I remember once, back in the late '80s, doing some contract programming for an insurance company, as part of a team putting together a package for doctors to use to report claims. DOS was still king and the best CPU was a 486 so memory was limited. As we couldn't expect our customers to have huge amounts of RAM by those standards, or have their machines well optimized, there was a specific minimum amount of available RAM expected. In fact, we had one test machine with exactly that much memory and if the program you wrote wouldn't work on it, you had to find ways to make it fit, including overlays. I wonder how many of today's "software engineers" could manage to work with that kind of constraint. And, the language we used was C; not C++, although it was available, but good old K&R C.

If you think you deserve more pay, then ask for a raise. If you don't get one, but you still think you deserve more anyway, then go apply for another job, either within the same company or with another company.

My dad worked mostly in supermarkets, both on the floor and in management and he told me once that when somebody asks for a raise it's because they need/want more money and if you turn them down, they're still going to need/want that extra cash, so if you turn somebody down for a raise, start looking for their replacement because they're going to be looking for a new job.

Billionaires should not be in the equation of who is elected and what laws are passed in a Representative Democracy.

And how do you propose to prevent them from having any influence while still maintaining a Representative Democracy? No matter how you dance around it, everybody is supposed to be represented, one way or another and if you don't let the billionaires have their say, it isn't representative, is it?

What do you consider to be weird ingredients? I ask because there are many herbs, spices, condiments and so on that are kitchen staples in one part of the world, exotic rarities in another. As a quick example, Grains of Paradise are a standard in my kitchen, but unless you live in Africa, you've probably never encountered them. And, I remember once reading an article where the writer was complaining that he'd had to hunt down peppercorns to make a marinade.

When Heroes of Might and Magic II first came out it was sold in a box with a paper manual. I recently bought a new copy from GOG; the download included the complete manual as a .pdf.

Back when I was in college, in the mid to late '60s, I took a course on using a comptometer, just our of curiosity although I never needed to use one in Real Life. They were neat machines and could do a lot more than you'd expect. There was a way to put two sets of numbers onto the array in separate columns and have the machine do all of the sums, products and cross products for you that you'd need later for various statistical tests. And, you could even do square roots by using the odd integer summation algorithm, although I long ago forgot how to do it.

Code and graphics aren't the only things that people create on computers. There's word processing, spread sheets and various kinds of financial programs to be considered as well, none of which are practical to be used on a phone's tiny screen.

That said, i have had pretty good luck getting them to generate Python code. Never working right away, but you eventually get to that point iterating.

And how long does it take, start to finish, compared with how long it would take for you to do it from scratch?

When did Windows get virtual desktop support? Back when I migrated to Linux, about 20 years ago, I learned to use and love them. I showed friends using Windows what they were, using my laptop, but none of them were the slightest bit interested in them except as eye candy. I was once told, in fact, that Windows users "couldn't see the point" in having them. If it's taken this long for them to start to catch on, it's a clear indication of why Windows is concentrating on meaningless, useless changes: their target audience is mostly made up of people who can't adapt to change and wouldn't want to if they could.

Given a big enough body of water, it will float.

Yes, and so would Saturn. Of course, in Saturn's case you'd have to ignore the fact that it's a gas giant although it does have a small rocky core surrounded by a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen.

Not always. Type I can be triggered by a serious childhood illness. As an example, I had a good friend who contracted rheumatic fever when he was three, and spent the best part of a year in bed. His parents ended up moving from the north east to southern California because he was too frail for the winter climate. It wasn't long before he was diagnosed with diabetes.

And, there's also LADA, which is just like Type I except it manifests in adults. That's what I have, and the root cause for it was exposure to Agent Orange, back in '72.

"...although the United States Navy might win a war without coffee, it hopes never to be forced to make the experiment." -- Samuel Eliot Morrison

Or, to keep me warm on those long winter nights, espresso with a shot of bourbon should do the trick.

I see. My father had 1% vision in his left eye, but he was drafted for limited service. Of course, that was during WW II.

So am I. In my case, my hearing loss and tinnitus was caused by exposure to too much "outbound" back in '72 when I was in the Navy. One morning, I woke up and learned that I'd slept through a 40 round shore bombardment. What's your story?