With iOS, you are a criminal for modifying your own property.

Yes, all those people going to prison over it is a tragedy pure and simple.

First known indication of knowledge of the relation for integer-sided triangles

Integers using what units? The prof never says. He just says the lengths. He might as well say "Today I walked a nice even 6."

Dealership may be mandatory in USA but, AFAIK that's not the case in Europe but, still, automakers go with the dealership model here also.

Don't go muddying the issue with pesky facts. Stick to the rants, please.

Thanks for the clarification. Before that, reading that sentence was the most unsatisfactory part of reading that sentence.

No doubt one or two of these can still be heard somewhere, but off the top of my head and in no particular order, these are sounds I can remember from my youth:

1. The rotary dialing of a telephone
2. The bell on a cash register
3. "old style" police sirens
4. A baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle
5. The clunk-clunk-clunk of a mechanical TV tuner
6. Tubes warming up
7. The unmistakable clinking of glass milk bottles being delivered
8. The "time at the tone" recording

Why bother even using HTML? Can't they just fax me a copy of the content?

Back in the mid 90's I was working for a small company that had a marketing director who, when he saw something on the "world wide web" that he thought would be useful to us, would actually print it out and fax it to us.
And then later he hired someone to make up some images for the web site. He called me up and asked what was the best way to get it to me? Which courier service? I said "Can't you email them?" "Oh no," he said. "I want to make sure you get them."

Anyway, I'm getting sick of hearing the word "algorithms" used as it seems to be in the movies a lot lately.

I once came up with an algorithm that wasn't very good, so I just commanded the computer to "Enhance!", and it got much better.

This isn't amateur hour, guys - there's real money at stake here.

People make mistakes every day of their lives. We always have, we always will. It's how we learn what not to do. It's just that almost all mistakes are harmless... except on the internet. There it's like living in a minefield. Make a bad step and boom. It's not a question of amateur hour, it's a question of being human.

"Nobody will ever need more than 2 digits for a year, so the crazies suggesting years be represented by 4 digits are just that - crazy."

Even the people who knew it would be an issue still used two digits. Resources were extremely constrained. It wasn't worth spending all of that for a problem that would happen decades later. I used to write complete programs that fit in 8K.

I see what you did there.

FWIW, Apple's stock is worth more than the entire Russian stock market combined.

Computer programming, even setting aside the practical value, is a much better brain trainer than chess. I was a chess master in my youth and made my living programming. The two were not even in the same ballpark as far as learning to think.

This is because chess is already a 100% solved solution space.

No it isn't. Far far from it.

The tactics (he takes and I take...) computers have down cold. That's how they beat humans. They never miss a trick, and so even the best humans get worn out sweating every crazy possibility. Many many computer games have been won by some one crazy move that makes a seemingly lost position tenable.
The strategy (long-term planning and positioning) is where computers are weaker. Not weak, but weaker.

Once the end game is reached a large database of positions is used. (Humans effectively do this too, in the sense that a particular ending is a known win, and so they can steer for it without having to work it all out ahead of time.)

But at least it's consistent. If you truly believed that people will go to Hell if they don't convert, wouldn't it be your moral obligation to do everything you could to help them?
Sure, the least annoying fanatics are the ones who leave you alone, but they are also, at best, hypocrites.