Indeed, but it's not only you that needs to be disciplined and consistent - it's everyone in the team that's working on the project. I had a nightmare of a time working with C++ code (CERN's Root package) that obviously had been people with a very different idea of sensible programming practice. It was a lot quicker, easier and more reliable to ignore it all and write mostly outside it, even if it meant reinventing the wheel a lot.

Plain C isn't nearly as opaque and unpredictable as C++ can be, but then I write mostly in Fortran these days (90 or later) which I suspect doesn't appear too high on lists of most used languages.

I use Keepass and let it generate random 6-8 character unique passwords with numbers and lower case only (for ease of typing on a phone/tablet) letters. For the stuff you use a lot those turn out to be easy enough to remember anyway. That's more than adequate for a online service, though obviously not as a key for local encrypted data.

Works well apart from from obnoxious password strength checkers that think it's easy to guess just because there are no upper case letters or symbols. A more intelligent checker would be very welcome.

I was looking at older Ford Mondeos, which mostly come as diesels. I decided against it due to seemingly endless reports of dual mass flywheel failure & injector failure.

Particulate filters becoming clogged is a well known problem, particularly for cars used for town driving so the exhaust doesn't get hot enough to burn off carbon deposits in the filter. Probably the worst problem I heard of in this respect was the Mazda 6, where the engine's attempts to burn excess fuel to try to clear it could result in diesel contaminating & overfilling the engine oil, potentially causing severe damage.

Maybe it's all just the inevitable trouble you get with a new technology and the new ones are better, I don't know. But I prefer to buy second hand and let someone else take the big depreciation hit in any case.

I've yet to hear of a petrol engine with a particulate filter. And even in the latest direct injection engines, the pressures are nowhere near as extreme as for a diesel.

I mentioned those things because they're notorious for failing in modern diesel engines, and make buying a second hand one a bit of a minefield.

No, but they do have turbochargers, very high pressure (3000 bar) injectors, finicky flywheels and exhaust filters that can get clogged.

That's quite a lot extra that can go wrong.

The phone companies themselves don't always control the handsets. Yes, they supply phones as part of a contract package but there are also a lot of people (like me) who got a phone from elsewhere and brought it on to the network.

That's no reason not to do IPv6 though.

It sounds clunky and awkward.

More like 300 years at most, with most of the affected area clear in under 100. The offending isotope is Cs-137, which has a half life of about 30 years. The long lived stuff isn't volatile enough to be released in significant quantity.

It might be OK if there was something technically interesting about it. But what's technically impressive about Tesla? Connecting a load of Li-Ion batteries to an electric motor isn't anything remarkable.

There've been more novel (and relevant) improvements to combustion engines over the past decade.

Probably not, actually. Neutrinos come from beta decay, which isn't what produces the energy in a fission chain reaction. Even the fusion reaction in a hydrogen bomb isn't itself neutrino producing. The fission products left over would produce neutrinos as they decay, but that would occur steadily over time and over a wide area, as they'd have been dispersed by the explosion.

Yes, but the CO will eventually get oxidised to CO2 in the atmosphere anyway.

CO2 emissions are directly proportional to fuel consumption (for a particular fuel). It's the other emissions - CO, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides etc. that can vary dramatically.

As someone who had a BBC Micro as his first computer (lovely machine for tinkering), it's nice to see the descendants of Acorn survive the juggernaut of the PC and x86. And long may it continue, the last thing we need is a vertically integrated colossus like Intel dominating everything, no matter how good their PC processors are.

Fission fusion hybrids have been thought of. Unfortunately you tend to get all the problems of both - the fusion part is still expensive, while the fission means you still have a big decay heat problem to deal with.

That's a very valid point, but what I remember of modern language teaching at school (French in my case) was very utilitarian. Just lots of vocabulary, conjugation rules etc. to memorise - all how to speak the language but very little as to why you'd want to bother and little of intellectual interest. Latin was better, in that we actually looked at examples of Latin literature and poetry and the Roman civilisation. Shame the language was much harder, with all the noun declensions and so forth.

All a bit of a waste really, as there's a lot of interesting things to learn about languages. The scientific side - how they evolve over time, how various languages relate to each other - cognate words, sounds shifts etc. And the literary/cultural side for those that way inclined.

In any case, I can't see anything that programming languages have in common with natural languages besides the word "language".