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In the context of "smoking a fag", if you take "fag" to mean "homosexual person", then "smoking" might mean "setting fire to" or "shooting". As in, "let's go smoke some gooks", as you might hear in a Vietnam movie.

The continents move over hotspots, which is why the Hawaii island chain exists. I don't know much about the Antarctic continental plate, whether it is moving or not, but it may have drifted over a hotspot some time in the last few million years.

Walk towards Greenwich and turn left.

That's like including an option "I never vote in Slashdot polls".

The absolute terms "true" and "not true" are not appropriate for a hypothesis like this. There may be some parts of it that are accurate, but for instance the size, mass, velocity, density distribution etc. of the Theia might be wrong, or the physics in the simulation might be wrong, etc.

There's no reason for anything. Life is just a bunch of stuff that happens, and one day it might stop happening if something big enough hits the planet, like the one that made the moon.

The most recent one was a custom SQL cursor in Oracle EBS. Add an index, refactor some correlated queries, and create a cut-down version of a complex view that it was using.

Another of the examples a few years back was where I reimplemented an FTP process to retry each individual step instead of reverting to the first step on failure. Given that each step had about a 50% chance of failure on a bad day, and each script had about 20 steps, it meant that it was failing... (runs calc...) 99.9999% of the time. OK I'm exaggerating a little, maybe it wasn't 50%, and only a few of the jobs had as many as 20 steps, it was about 10 years ago and I forget the details so my ego may be filling in the gaps. But it did mean that we didn't have to have a guy sitting at a screen hitting "Retry" all day long, and we could get file sets deployed in a couple of minutes instead of taking all day. The FTP was being done by a proprietary tool, so I had to implement my own system to parse its manifest.

And then there was that Excel spreadsheet that was massively bigger than it should have been. Everyone's system ground to a halt every time they openened it. No-one could figure out why it was so big, I spent an afternoon trying the obvious things and gave up. Then inspiration hit me, and I wrote some VBA to look at the number of "shape" objects in each sheet. There were millions of them. Someone had put boxes around a bunch of cells, those boxes had somehow been shrunk down to one pixel and replicated thousands of times, so a quick VBA procedure to delete all box shapes, and bingo, some people could do their jobs again.

A lot of people don't realise that computers don't behave in the way that we expect - we have an intuitive grasp of the laws of physics, but information is not physical and does not obey the same laws. There are infinities and paradoxes and undeterminables that are hard to understand. Minds that can intuitively navigate this space are few and far between.

3. What is the most unusual computing platform that you wrote a program from?

In order to write a BASIC interpreter, we needed an assembler. So my dad wrote one in GW-BASIC. Once our interpreter was sophisticated and stable enough, we rewrote the assembler in our own language (based on Acorn BBC Basic). Eventually we splashed out on a copy of MASM once we had a computer that was PC-compatible enough to run it (the Sanyo MBC 550 wasn't quite up to it, IIRC).

Were you programming a Java Ringpiece?

My dad and I did a lot of the design work on a BASIC interpreter for the PC while on a caravan holiday in France when I was a teenager back in the '80s.

I was recently brought in to a team to help with some performance problems, and I ended up speeding up one of the operations by nearly 100,000 times. But I accept that these gains are few and far between, I've only achieved 5-figure performance improvements a handful of times in my 30-year career as a programmer. Most of the time it's hard to get much more than double, as you say depending on how good the original development was. Sometimes I've managed to get 5-figure improvements on revisiting my own code, so I do have sympathy for the 'bad programmers', it isn't always easy to do a good job on the first pass, especially in unfamiliar environments.

Has it been exploited? A zero-day attack is an exploit on the same day that the information is released. No-one has said anything about an attack. If it gets attacked today, it's a zero-day. If it's already been attacked, then it's an already-exploited vulnerability, there's no point in attaching positive or negative numbers to it. An exploited bug that never gets detected would be a minus infinity day attack!!!! Anyway that's a "zero-day attack", I don't know what a "zero-day vulnerability" is, the term doesn't make any sense. I think people are just saying "zero day" because it sounds cool.

Because both "station" does not derive from "stationary", they both share a common root with the latin word "statio" meaning “standing, post, job, position”.
And depending on your frame of reference, every "station" on the planet is moving a million miles a day.

Your second sentence seems to contradict the first. Microsoft never made any money from Internet Explorer. Making money has nothing to do with monopolistic practice, in fact monopolistic practices lose money all the time in order to maintain a lock on a more lucrative market. It's pretty much the definition. If someone's losing money (e.g. manufacturing consoles at a loss) then they are doing it in order to gain market share (possibly to acquire or maintain a monopoly) in something else (e.g. console games).