Blimey, in about 1998 this old guy from the Jo-Hos knocked on my door and presented me with some literature including something about how "all scientists" believe in god, especially the Great Fred Hoyle, so God must be there.

It also said that "scientists are telling us" about this vast, untapped wealth of hydrocarbon deposits on the deep sea beds in the form of these methane thingy-ma-bobs, so God had provided us with all the energy we'll ever need. He's a great guy that God dude! He didn't mention atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global warning, though.

So, the Jo-Hos are right. God is really there! And we will never run out of energy!

Slackware does things The Right Way(TM). I've been using it since 1995 as my main distro with a brief detour into SLAMD64 in 2007 when I bought a 64-bit AMD and Slackware was still x86-32.

I've had the misfortune to have to suffer Debian. RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu and Arago for work over the years, but Slackware is the best. Everything I've learned from Slackware has empowered me to be productive with all of those other distributions.

why?

Learning a language that comes from a completely different school of thought (i.e. "paradigm") will give you a far larger perspective than only having learned one language or family of languages. For example, if all you ever saw was C++, Java and C# your world view would be extremely limited. Someone who has learned a little FORTH, LISP and Smalltalk, not to mention various assembly languages, would be an order of magnitude more productive than you, produce fewer bugs and be able to think of more good solutions to difficult problems.

If all you ever do is write GUIs for the corporate Oracle or MS database, then stay in your C# paradise.

Errr... the UK still has an reasonable approximation of a well-functioning court system. That the police say something is illegal isn't enough to get you thrown in jail.

It is under Tony Blair's Anti-Terror Laws. You only need to be suspected of something that could be vaguely related to terrorism to be locked up. No jury trial involved, just the police, some politicians and a few judges.

Very wise words.

I'd add to that: write unit tests for your code (preferably before you write the code). You'll understand how it works and where it's broken quicker and better and free up your brain cycles more for the creative design part.

You will learn and improve much more quickly with much less stress.

Back in the day (80's 8-bit micros) I started on BASIC and Z80 machine code followed by a little FORTH.

The one thing I really wish I'd known about - or understood - was what LISP really is. It was often described in the popular computing press as a language "for processing lists."

How very wrong. The reality is so much better.

I didn't seriously look at the lisp family of languages until about 6 or 7 years ago. I really wish I'd looked 25 years sooner.

It's actually several thousand frames that play out a sequence of events. It was notable both because of the unique presentation (most frames, particularly the early ones, change only subtly) and because of the details that go into establishing the otherwise unexplained setting.

What activity would the TSA need to install body scanners at to cross the line for you? The train? Subway? City bus? Terrorists have blown up far more cafes than airplanes, so logically you should need to be scanned to buy coffee. And it wouldn't be an imposition, since you're there voluntarily!

The "restrictive profile" that Google is using for the filtering is defined in Unicode as any combination of the Latin character set with another set or sets, with the exception of very specific combinations (selected legitimate combinations of Asian sets that contain radically different letter forms and thus are unlikely to cause confusion).

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's been like "oh, you mean the datacenters on barges for the cooling water, from several years ago?" whenever someone brings up these "super secret" Google containers!

I can edit tens of thousands of lines of code in an instant with sed and grep without even "opening an editor." Through the miracle that is sh I can pipe stuff into my custom (very small and simple) C and sh tools to frob the code. Then I just type make to rebuilt it all and my unit tests tell me that it worked.

At the other side of the office, they're cursing and swearing and Microsoft(TM)(R) Visual(C) Studio Intergalactic Azure Edition For the Enterprise(R) because it's still importing the project...