It's not exactly new. For years until 2008, the 76th Flying Tiger Squadron in the U.S. was known as the Space Force. It managed all rockets, satellites and more for the U.S. Air Force and was the only Flying Tiger Squadron with no planes.

From 1989-1997 I was with a software company called OSoft. We thought of it as Microsoft without the MICR, or Magnetic Ink Character Reader.

I know a woman who lived with a very restrictive HOA, but they couldn't keep her from building an airplane in her garage. With the wings off, it fit perfectly.

Yes it's just a slime mold, whose unusual properties have been known but not really understood for years. What's new is just having one on display in a zoo.

Andy Grove at Intel was worried about the rumored Motorola 68000 so when the 8086 team told him they needed six weeks more to implement memory management, he wouldn't give it to them. You can blame him, and not Bill Gates, for most of the Windows blue screens of the 1990s when software designed to run without memory management were put on later chips that had it.

I remember those studies, and as a result have thought for many years that aerodynamic cars are stupid for everyday driving in hot climates.

There are people who don't like the idea of Alexa and those who do. For the first category, the "Don't own one" response is natural. For the second category, your response is natural. As for me, I have a natural bias because I have a voice problem. Not a bad one, but people often have to ask me to repeat something. Alexa would be somewhere between useless and extremely aggravating for me. One of my sons and his wife and kids love Alexa, and the other son and his wife hate it, so I don't know whether my granddaughter would like it or not.

When software is tested the testing should include the ease of a full uninstall, plus some regression testing to be sure the uninstall didn't have side effects. I stopped buying Logitech products about 15 years ago when one uninstall had side effects that took me 8 hours to fix.

But the problem most likely exists in all the newer languages, yet I have never heard of programmers being aware of it or optimizing for it.

In 1973 or 1974 I was the systems programming manager at the National Academy of Sciences after our IBM mainframe had been upgraded to the first version of the OS supporting virtual storage. And many programs, mostly Fortran programs, were running much slower than they used to. The problem was two-dimensional arrays and how they were initialized and searched. If you're looping through the wrong subscript in a big array, you cause a page fault every time you increment it. Flash storage makes that a much smaller problem than it is with disk drives, but I'm sure most programmers today have no idea that this problem exists or how to handle it.

When I turned 16 in 1962 I spent some of the first money from my first job on a shortwave radio and discovered Radio Moscow. Most of what they broadcast was pure propaganda, but it did teach me that in some areas, other points of view were valid. The U.S. government did nothing to stop it in 1962, and now it wants to spend $160 million over two years. I could see spending money to make it harder to find ISIS sites, but Russian fake news is in a different category. Maybe it really does pose more of a danger than ISIS sites, but it's a very different kind of danger. The only thing clear is that propaganda can't be stopped. It's just a matter of degree.

The first time I re-used an API was in 1968, to implement job accounting on an IBM 360/40 running IBM DOS. Their is a huge amount of prior art to re-using an API. To read accounting info added to Job cards, I had to intercept the job card and process it myself before then handing it off to the next step of processing.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of IBM's mainframe APIs were public and cloned regularly. One of the first reasons was to perform Job Accounting, i.e., charge for the run of batch programs based on some combination of userid, account number, CPU time and clock time used, etc. For instance, if a Job card was processed by an API in module jobctla.exe, we would rename that IBM module to jobctlx.exe, and write our own jobctla.exe. In our module, we would simply pass on the the API calls we didn't want to process in any way and for those we did want to process, we would do our own processing and then hand the call off to the renamed module. Rewriting APIs was an easy way to do pre-processing of commands.

Back in the early 1970s, as an IBM mainframe systems programmer, I copied APIs to add functionality. E.g., the program that read JOB cards was JOBCTLA. If I wanted to extract accounting info from the job card, I would rename the IBM module to JOBCTXA and replace the original with my own version. It would do what I wanted, and then call the IBM version.

My wife and I have been watching the "Great Courses" course on "Cosmology" all summer and think it is a wonderful overview of the subject. We've watched 26 of 36 lessons and will definitely be finishing it. We have already decided that the next course will be "Dark Matter".