Best to talk to a lawyer for specifics, but like non-compete agreements, NDAs often include things that can’t legally be enforced. The people wanting you to sign the NDA just hope you don’t know better and you’ll shut up.

If you know better, you can take their money and then disclose the facts anyway.

Version 2 came with Windows 7. Version 5 comes with Windows 10 (and I think 11). V7 is the latest but being cross-platform doesn’t come with some of the Windows-specific modules built into v5.

I know I’m a heretic but I’m a huge powershell fan. Once you work with an object-oriented shell you’ll wonder why you’ve dealt with parsing text for so long. Works great on Linux, MacOS and Windows, it’s open source, reads and writes csv, json and xml natively, native web and rest service support, built-in support for remote computing and parallel processing and extensive libraries for just about anything you can think of. It takes a little getting used to but it’s worth it.

I do. Currently I use it mostly for personal stuff as part of my time spent on production support. Importing data from queries, exporting spreadsheets, reading complex json data and extracting needed info, etc. In the past when I was on DevOps used it with Jenkins and various automation processes, and I’ve used it as a developer to create test environments and test data.

As a long-time bash, awk and sed scripter who knows he’ll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this my recommendation: learn PowerShell

It’s open-source and completely cross-platform - I use it on Macs, Linux and Windows machines - and you don’t know what you’re missing until you try a fully objected-oriented scripting language and shell. No more parsing text, built-in support for scalars, arrays, hash maps/associative arrays, and more complex types like version numbers, IP addresses, synchronized dictionaries and basically anything available in .Net. Read and write csv, json and xml natively and simply. Built-in support for regular expressions throughout, web service calls, remote script execution, and parallel and asynchronous jobs and lots and lots of libraries for all kinds of things.

Seriously, I know its popular and often-deserved to hate on Microsoft but PowerShell is a kick-ass, cross-platform, open-source, modern shell done right, even if it does have a dumb name imo. Once you start learning it you won’t want to go back to any other.

I believe you’re misstating one thing if I remember the law last time I read it: It is a felony to knowingly sell a firearm to prohibited persons.

If you aren’t bound to the FFL requirements you are not obligated to ask if the person is in anyway prohibited from buying a firearm, and what you don’t know or ask keeps you free from jeopardy.

Oil and gas collapsed because of reduced demand from the pandemic and Putin refusing to cut production so he could tank US oil. Oil isnt likely to collapse again anytime soon.

That’s all good info and explains some of the problems that could be resolved for us programmers if we were on UTC, but for the most part these are programmer problems and the computer handles it for everyone else. Additionally, it makes a few issues clear that won’t be resolved with a UTC switch.

First, as mentioned countries all over the world decide for themselves what timezone they’re going to follow. Even if countries were to switch to UTC, we know they all won’t do it nor at the same time, so programmers will have to deal with that added complexity too having some on UTC, some off, some switching on this date or that… if the movement got serious we’d have another Y2K frenzy, but not one that ended on a specific date… it’d linger for years as various countries came on-board. Additionally, we’d still have to deal with all the historical calendar, timezone and DST switches he mentioned. Those wouldn’t go away… in fact we’d be introducing a bunch of new ones.

Fact is timezones are understandable and work pretty good for normal people and their day-to-day tasks. Normal people aren’t going to want to understand UTC and then have to translate their normal day times to and from others around the world. No matter where you are I understand what you mean when you say your morning started at 6am or you eat at noon or you go to bed at 11pm or 23:00 for that matter. With UTC I don’t know what 23:00 means in Australia, Germany or India relative to your day… not only programmers but even normal people would have to know how to translate that to a time they can relate too, so you’d have to know timezones anyway. So while I’d know 23:00 was exactly the same point in time for each of us, I wouldn’t know how it relates to your day the way it relates to mine… is it morning, night, mid-day? It would actually make today’s programmers problems - which isn’t too common for most of us - a problem for everyone.

Why switch? It’s not too complicated a concept for the average person to understand and deal with. In fact, it’s intuitive. Sure in software the logic has a few nuances that are a bit complex when needing to deal with local time and timezones, but that’s why we make the computers do the tricky work.

My understanding is DST did still save appreciable energy until we replaced incandescent lights with fluorescent and leds. Longer daylight in the evening when people are awake and less in the early morning when people are asleep means lights aren’t being used as much. The average light bulb used to consume 60 watts or more and also let off significant undesirable heat, so with a house full of lights DST really did cut back energy usage. Now though with led lights low consumption and virtually no heat, it’s not nearly as significant.

You lost the ability to enjoy it forever, and that’s what the language at time of sale said you’d have.

A war can also solve another problem China has: too many men and too few women. War deaths will not only reduce the man to female ratio, but as in past Chinese wars soldiers will bring home war “brides”.

Clearly you’ve not had to write and maintain much XML.

Good for you. Do you want a cookie or something?

I don’t know about that guy but you need a chill-pill dude.

Had no trouble here on mobile.

Not sure why you felt the need to reply

You said fuck you to those who refuse to stow under the front seat. I’m telling you why. It’s the only way I can stretch my legs out a bit, having my feet under the seat in front of me. My backpack goes in the overhead bin and obviously doesn’t take nearly as much room as a full-size carry-on. Might get 2 or 3 backpacks in the same space. Some people think because my backpack could go under the seat in front of me I should be obligated to put it there. Some demand a stewardess help them find the backpack owners and get them moved so they can put their suitcase overhead. No, screw that… check your suitcase. I checked mine, you can check yours. I’m not making myself more cramped because you wanted to save $40.

Regarding your stow under the seat comment… I’m a tall dude. I’m cramped enough as is so I’m not putting crap under the seat in front of me as it’s the only place I can stretch out. I also check my suitcase virtually everytime.

I do however bring on a carry-on relatively small backpack with my laptop. I put it in the overhead bin… not under the seat. I don’t feel guilty at all. All the other people bringing the biggest ass suitcase possible, along with a backpack and maybe a purse too… they’re the ones hogging space, not me with my one backpack in overhead. Seats are crammed enough. You wanna be angry, be mad at the airlines making seats so small and being bag charge crazy.

That’s why I love my Garmin. 4 years old and still lasts 5 days.

Couldn’t agree more. It’s a great shell and scripting language. It’s object-oriented nature, native support for virtually every text format (csv, json, xml) and great libraries for others (yaml, excel), awesome regex and web/rest services support… it’s hard to beat and works on virtually every platform.

Too few people in the Linux community will even look at it though since it has MS name on it.

Not enough