In 1972 I completed what would have been among the first "A" levels in Computer Science in UK. It was pretty good, ran at the local technical college, where they had an IBM 1130 with a card reader, printer and - wait for it - 4kb of main memory! We learned FORTRAN IV - and I was keen so also learned a few other languages. It was all pretty new, even exciting enough that a TV company came down and filmed some stuff (including the plotter output from one of my program - sadly I wasn't there, missing my chance at fame).
In fact, it was pretty good, and leads me on to a pretty decent degree in Computer Science at (thank you) Essex University.
And here I am, forty years later, still working in the field. No Ferrari, but no starvation so I guess I did ok.

I did flee Britain's awful weather though. Sydney is much nicer (usually - perhaps not this year).

Pressing
          Stop Stop Play
used to skip directly to the start of the movie, but that doesn't seem to work with recent DVDs.
Worth trying though.

Twenty seconds may be longer than the average Slashdotter's SO lovemaking time.

When I was involved in writing one of the first packet switching systems in Europe (AT&T, Belgium, 1979), we found a brilliant way to fix bugs was to explain the bug (and thus the operation of the program) to someone. They didn't have to do much, just nod and look interested.
Then usually about halfway though, the hapless coder (eg me) would go "Oh shit" ... and the listener cold then leave.
We called it the "tailors dummy" approach to debugging.

A bit like pair programming, only less labour intensive.

I suspect it would be a rare male who has not at least **thought** about sex with under-age girls.

I seem to recall a story about an army general who was training schoolboys in gun use. He was complained to that they would be equipped to be terrorist, and he responded to the - female - complainant that she was fully equipped to be a prostitute. But was she?

I believe the interview went badly from then on.

Seriously though, who has not thought about the most horrendous deeds? Fire-bombing ones school, blowing up the Houses of Parliament, raping the odd supermodel (or teacher, perhaps?); surely all males have fantasies? Presumably females too, but I claim less direct experience.

If people go to jail for thinking about terrible things and even writing them down, where would almost all American movies come from?

As a one time ocean cruiser - in a small boat - may I just say how terrifying this sounds?
There you are, sailing along off the coast of somewhere, minding your own business and wondering if you can stretch to one more warm beer from your fast-dwindling supplies, when a robot helicopter comes along and shoots the shit out of you.

As if rogue waves, giant fish, waterspouts and annoying customs officials weren't enough, now we get robot helicopters?
Come back Bender, all is forgiven. At least you could try to reason with him, um, it.

It has puzzled me for years why Americans (and others) say math - and sports, whereas Brits (and others) say maths - and sport.

Consistency is a wonderful thing.

In Australia, many organisations (such as banks) are forbidden to hold customer information in a location where it may be seized by a non-Australian court order.
This effectively prevents us from doing business with American outsourcing companies. UK is ok, and Singapore, the list is surprisingly short.

If this were true of other countries, as I suspect, isn't American business going to get a bit cross about being ostracised by foreign companies.

"Buy our cool new cloud service!" ... sorry, can't do that until your laws become more business friendly. (Did you ever expect to see non-business friendly, and USA in the same sentence? No, nor did I).

Yes, this happens. A while ago I was made redundant by a Very Large Telephone Company. Said VLTC paid me a nice redundancy, and gave me a system I'd written they didn't want (which made me a nice living for a few years, thanks VLTC). No complaints. Before I left, I archived everything nicely, documented the archives, and handed over several copies.

A year or two later, they called me up and asked if I "happened" to have a copy of the source to a system I'd written. (Yes, it had been in those archived copies).
Fortunately I did (what, me, paranoid?), so I then made a nice living for a short while selling them back the stuff I had written for them before, for which they had already paid me. And both parties were quite satisfied.
Oh - rinse and repeat. Happened again a year later for yet another system (they were trying to replicate its functionality outsourcing the writing of it to India). I charged more and again, all were happy.

Weird.

last week I couldn't even spell engenier, and now I are one.

>> Damn. I guess I'll go and paint all my car windows black.

Is your name Spike?

>> what product or service other than narcotics is there such a passionate, unmet demand for in America?

er ... how about medical services. Oh, sorry, you already have cartels for that.
Maybe - lower cost medical service? Now there's a market!

No sci-fi - yes, this seems to be a problem. Sci-fi seems to have split into several splinters.
Fantasy claiming to be sci fi. Lots of this.
TV and game stuff - crappy books claiming to be Halo books (spare me), and crappy Start Trek or Dr Who stories.
and some dribs and drabs of actual sci fi. With far too many excessively long series (come up with some NEW ideas, why don't you?)

Actually, fantasy overwhelming the sci fi and fantasy shelves is my big complaint. Who are these followers of dragons and magic? I've read Lord of the Rings, and it was damned good, but that's not why I'm here in this bookshop.

I miss Niven - when he was just Niven. And Forward. And ... oh anyway there are quite a few.

Well, one of them might be mine. I run unencrypted WiFi - but try and actually connect, and you'll find I have a list of MAC addresses I accept, so you won't get a connection. And yes, I'm in Sydney.

The problem is simple. It costs USD200,000,000 to make a movie, right? (Ok, that's an expensive one - but what the heck, I like expensive ones).

Now, a fair number of movies are flops - and it's hard to predict this in advance.

So the studio needs to earn an awful lot of money from the good ones to stay in business (and we all want the movies to get made, right?)

How do you do it? If everyone downloads the movie for free, then the studio goes broke and doesn't make any more movies. Or do you want everyone else to pay, and just special computer-savvy people to get it for free? Is that it? Because that's what's happening now. Doesn't sound quite fair to me.

So stop moaning about how the studios are stealing your money - instead come up with a decent workable business model so you get a fair product for a decent prince, and everyone can make a little money.
And we can all sleep much better.

And you can stop moaning.