It's not impossible that the Pentagon could have thought "alright, we want these readings. is there a civilian use for this kind of data and decided to see if a civilian project could be sprung up... Though that's more of a Cold War conceit. These days they would just do it themselves, it's probably an easy and cheap project.
Just as there are commercial earth imagery satellites, I would expect there are commercial RF source detection satellites. There are obvious sales channels to hedge funds, countries, militaries, and commercial transmission operators (searching for causes of interference).
Hedge funds is the fun one: detecting economic activity and growth (independent of official government figures).
Thanks for sharing. I hadn't expected there to be any particularly interesting etymology at all, but there is. (I also hadn't considered that anyone might find the term offensive, but it did motivate the Q&A, so.)
With how expensive payouts to the stable of a dead gladiator could be[0], it seems very likely to me that a lot of the matches were at least coordinated, if not outright planned.
[0] "But if he were injured or killed, the lease would convert to a sale and the gladiator's full cost would have to be paid, a sum that might be some 50 times higher than the lease price." https://www.jstor.org/stable/30038038
Okay but the solution here is to identify and parcel your cases into discrete entities. The article doesn't say "don't accept anything odd", it says "clearly identify what you accept". If you have to accept odd cases, identify them so it's clear what's happening.
So this isn't about purity, it's about being declarative. i.e. make your code say what it accepts, instead of writing board/implicit acceptable inputs that inevitably forget cases and crashes.
If you limit what you accept as inputs then you can stop worrying about downstream error handling and debugging.
Half of developers in North America, and especially those at top tier companies, use Macs. You can't buy that kind of top tech mindshare with marketing. Also now with the M-series CPUs, Macbooks aren't PC Clones anymore, they're back in the game of being an exclusive platform, which will get even more exclusive as they add other specialized chips. Their sales share of the market and as you mention, their profit share of the market keeps increasing, so even on that alone, why would a bean counter decide to drop them?
Don't forget Apple's size... the AirPod business, stood alone, would be a Fortune 500 company. Even if an Apple business is a bit small compared to the iPhone, it's still a humongous business by any other comparator.
I'm not an Apple fanboy (e.g. I use an old Chinese Android phone) but I'm still awed by their business.
> Their sales share of the market and as you mention, their profit share of the market keeps increasing, so even on that alone, why would a bean counter decide to drop them?
Apple at the moment doesn't have any marketshare in rugged, "out in the field" laptop computers. Obviously if any company can brute force an entry into any market it's Apple, but they would need significant investments into third parties that hold potential customers hostage to Windows, and Apple Just Does Not Do That unless the third party in question is a direct supplier of theirs.
What??