A lot of those users are in poorer countries where the ad revenue per person is lower, where they'll probably change less to remove ads.

99% of the vba I come across is terrible, undocumented, and not performant

but usually works in most cases if you can even get your excel to allow it to run

as I've gotten older, I've found that I can usually avoid using vba and more elegantly accomplish my tasks with existing functionality (or just accept having slightly wrong outputs in exchange for clarity and performance where being 100% right isn't important like being off a couple dollars on certain business calculations where the full result is a huge numerical estimate anyway...)

It's not the every day sea level that is the problem. The problem is when a storm surge hits a small increase in sea level results thousands more more acres of land being flooded.

The were other advantages of Google back then, like it's page rank based on links to each page was superior, its index was more comprehensive and it would only show pages with all your search terms, rather than show popular pages with one of your search terms.

While I 100% agree with your technocratic/liberal view of the world, mine has been tempered moderately by reading the The Republican Brain (by Chris Mooney) years ago

The thesis essentially is that evolution has yielded a continuum of people on this planet in terms of how they view the world and there's sadly not much we can do to convince conservatives to be more liberal.

Perhaps I have a defeatist/cynical view at this point in my life but I don't expect any sort of real movement on CO2 emissions to meaningfully address climate change and don't expect the US (or other similarly immature/corrupt countries) to adopt changes in healthcare or prison reform until it benefits special interests. I don't foresee the populace at large adopting purely technocratic/liberal views until we reach something closer to post scarcity which I doubt will ever happen :(

I've been using acrobat 8.0 for like 10-15 years

once in a blue moon I encounter some incompatible pdf and I just open it in sumatrapdf but that's like 2% of the time

because sometimes the very best doctors come to the US since they'll get paid the most here though for the overwhelming majority of situations and people (assuming you're not in the top 1% of income), you're better off in any other developed country besides the US

Except their craft seem to be able to move is ways beyond our understanding.

I remember for most of its history National Geographic wasn't available on Newsstands. It was originally only delivered to members of the National Geographic Society.

Don't think for a moment that the people who wrote this question at The College Board are top quality developers which may or may not make this a good question depending on one's perspective

The video game comic Penny Arcade (which used to have a link on the Slashdot homepage) have put out four games since 2008.

Once difference is that many if not most software developers work on software developed for internal purposes where sales numbers don't exist.

With ad supported TV advertisers required an objective measure of viewership. This data was also used to creators to make sure they where paid based on the popularity of their show. With streaming they don't need need an objective measure of viewership so they manipulate viewer numbers to get out of paying creators.

didn't know that about ABA check digits - that's comforting

by receiving bank, do you mean whoever receives the ACH push or pull request?

yeah, 15 digits is often not enough space

realistically speaking though, there's little to prevent a motivated criminal from siphoning money from someone's account one way or another these days since anyone can print any check routing/account number on any "secure" stock and "sign" it close enough esp when positive pay isn't in place on the majority of accounts anyway...

As someone who has worked in the ACH industry, what's your take on the seemingly lack of authentication for most transactions?

e.g., if I mail a check to a recipient, if there's a small error in the address or even payee, it will most likely go where it intended without issue whereas if there's a single digit off on the account or routing number, the transfer either won't work or will end up in someone else's account

Further, it seems much more difficult to reliably transmit remittance advice type information with ACH as well?