I learned touch typing in school, but didn't really get to the numbers. I use the number pad as much as I can, but when I use the top row I will use left hand for 5 and below and usually but not always the right hand for higher numbers. The problem is that I never got the positions totally fixed in my muscle memory, so when typing anywhere from 5 to about 8 there's a good chance I'll do a little run up the keyboard till I find it (6, backspace, 7, backspace, 8, got it!).

What a silly question. Do trains need windows for the passengers? Or planes? People like to look outside, so of course there will be windows.

I blogged about it here (with a bonus explanation for how religion works), but in essence the question as asked presents you with two incorrect answers (each possible answer has one colour correct, one incorrect), so you pick one of them and then argue with everyone else that you are right.

"Nor" is a hangover from Old English, when the language had a dual number in addition to the singular and plural we have today.

When you break an incandescent bulb then turn it on, all that happens is you get a brief puff of smoke followed by darkness.

I think you are confusing LAN meaning "Local Area Network". WAN means "Wide Area NetworK", but it's not so much wide as it is long. Hence in this context LAN means "Long Area Network" :P

I am flying from Australia to South America for a holiday. Because of all this TSA nonsense, I paid extra to fly via Chile rather than USA. This also means I flew using LAN rather than a USA airline (which is money lost for the USA economy).

That depends on both the developer and the user :P Just kidding, I agree. When someone asks me what a BA does, the simplistic answer I give them is that I act as a translator between users/the business and the programmers.

I deal with some users that have almost no clue about computers and technology, so they have a tendency to think that IT development can deliver more than it can in a lot less time than it really takes. Even worse, the organisation I work in is strongly hierarchical so my communication with some users is often via several layers of management (each of whom know very little about computers and technology). Suffice to say, it is quite the challenge to manage users' expectations!

Everybody seems to be confusing the term "customer" with "stakeholder". The fact that a person may not understand what they really need when asking for an info system should be no surprise to anyone in the IT industry by now. It's the whole reason for the existence of business analysts like me. Being a good programmer does not by any means guarantee that you are good at gathering and understanding requirements. Being a good BA certainly doesn't make me any sort of programmer (though I do understand the concepts).

I don't understand that argument. If there was an emergency that required evacuation, you would have to be pretty darn absorbed in your game not to notice the bumping and the oxygen masks coming down and the smoke and the people screaming and the loud "assume brace position" warnings. The time it takes to put your Game Boy down is probably significantly less than the time it would take to undo your seatbelt, stand up and get into the aisle of a plane full of other people all trying to get off as quickly as they can.

They assure me that the bullocks are superior. Bullocks are huge and powerful, and low maintenance.

Castration isn't required. The bullocks used by my wife's family in her native country weren't castrated.

Cows are work animals, though they are selectively bred for meat now. Try ploughing a field in a developing country where you can't afford kerosene for a tractor and then you'll appreciate the value of a cow!

Is it really a structure built out of liquid metal, or is it a structure containing liquid metal?

And there has never been an example of a word or phrase shifting in meaning as the cultural context in which it was originally used changes...