It's all just for fun.

I've bought a "modern laptop" for $299, for my mother-in-law who didn't use computers until she was about 60.
An "HP Stream 14" or some such. CPU was something Celeron-like, 4GB RAM, Windows in "S mode" (unlocked to run the real thing easily enough)
Took far longer to do anything than the C64 my parents got back in the 1980s.

Are you OK? You don't seem OK.

What does any of that have to do with Beethoven and Wagner?

They are a public company, so you can check their financials.

It's time to learn about the REU!

Considering you can pretty much take any low-end hardware and emulate a C64, or any other 8 bit system, probably the only real challenge is the keyboard. Ironically a suitable mechanical keyboard is by far the most expensive item, with the price ranging from $100-$200.

Allegedly this was a permitted practice; but the speed with which they said that they will be abandoning it once it became public knowledge; and the number of federal IT people ProPublica was able to find who had never heard of it, suggests that either the proposal that was approved was not entirely candid about what the plan was; or the approver was too low or obscure to actually approve.

This certainly wouldn't be the first time that something perfectly on the up and up was abandoned for PR reasons; but MS would probably be loathe to give up the ability to whitewash whoever into sensitive projects by having an $18/hr copy-paste pal in the loop; so they must see the exposure as potentially serious.

It seems the problem was an NP hard problem, and the goal was to build a heuristic that gets as close as possible to a good answer without being perfect.

In other words, in this contest, the goal was literally to write buggy code.

"Penultimate" isn't a synonym for "ultimate"—it means the thing before the ultimate. Likewise we have penumbra for the blurry edge of a shadow (umbra). This results in some truly special words like "antepenult," meaning "the thing before the thing before the final thing," commonly used when discussing where the stress/accent falls in a Greek or Latin word.

"Invaluable" does indeed mean "not able to be valued" when analyzed morphologically, but the standard usage of it is indicating something is beyond value, i.e. infinitely or inestimably valuable. A value of zero is still a value, after all.

"Inflammable" however actually means "able to be inflamed," as in "put in flame" or "set on fire." The confusion comes from assimilation of the Latin preposition "in" (which we have as "in" or "on") instead of the more typical prefix "in-" (which demarcates negation.) You don't have to look very far for other words where "in" doesn't mean "not": indicate, inherit, imply, investigate, indict, involve...

The summary beat you to it. ltr

Here it is as a competitor that hasn't been indicted (yet): https://www.renttherunway.com/

Were they invaluable? Now they are zero.

It's called Stack Ranking and it causes problems when people need to cooperate (like on programming teams), because people won't cooperate, they'll backstab each other. It's entirely counterproductive.

It works ok on sales teams when salespeople operate independently of each other. (ie, the more they work together, the less it works).

LOL no doubt that will hold up in court. The law doesn't say it has to be defined with the authority of the copyright owner.

The part about authority means that even if you manage to break the copy protection (which you have by switching your user agent), if you do that without authorization, then you've broken the law.

Again, this is one of the problems with the DMCA.