Not quite.

Although the US has waged numerous wars in the last 2 decades to keep it that way (especially for oil), that little peculiarity was never completely true and it's nearing its end (see Putin, Russian oil/gas and ruble)

Well, as somebody said a bit lower, the Pakistani supreme court said it doesn't apply to them in 2020.

Seems normal, really. Why would they bound by a decision an outside power made for them?

Pakistan exists as the current country since 1947. Before that, it was a part of the British Empire.

So, well...

Or, just maybe, there is a fundamental problem with the actual cosmological model.

Just as a quick reminder : post-WWII, we had a standard model that seemed to work pretty well. Fast-forward a few decades, and the improvements to our various measure instruments showed huge discrepancies. To address that, essentially we could either:

A) Admit the error, and back to the drawing board to try and rebuild a new model that fit better with what we could see (no need to restart from scratch, just go back to general relativity, since we've proven it, and try and find out were we've erred from there). Huge task that, among other things, implied that some people who'd got cushy positions from their work on the standard model could expect to see their whole careers go up in smoke.

B) Bolt what amounts to an undefined variable to the standard model, rename the whole mess lambda-CDM, and call it a day. Nothing is solved but hey, it's ok since we've given the discrepancy a funky cool name: dark matter (and later on dark energy).

Is it in any way a surprise to anyone to see that the choice went to B ?

Might be the problem of cooling the reactor, for instance : no atmosphere/water means no easily available medium through which exhausting heat. That's an environmental problem.

But a couple of other posters talked about the five. From context, they were talking about countries, not geographical areas.

Or maybe they add something like Russia and the EU ? If so, I'm somewhat doubtful about the former, and taking the latter as a unified whole seems misguided to me.

I'm drawing a blank about those 5 : US, China, India... ?

This being Star Treck, when they mention coming from the planet Vega ?

Wouldn't that be very useful for a SETI like project ?

Is that really in any way significant ?

Don't programming teachers not know how to calculate complexity anymore?

The answer works, so in all cases it should get a passing grade, at least. If the complexity is equivalent to that of the expected answer, full mark. If it's better, bonus points (the teacher grading the test should also explain why in the first and last cases).

Actually, your reply makes me think of one way (that I can really grasp) the classes are (may be) useful.

Back when I learnt to program (30 years ago, I'm not getting any younger), memory capacity was an issue, which gave us a real reason to work with big tables as global variables (no way in hell could we iterate them throughout all subfunctions as local variable. Depending on what we were doing, we would just have been begging for the memory to go burst). If (IF, big if) an OOP language was made cleanly enough, I can imagine a nice and proper management of such as local variables (like you described), but in a way that didn't really copy more than was necessary from the original table.

But well, since memory isn't an issue anymore...

Well, taking it from your example, I still can't really wrap my head around how exactly are your curve classes different from using functions with well defined local and global variables / tables (depending upon what you want to get out of it). Along the same lines, going over what other have said, a lot of the advantages that are given are not so much OOP centric as simply more advanced, less 'think about it carefully yourself or you'll screw up' language features (garbage collectors and the like...).

But, well, I haven't really programmed anything for more than 15 years now, so I'm hardly the target demographics...

By the way, even having to face the most complex of problems doesn't mean I would get the point of OOP.

I don't know, I had pretty weird teachers...

One thing, though: there was no way I wouldn't spend a long time with pencil and paper before writing the first line of code (if only for the sheer number of time I had to make sure the complexity of my code wouldn't go above pretty damn low thresholds). That tend to make you plan ahead what you're going to need for your various main(s)