Your entire elaborate argument is based on a false premise.

As I said, the road damage is exponential with the weight. It is proportional to the axle weight to the fourth power.

Fuel economy is roughly linear with weight, or even less than linear (big rigs get much better MPG per ton than smaller vehicles). Therefore, fuel taxes don't begin to recover the extra costs of heavier vehicles.

Who has made the stupidest argument you've ever heard now? You might look in the mirror.

This is true and good, so long as you're interested in making software that can be done entirely with existing technologies. As soon as you hit the brick wall of "but there isn't anything in the standard library that does this," you need the old graybeards who spent their entire careers making the standard libraries you rely on.

Speaking as one of them, the pay and hours are both good and it keeps me on the cutting edge of some fascinating technologies.

The common idea is that we over-40s who've been doing this professionally for 25+ years can't adapt to modern software dev practices. Quite the opposite, really. Mostly we're kept so busy that we don't have the time.

None of this is meant to disrespect what the younger generation does with (as you say) "connect the dots library calls". That code needs to be written, and it's best if it's written by smart people who care about their work. :)

If you live outside of Kentucky you might only know them for their derby. What many people don't know is that Kentucky also makes some of the finest jelly around, and that many stores outside the state carry it. So if you've never had the experience, you should pop 'round to your local grocer and ask about Kentucky jelly today!

Your hypotheses that road damage is caused solely by the pressure on the top few millimeters of the road is highly questionable. The Prius is not going to be pounding down through the structure of the concrete nearly as much as your super-duty pickup hauling a huge boat.

I do agree that big rigs should be paying drastically more in fees than they do. However, industry lobbyists will always trump common sense.

Since road damage is exponentially proportional to vehicle weight, heavier trucks *should* be paying more in fees.

What kind of talk is that? We need to come up with some decent excuses for why Nvidia can't access the last 500M of RAM! I'm going to suggest that it's global warming! The video card was designed for a room temperature of less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit but ever since global warming, room temperatures have been warmer than that!

If they think the threat is designed to secure passenger/crew compliance for another 9/11 style attack, yeah, I think they would shoot down a civilian aircraft if it didn't respond to their orders. Of course, passengers and crew these days expect any such threat to result in another 9/11 style attack and have proven repeatedly that they will beat the shit out of and quite possibly kill anyone trying to pull shit on their airplane. So the fighter jet is still just multi-million-dollar dick waving. It's probably more to let terrorist organizations know that we will shoot a plane down if we have to, rather than because we expect that we'd actually have to.

Normal in a race.

"Closed course. Professional driver. Do not attempt."

Looks like you need to get a bumper sticker with Calvin pissing on a Honda.

Your car is trying to tell you that you're about to roll it.

You do realize that most cars sold in the last couple of decades have computers that can override your inputs and monkey around with your brakes whenever you're trying to speed up or slow down the vehicle?

I'm sure this happens already, as kids often add absurd fins and wings to production cars, and then drive the modified abominations on public roads. But apparently I've been OK with this for my whole life, so I have no reason to worry about what will essentially be more of the same.

I saw a lot of EISA systems. It was a reasonable performer and physically robust (not as sensitive as PCI cards to positioning in slots, etc.). I'd say that EISA hardware was generally of very good quality, but high-end enough that most consumers wouldn't run into it despite being a commodity standard, sort of like PCI-X.

The systems I had experience with were running Linux, even then. :-)

I reckon that might go a ways toward explaining why the company's doing so badly.

I'm sorry, sir, I don't have a social media account by that name. The one you're looking at was probably created by the FBI to catch pedophiles.

All the while enabling decades of bike shed arguments about brace formatting and countless bugs due to optional braces (because they are under-constrained).