However it's very clear that you are just winding me up for a bit of fun and nowhere near as ignorant and stupid as you are pretending to be.

Seeing as you're genuinely confused as to what I'm talking about, we've been running tasks in parallel in Python ever since the beginning. Just use processes instead of threads. There are differences (no shared heap, IPC) but there are benefits (no shared heap!). If you're used to the thread pool paradigm, Python has both a thread pool and process pool with the thread pool obviously limited by the GIL while the process pool isn't.

So what's with the thread obsession? It's not the only way to run tasks in parallel.

If you were an elite software developer, you'd be too busy to join a jumped up organisation like the ACM.

Why is that silly? Do we really think crooks will not find some way of overriding the "slow down" command? As for "partners", a computer does not get stressed or feel under pressure when chased by cops and thus will be less likely to make mistakes.

Why is worrying about this silly?

A couple of questions for you:

1) What happens when your single server goes down? How long does it take you to get back up and running?
2) What happens if your demand is spiky?

If you're going to use an instance for a year constantly, you need to look at reserved instances. That brings the price down to $3054 for the year which is not bad as you don't pay for electricity or cooling.

With judicious use of semicolons, you could fit all that into a single line.

You might have to scroll horizontally a lot, but it's still a single line!

I've seen this a million times. People with poorly designed relational databases with no thought given to query plans complain that their database is slow. They then migrate said database to a NoSQL solution (typically a document database like MongoDB) and then find that it is still slow! . In a few cases, the NoSQL solution is significantly slower.

The problem is NoSQL encompasses many different types of solutions. Key value stores like Redis are pretty good (key lookups support wildcards!!!) and I use them as an alternative to memcache. Document databases like MongoDB? If you're excited about them because you don't need a schema, you're just asking for carloads of trouble down the line because you've mistakenly bought into the thinking that you can just chuck arbitrary data into Mongo and get it to perform well.

Are you high? Instagram (200 million users) uses PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is web scale :)

The majority of POS terminals in the wild run Windows XP. This is unlikely to change anytime soon, so I have no idea how Windows XP's official retirement in a few days time will play out as none of the retailers I work with intend to change their tills. This isn't surprising (to people who support POS terminals), as we still see terminals running Windows NT4 (!!!!!!!).

Our advice to retailers is to always have their tills on a separate non-internet facing network. No one really does this though ....

It's handy having your an office suite on your tablet as it allows you to make quick edits on the go. No one is expecting you to write your thesis on a tablet, but for reviewing documents, writing comments and making small changes having Office on the iPad stupidly useful.

As for Office suites in general, I don't know what it's like where you are but in the UK you're almost guaranteed that to run into MS Office files in whatever job you do. There's no avoiding it even as a techie as your specifications and such are almost certainly written in Word.