Nope he means football, but not the weedy version of rugby played in America by precious little flowers who are so delicate they need to wear helmets and have a breather after every throw of the ball, not the game where 60 minutes of action is padded out to three hours with TV adverts, not the game where being caught cheating gets you a slap on the wrist instead of disqualification.

He's talking about football, the game where use of the feet to control the ball is the rule rather than the exception, where skill and dexterity with the ball are more important than being a meathead capable of barging other meatheads out of the way.

The summary misses the main point of the story. Tony Abbott ridiculed the concept of teaching children to program in response to a question by the opposition leader when his own government of which he is the leader already has a policy in place to fund teaching children to program (although not to make it compulsory).

The flaw in your argument is that Apple decided to go it alone with maps because of Android. Without Android, Google and Apple would most likely be in partnership on pretty much everything online.

Danger money

The common factor in all of those unproductive meetings is you.

Just saying...

I'm not convinced we got the lesser evil though.

On every popular PC operating system in use today (and Linux), the kernel and the drivers share the same address space. It is thus beyond reasonable expectation for the OS to be able to protect itself from faulty drivers. Although Linux was designed this way from the start, OS X and Windows both started as microkernels (where the drivers have their own address space) but were "downgraded" to monolithic kernels because of performance concerns. Switching between address spaces has an enormous cost.

I can write you a touchpad driver that will crash Linux even if you don't use the touchpad on start up. That Linus Torvalds really doesn't know what he's doing.

Actually, it's easy to read because it is verbose and inexpressive as you put it. Generally speaking, the more information you pack into a sequence of characters, the harder it is to understand. There are also relatively few syntactic constructions to get your head around and tokens are not usually overloaded with different meanings. It doesn't take long to learn the whole language, which means that even a newbie has a good chance of reading a piece of code without coming across something they haven't seen before.

And I bet he would have been more productive with a modern IDE assuming there is one that supports COBOL.

It's not about what you need. Autocomplete is not necessary, but it certainly makes life easier. You don't need a chainsaw to cut down a tree, but you'll get the job done quicker if you've got one.

Our sysadmin once made a Linux VM unusable with nano. He used it to edit the pam.conf file and nano helpfully wrapped a long line by putting a line feed in at the last space before 80 characters. After that, nobody could log in anymore, not even the sysadmin who had logged out to test the change he had made.

We got the system back with a Linux live CD and the sysadmin started the vi tutorial the same day.

There are several to choose from.

Why not? Are ASICs magic chips that are not subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

Which is why the current iteration of the Boeing 747 and the A380 may be the last four engined airliners.