Actually, I learned it chiefly because what it would do for me on Windows: a REPL plus access to COM. Need to bash around Excel spreadsheets & do funky regexp stuff? Done. Do I like it? A lot? You bet. But I didn't pick it up out of some existential need to improve myself.
De Tocqueville made similar remarks, obviously based on the history of War of 1812. For that matter, consider the Civil War: Grant and Sherman were out of the service at the start,
"philosopher and technologist": ACM offers a paper on "Ontological approach toward cybersecurity in cloud computing". Evidently the PHB is more on target than usual.
"Under the pre-1978 copyright law, you could now teach history and politics using most of Toynbee's A Study of History (vols. 7-10 were first published in 1954) or Henry Kissinger's A World Restored, or stage a modern adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's A Time to Love and A Time to Die for community theater."
As far as I know, you can teach a class using Toynbee or Kissinger; the students just have to find copies. As for community theater, they put on works far more recent--one friend appeared several years ago in "Dancing at Lughnasa" (1995), another in "Lips together, Teeth Apart" (1991; or whichever MacNally play gave him a chance to shed his clothes--"Love! Valor! Etc" of 1994 maybe). What the terms are, I can't say; but it doesn't seem to run anyone broke.
I do agree that the copyright extension gone beyond reasonable bounds. The critic Hugh Kenner made an interesting case that the extension of copyright in the United Kingdom about 100 years ago had a dramatic effect on the public's impression of what literature was, creating a discontinuity in perception that made the modernists' work appear to have come about without its actual context.
My sample of the US is not large, say between 50 and 100 households in a country of 300 million persons. It tends to be skewed towards the more educated middle to upper middle class. (That is, towards more or less the NY Times demographic.) But the great majority of those households have at least one adult who cooks decently. The person I can think of who goes through the most carry-out lives the sort of frazzled suburban life where the kids have lessons, practices, etc. at frequent intervals, requiring a lot of driving.
And somebody seems to be cooking in the poorer neighborhood a short walk away. The grocery stores have fresh vegetables, meat, 10-pound bags of rice, and so on, along with the canned stuff.
I wonder whether the article isn't aimed at readers in their 20s, on their own for a little while, but not really accustomed to a settled life.
(After looking at dhughes's post: my sample is also skewed toward the baby boomers. Caveat lector.)
