And cold showers help you suppress those dirty, dirty thoughts!! You shouldn't care about anyone but mother earth! :)

Seriously, though, there are lots of ways of saving energy without forsaking hot showers forever. And solar hot water panels are such basic technology that I'd be very surprised if their energy footprint outweighed their benefits.

If the offsets don't do what they advertise, it isn't Al Gore's fault that they don't.

a) citation please
b) that seems unlikely, since dividends or capital gains would be more tax efficient
c) Climate change deniers wouldn't recognize logic if it spat them in the face.

It's all beneficial, but asking someone in the third world to burn less wood to cook their food while you happily burn gallons of gas to drive yourself to the mall is ever so slightly hypocritical.

I'm all for cool long term research projects, but they're expensive and the outcome is uncertain. Otherwise it wouldn't be research.

Wouldn't it be more practical to start with things that we know work and are cheap to do?
* Stop wasting electricity on AC. Long term, you want to build self-cooling houses; short term, paint roofs white.
* photovoltaics. Proven. Works.
* Traffic.
    ** Stop using 2+ tonne hunks of metal to transport one person a few miles each day
    ** If you insist on using hunks of metal, #ffs at least make them more efficient. US cars are a disgrace. In lots of ways, but fuel efficiency is most relevant here.
    ** Seriously encourage cycling. It is way more practical for most journeys than you think, and e-bikes make it accessible to practically everyone.

Now that's a remarkably asinine response from a self-proclaimed scholar of philosophy.

If you think that Ayn Rand is philosophy, and that having read Ms Rand makes you "very well read in philosophy", we can only hope for your sake that you're only 15 and you'll grow up in a few years time.

In the meantime, you seem to be using an awful lot of words that don't mean what you think they mean. "Liberal", "censoring", the aforementioned "philosophy", and "fuck". Oh, and "statist".

You may want to politely enquire with your English teacher about the possibility of borrowing a dictionary; if it's not to "statist" or "liberal" for you, your local library may have one.

Now get the hell off my lawn!

If you think 2 or 3 trees on an American-sized plot of land makes a forest? Have you ever seen a forest?

Positive in the negative sense ;)

Having better cooking facilities can improve the lot of people in poor countries in lots of other ways. More efficiency => less time spent gathering fuel. Less smoke and soot => fewer health problems. Etc. etc.

Python only forces you to indent in the way any sane person would indent anyway. That's not evil.

That's an easy process.

1. Buy a pig
2. Feed it broccoli (& other stuff)
3. Slaughter pig
4. Salt & cure bacon.

Factcheck: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Ian_Tomlinson

Manslaughter, at best. If you want to "murder someone for fun" I would suggest striking them in the leg with a baton and then pushing them to the ground is a great way to do that.

PC Simon Harwood was tried for manslaughter. And not found guilty.

And then he was sacked for gross misconduct. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19620627

Doesn't sound like the police are above the law. At least not in this instance.

So if you were witnessing illegal behaviour in the DoD, you're saying you shouldn't report it or whistleblow?

Dude. That is just so wrong.

Exactly. Surely exposing criminal activity by the government is more legal than covering it up.

And doesn't the constitution trump whatever snoopers' charter they were operating under?

Early 30s, undereducated, curmudgeonly, senior software developer here.

Not only is math my weakest area, but that weakness was probably partly due to my self-defeating and self-fulfilling belief that I didn't *need* much math, so I got my CS degree from a shitty university with just through Calc 2 and a couple non-calculus-based stats classes. No linear algebra, no dynamics, no quantum-anything, no Fourier analysis, no algebraic topology, no number theory, no discrete math, etc..

And so I've spent the last decade writing stupid CRUD-and-forms apps. It's boring shit that only pays high-5-figures (in my top-3-by-population U.S. city as I work in university research, though I am repeatedly sought by some of the biggest names among tech employers. But I choose my current employer for the work-life balance).

But to go anywhere more-interesting -- say, working on self-driving cars, or data-mining stocks or health data, or building robots -- I need more math. Shit.

I have taught myself some linear algebra from a LA book, at least, as well as learned some slightly less-basic stats (e.g. Markov models) and taken a couple graduate-level CS courses in AI and ML. But it's definitely not enough to break-free of my self-imposed intellectual chains.

So, get as much math as you can -- not because you'll definitely use it (maybe, maybe not), not because it's fun (but if it is for you, great; it is for me, when I understand it), and not because it's important for its own sake (by definition, anything that isn't eventually useful is useless), but because it gives you FLEXIBILITY later in life. And you have no way of knowing, a priori, whether you will need that flexibility.

I'm not original in this thinking. Learning more math is what Nassim Taleb would consider an example of "robustification" -- becoming robust against unknown undesirable future "bad" events or scenarios.

My strong advice: Don't be so damned efficient - or arrogant/overconfident - in your learning that you fail to robustify yourself against a future you that is smarter and wiser than the current you.