informed trade-off their comfortable with, all is well.

If you get a good team together, you're going to get good code. You'll get better code if you empower them. Experienced and good teams will usually have a lot of these processes and tools in place because noticing things like high code complexity automagically alerts them to "bad smells" that can be examined and either accepted as necessary or invested in to address or test more thouroughly.

Generally, I think development is most fun when you're on a new project and don't give a damn about breaking things. Then it's pure creation. But once an app is older and there's some weird code you're staring at you have to decide, "is this probably a bug, or is this a bug fix for some weird situation or platform?" That's when you wish that the guy having fun three years ago had written some damn tests.

70% Unit Coverage:
        -- You've written code level tests that flex 70% of your code checking for regression failures.

CCN:
        -- Technical term you can look up, but basically it's a measure of how many decision points are in a block of code. Less decision points is simpler. Too many and you may have something difficult to test and difficult for a programmer to understand. Higher complexity generally means more risk and a higher need for testing of various types.

Presprint grooming:
        -- A "sprint" is a time block set aside for development. Usually 2-8 weeks. The goal is declare what you're going to get done in that time and not change the requirements during that time. Between sprints, you can change your processes, "groom" stories (tasks that describe things in a user experience way generally).

Test driven dev:
        -- When writing a new feature, right a test for that feature first and you're close to done when the test passes and you haven't broken other tests.

I love competing in the job market against people who can't write well.

Now... where's the grammar / spelling error in that sentence? You're going to get me for that slash, aren't you? Contractions in aren't? Sentence fragment? again?

Many (all?) states have streamlined ways for people with Math / Science degrees to become math / science teachers without having to get an education degree. There is training and a certificate, but not another 4 year degree.

Grad students are trained to work extremely hard for little or no pay and even less credit. Perfect hire for this kind of work.

Generally, I agree.

But when should you invest extra in infrastructure? During a recession.

Because:
  - The price is lower than normal (even factoring interest on borrowing, labor and equipment are idle and should therefore be cheaper than normal)
  - It's better to pay salaries of construction workers than pay them unemployment for not working
  - Whatever stimulative benefits you may or may not get

When the government is rich tends to be when the economy is booming and infrastructure projects are extra expensive. If you're looking at a decades long ROI, you might as well start with a lower "I" and at a time it could be particularly helpful to the economy.