Age related myopia is a fact of life. It affects your reading ability and pretty much everyone gets it.

You're completely wrong here:
1. Myopia affects your ability to see at a distance, it does not affect your reading ability. Most people do not get it; it typically develops until age 20-25 in those who do get it. It's the reason for most glasses and contacts in people under age 40. LASIK is most commonly used as a correction for those with myopia.
2. Presbyopia is the age-related age decline that most people get; it affects your ability to focus, which is why many old people need reading glasses or bifocals. It tends to start sometime after age 40 and progress.
3. People with myopia absolutely tend to have much-delayed onset of significant presbyopia, less severe cases, and sometimes avoid it entirely; LASIK eliminates those delays.

See, e.g., the American Optometric Association's Care of the Patient with Presbyopia:
http://www.aoa.org/documents/o...
Patients with uncorrected or undercorrected myopia are less likely to experience difficulty with near tasks... Due to lens effectivity, patients who wear spectacle
corrections for myopia experience presbyopia later than those with emmetropia or hyperopia. Patients with myopia typically require less powerful bifocal additions than same-age patients who wear spectacle corrections for hyperopia.

You don't eveb need to deep-dive into the AOA to find this out, either; even Wikipedia says "Many people with myopia (near-sightedness) can read comfortably without eyeglasses or contact lenses even after age 40. However, their myopia does not disappear and the long-distance visual challenges remain. Myopes considering refractive surgery are advised that surgically correcting their nearsightedness may be a disadvantage after age 40, when the eyes become presbyopic and lose their ability to accommodate or change focus, because they will then need to use glasses for reading. Myopes with astigmatism find near vision better, though not perfect, without glasses or contact lenses when presbyopia sets in, but the more astigmatism, the poorer their uncorrected near vision". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Thats' not my understanding at all. my understanding is that when you get old your vision doesn't so much "change" as become less "elastic", you loose the ability to easily re-focus.

That much is true, but myopic individuals are naturally focused at nearer range. It's not uncommon for presybobia--or at least significant enough to need reading glasses--to be delayed past age 50 in people with myopia (especially those with little or no astigmatism), or even avoided altogether. Well, that's not entirely correct: if you're wearing your contacts or glasses, you'll need to take them off to see at close range during that interim period.

http://www.aoa.org/documents/o...

"Due to lens effectivity, patients who wear spectacle corrections for myopia experience presbyopia later than those with emmetropia or hyperopia. Patients with myopia typically require less powerful bifocal additions than same-age patients who wear spectacle corrections for hyperopia."

That's what you'll have to do if you have LASIK. If you don't have LASIK, you'll avoid the need for reading glasses or push it back by many years. That's kind of the point.

Yep. My dad's an ophthalmologist, and he doesn't recommend LASIK for anyone over 30 because of this (except in a handful of unusual circumstances). You're trading off future reading vision for distance vision now, and the older you get the closer "now" becomes.

I'll gladly keep my ability to read without holding things at arm's length or putting on reading glasses for as long as possible, though admittedly my distance vision isn't that bad (I wear my contacts if I'm going to a movie or something, but I don't need to wear them for normal daily life) and I was already pushing 30 by the time LASIK really matured (about 10 years ago)

If you're, say, 26 now (so you'll get a good 14-20 years of fully corrected vision) and have terrible distance vision, LASIK may make a lot more sense.

No, generally emacs users are happy with systems that have both emacs and vi, and emacs won't prevent vi (and all the tools depending on ex/ed) from working.

Except when distributions screw up their dependencies, which they almost all did for about the first 10 years.

Emacs' crappy legacy ctags was part of the emacs package rather than a separate ctags package (despite the fact that emacs itself prefers etags). Hence it was impossible to install emacs and have modern functional code navigation in vi (vim/elvis/nvi) without overriding the rpm/dpkg dependencies or some other hack.

(This is not emacs' fault, it's the distributors who screwed it up for years).

Gravity was modelled and absolutely key in Starflight--if you tried to land on planets that were too high-grav, your lander would crash and you'd die. So scanning for gravity was among the more important aspects of a landing mission.

Braben boasts that his games predicted extra-solar planets ('These were pretty close to those that have been since discovered, demonstrating that there is some validity in our algorithms'), and that the game's use of current planet-formation theories has shown the sheer number of different systems that can exist according to the rules, everything from nebulous gas giants to theoretically habitable worlds.

Starflight did this in 1986.

This is not a free speech issue. You are allowed to say and write "redskin" anywhere you wish. You just can't trademark it.

Yes, you can. This decision explicitly doesn't revoke the team's right to use the trademark "Redskins". It removes it from the USPTO primary registry, but it doesn't revoke the trademark (in other words, what was an (R) is now a (TM)).

They can't. The plaintiffs were specifically chosen as people who had recently turned 18 and were still eligible to challenge.

They had a trademark on their brand. The feds decide they don't like the mark so they take it away. The owners end up being harmed economically all because the government didn't like the descriptive nature of the brand. They've effectively stifled the free speech of the owner by denying them the use of the mark.

Please read the decision. They have done no such thing, and haven't cancelled the trademark. They've removed it from the primary registry. The team still has full protected (TM) rights, and third parties won't be allowed to make knockoff jersey with the name on it or anything like that. It's just not a registered (R) trademark anymore.

From the decision:
This decision concerns only the statutory right to registration under Section 2(a). We lack statutory authority to issue rulings concerning the right to use trademarks. See, e.g., In re Franklin Press, Inc., 597 F.2d 270, 201 USPQ 662, 664 (CCPA 1979).

The trademark exists to protect their business interest in the brand name. The feds aren't canceling the mark because other business entities want to use it, they're canceling the mark because the feds don't like it.

This is wrong. The feds aren't canceling the trademark, period. They are canceling its presence on the USPTO primary registry (where it's not allowed to be under the Lanham act), but it'll still be a (TM) trademark with court protection (just not an (R) registered trademark).

From the decision itself:

This decision concerns only the statutory right to registration under Section 2(a). We lack statutory authority to issue rulings concerning the right to use trademarks. See, e.g., In re Franklin Press, Inc., 597 F.2d 270, 201 USPQ 662, 664 (CCPA 1979).

The government is not restricting speech at all. The summary is hopelessly dumb: the decision doesn't strip the team of their trademarks, it simply removes them from the USPTO registry as required by the Lanham act. They'll still be protected (TM) trademarks that nobody except the owner is allowed to use, they just aren't (R) registered (which has implications on venue and damages).

From the decision itself:

This decision concerns only the statutory right to registration under Section 2(a). We lack statutory authority to issue rulings concerning the right to use trademarks. See, e.g., In re Franklin Press, Inc., 597 F.2d 270, 201 USPQ 662, 664 (CCPA 1979).

If you have a CPU-intensive thing, you can use shared memory and binary structs to share it, no need to turn everything into a string.