cfmcdonald

I think you're just inferring something that isn't there at all in the OP. Here's what it says:

> The book takes us through a series of key moments in the development of the internet: 1969, when the publicly owned Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the first public computer network that became a forerunner to the internet, went live for the first time; 1976, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) linked two networks for the first time in pursuit of its goal to “bring the mainframe to the battlefield”;

The only mention of a military application is related to the event of DARPA linking two networks for the first time. This is in fact what happened. That event has nothing to do with the creation of ARPANET, which is clearly mentioned here as a distinct, earlier event. There's no other mention in the article of a military motivation for the creation of the Internet, or other computer technology.

> The "bring the mainframe to the battlefield” is just false

It's actually true, more or less. Bob Kahn's initial motivation for thinking about internetworking was in order to connect PRNET[0], a packet radio network intended for possible field use by the Army (by using mobile trucks as stations), with the computing power in ARPANET.

> As is the idea it was built to withstand nuclear attack

Yes, but I don't see that mentioned here.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRNET

Yes, it was a joke. I don't think I said anywhere that all of these were bad ideas. The point was that everyone was trying lots of different ideas, because no one had any solid theoretic basis to tell them what might actually work.

Review by domain experts would be nice, but keep in mind this is just a hobby blog, not an academic publication.

I did read Winchester's chapter. I actually found Gavin Weightman's coverage of Wilkinson in The Industrial Revolutionaries better.

I wanted to have more on Wilkinson, but I had to draw the line somewhere. This was already the longest post I've ever written by a good margin.

Animals can do all sorts of weird things that might have once been believed to be impossible:

"Birds Can See Earth's Magnetic Fields, And Now We Know How That's Possible" (https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-see-magnetic-fields-crypt...)

The only reason you can state with confidence that a human with stick can't detect water underground is that they've never been able to do it.

It's very unlikely that anything like this exists. Whatever writing craftsmen may have done in ancient times, it simply was not preserved and copied.

The situation gradually improves post-Renaissance, but we don't even have any contemporaneous writings about how Newcomen designed and built his engine in the early 1700s - just second-hand information from decades later.

I have a number of nits with this post (e.g. OP is confusing Docs and Drive), but more generally I don't get OP's point.

Drive search, bookmark search, and Web search are totally different features in totally different products. Notably, the first two have no ads, so driving you to search in this case has no clear positive effect for Google.

Large companies used to have company historians and company archivists. Some still do. There were probably never very many of those, though.

The new policy seems to be to throw the (digital) archives down the memory hole to avoid lawsuits.

Yes, in the 1960s. Universities were expanding rapidly to respond to the influx of baby boomers, and humanities majors were much more popular, so it was relatively easy to get hired.[0]

It's pretty much been varying degrees of bad since then, but as the first chart in [1] shows, it got a lot worse after 2008.

[0]: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

[1]: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

Sure, hubris is part of it.

You are also getting paid (hopefully - if you aren't, then you're really screwed). It's not a lot, but enough to live on as a single person.

Then, the academic humanities lifestyle is quite cushy for anyone who really loves reading, thinking, and writing. And as a Ph.D. student, you get to live it for 5 years or more. There's very little of the grant race (you just need a few thousand dollars a year to travel to conferences/archives), there's no grueling lab work. There's not much pressure to perform from your advisor, who is likely working on unrelated projects within the same sub-field. It's just reading, thinking, writing, and talking about other people's writing.

Author here. They are very different. Code (a fantastic book, by the way) is a technical book that provides an introduction to how computers work from first principles. The Switch is a historical book that describes how the switching components of the first computers evolved in a telecom context (starting from the birth of the telegraph), then were adapted for computing.

There's a bit of crossover insofar as Code uses relays to build an understanding of how digital logic works and has a few brief historical asides. Likewise The Switch provides a few brief technical explanations to help the non-expert reader along. But in general The Switch will not tell you much about how computers work and Code will not tell you much about where they came from.

Author here. Sure, there are lots of ways to tell the history of computers, because lots of different lines of development fed into their creation. I hint at this in the prologue.

But I chose to highlight one particular aspect (the origins of the basic components used to build digital computers - relays, tubes, and transistors). This naturally downplays the importance of IBM relative to other possible ways of telling the story. There's a mea culpa somewhere in the footnotes about the neglect of IBM.

Generally in boardgaming "tactical" is used to refer to moment-to-moment/turn-to-turn decision making, reacting to the immediate situation. I don't see how that applies here, you can't decide on a draw/action strategy at the start of the game and then decide as you go which cards you're going to use for it. I guess you can, but it seems like a bad idea.

To be successful you'd need to start by studying the card offer and seeing if draw/action strategy is possible and advisable. To do that you need to understand all the possible ways to build an engine(if any) from the available cards and how they might interact with other cards that are available. That seems like strategy to me.

At the time it was created, the default copyright term was 28 years, with an additional 28 if renewed. The owners of the rights to the movie neglected to renew it, and it fell into public domain in 1974. Anything not in public domain in 1976 had its term extended by a new copyright act, and then extended again in 1998.

I'm curious to hear your list. I've read a lot of fantasy and IMO the vast majority of it is poorly written schlock. GRRM stands out to me because he can actually write fairly well (though the quality has slipped a bit in the last couple books).

If you check the footnote there it seems Ballotpedia computed this rate themselves. It seems exceedingly unlikely this has anything to do with fraud, since other states handily won by Trump like Alaska and Iowa show similar large drops in 2020. I think fundamentally the data here is incomplete for 2020 and nothing meaningful can be said about it yet.

Okay, so if the total rejected ballot data isn't available what is your basis for claiming that it did happen? The burden of proof rests on the accuser. In any case we know that the signature rejection rates for Georgia in past elections were low.

What do you mean we don't have definitive results? Biden's win was certified by the states in the last week, in accordance with the law. It will only get more definitive when the electoral college votes next week. This is nothing new in the U.S., it's the way the process works.

1) Didn't happen. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-georgia-rejecte...

2) Both Democrats and Republicans had greater turnout. This was expected since Trump is a highly polarizing figure. Not relevant to claims of fraud.

3) Like, say, Utah, which voted for Trump? https://www.fox13now.com/news/election-2020/utah-reports-90-... Please show relevance.

4) Expected, due to increased mail-in ballots and delay in counting mail-in ballots required by law in several states.

5) A glitch that was fixed. Relevance?

Yes, they tested everyone else in the restaurant and no one else was infected. If you are going to make specific critiques like this, you really need to read the article first.

I don't think I'm being generous, "this century" unambiguously means the current century starting from year 1 (19th, 20th, 21st) not the previous 100 years. See for example the usage in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century

One could argue that the whole point of traditions like Christmas is to have comforting, repeated experiences like listening to the same music each year, something to ground your mortality in timeless rituals that started before you were born and (you hope) will continue after you die.

That said, there is lots of Christmas pop that doesn't make it into the canon. I have no recollection at all of the first song on the Christmas tape, and i was around then (and going to K-Mart with my mom).

You do realize that this century started only 20 years ago?

It takes time for secondary effects like that to show up. But I recall reports of large numbers of restaurant closures as far back as late spring.

I guess life would be largely the same except for the millions of dead people?

In general though, there has been a huge variety of policy responses across the globe and over time, so I'm not sure what you mean be 'we' 'shutting everything down'. My state came closest to shutting everything down for a month or so in the spring, but there has been a constant effort since then to adjust policy to balance health risks and economic/social pain. Italy had a super hard lockdown. South Dakota isn't even wearing masks.

It seems pretty clear from the video that the guy's video call dropped, it wasn't cut by CNN. CNN is reporting on these criticisms of Emanuel on their website: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/24/politics/rahm-emanuel-transpo...

So if they are trying to secretly cover them up (as you seem to imply), they are doing a bad job.

Hmm, I saw a different irony, that this conversation about the dangers of Silicon Valley censorship is being hosted free of charge on YouTube.

On the gun thing, I'm not sure what you're talking about. I just tried searching for "gun safety" on YouTube and got tons of results.

It is Washington Irving, not the Gershwins, who is responsible for the "Columbus set out to prove the world was round" myth.

You don't need a "smart home" for this. I have a decades old thermostat that can be programmed to turn down at night.

> Thanks to this law you can't be held liable if you have a blog with a comment section.

Even absent a comment section, most blogs are hosted by someone else (e.g. WordPress), who does not vet the content on that blog. That won't be possible anymore in a post-Section 230 world.