Australian energy companies don’t have too much to worry about, at least while the Prime Minister’s tongue gently caresses the large intestines of fossil fuel executives.

Think about the fallout if Deutsche Bank hired a database administrator with prior convictions for banking fraud, only to see that employee steal 100 million from the bank.

The Global Financial Crisis showed that banks and financial service companies are full of crooks clever enough not to get caught. So having prior convictions would be a red flag for them.

My wife finally got driverless cars a few days ago (or why I’m always going on about them). We were talking about our baby daughter being a teenager. When she realized that driverless cars would let our daughter get home from parties (without us picking her up) and that there would be less temptation for her to get in a car with drunk & stupid teenage drivers, my wife was “Bring it on!”

Moving gradually to driverless cars by giving the human less and less to do is a bad idea. It’ll just be more temptation to check their iPhone, whereas if the car is doing the driving they can do what they like.

AFAIK, capsaicin doesn’t actually have a flavour, or at least a significant one. It chemically induces pain receptors to feel pain, so if you’re tolerant, you can enjoy the flavours of the dish. As parent says, searing pain may distract you from flavours.

Peppers can vary greatly in heat. I read recently some farmers talking about their peppers. They said that one pepper in ten would cause serious pain, and the others were significantly milder.

That said, when I was in my twenties I would sometimes go to an Indian restaurant that did up to vindaloo, then vindaloo +1, meaning extra chilli. One of the most fun nights I ever had was watching two friends make their way through a +1. The most I managed was +2. If you ate a +5 you got on to the honour-board, and the theoretical maximum was +13. Fun times.

Apparently the local university rugby club would take their new recruits there for a machismo initiation. That would have been fun to watch.

You two could probably talk pirate together, me maties!

She'd probably object to me using any networked appliance (including my phone) to take photos of her lady parts

Stay up at the support end. The business end is for the professionals

That would be great if there weren’t any House Republicans. Our new conservative government in Australia has decided that the previous government’s plan to do that (to 96% of houses) was not a good idea, and instead we’ll all be getting 25Mbps by 2019. Good one!

In November 2012 we used 140kWh (we were away for part of October 2012 which rules it out for comparison). In October 2013 we used 311kWh. Getting a new sauna will do that! Thanks to the smart-meter, it looks like a sauna takes about 8kWh over about two hours. It’s an 8kW heater, but only uses full power during the initial phase.

My electricity retailer has just been bought by a company I can never use because they appointed a debt collector for money I didn’t owe them. So it’s time to search for another one. Last time I analyzed pricing they were all much the same when all their pricing idiosyncrasies are accounted for. If my new company hadn’t made me the angriest I’ve ever been in my life I would say that I would be prioritizing doing my tax over choosing yet another electricity retailer.

My friend dragged me along to see it. I’d seen the trailer, which was just troopers & bugs, and gave no idea of what the movie was actually like. I really enjoyed the satire, and Denise Richards’ cute smile as the “piloted the spaceship”. And it had Neil Patrick Harris, who is awesome!

All the people in the movie were thinking exactly what they’d been told to think. Maybe Verhoeven was playing a joke on all the people who thought what it looked like the movie was telling them to think.

I don't want any frequencies boosted or attenuated, I want a flat frequency response. I don't want it to "sound good" I want it to faithfully reproduce the original performance. I want it to sound like the musicians are in the room with me, and you won't get that with MP3s.

If you were really keen, you could listen to some music on a high-quality speaker system, then try to approximate that in your headphones with appropriate EQ. But the next best thing is flat- let professional sound engineers do their job!

Hehe, the car I bought this year was a bit cheaper because no other buyers wanted manual transmission. Talking to people who actually know about cars, it seems (good) automatic transmission is just as good as manual these days. I’d rather be reading than watching the road or changing gears.

+1

I don’t really like driving and I absolutely hate parking. Both problems solved.

This year I bought a 2011 car to be able to use a child’s seat. I really hope it’s the last human-driven car I buy.

To not really answer your question, blind singers (who do have both their hands free) follow the music with one hand and the lyrics with the other.

In 2007 I had a lot of choral music at my wedding, including an original piece. One of our friends is blind, so a few weeks before, I sent off all the music to the local Institute for the Blind where someone put all the music into braille. Automatic tools for putting music into braille would save choirmasters a lot of planning and free up the volunteer transcribers to do other things.

Yes, I was surprised, because Lua is the only programming language my brain has taken kindly to. Of course, it could just be my brain, but is more likely to the WoW’s WTF folder, as mentioned elsewhere.