Yes, there is so much of it and modern techniques and languages are so poorly suited to the sorts of thing COBOL is good at, it's going to be a very long time before it goes away completely.

      I used to know something about it 45+ years ago, but I doubt I could do anything useful now.

FORTRAN really works well and lots of new code it still written in it. It really *is* the language of technical computing and very good at it.

COBOL, on the other hand, exists solely due to maintaining legacy code, nearly no one is starting new projects or writing new code in COBOL.

Of course. Human beings and many other animals will probably always deal with novel situations far better than any algorithm.

We value everyone's opinion and point of view, as long as it is right.

a government made up of so-called technocrats who hate nothing more than democracy (i.e. debate, consultation, compromise and so on are anathema).

      What is so alarming is that there are a surprisingly large proportion of Americans who think the same way, and see it as some ideal solution - utterly incompatible with foundational principles.

Stealing substantial amounts of money is a crime. It's still a crime if you tack on "with a computer" on the end of it.

But it's also entirely impractical, not to mention dangerous. It will always be bog slow. But the fatal flaw is that the ground handling will always be a disaster waiting to happen, it is inherent to the concept.

This is not new information, it has been clear for years, incliding the IPCC, that the entire "movement" is an economic revolution, not about the science.

It's a lot easier than accomplishing something themselves.

My iPhone is 7ish years old, I just got an update last night and have no plans to switch it.

It's not a bad solution for this particular case, and the fact that it is in no way a new idea doesn't change the utility of it very much.

        It turns out the range of applications for which you need this sort of capability is very limited. The Cheyenne was fast - but conventional helicopters were fast enough for an attack helicopter (like the Huey Cobra). It was too slow for most airplane purposes. So there is a very small niche where this sort of slightly-faster-than-normal helicopter makes sense. In fact I doubt this application (able to hover and land on a hospital roof, and get to the hospital a little faster) is actually worth the effort to develop something microscopically better than a nice cheap regular helicopter.

But it seems somewhat familiar. From almost 60 year ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      With almost identical performance specifications. This idea of what is called a "compound helicopter" which combines mostly-helicopter design with wings and forward propulsion of a conventional airplane . Helicopters tend to be limited in speed because with forward speed, one blade it swinging forward and getting the forward speed + the speed of the rotor on one side, and forward speed - speed of the rotor on the other. This means that it gets way more lift on the forward0travelling side and way less on the trailing side. This would roll it to one side, and requires the blade pitch angle to be driven up and down as the blade rotates.

          Putting on a small wing and conventional propellor (or two) allows some roll control and some lift and unloads the demands on the rotor to something practical. 220 knots (about 250 mph) is going to be about the limit.

        Beyond that, the entire idea becomes impractical and other deigns like tiltrotors (V-22 Osprey) and dual mode/vectord thrust jets (Harrier, F-35B) are required.

Nobody cares about the GDPR, and what would you do about it at this point, anyway.

If you or anyone else posted pictures to "the cloud" and thought that was ever going to be deleted, you are at least as culpable as Apple.

That's about right.

      But my take-away was a bit different - I was shocked to find that there is a "dinosaurs weren't real and paleontologists invented them in 1850" conspiracy theory with at least hundreds if not more followers. That's in there with the moon landing and flat earthers as far as implausibility goes.

You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it means.