cicero

We had one of these when I was a kid in the late 1970s. My dad built what was essentially a modem and used it to connect the teletype to an old Motorola single channel radio with a crystal tuned to the amateur radio (Ham radio) teletype repeater in Dallas, Texas. There was a community of Ham radio teletype (RTTY) users in Dallas with similar setups that formed what was essentially a chat room. There was even one Ham that had a PDP-11 minicomputer connected to his system that acted like a chatbot. You could send a message to it to get weather reports and a few other interesting functions. When I would come home from school each day, I would find several feet of paper had come out of the teletype, and I would scan it to see what had been said while I was gone. If I wanted to contribute and the channel was clear, I would flip the transmit switch and start typing. Everything I typed would appear on all of the other rigs that were connected.

We could also connect the modem to my dad's HF radio and chat with RTTY operators all over the world. I would spin the tuning dial until I heard the distinctive RTTY tones. I would adjust the tuner until the pitch sounded correct and then turn on the teletype. Often garbage would come out until I got it tuned in perfectly, and then I might see someone calling to start a conversation, or a conversation already in progress. Sometimes I would catch a teletype art (ASCII art using 5-bit Baudot code) picture in progress. If it looked interesting, I would stay tuned in case they repeated the transmission. This took a while because these machines operated at 60 words per minute (~6 characters/second).

After a while, my dad upgraded to a Model 19, which had a paper-tape punch and reader. This allowed me to create my own teletype art, so I worked several hours creating an R2-D2 that I was very proud of. I sent it to several people and was thrilled one day when I was tuning around and recognized my R2-D2 being sent by someone else.

When my dad later brought home an Apple II, he was able to connect the Apple II to the modem, so we replaced the Model 19 with a Model 28 RO (Read-only), which did not have a keyboard or paper tape, but that was okay because we used the Apple II. Because modern computer printers like an Epson MX-80 were rather expensive then, we used the teletype as our printer, and I even turned in some school papers printed on the teletype in all-caps on yellow paper torn off from a roll. (I'm sure my teachers loved that.) When we eventually did get an Epson printer, it was hard to justify keeping the bulky teletype, so it was sold. We still did some RTTY now and then on the Apple II, but it wasn't quite the same as having the teletype machine left on all day. Of course, most of the rest of the RTTY community was also moving to microcomputers, and the hobby began to rapidly change. Then I went off to college to study computer science and haven't done much with amateur radio since then.

This principle was used in medieval disputation. The Summa Theologiae [1] of Thomas Aquinas is broken down into "articles" that examine every aspect of a particular broader "question". Each article begins with a series of "objections" that attempt to state the best possible arguments against the position that Aquinas will take. The next section has a relevant quote from authority, and then Aquinas explains his position. Finally, he provides an answer to every objection. Although reading something written this way is difficult for modern readers, I think it provides a healthy antidote to the craziness we have today.

1: http://summa-theologiae.org/

That's the problem with democracy that ignores the existence of divine authority, or at least natural law.

Are you primarily targeting Microsoft platforms? If so, then C# might have the edge. Otherwise, you might prefer Java.

Maybe you should learn some serious theology rather than a caricature and then you would see what justice has to do with it. I would suggest St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas.

Jesus says that if you seek, you will find.

The dull man cannot know, the stupid cannot understand this: that, though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish, they are doomed to destruction for ever ... The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord, they flourish in the courts of our God. (Psalm 92:6-7, 12-13)

This world is full of injustice, but the message of Christianity is that injustice is temporary and justice is eternal. Every man has a choice between eternal life and eternal death. God wants life for everyone - that is why he gave each of us life. He gave us the ability to love, but we also have the freedom to hate. Heaven is eternal love; hell is eternal hate. You get to choose the path you want to take.

> 10. Connect with nature and the universe at large... 18. Choose love.

Even better, seek the creator of the universe and the source of love. Many people come to the conclusion that since science has enabled us to understand so much about how our universe works, we can jettison the idea of a creator. However, the contingent nature of our universe and everything in it requires a cause that is not contingent, and religion, especially Christianity, has been telling us about that non-contingent cause for centuries. I urge people to seek out that cause by looking to the testimony of the generations of good people who claim to know this cause.

This is why Aristotle said that the intellect cannot be material. The human intellect is able to receive and understand abstractions. However, whenever you try to represent an abstraction as a physical object or in a physical medium, it is no longer abstract. It is true that you can write about abstractions using physical ink on physical paper, but those are just symbols; they are not the abstraction. It is only when a person reads the symbols, understands them, and forms the abstraction in his mind that the abstraction comes into existence.

So, we can create programs that appear to do intelligent things, but it is the human observer that brings meaning to what the program is doing. The program might output the letters "dog" when a dog pass in front of its camera, but its the human that sees the "dog" that knows what a dog actually is.

The article is about Mars One, which was about sending humans to Mars.

The dashboard lighting in my Mini Cooper turns red/orange when it gets dark outside, and I set the accent lighting color to orange. I think it helps a lot.

I think what you're saying is correct when it comes to perception with our senses, the kind of knowledge we share with the other higher animals. However, there is a higher level of knowledge that is unique to humans, which is rational in nature and can come up with certain knowledge. We can know certain mathematical and logical truths with certainty, such as 2 + 2 = 4 and that A and not A cannot both be true. We may not get an accurate count of cows in the field because one is hidden from view, but we can know with certainty that if we have X cows in field A and Y cows in field B, we have a total of X + Y cows in the two fields.

Yes they were. Thanks.

Yes, it was. I don't know what happened that year, if my dad got a promotion, won the lottery (just kidding, there was no lottery then), or what, but we hadn't had a Christmas like that before.

Christmas 1976 my parents gave me an Arp Axxe, which was a simpler, less-expensive version of the much more famous Odyssey [1]. It was great for a kid to learn about electronic music because the controls were laid out to where you could visualize the signal flow. It also came with a great textbook. I learned a lot about sound and analog signal processing as well as had a lot of fun. May Mr. Pearlman rest in peace.

1: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2014/02/17/korg-is-bringin...

In 1991-92 I was doing Unix programming by accessing the host using a terminal emulator on a 80286 PC with MS-DOS. I usually edited my code using vi, but when I compiled and got errors, I would correct minor errors using ed because it didn't erase the error message from the screen. I could quickly go to the line number specified in the error message and make the change. When I got upgraded to an X-Terminal with 19" screen, I changed to running vi or emacs in one window and compiling in another. I have never used ed again except for nostalgic fun. It's like working a puzzle to figure how to make the edits you need with the minimum number of ed commands. I never did use ed on a teletype, but that is where it would really shine.

I have used Keypass for years. It is not as convenient as some of the alternatives, but I trust it more.

Time does filter out the bad books, and most books that are written fall into that category, but the books that endure the test of time are really good.

I look forward to reading this article when I have the time because I am a Go newbie, so a well explained example program will be useful to me. Also, I find language implementation interesting, and I've always admired the AWK language. I for one and glad he did it and wrote an article explaining it.

Finally, I think it is good to see C software being rewritten in more robust languages like Go and Rust, if people are inclined to do so. I don't think rewriting all the C software should be our top priority, especially high-quality programs like AWK, but it's a good overall direction to go when people are interested.

The ratio between the the gap in their ages and their ages is larger when they are younger. This is why age difference in a couple becomes less significant as they both grow older. Five years is a big difference between teenagers but not between octogenarians.

I remember Pournelle was a big fan of S-100 based systems because you could upgrade them. His motto was something like "silicon is cheaper than iron," meaning that you could replace boards in an S-100 system rather than buying a whole new computer.

Okay, Apple caved to save their bread and butter; I'm not nominating Apple for corporate sainthood. However, they are not building a business model based on exploiting our data. They should get credit for that and be allowed to point out the problem with that kind of business.

I've been thinking along the same lines. I currently use Python for relatively small projects, but even then, I wish I had type declarations when I come back to code I haven't looked at in a while.

What is your favorite language with an advanced type system, Haskell, OCaml, or something else? I've dabbled in both, but I want to dive deep into one. I like the look of Haskell more, but I'm a little afraid of it.

I had success with that design as a kid. It was called "the bishop's hat" in the book I had.

Although I'm not yet retired, I have been thinking about something similar. When I was younger, I loved learning new languages. Now I find I'm less able to learn so quickly, and I'm more interested in getting things done. I'm interested in building things that are reliable and will last, so Haskell has been interesting to me. However, there is something about Common Lisp and Racket that keeps drawing me back, even though I tend to favor static typing. (Maybe Typed Racket is the answer?) My everyday language right now is Python, but I'm looking for something that feels more solid.

There is a great documentary [1] about the Grande Chartreuse, available on DVD [2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence

2: https://www.amazon.com/Into-Great-Silence-Two-Disc-Set/dp/B0...

Even if you disagree with that, there are many other goals in life that are aided by being physically healthy.

Markdown is supported, but is it required? I know lots of Messenger and Skype users that have never heard of Markdown.

If I remember correctly, that's what Google said when Chrome was introduced. Browsers at that time did not adequately support their services, so they made their own browser.

I have heard critiques of functional programming, but not that there is a problem with leaky abstractions. Can you provide an example? Does it invalidate the discipline of trying to use pure functions when possible?

I learned to program using BASIC on an Apple II. All of the variables were global, and it wasn't until I got Apple Pascal that I had access to a language that had local variables. I immediately saw the advantage of the discipline of using local variables whenever possible because I had experienced the difficulty of tracking down where in the whole program a global variable might be changed.

It could be argued that local variables are just syntactic sugar over a global memory space, but no one credibly argues today that we should therefore only use global variables. Local variables make it easier to reason about the behavior of a program, and it appears to me that functional programming takes that idea even further.