During WW II, Superman stayed neutral for the most part in the comics and funny papers. His explanation was that this was one problem it was up to mankind to solve for itself, one way or the other. The big exception was in the cartoons, that had him fighting in both main theaters as well as dealing with spies back home. Possibly the best of them, or at least the most dramatic, was Eleventh Hour,with Superman sabotaging Japanese warships and almost causing Lois to be executed.

Back in the day, card images were files consisting of a set of records of 80 characters or less. These could be used as input to a program that had been designed to work on punched cards or created as the output from such a program. The idea was that as long as you restricted yourself this way you didn't have to take the time tore-write working programs instead of expanding your system with new code.

My software development experience spans more than a half century. We have come a long way from the time when I was punching out FORTRAN and assembly language job decks on Hollerith cards.

You and I are probably roughly the same age as that's how I started off too, in my case an IBM 1620 with 20,000 digits of core memory. It could be expanded to twice or three times the memory, but was otherwise thoroughly obsolete. Just out of curiosity, do you still enough about card images to explain why they were once important, without looking the term up.

In the 1960s and 1970s a "real" programmer might have said that anyone using a compiler like FORTRAN or COBOL instead of writing assembly code wasn't doing "real" programming. In the 1990s, a "real" programmer might have said that anyone using an IDE with syntax highlighting and code completion instead of vi and make was taking a shortcut. Today, you're suggesting that using an AI assistant to handle boilerplate code, debug a tricky API call, or translate a Python algorithm into Rust is somehow not worthy.

So what you're saying is that back in the '50s, '60s and '70s a Real Programmer was somebody like Mel, who wrote code that was so compressed, so dependent on the computer's oddities that it could take years for another skilled programmer to figure out how it worked. And here I thought that the late Dan Alderson was a Real Programmer because he knew how to do pointer arithmetic and direct memory manipulation in FORTRAN77.

Now, if they displayed the alert on the signs over the interstate, they would better target people who might actually see it.

They do here in Colorado; I don't know about other states, but if they don't, they should. That doesn't mean that the Amber Alerts shouldn't go out to phones, because not everybody's going to be using the interstates at any given time, but it does help alert drivers who have their phones muted to avoid distractions.

I remember, once, getting alerts for a brush fire over 100 miles away, and it wasn't redundant. I don't remember the fire's name, but it was generating lots of smoke, the winds were very strong and heading in our direction. The alert wasn't about the fire so much as warning everybody in the wind's path to stay indoors as much as possible and to wear masks if they had to go outside. The air quality was so bad that you couldn't draw a full breath without coughing, which made it hard to sleep. There may not have been anything I could do about it, but I appreciated the warning.

I live in Colorado at an elevation of over 6000 feet. We don't get hurricanes here and I've never received an alert about one. Checking, I see that there's a control panel on my phone for those alerts, and the only type that I couldn't op out of is National Warnings, which seems reasonable. I've not turned any of the others off, and the only alerts I've ever received are Amber Alerts, and never more than one for any incident. If you're receiving multiple redundant alerts, you should find out what agency is responsible for sending them out and complain there.

You do know, I hope, that many species of bat are insectivores and as such are an important, and free source of nocturnal pest control?

Looking into World War Part Two, perhaps the first truly industrialized war...

I'm not so sure. Before The Great War (AKA WW I) most long-haul transportation of goods was either by rail or in wagons hauled by animals, mostly horses or mules. Then, during the war, the Army created a large fleet of trucks and trained large numbers of doughboys to drive and maintain them. This was for two reasons: first, the trucks could get supplies and reinforcements to the front faster than the animals could and second because they tied up far fewer men caring for them. After the war, much of that fleet was sold off as surplus and bought by veterans who'd been driving them over there, and were used either to set themselves up as freelance truckers or to found trucking companies, cutting the time it took to mechanize transport in the USA by several decades.

It seems like a way to do multiplication by doing addition.

That's because that's exactly what it's for, along with doing division via subtraction. And, you can use loglogs (the logarithm of a logarithm) to do exponentiation and find roots. Interestingly, I once mentioned loglogs to two friends, a physics professor and a mathematical astronomer turned programmer and neither of them recognized what I was talking about.

I notice that you confine your reply to a cheap shot about my supposed ignorance and avoid responding to my question about the battle that turned the IJN back for the first time and the one that crushed its main strike force, and taking the initiative away from them for the rest of the war.

The decisive Japanese and German defeats were dispensed by other armies.

Really? Where were all of those allies fighting during the Battle of the Bulge and where was the Royal Navy during the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway?

What do you find so funny about the University of Bologna? It was founded in 1088 CE, and is the oldest continually operating university in the world. And no, I didn't know any of that until I read your post and took a moment to do the trivial bit of research that you should have done before showing the world how ignorant you are and how unwilling to learn. Now get off my lawn and go tell your mother she wants you!

I remember once, back in the late '80s, doing some contract programming for an insurance company, as part of a team putting together a package for doctors to use to report claims. DOS was still king and the best CPU was a 486 so memory was limited. As we couldn't expect our customers to have huge amounts of RAM by those standards, or have their machines well optimized, there was a specific minimum amount of available RAM expected. In fact, we had one test machine with exactly that much memory and if the program you wrote wouldn't work on it, you had to find ways to make it fit, including overlays. I wonder how many of today's "software engineers" could manage to work with that kind of constraint. And, the language we used was C; not C++, although it was available, but good old K&R C.

If you think you deserve more pay, then ask for a raise. If you don't get one, but you still think you deserve more anyway, then go apply for another job, either within the same company or with another company.

My dad worked mostly in supermarkets, both on the floor and in management and he told me once that when somebody asks for a raise it's because they need/want more money and if you turn them down, they're still going to need/want that extra cash, so if you turn somebody down for a raise, start looking for their replacement because they're going to be looking for a new job.