During my wife’s pregnancy, Julian was the only boy’s name we both didn’t mind. The baby turned out to be a girl (we wanted an old-school surprise), but if we have a boy in the future there’s a good chance he would be my favourite Julian.

Luckily, it’s trivially easy to find stuff that’s OK, and a page’s layout generally gives a good indication of its worth.

Yes, traversing or pretty-printing a Lua table (which may contain tables itself) is commonly needed and should be easy enough for a beginners’ class

Iff you use Lua of course.

Oops, that wasn’t very clear. I meant macros for World of Warcraft. You could bind macros to a key, such as
/cast "Flash Heal"

One macro command was /script which would execute Lua code. Macros were limited to 254 characters, so the Lua code was limited to 248 characters (/script + a space took 8 characters). You could do a surprising amount with this.

BootChess vs1K ZX Chess

Probably a bit like watching snails race, but snail-races can get interesting.

Back in the day I learned Lua by programming 254-byte (I think) macros. As far as I know, the one-letter globals didn’t do any harm and it was good fun. Once I worked out how to write add-ons of unlimited size, my programming skills and code legibility improved greatly.

Zipped Scheme would be pretty small, once the right parentheses are compressed.

Australian energy companies don’t have too much to worry about, at least while the Prime Minister’s tongue gently caresses the large intestines of fossil fuel executives.

Think about the fallout if Deutsche Bank hired a database administrator with prior convictions for banking fraud, only to see that employee steal 100 million from the bank.

The Global Financial Crisis showed that banks and financial service companies are full of crooks clever enough not to get caught. So having prior convictions would be a red flag for them.

My wife finally got driverless cars a few days ago (or why I’m always going on about them). We were talking about our baby daughter being a teenager. When she realized that driverless cars would let our daughter get home from parties (without us picking her up) and that there would be less temptation for her to get in a car with drunk & stupid teenage drivers, my wife was “Bring it on!”

Moving gradually to driverless cars by giving the human less and less to do is a bad idea. It’ll just be more temptation to check their iPhone, whereas if the car is doing the driving they can do what they like.

AFAIK, capsaicin doesn’t actually have a flavour, or at least a significant one. It chemically induces pain receptors to feel pain, so if you’re tolerant, you can enjoy the flavours of the dish. As parent says, searing pain may distract you from flavours.

Peppers can vary greatly in heat. I read recently some farmers talking about their peppers. They said that one pepper in ten would cause serious pain, and the others were significantly milder.

That said, when I was in my twenties I would sometimes go to an Indian restaurant that did up to vindaloo, then vindaloo +1, meaning extra chilli. One of the most fun nights I ever had was watching two friends make their way through a +1. The most I managed was +2. If you ate a +5 you got on to the honour-board, and the theoretical maximum was +13. Fun times.

Apparently the local university rugby club would take their new recruits there for a machismo initiation. That would have been fun to watch.

You two could probably talk pirate together, me maties!

She'd probably object to me using any networked appliance (including my phone) to take photos of her lady parts

Stay up at the support end. The business end is for the professionals

That would be great if there weren’t any House Republicans. Our new conservative government in Australia has decided that the previous government’s plan to do that (to 96% of houses) was not a good idea, and instead we’ll all be getting 25Mbps by 2019. Good one!