So, the "Hurricane Hunters" are primarily associated with the Air Force Reserve 53rd weather reconnaissance squadron. This gentleman is not one of those. It's a moderately misleading headline.
Windows was never oriented around "just works". That was Mac. Windows's main selling point is that it never becomes incompatible, and that has largely stayed true. You can still to this day insert the disk for some proprietary application from Windows 2.0 and it will still install and run. Try that with another operating system!
Comparing national militaries is a complicated and tricky business. I would like to recommend Perun on YouTube. Usually pretty good defense economic analysis in digestible one-hour PowerPoint presentations. Some comparative material.
"Case law," meaning deciding court cases by referring to the results of previous cases, is much less important in Louisiana. Courts of appeals and the Louisiana Supreme Court are more liable to go against previous precedents than they might be in common law states.
A lot more basic stuff in Louisiana is written into law statutes. The Louisiana constitution was completely rewritten in the 1970s, but today it is still the size of one of those old fashioned phone books.
Louisiana has parishes instead of counties.
In a criminal case, the Louisiana constitution does not guarantee defendants the right to trial by jury. That's an English law tradition thing, not French (or "continental European"). Louisiana criminal defendants do get a right to jury guaranteed by the US constitution and by Louisiana statutes.
Louisiana is (basically) the only state in the Union that doesn't require a unanimous jury verdict in criminal cases. They got partially overruled by the feds on this recently, though.
Louisiana does not participate in the Multistate Bar Exam. The Louisiana bar exam is the longest one to sit in the Union.
You cannot disinherit any of your children. All children are entitled to a minimum fractional share of your estate. This is a reform actually from Napoleon, getting rid of "primogeniture" that was all the rage in England.
Louisiana has a thing called "usufruct" that could be used to, say, let your spouse keep using your assets after you die (and your assets were force-inherited to your children).
The governor of Louisiana is required to recite the oath of office twice, in English and French.
That's what I was thinking. What the heck were the terms of the deal that let Adams off the hook? Is Adams completely ignorant of the ways of the Cheeto?
I think most of this is genuine belief. There was a doctor named Wakefield who fraudulently published this autism claim in academic journals. Those papers were retracted, but the damage was done.
I think it sticks around as a conspiracy, because otherwise there's not a whole lot else that can explain the causes or origins of autism.
There are also a bunch of contracting arrangements where the workers are W-2 employees of a private company that has a contract with the gov to provide bulk professional services from said employees.
Those workers have some room to negotiate salaries and benefits like any private sector worker. Although the terms of the big contract can put some limits on what the private company can offer.
A lot of national labs and NASA stuff works like this.
Rockets do not aim straight up when they are leaving. They go straight up for a few seconds, and then they tilt over in the desired direction to pickup speed.
They don't burn up on the launch because they time the tilt over maneuver so that they get above nearly all of the atmosphere before they start picking up serious speed.
The energy that makes you burn up is your own kinetic energy. The "small" deorbit burn slows you down just enough to touch the atmosphere, but you're still going nearly full speed: 7200 m/s. Around 30,000 km/hr.
If you slow down more in space, so that you enter the atmosphere at low speed, you don't burn up. But you need a whole lot more backpacks to handle the full speed. It's cheaper and burns less gas if you use the air to slow down.
It seems difficult to have enough bottled oxygen to deorbit yourself, but maybe doable.
The MMU backpack units on the space shuttle had a total delta v of ~30 m/s. You need about three times that amount to deorbit from ISS. So imagine you need 3 MMUs give it take worth of expendable propellant oxygen, and you can do it. (The MMUs used nitrogen, but for this purpose oxygen is pretty much the same.)
After you deorbit, you will of course burn up on re-entry with no heat shield. But it might be conceivable to design a personal heat shield surfboard.
You could also avoid the whole burning up things by braking a lot more during the deorbit maneuver. But instead of 100 m/s, you need to slow down by more than 7000 m/s. That's quite a few more MMUs worth of gas. But if you do that, then you're essentially making a free fall jump from space, which has more or less already been demonstrated.
Edit:
To address the linked article in some way: each astronaut on the station has a dedicated seat on a capsule to come back down in an emergency. Usually, it's the same space capsule you came up on, but not always. Those are maintained ready to go at all times, and the astronauts can be back on the ground in 60 minutes whenever they need to. These spacecraft can be operated to splashdown by astronauts alone with no ground assistance, if needed.
Fortran is older than Basic and C. In fact, Fortran is more or less the first high level programming language. The first Fortran compilers date to the early 1950s.
Fortran was created mainly for the purpose of linear algebra: operations with (giant) matrices. Linear algebra is used to compute approximate solutions to ordinary and partial differential equations, and this is a major part of what people needed computers for (and still do).
Programming concepts like subroutines, functions, if statements with blocks and else clauses... All of those were not in original Fortran because no one had thought of them. These things entered Fortran over time as they became popular, and goto slowly became less popular. Syntax from the punch card era was replaced in Fortran 90, but it is still available as an option for compatibility purposes.
Structurally, I prefer to describe Fortran as like C, but with better built-in arrays, and no built-in general purpose pointers. Not having the pointers allows the compiler to do certain optimizations that C can't. But C is the better systems language, because the pointers let you naturally express all kinds of data structures besides arrays.
However, it's not at all clear to me that Mr. Mangione may have intended to intimidate or coerce the entire population is health care CEOs with his alleged actions. There's a decent-looking alternative theory of this case that he may have been just pissed with the one guy.
These facts will have to explored at trial if the state wants to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt
So, the "Hurricane Hunters" are primarily associated with the Air Force Reserve 53rd weather reconnaissance squadron. This gentleman is not one of those. It's a moderately misleading headline.