During WW II, Superman stayed neutral for the most part in the comics and funny papers. His explanation was that this was one problem it was up to mankind to solve for itself, one way or the other. The big exception was in the cartoons, that had him fighting in both main theaters as well as dealing with spies back home. Possibly the best of them, or at least the most dramatic, was Eleventh Hour,with Superman sabotaging Japanese warships and almost causing Lois to be executed.

Back in the day, card images were files consisting of a set of records of 80 characters or less. These could be used as input to a program that had been designed to work on punched cards or created as the output from such a program. The idea was that as long as you restricted yourself this way you didn't have to take the time tore-write working programs instead of expanding your system with new code.

My software development experience spans more than a half century. We have come a long way from the time when I was punching out FORTRAN and assembly language job decks on Hollerith cards.

You and I are probably roughly the same age as that's how I started off too, in my case an IBM 1620 with 20,000 digits of core memory. It could be expanded to twice or three times the memory, but was otherwise thoroughly obsolete. Just out of curiosity, do you still enough about card images to explain why they were once important, without looking the term up.

T-Rex complained about there not being enough hours in a day to do everything. Wished days were about 1/2 hour longer!!!

In the 1960s and 1970s a "real" programmer might have said that anyone using a compiler like FORTRAN or COBOL instead of writing assembly code wasn't doing "real" programming. In the 1990s, a "real" programmer might have said that anyone using an IDE with syntax highlighting and code completion instead of vi and make was taking a shortcut. Today, you're suggesting that using an AI assistant to handle boilerplate code, debug a tricky API call, or translate a Python algorithm into Rust is somehow not worthy.

So what you're saying is that back in the '50s, '60s and '70s a Real Programmer was somebody like Mel, who wrote code that was so compressed, so dependent on the computer's oddities that it could take years for another skilled programmer to figure out how it worked. And here I thought that the late Dan Alderson was a Real Programmer because he knew how to do pointer arithmetic and direct memory manipulation in FORTRAN77.

Yep, I'd been doing it wrong for years. I was using plastic bags because I thought they were recyclable. My daughter started working for the city and told me they weren't.

Now I use paper bags in the recycle bin in the house.

I expect the fertility rate in the US to rise due to the following:

• * Lack of contraception (I expect SCOTUS to reverse Griswold)
• * Increased child mortality due to lower vaccination rates, and epidemics of "eliminated" childhood diseases
• * Lack of education as more school boards are taken over by religious fundamentalists.

Now, if they displayed the alert on the signs over the interstate, they would better target people who might actually see it.

They do here in Colorado; I don't know about other states, but if they don't, they should. That doesn't mean that the Amber Alerts shouldn't go out to phones, because not everybody's going to be using the interstates at any given time, but it does help alert drivers who have their phones muted to avoid distractions.

I remember, once, getting alerts for a brush fire over 100 miles away, and it wasn't redundant. I don't remember the fire's name, but it was generating lots of smoke, the winds were very strong and heading in our direction. The alert wasn't about the fire so much as warning everybody in the wind's path to stay indoors as much as possible and to wear masks if they had to go outside. The air quality was so bad that you couldn't draw a full breath without coughing, which made it hard to sleep. There may not have been anything I could do about it, but I appreciated the warning.

I live in Colorado at an elevation of over 6000 feet. We don't get hurricanes here and I've never received an alert about one. Checking, I see that there's a control panel on my phone for those alerts, and the only type that I couldn't op out of is National Warnings, which seems reasonable. I've not turned any of the others off, and the only alerts I've ever received are Amber Alerts, and never more than one for any incident. If you're receiving multiple redundant alerts, you should find out what agency is responsible for sending them out and complain there.

Orion is not Starliner.

It wasn't nicknamed the "Senate Launch System" for nothing.

About 10(?) years ago, I was at a Gabriel Iglesias show at PHX (known at the time as Talking Stick) Arena.

He had literally just asked everyone in the arena to turn off their cell phones, when every single phone in the arena went off... Amber Alert. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen.

Instead of "move to higher ground", try "Get the f**k away from the Guadalupe River RIGHT NOW!"

I have the same combination on my luggage!