He he. I wondered if MIT had done a deal with Martin Odersky's Typesafe or partnered with EPFL.

Scala as a teaching language in the USA?

I don't game and my linux box has intel graphics. :)

I would consider a "steam machine" though if I wanted a new development box for my office desktop. Whether I stuck with nouveau or loaded the properietary graphics would depend on whether the free drivers were sufficient.

I have a friend who used to grind his own almonds as a health-kick but went back to cow's milk after his fad diet ended. :( For the record I did go through a soy-latte phase a few years ago, so I'm no stranger to faux-milk.

Lamb is a fairly common meat here in Australia, though not as popular in certain other countries I've visited, where it's regarded as peasant food. But then similarly, goat meat never caught on here because of the gamey taste. Kangaroo has never caught on either, which is a shame given they're culled to control overpopulation.

Switching animals isn't a whole solution but if beef is the worst offender then surely divesting in production by promoting alternatives, including vegan recipes, is a strategy worth persuing?

(Sorry if I have unintentionally offended your vegan sensibilities - I'm a pragmatist from a long line of meat-eaters!)

Are there enough converts to veganism in achieving a significant water reduction? That is to say almond milk and tempeh will appeal to only a small fraction of the population.

Do Californians love their steak too much, or would less water-intensive animal protein such as chicken, seafood or lamb reduce the state's water consumption? Have there been any studies on the relative water usage in production of goat or sheep cheese vs moo-cheese?

Virgin is doing okay in Australia as the #2 airline. They also do mobile phone services running on the Optus network.

I expect Apple Watch apps will be written in Swift.

But now you're telling me the watch itself won't keep accurate time because Darwin isn't an RTOS? Suckers!

Isn't that the point of Quark, their 'wearable' SoC?

We use the honor system in my country. Just state your full name and address...

Incidence of voter fraud is statistically insignificant.

Did language acquisition help in your journeys or do you travel only to countries where they speak Canadian? :)

For me I learned Spanish as an adult merely as an intellectual exercise as a podgy IT nerd. I'd never left my home country before but it did inspire me to travel to Europe and South America - but only in hindsight was it a means to an end. I'm currently doing a 3-week MOOC on Dutch, which again is an intellectual exercise but may inspire me to travel to, say, Belgium at some point in the future.

But yeah, I can relate to being a teenager living in an Anglophone city learning French because doing a language was a required part of the curriculum.

Evidently they did not consult Firefox on the name.

My laptop way back in 2007 running XP had a finger scanner for logins and the like. I guess it's nice if there's a UI/Authentication API standardized for which vendors only need to plugin in a hardware implementation.

"Mac Minis of the time".

Which in the P4 era (mid 2000s), would have been powered by motorola PowerPC chips as used in mac laptops.

And ending sentences with a preposition is exactly what every Germanic language has, dones and always will do.

"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." - Churchill.

Well for the last 4-5 years I haven't owned a tablet. :) A phone can do everything a tablet can do, albeit on a tiny screen such as "convenient data access and occasional very light data entry".

What constitutes a "real PC" these days? Laptops are, for many, a desktop replacement. Touchscreens are becoming the norm because it's a 'value-add' that adds little to the purchase price. If you embed the CPU in the screen instead of the keyboard, you have the option of detaching the keyboard altogether.

Should one device perform both functions, or do we stick with the Apple mantra that you need both an iPad AND a macbook? Or the Google mantra that, increasingly, you don't need a desktop OS altogether?

Well I agree with GP's assertion that a 4" phone shouldn't have the same interface as a 2x21" desktop. As such one of my 'computers' runs Firefox OS and the other KDE atop debian.

But I don't have a tablet in my life. A 9" phone, running iOS or Android, that doesn't make phone calls, no thanks! What would convince me to buy a tablet would be one that comes with a fancy stand (we used to call it a docking station back in the day) that allows me to plug in all my existing peripherals and transform into a workstation OS.

MS share that vision. KDE share that vision via plasma (though their Vivaldi tablet didn't make it to market).

To rely on a rival SoC vendor for parts undermines Apple's commitment to develop their own chip, as opposed to using an off-the-shelf component such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Exynos or Tegra.