What exactly does a publisher do when a book is sold in electronic format? If what they do is still valuable, then someone will pay them for doing that. If not, what's the point of publishers?

Well similar articles appear in US media whenever some kid has early success in science or technology. As evidenced by the fact that this piece of news has even made it to Fox.

I would agree in general that Germany doesn't suffer quite as much from anti-intellectualism as the US, but it's not a black and white scenario, either.

It's possible that he has dual citizenship, but that seems unlikely given that he only arrived in Germany 4 years ago and didn't speak any German at the time. 4 years would be a bit short for him to receive citizenship otherwise.

None of the German newspaper articles I found refer to him as German, so I'm inclined to think it's simply an error in the article.

There are stores selling refurbished business laptops. Those are typically older and have broken batteries, but fully sufficient for the average consumer who doesn't need a battery anyhow.

Essentially there are lots of people who both believe that Windows is the correct operating system and have no idea what they are doing. That's why rating firms run on Excel spreadsheets. Huge Excel spreadsheets nobody can maintain.

Plus there is another thing which is more important than security, it's the social structure. You usually cannot questions others decisions, even if you have actual proof that you are right. That's not acceptable in most companies.

The combination is also common. You have some idiots starting with VBA and having half maintained Excel spreadsheets which only grow, but never shrink. Converting them would be near impossible, so even if you are able to change the consensus, there's nothing people can do about.

Working in a company which is like that, I can tell that this is extremely frustrating.

IMO everyone should be allowed to puplish in the language of their choice, so long as they do it in the privacy of their own home.

Or during an eclipse.

It's a pity you can't afford a computer that uses proportional fonts.

Actually, I suspect that the fraction of the population who would sign up for a job as a test pilot has been pretty constant since the invention of the airplane.

The notion of "the right stuff" is just propagandistic idol-making. Governments love to offer the public a hero.