I'm 6'7". I do my best not to fly (don't really want to be sexually abused) but when I have to, I am fucking miserable.

Yeah, tell me about it. I'm 6'4" (plus a 1/2" extra in the morning) but I have an especially long torso, so we'd probably be eye to eye sitting down. I don't know about you, but the seat in front of me prevents me from slouching the least bit, when I lean my head back on the head rest, my gaze is vertical. It's pretty close to a 90 degree bend, which I try out just for shits and giggles, while other people find ways to sleep.

Pro tip for tall fliers: the foam cushion usually rips off the aluminum seat frame (Velcro). If your ass can handle sitting on the hard, cold metal you might manage enough of a head rest to get a half hour snooze in the mid-flight red-eye hour of total desperation. I've done this many times.

I got stuck on the apron at Schiphol once while they replaced a starter motor. The middle-aged Germanic woman beside me had tree-trunk thighs, clad in tight black neoprene. Our thighs met in a thermonuclear embrace on my side of the arm rest for our entire stay on the apron, plus the return flight to Montreal.

At this point, the airlines can go fuck themselves. I'd rather not leave the ground.

That's the "stop punching yourself" argument.
It was bullshit when your older brother did it to you and it is bullshit now.

How the hell is this insightful? Other than an insight in ignorance I fail to see it's relevance.

Your Internet license has been revoked.

Don't use a programming language. Use a tool like Matlab or Mathematica instead. These tools are well designed for scientific computing and have sufficient scripting built in to support the programming-language-like functionality you're probably looking for.

You won't be able to call yourself a programmer. But you're not a programmer, you're a scientist.

Yes! You absolutely should learn business!

Not so you can do it yourself: by now you know what work you like to do. Why rob yourself of what makes you happy?

Learn so you can understand the folks you work with for whom the business side is their source of joy. They'll notice. And enough of them will repay the favor to expand your opportunities to do the work *you* enjoy.

now operating mostly beyond its original 40-year licenses

What do 'best before' dates on food really mean?

Some number pencilled into an operating permit granted in 1969 is not the last word on how long these facilities will continue to operate safely.

There was—at the time—not a single reactor of a modern design with a forty year operational record on which to base even the wildest guess. The number "40 years" had more to do with investor ROI than any engineering crystal ball.

I recall one reactor shut down for an expensive refurbish a long time ago because circulation pipes had become unexpectedly brittle in less than a decade of exposure to a constant, low level of neutron flux.

Summary: we didn't know shit.

On day one, it's extremely hard to tell the difference between a Toyota and a Chevy. At year thirty, the stakeholders think they've won the lottery because it was a Toyota after all. At year thirty-five, Toyota develops a frightening latency in response to the graphite rods. At year forty-two you've got this headache sorted—or so you would like to believe. It was operator over-reaction to upgraded SCADA data collection rates. No, it was xenon capture by surface pockets in metals exposed to decades of micro-crystalline annealing. No, it was pockets of non-uniform fission density due to a very minor change in the fuel-pellet binding agent made as older mines ceased production.

All the reactors built in the 1970s were version 0.9. No reactor anywhere had a forty year operational track record with a modern design.

That's a common meme for people that don't know the psychology of suicide. Suicide generally takes a fair bit of strength of character. The problem is not being "a pussy" or "taking a pussy way out" - it's an unfortunate evaluation, often from wrong premises. A common one is that a bunch of psychological or life situation issues are permanent/long term, while they are usually possible to change. Another is overestimating how much the person is a burden to other people in their lives, and wanting to lighten their load.

If they had designed the system to not have a master key, such that each user had their own keypair and each user had sole possession of their specific decryption key then they would have been immune to the insiders - cartels or DoJ.

Indeed, especially since the skills of programming a mechanical engine go many eons farther back with, I believe, the invention of the loom. The result was somewhat different (a woven pattern, rather than a scalar value), but the idea of a set of sequentially executed instructions with loops, counting variables, and exceptions, started a long time before Babbage. Knitting and crocheting is rather quite similar, and embodies similarily pre-existing art, as well.