Explain. Isn't a dimmer switch just a variable resistor? Do you need fancy dimmer switches if you want them to work with LED bulbs?

I had a boss who used to say that her job was to be a crap umbrella, so that the engineers under her could focus on their actual jobs.

Yes. GCHQ is the signals intelligence agency that grew out of the work at Bletchley Park on code breaking in WW2. So the UK's version of the NSA.

https://www.gchq.gov.uk/ <- this is their website.[1]

[1] If you click on it they will be able to track you down via your IP address and super seekret cyberspy-fu. Just kidding. .... or am I? Actually I really am. I have no way of knowing either way. Or do I? I mean, how would you know? I really don't though. At least as far as you know.

Re:docking, if you went far away from the station, then kept it aligned in your crosshairs as you approached, you would be perpendicular to the front face of the station. Once I figured that out I could dock every time. I don’t think you needed to match the rotation of the station at all (at-least, not in BBC micro disk Elite).

When Elite was released in 1984 I was 10 years old and had a BBC Micro and saw the poster in (probably) W H Smith and it looked interesting so persuaded my parents to buy it for me. In those days there weren't game trailers (obviously) and very little pre-publicity so no-one really knew how groundbreaking it was going to be.

My family and me happened to be on holiday that weekend so then I had the fancy box and manual (and novella) to read but we weren't going to be back home for a few days (where the actual computer was). So I spent the whole weekend reading the manual. The manual was amazing, and done in 'in universe' style, as if you had just purchased a Cobra Mark II spaceship, the main control panel of which just happened to look like a BBC Micro Model B. I was reading it thinking 'Is all this in the game? docking, space combat, trading, all those different types of spaceship to encounter, upgradable weapons and peripherals, eight galaxies, police spaceships, planets with descriptions of their inhabitants, mysterious aliens that pluck you out of hyperspace. Readers: Yes, it was all in the game.

edit: original manual at internet archive: https://archive.org/details/elite_acornsoft_manual/mode/2up

As a ten year old it was a very hard game though. Docking was HARD. Understanding trading was hard, what should I buy with my 100 credits at Lave that I could profitably sell at Leesti? There wasn't an internet to look this up on. I suppose there might have been articles in magazines, but not sure it would have occured to me to go looking for those. Space combat was great though, the 3D scanner with the vertical bars made it very intuitive. The magic of locking a missile and then firing it off!

I dont think I ever got above rating Poor though, because I never really grasped how to get the best out of trading (I was 10, ok? And no-one had ever seen a game like this before). A few years later Elite Cheat got released - a program to make fake 'save files', and then I really got to explore what the game could do.

Maybe this is a little unrelated, but why did our industry collectively pound our fists against the table and scream until XML went away? It's a little ugly and very verbose, but it's highly expressive and it has a proper schema language.

I'm too young to know what happened or why. By the time I got my first engineering job, JSON was the standard choice for "stuff you need to serialize."

I feel like YAML has also become the default choice in several areas where XML would be flat-out better.

There is a popular coast-to-coast walk in the UK that runs across the top of England that is approx 100 miles in a straight line. No-one in Britain is more than about 70 miles from the sea.