my anecdata is that I have always filed manually by myself, but every time had a small adjustment made by the IRS... indeed filing a correct return the 1st time seems close to impossible.

is there a reference for the USSR shooting an SR-71 down?

There is no reference for this, because it never happened.

this is a beautiful zeugma you have here.

This is a re-discovery of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Allen 's work, everything old is new again!

This topic definately resonates with Thomas Allen's Managing the flow of technology (he was a great prof and all-around nice human being).

which new feature are not supported?

it's funny because I have seen the opposite. Engineer: "it crashed because it dereferenced a null pointer" boss: "add null pointer checks everywhere!"

... and because it used "if" instead of "assert", it made the null pointer arg a valid argument, making it a tolerable state of the running software, which displaced the locus of crashes far from the source of the issue. Moral of the story, use "assert" to make it crash as early as possible and debug THAT. You want to restrict the representable states in the software, not expand them by adding null checks everywhere.

This is right on point. I read this book recently, by coincidence, and it's funny and fascinating at the same time (at least for someone who speaks both English and French).

This whole topic seems to be a re-discovery of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics with non-linearities and saturation.

In the same vein, on the consumer side we talk of admission control (which is just another name for "drop incoming messages") and throttling...

Funny you mention shearing in the last paragraph. Transvection were such a revelation to me in undergrad math.