You could go further -- much of the 'why' context might be captured outside of the source code completely, say scattered across design documents / commit messages / issue trackers / test suites / powerpoint decks.
Maybe Americans get higher incomes because US companies structurally sell to larger markets than Australian companies, so - at least for those roles with scale / leverage - the role is more productive & the absolute value that the employee can extract is high, even if the proportion of the overall value extracted by the worker is similar to or lower than the proportion extracted by an Australian worker.
Maybe if Americans had stronger unions, perhaps American workers could benefit from both higher incomes - due to the increased scale & opportunities of the US market - & increased protections relative to Australian workers.
Another thing that is quite different between the US & Australia is that in the US, the public is generally a lot more trusting of business over government. US business interests have a long history of influencing US public opinion- there's examples of stuff like business interest groups creating educational materials & getting them into schools, so kids learn early about the wonders of capitalism & free markets. It's unsurprising that you might not find unions so popular in such an environment. A book that details quite a lot of that history is Kerryn Higgs' book Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [1].
One of the reasons that unions in the US are unpopular because they function as the funding arm of one of the political parties. In some states you have to join these unions to get a job at a state agency or at a government funded school. This is obviously incredibly corrupting, where the unions donate huge amounts of money to politicians who then feed back more money to the union members, and it's all paid for by taxpayers.
There's also ridiculous rules that many of them have adopted. My favorite example is that in my state a teacher was awarded the "Teacher of the Year" award, which is a pretty prestigious award, and requires you to be nominated by your students. Before the next school year she was fired because they had to make some cuts and the union had set it up so it was a Last In-First Out arrangement. So the teacher of the year was let go as that was her first or second year teaching. The teachers union prioritized its older members at the cost of that school losing their best teacher.
American unions are very different, in my experience, from what I saw from the European companies I've worked for. Those employee unions seemed solely focused on the people working at the company and did a good job representing their interests and solely their interests. If that's how unions in the US functioned, many people would have a much different opinion of them.
tangent: this unfortunate design choice by the old Sierra adventure games has been discussed a number of times on the Designer Notes podcast, focused on game design [1]. Soren opens each discussion by asking the guest which is the first game they remember.
I think most (all?) Steam games link steam_api.dll (or something like that) which somehow figures out the running Steam process and thus the Steam ID, and then does a HTTP API request to check that you own the title.
Like 15 years ago Steam launched CEG (Custom Executable Generation) - I remember reading a write-up a while ago, but each user had a customer launcher generated on install I think, and I think there was an extra segment put into the .exe file and that was put to use somehow, though I don't know if CEG is still a thing.
The ownership check you are referring to is a local check. There is another check (involving EncryptedAppTickets) which is not local, but far fewer games use that.
CEG is long dead/was broken immediately in a pragmatic, automatable way.
In 2016 Trump got 46.1% of the popular vote vs Hillary Clinton's 48.2%.
Expressed as fractions of the total US population in 2016:
- about 28.5% of the population was not eligible to vote (due to age or other reasons)
- about 31.6% of the population was eligible to vote but did not vote for either candidate
- about 20.4% of the population voted for Hillary Clinton
- about 19.5% of the population voted for Trump
If approx 1 in 5 is 'tiny' then support for the alternative was also 'tiny'.
> To target a space-based laser for the Strategic Defense Iniative (commonly known as the "Star Wars" program)
I'm guessing this application would be selecting an ordering to engage multiple simultaneous targets in minimal-ish time - MIRV warheads or missiles launched in a barrage.
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