I would bet that the people of the time saw themselves as very civilized for not simply wiping the native population out.
Like, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad just 250 years before the European ships started arriving in the Americas: “Most of the residents were massacred during and after the siege, with civilian casualty figures ranging in the hundreds of thousands.” The end of the Mongol period was when Timur / Timurlane resulting in the deaths of 20 million people. That’s just a century before the Europeans started conquering the new world.
Maybe the Europeans of the 1500s to 1800s thought of themselves as kind and enlightened in that they made treaties with the natives instead of just massacring them. Maybe they thought of themselves as exceptionally kind because they actually assigned land to the natives, instead of simply taking all the land for themselves.
Instead of thinking of the European colonial forces as an especially brutal and rapacious group, maybe it’s better to think of that entire time period as brutal.
Also, as an aside, the natives are always portrayed as being peaceful, gentle people who are victims of the awful Europeans. But, we know that they were fighting amongst themselves before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans found native villages surrounded by palisades. There were already native groups who had been driven off their land by other native groups. They were massacred, but that was more a function of diseases and technology, rather than a difference in character.
Libraries are also written and maintained by humans.
It’s fine to optimize if you can truly justify it, but that’s going to be even harder in libraries that are going to be used on multiple different architectures, etc.
For a long time I’ve been of the opinion that you should only ever optimize for the next sucker colleague who might need to read and edit your code. If you ever optimize for speed, it needs to be done with massive benchmarking / profiling support to ensure that the changes you make are worth it. This is especially true with modern compilers / interpreters that try to use clever techniques to optimize your code either on the fly, or before making the executable.
I think just reading his Wikipedia entry, I caught someone at CNN being kind:
O’Brien left CNN in December 2008. He was rehired by CNN as an aviation analyst in March, 2014.
2008–present: owner Miles O’Brien Productions, LLC in Washington, DC
In February, 2014, O’Brien was injured when a Pelican case filled with television equipment fell on his left forearm, causing acute compartment syndrome and resulting in the amputation of his left arm above the elbow.
So, the month after a gruesome injury he was re-hired by CNN, who probably have a pretty good medical plan, better than what he probably would have had when he was self-employed. Maybe not, maybe it’s just coincidence. But, it’s nicer to believe that someone at CNN thought they should look out for a former colleague / friend who needed some help.
As a side note, the program is amazingly performant. For small numbers the results are instantaneous and for the large number close to the 2^32 limit the result is still returned in around 10 seconds.
It seems like it would work because people wouldn’t think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.
A quantum Santa could deliver presents to every house simultaneously if nothing observed his passage. On the other hand, at some point the wave function will collapse, like say when people check what presents are under the tree. When the wave function collapses, the probabilities all go away and there’s a single answer, so he could deliver presents to one and only one house.
There’s a reason most historical fiction focuses on nobles and land-owners. You can tell interesting stories about them, and modern people can sort-of relate to their lifestyles. If you told stories about the common people, modern people wouldn’t be able to focus on the story, and would get distracted by how brutal and awful their day-to-day lives were.
Simplify that to “Piracy isn’t stealing”. Copyright infringement (so-called piracy) is very different from stealing.
Sure, if “buying” isn’t permanent despite assurance it was at the time, then copyright infringement is even more justified. But, copyright infringement isn’t and has never been stealing.