You were largely correct.

It's "a university" because the English pronunciation is YOO-niversity, which starts with a consonant(ish) sound. If we pronounced it OOH-niversity which is a vowel sound it would be "an."

Other than the rampant conjugation and screwy prepositions in German (several seem to translate to 3 different English ones) I'd say I like what I've learned of the language. In some ways it really makes more sense than English...and it's mostly easier to spell :) Maybe there are rules about double-vowels-with-an-umlaut that I just haven't seen.

I believe the exception is if the first letter is something that is a *silent* consonant, leave it with "a." For example, honorable or university*. A lot of people (native speakers) seem to not get this as you'll see "an historic" a lot of the time but the 'h' isn't silent so it should still be 'a.'

I'll admit that the "if it's separated by another word, use that word instead" seems maddeningly inconsistent. I consider it a bonus that we don't conjugate every god damn part of speech, though. After taking a few years of German, it seems like in German you have to conjugate 6 or 7 out of 10 parts of speech, while in English it's only really 3 (pronouns, verbs, and articles). And of course the genders for 90% of nouns are completely random. My favorite is "das Mädchen." Argh!

* Do I remember correctly that Universität is begun with an "oo" pronunciation? In English it's a "yoo" pronunciation.

The first 2 results for "a vs an" on Google agree with me, anyway. I wouldn't be surprised at a dissenting opinion.
https://owl.english.purdue.edu...
http://www.quickanddirtytips.c...

Ah, okay. I probably would have picked up on that if you had said "at university" instead of "at an university."

(Not sure what the rule is officially but I'd say "a university" not "an university." Cf. whether it's the spelling or the pronunciation that determines a vs. an.)

Having just recently bought a used stick-shift, I've vaguely wondered each time I had to take it in for something whether all the probably barely 20yo assistants who move the cars around at these places know how to drive stick...and if so, how to do it without mangling my transmission.

Admittedly I'm only 25 myself so hey :) But I also know the basics of assembly so I'm probably in a pretty weird demographic these days.

*in the same vein

*middle option

To clarify, I did take *a* course in COBOL and a half-course in assembly. Sadly they had crammed together the courses for Computer Architecture and Operating Systems into one, CAOS, so the other half was basically threading in Java.

Don't know about where you went, but we have separate majors for CS and SE where I graduated. The SE guys took a couple extra NIC programming classes and suchlike, while at the other end the Computer Information Systems people did a bunch of COBOL classes. I did Computer Technology, the "middle options."

CT and CIS were both internal branches of CS, and CS and SE made up the agglomerated CSSE department. Post-graduation I'm not really qualified to say, but you specifically said "at an university."

Yes. Explain to me how embedded programmers need to know about web security?

Rereading your post, it looks like you weren't implying the link between a person and a bitcoin userid like I thought. But still, part of the value of bitcoins is that there is no central authority to revoke your currency. Hence the use in black market applications etc.

Well, until that one group that has 50%+1 of the coins decides it wants to become that authority, I suppose.

Or maybe they started out with good intentions but got corrupted like everything else in this world.

Or stay uncorrupted and then get stomped on by all the people who went to the Dark Side I suppose.

Maybe they were just threatening not to return the money at some indeterminate point in the future unless they took it down :)

Second Law: We're apparently counting in zero-indexed binary so this law doesn't exist.

Wasn't the whole objective of Bitcoin to create a system where you *couldn't* do that?

Bullshit. The Mongol Empire was not the Chinese Empire. Maybe one or more of the chunks it disintegrated into can have some lineage traced down to China, but no.

Not like Mao was doing his best to eradicate that culture or anything...

Egypt is still around. How much closer together are Traditional China and Communist China than Pharaonic Egypt and Egypt Now?