There's virtually nothing in the populated areas of Australia, other than other humans, that attacks humans and can be usefully defended against with a firearm.

We have nasty spiders and snakes, but you don't use firearms to kill either of those. Both only strike humans defensively. Our large land animals are all herbivores; kangaroo, emus and cassowaries have a very nasty kick but they'll run away in preference to attacking you. Dingoes, despite the high-profile death of Azarea Chamberlain back in 1978, are basically wild dogs, and represent little threat to people.

We also have a collection of potentially lethal acquatic species, including the Blue-Ringed Octopus, several species of jellyfish, and some sharks. Again, guns aren't a lot of use against them.

Crocodiles, which I guess you're referring to with the giant knife reference, are the one animal that will actually try to eat an adult human. They only live in the tropical north of the country, far away from the major population centres, and any that move in near the cities in those regions are killed or relocated by professional shooters.

So, no, you don't need a gun to protect yourself from the wildlife in Australia. And despite some myths, if you want a rifle or shotgun for hunting or target shooting, or need one for farming or pest control, you can get one in Australia. You just can't walk into a gun shop and buy an AR-15 or a big-calibre handgun for "self-defence" here. And, nearly 20 years after the changes to the gun laws, that remains overwhelmingly popular here.

Like that scene from The Fifth Element? I'd post a link but I find it amusing that if you search youtube for "That scene from the 5th element", it's the second link.

Oh that's an easy problem to solve -- you just require the user to store their key in a keystore that makes sure you could get at it if you ever want to decrypt their E-Mail. The vast majority of the users would never realize that completely eliminates the security they were looking for when they decided to use encryption in the first place. If you really need an excuse (which you don't,) you could make a nice shiny feature like the ability to decrypt your mail from any machine on the internet.

Funnily enough, I got the following story about a pilot once; a fairly new skydiver found himself in the unusual position of being the last one off the plane, so he asked the pilot if he wanted him to close the door on his way out. The door's usually a sliding affair and difficult to close from the outside. The pilot explained that this wasn't necessary because after the last skydiver left the plane he'd light his cigar, trim the controls and walk back to close the door himself. Of course, you can actually do that in a plane -- it's not like you're likely to hit anything at 13000 feet.

Indeed! That's why my suggestion was that instead of airbags we have sharp deadly AIRSPIKES! If you're in an accident, the airsplke stabs you in the face! I'll bet you'll pay some serious attention driving, THEN! If not now, then in a couple of generations once the people who don't pay enough attention to avoid getting an airspike in the face have weeded themselves out of the gene pool!

I'm no fan of Java-based curricula, for the same reason I'd be no fan of Fortran-based curricula. Computing isn't about one language. Each language and system shows you one hyperplane of a vast multidimensional space. The best programmers know lots of languages, and choose wisely among them — or even create new ones when appropriate.

In the production world, there are times where some C++ or Java code is appropriate ... and there are times when what you want is a couple of lines of shellscript and some pipes ... and there are times when the most sensible algorithm for something can't be neatly expressed in a language like C++ or Java, and really requires something like Common Lisp or Haskell. If you need to exploit multiple processors without getting bogged down in locking bullshit and race conditions, you're much better off using Go than Java.

(Just last night, at a meetup, I was talking with two bright young physicists who reported that their universities don't do a good enough job of teaching Fortran, which is the language they actually need to do their job. Scientific computing still relies heavily on Fortran, Matlab, and other languages well removed from what's trendy in the CS department — no matter if that CS department is in the Java, Haskell, or Python camp. But if you want to learn to write good Fortran, you basically need a mentor in the physics department with time to teach you.)

And there are times when the right thing to do is to create a new language, whether a domain-specific language or a new approach on general-purpose computing. There's a good reason Rob Pike came up with Sawzall, a logs-analysis DSL that compiles to arbitrarily parallel mapreduces; and then Go, a C-like systems language with a rocket engine of concurrency built in.

(And there's a good reason a lot of people adopting Go have been coming not from the C++/Java camps that the Go developers expected, but from Python and Ruby: because Go gives you the raw speed of a concurrent and native-compiled language, plus libraries designed by actual engineers, without a lot of the verbose bullshit of C++ or Java. Would I recommend Go as a first language? I'm not so sure about that ....)

What would an optimal computing curriculum look like? I have no freakin' clue. It would have to cover particular basics — variable binding, iteration, recursion, sequencing, data structures, libraries and APIs, concurrency — no matter what the language. But it can't leave its students thinking that one language is Intuitive and the other ones are Just Gratuitously Weird ... and that's too much of what I see from young programmers in industry today.

Well the math doesn't seem to care how many dimensions you have. If you need another dimension, just add another one!

Looking for a job where I can get away with expensing this.

If only we had some stem cells, we might have saved him!

If you've never stayed there, you can post a bad review for free? Because I have a special review I've been saving for years for just such an occasion!

Neat idea, but shouldn't they be concentrating on the game and not playing "Learning my ABCs with Mickey"?

"Machinery" is from 1947. Back then you didn't type your code, you wire-wrapped it.

Your servers are already pwned.

Become the sole developer for Blackberry app!