It IS mentioned.

The assembly member that proposed it, in the press release announcing the passing of the bill, talks about BitCoin, Amazon Coins, Starbucks Stars, and Diablo II Stones of Jordan*. Of course the legislation itself doesn't mention BitCoin, since the section that it repeals pre-dates BitCoin, and when you're repealing a section, you just say "Section X is repealed", not "Section X is repealed because BitCoin".

*One of these is a lie.

...and money laundering and sanction evading are illegal... and they can fine foreign banks for those activities that were carried out overseas... could they have fined banks for issuing currency overseas?

If we are looking at the system from "above", like looking down on a plate on which peas are rolling around, then the apparent distance between them is the same as the actual distance between them. If we're looking at them edge-on, then we don't really know how far apart they are. The apparent distance sets the lower bound for the actual distance, but the upper bound is unknown. And yes, there's always a degree of conjecture in astronnomy. All we can really say is that there are three black holes near the centre of that galaxy, and they are almost certainly in orbit around each other.

What people don't seem to understand is, science relies on publishing of un-proven theories. You observe, model, predict, publish, and eventually you will be either proven right or wrong. Without the "publish" step, especially in long-term sciences like astronomy where it could take centuries for a theory to tested (such as, "will that comet return in a hundred years"), you could make a thousand contradictory predictions and then publish the one that happened - by co-incidence - to be correct. If you limit yourself to a single prediction, which turns out to be correct, then you are worth paying attention to. My mum is always saying "Scientists keep getting things wrong, therefore all science is rubbish". Getting things wrong is crucual to scientific progress.

The Hoover Dam has to be strong enough to hold back all that water. These only need to disrupt the wind.

Could they find a name that sounds more like a James Bond villain?

Scroll down to TTYM.

In the context of "smoking a fag", if you take "fag" to mean "homosexual person", then "smoking" might mean "setting fire to" or "shooting". As in, "let's go smoke some gooks", as you might hear in a Vietnam movie.

The continents move over hotspots, which is why the Hawaii island chain exists. I don't know much about the Antarctic continental plate, whether it is moving or not, but it may have drifted over a hotspot some time in the last few million years.

Walk towards Greenwich and turn left.

That's like including an option "I never vote in Slashdot polls".

The absolute terms "true" and "not true" are not appropriate for a hypothesis like this. There may be some parts of it that are accurate, but for instance the size, mass, velocity, density distribution etc. of the Theia might be wrong, or the physics in the simulation might be wrong, etc.

There's no reason for anything. Life is just a bunch of stuff that happens, and one day it might stop happening if something big enough hits the planet, like the one that made the moon.

The most recent one was a custom SQL cursor in Oracle EBS. Add an index, refactor some correlated queries, and create a cut-down version of a complex view that it was using.

Another of the examples a few years back was where I reimplemented an FTP process to retry each individual step instead of reverting to the first step on failure. Given that each step had about a 50% chance of failure on a bad day, and each script had about 20 steps, it meant that it was failing... (runs calc...) 99.9999% of the time. OK I'm exaggerating a little, maybe it wasn't 50%, and only a few of the jobs had as many as 20 steps, it was about 10 years ago and I forget the details so my ego may be filling in the gaps. But it did mean that we didn't have to have a guy sitting at a screen hitting "Retry" all day long, and we could get file sets deployed in a couple of minutes instead of taking all day. The FTP was being done by a proprietary tool, so I had to implement my own system to parse its manifest.

And then there was that Excel spreadsheet that was massively bigger than it should have been. Everyone's system ground to a halt every time they openened it. No-one could figure out why it was so big, I spent an afternoon trying the obvious things and gave up. Then inspiration hit me, and I wrote some VBA to look at the number of "shape" objects in each sheet. There were millions of them. Someone had put boxes around a bunch of cells, those boxes had somehow been shrunk down to one pixel and replicated thousands of times, so a quick VBA procedure to delete all box shapes, and bingo, some people could do their jobs again.

A lot of people don't realise that computers don't behave in the way that we expect - we have an intuitive grasp of the laws of physics, but information is not physical and does not obey the same laws. There are infinities and paradoxes and undeterminables that are hard to understand. Minds that can intuitively navigate this space are few and far between.

3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?

In order to write a BASIC interpreter, we needed an assembler. So my dad wrote one in GW-BASIC. Once our interpreter was sophisticated and stable enough, we rewrote the assembler in our own language (based on Acorn BBC Basic). Eventually we splashed out on a copy of MASM once we had a computer that was PC-compatible enough to run it (the Sanyo MBC 550 wasn't quite up to it, IIRC).

Were you programming a Java Ringpiece?