I don't know how much American History is taught in modern high schools now, but back when I was in school, we were expected to know who he was and what he did, although we probably weren't expected to remember it for the rest of our lives. Personally, I remember his name and that he was important in the first half of the 19th Century and that's about it. I wonder how much the average British subject remembers about Disraeli after he's out of school.

Just like a British student thrown into an American school would be thinking, "Who the fuck was Henry Clay?"

Linux is basically rpm/yum and deb/apt flavors.

I take it that you haven't given the .rpm side of Linux a look for a decade or more. That's because yum has been replaced by dnf for at least that long. In fact, yum itself is nothing more than a shell script that calls dnf, and it's only there for backward compatibility.

If you know what a binary search is, you'll understand that it's a very simple algorithm, and the code should be very easy to follow. However, judging only by the existing code, whoever wrote it, or worked on it before wasn't at all skilled. Putting that comment in gave future code monkeys fair warning that there was more in that function than met the uneducated eye.

This reminds me of a time, decades ago, when I was doing a bit of maintenance coding for a small business. One small task I was given required searching a static table for a magic number to plug into a calculation. Just because I could, I wrote it as a binary search instead of the linear search that the other coders who'd worked on this would have used. As I doubted that the next person to see this would understand what I'd done, I included exactly one comment at the beginning of the function: "If you don't understand how this works, don't mess with it." I've sometimes wondered over the years how long it took until some ham-handed code monkey screwed it up to the point it had to be re-written.

Yes, you do indeed keep saying this, over and over in almost the exact same words, and hardly anybody ever responds. Have you ever wondered why? Well, maybe because everybody here is tired of you posting the same ideas over and over and has stopped reading your posts. And, of course, there's the possibility that you're completely wrong and most posters here are tired of pointing this out.

I think, though, that one of the best lines in any of their books was, "Think of it as evolution in action." There are just so many situations in Real Life that it fits.

I'd like to point out that blowing criminals from guns wasn't an English custom, but once they learned about it in India, they embraced it with enthusiasm.

Yes, that Dr. Pournelle. I knew him through LASFS.

A friend of mine, the late Dr. Pournelle, lived in Los Angeles, and had several Humming Bird feeders plus an Oriole feeder at his home. He told me, once, that sometimes a hummer, usually male, would claim ownership of one of the feeders and try to chase all of the other hummers away, with mixed success. Once, one of them tried to claim the Oriole feeder but the orioles, being much bigger, just ignored him.

And raisins. You must never forget how much impact the California Raisins have had on the state's economy.

If you'll do a little research, it's easy to learn that the Liberty ships had an expected service life of five years. You'll also learn that a surprising number of of ships lasted long enough for various European shipping lines to use them to rebuild their fleets.

Granted, beheading is a traditional method of execution in that part of the world, but the North Koreans have a much more spectacular form available that has lots of historical precedents: blowing the responsible people from a gun, preferably in public, with lots of publicity.

Not only that, the British seem to think that if a noun ends with an S, it must be plural. At least, that's the only reason I can see for them thinking that the short form of mathematics is "maths."