Hey, look on Blueberry Hill, you'll find your drill ! (From the Far Side Cartoon) Luc

The main difference between "being in a 0 gravity field" and "orbiting in a station around earth" is that in the 2nd case, you are spinning at the same rotational speed as the station so Coriolis force applies and if you throw an object to a friend in the station, it will not follow a straight line (as the object would do in the first case) but a curve.

How could instructions be non-deterministic when they share the same clock (even on different cores) ? Even random numbers generators are determinitic. I think that the only way to introduce some "chance" in a piece of code is to get information from "outside" : wait for something from a mechanical disk, a keyboard, an other computer...

When you were a child and wanted to open a tap to get water, you could just learn from your parents or friends and copy their action : turning the tap conterclockwise. That was the copy & paste time... Now you are a grown person and you are no more thinking about how to open a tap but why to do it. I can say I'm an experienced programmer (47 years of developping applications of all kinds) and though I can write a sorting function from scratch (I may write it for my own pleasure!!!) I don't care about it; what is important is that, in order to make my new application work, I need to sort some kind of list and, then, I look for the simpliest way to do it. Doesn't matter by Copying & pasting or creating it or giving a young one the task to reinvent it (for it's own education), I just need to have the tap open so I can water my garden... And that is my real pleasure in life!!!!!!

First time was in October 1973, I was 21 at computer engineer school, language APL on a teletype with punched tape computer : IRIS 80 under system SIRIS 7, and it was the Fibonacci suite... And last time I wrote a line of code was this morning, 40 years later, take or leave 2 weeks, it was VB on a PC, and it was modelization of a Robot in 3D.