Again, you were either eleven or you were living under a rock if you hadn't heard of the Transformers. Cuz if you had heard of it, you'd have known it was for kids and adolescents, and the female actress was there to keep the dads interested.

And that's exactly why we need to build more power infrastructure, particularly nuclear, and hand it all over to AI companies for free.

I'm not following this FP branch too well, but bash.org is gone so I can't check (or read the jokes).

My favorite from that source was just recovered by the AI. I find it depressing to get it that way, but it's still funny after all the years.

But these days they've perfected the art of bribing the cheapest politicians to rig the rules in their favor for more profits. In conclusion, we can now solve the energy crisis by attaching magnets to Adam Smith's corpse and generating electricity as he spins in his grave.

Now you've gone an put a fork in it. I feel like I have an excuse to try to clarify the dimensional thing a bit.

Mathematicians among us may fear the curse of dimensionality, but that's the way the world works. LOTS of dimensions. But we humans are not good at dealing with more than a few a a time, so we always try to prioritize one or a few of them. It's not that the other dimensions don't matter, but we ignore them and that often causes problems. Probably extinction if the Fermi Paradox isn't some kind of mistake or diversion from reality... The hilarious economists think time = money (for some conversion rate), but time >> money is more relevant. Profit uber alles leads to bad places. (Current priority book is Careless People: A story of where I used to work: Power. Greed. Madness by Sarah Winn-Williams on the evil that is Facebook. Only a few pages in, but quite funny so far.)

And it doesn't help that most of the abundant dimensions in the real world are not commensurable. It's not a matter of finding weights to make them comparable or convertible, but that the units are not related and that there are so many things we don't even know how to measure at all. How much love is too much? (That's a joke, but Ma Nature has a sick sense of humor. I bet you don't want to have four kids just so the two with less lucky rolls of the genetic dice can die before reproducing...)

I think the Subject should reflect the comment. If the topic of the discussion or the focus has changed, then the Subject can help indicate where and why.

The best Subjects help readers understand the main point the author wants to focus on, but I also think it's reasonable to set up a joke with a Subject. I think the vacuous Subjects basically encourage people like you to devalue the entire idea of using Subjects in constructive ways to help readers. Call it a kind of lazy writing, though I think it's often a symptom of a lust for FP. However I think it's actually best to start with a Subject that will guide my writing and then look at it again after I'm done to see if I've lived up to the Subject. If I do have to change the Subject at the end, then I should think why.

I think the worst use of Subjects is as a kind of marker to "claim" ownership of a thread. Vacuous Subjects seem to work especially well for some identities and non-identities.

Then again, it depends on why you're writing. One of my reasons is to try to write better, and the results to date do not make me feel happy. However in terms of clarifying my own thinking about a topic I sometimes feel like I make a bit of progress as I struggle to get my thoughts in some semblance of proper order.

Gosh, I hate to feel like I'm put in the position of trying to defend a corporate cancer, even if the fine people of Microsoft have tried a little to mend a few of their evil ways, but I cannot pass by the low hanging fruit. Of COURSE they did it. You know they did it, and some more besides. (With apologies to Flip...) But they had to do it or they would have been crushed or acquired or worse by some bigger and meaner, dare I say more evil, corporate cancer that did a better job of retaining its earnings by using tax dodges.

I think there may be a root of the problem: When any dimension becomes too dominant, then the system tends to collapse along that dimension. Profit uber alles destroys everything in its path.

Solutions? A progressive tax on monopoly profits? Naw, that trick will never work. (With apologies to Rocky...)

Thanks for tracking that down. To me that's the real news here. Reactor vessels are not the only application for this technology.

It's a dessert topping and a floor wax. This was an unusual feature of UNIX, but since then it's become the norm, albeit with everyone else inheriting it from there. You can write MS-DOS scripts with complex independent logic, you just don't want to.

I don't know that I've learned it "properly" to this day, but I can thank The UNIX Programming Environment for making me basically capable. (I believe that my paper copy is a later edition than this...)

Silicon Carbide is difficult to work with due to the high temperatures required, so if they have a 3d printing process that is effective at producing the kind of quality needed for a reactor vessel, that's what's really interesting here. Or... whose tech are they using?

I started using a standing desk soon after I quit teaching, and I guess there's a connection. But I also have some level of ADHD traits, and I find it easier to work on a computer if I can move around. I guess the commenters that don't understand standing desks have never used one extensively; the idea is not to stand in attention for 8 hours straight, but to allow your body some natural movement.

It also feels nice to sit down for a break, or for things like reading. I don't like the idea of moving the desk down to a sitting position, I'll much rather move myself somewhere else (undocking the laptop if necessary).

I'll answer your stupid rhetorical question with a stupid rhetorical question of my own:

Why should Microsoft break the license when they can just write whatever code they want?

Because all the code we write is copyrighted by default. It is an important aspect of our craft. If you do not consider yourself a craftsman, as a programmer then you are just a code monkey.

They used a lot of BSD, but that was noticed. The entire Windows 2000 source code was leaked, so it wasn't hard to check if open source was used (just time consuming).

Nowadays Microsoft contributes to open source because they want people to use Azure Cloud.

Dang it, "availability" is an overloaded term.