I think all those are a little true. But I'm mostly guessing. I'm happy to change my mind if anyone knows better.
Either way, these folks are my hero.
Years of experience
It's hard. I love Harry Potter. I love Ender's Game. But their authors hate the people I love. Not personally. They don't know them and hate them anyway. It makes me sad. I want to share those books.
But I guess it's better to share books by people who don't hate my friends. I'll always have Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I've been sharing The Golden Compass with my kids lately.
Harry Potter was good. But I can live without it in my life. I think I will keep sharing Ender's Game though.
Good for them!
We knew spooks were all up in the phone network. They'd show up and ask installers to run them some cables and configure ports in a certain way. I was friends with folks who were friends with the installers.
Tom's got every right to be proud for the British plug. It's super over engineered and a love it.
A while ago I read a book where a town got nuked. Only it was just a rumor spread on Facebook. Town is fine. But tons of people believed it. Set up road blocks and stuff. For years.
edit: I thought, "there is no way people would do that." Oh well.
I used to work for them. It was weird and wonderful and I miss it and I don't. Lots of mission driven folks working hard to keep things going getting very little respect. But a lot of respect. But sometimes none.
Iirc a lot of their budget is spent doing charity stuff. Encouraging contributions for tiny languages. Trying not to cave to Russia or the US or France. Trying to make it less of a boys club. Trying to get local organizations going.
I remember once they sent an email that said "if the French government asks you to delete this page please just delete it. It's not worth going to jail. Someone outside of France will revert the delete."
I wasn't qualified for the work. No one was. But it was honest work.
It's not my favorite but it's fine.
Although it was his first day in charge, Sliney had an over-25-year background in air traffic and management in the FAA.
I'm reasonably sure compilers can shift the if out. I believe it's called "loop invariant code motion". Won't work in call cases, but in the variable case it should.
When someone is having a computer problem I ask them to restart first. Not because I think they don't know to do it, but just in case. Some people don't know. Sometimes people forget. Obvious advice is useful sometimes.