I didn't say I had a problem with it; I was just stating that it's very commonplace and it has nothing to do with 'renter's mentality' as it happened when purchasing a home (this is the 4th home I've purchased in my lifetime).

A person with a 'management' title has no theoretical limit to the top end of their salary. Everyone else does.

I just bought a house in March. Any listing where the home was already vacated (95% in my case) the listing was AI-augmented with furniture that would not exist when I went to tour the home.

This has nothing to do w/renting; it's everywhere.

Nobody has the wherewithal or the balls to go up against him so he can basically rule by Fiat.

Would you be happier if he ruled by Volvo?

Birds with toothless beaks diverged from that diet to a seeds and insects based one...

Oh, really? I'm sure that the eagles, hawks, owls and other birds of prey would have something to say about that.

I was playing on a 53K USR Courier at 185 ping and that was a bit laggy when compared to the LAN at college (even if it was 4xT1s for 25K students). I really want to know how the hell you were able to do anything useful at 500+ms.

A few months ago I had a poster complain that I'd removed the beginning and end of a sentence of his I quoted and replaced the missing parts with three dots. Apparently he didn't know what an ellipsis is.

The primary goal of political campaigns is to turn out supporters because most elections are decided by who turns out.

Don't you mean that all elections are decided by those who turn out? Unless you're suggesting that there's ballot box stuffing and other fraudulent methods of affecting the outcome of an election going on it's rather hard to see how those who don't turn out and vote can have the slightest effect on the outcome.

Long before I worked, briefly, at JPL, MOPS, the Maneuver Operations Programming System was written for an IBM 360, in assembler. When they moved up to a Univac, it was re-written in whatever version of FORTRAN was current and worked very well. In fact, I'd bet money that that package is still running there because, like the old COBOL programs, It Just Worked. I know this because I had the privilege of working with the late Dan Alderson, the last member of the team that migrated the package still at JPL when I was there.

In the almost three years that we worked together, I only saw him presented with a bug in the package once, and it turned out to be a user error. The user was trying to calculate the perturbations on Voyager I caused by 11 of the Jovian satellites, either to calculate their masses, or at least the maximum possible, causing the program to crash. It didn't take long for Dan to find the problem: the data for the satellites was kept in an array, and being written in FORTRAN, the array was designed for a max of ten objects. He suggested that the user edit a copy of the source to enlarge everything and use that instead of the regular program.

I take it that you've never had to deal with code from back in the Bad Old Days when self-modifying code was the norm. For a classic example, take a look at the story of Mel, the real Programmer, either from Wikipedia or FOLDOC because the explanatory text is different in each.

Yes, COBOL is wordy, but were you ever told why? It's so that the language is self-documenting and the bean counters can follow what's going on well enough to be able to spot any attempts at embezzlement.

...it's a Waldo, not a Robot.

I don't think so. Traditionally the term waldo has referred to equipment that allows you to manipulate objects in a place that the operator can't go to for whatever reason. Here, there's no physical reason that the operators couldn't go to Japan and do the work in person; the barrier is social, not physical. If what you wrote were right, drones would be called waldos, but they're not.

Instead we gave them the electoral college so they could have more voting power than they deserved.>>

Actually, if you look at how the Electoral Collage was set up, and the populations of the original states, you'll see that even with the Three-fifths Compromise neither the North nor the South had enough power to control presidential elections on their own. Generally, the south managed to get either pro-slavery or neutral presidents elected right up until Lincoln took office then seceded because they assumed that Lincoln would abolish slavery although he'd made it plain that he was in favor of helping it die out over time.

It turns out that, in French, many of the verb conjugations sound the same even if they are spelled differently, I feel that my speaking and listening skills could have progressed farther without a hyper focus on that baggage.

I feel your pain. I took Latin in high school and ran into five declensions for verbs and multiple patterns for nouns, consisting of different suffixes for different cases. Not only that, Latin uses a construction called the ablative absolute that packs lots of information into two or three words, but translates into English as the nominative absolute that's a lot longer. As an example, in the classic Latin tale of the Golden Fleece, the author packs, "The provisions having been stored, the Argo set out..." into two words. I only remember seeing the English form used once in published literature.

AI summaries even go at the top of search results when they're redundant. What good that a summary when all you're looking for is someplace local to buy something, or a picture to add to an essay or report?