msla

> The Ethernet spec was first drafted on this day in 1980 — DEC, Intel, and Xerox defined the standard several years before the internet existed

The Internet existed before 1980. It dates to 1969, in that there's a continuous history from the ARPANET to the modern Internet, even though NCP wasn't replaced by TCP/IP until 1982.

Does the standard allow ALL-CAPS headers, or is that just a DOS thing? Because it seems like the C standard always specifies lower-case, but I guess DOS compilers (and, maybe, DOS users) can't distinguish between ALL-CAPS and all-lower.

This is by and for people who do not distinguish between the UI and the OS, like how "MSIE" is "The Internet" for them.

This is by and for people who do not distinguish between the UI and the OS, like how "MSIE" is "The Internet" for them.

This is by and for people who do not distinguish between the UI and the OS, like how "MSIE" is "The Internet" for them.

The bank has the best doors, the best locks, and the best cameras, and it is patrolled by a guard who props the doors open to so he doesn't have to keep fooling with the locks and points the cameras the other way to extend his smoke break. SeL4 would be another system used by humans.

Wheeler put out a blog post:

https://dwheeler.com/blog/2012/02/14/

linking to this blog post:

https://blog.james.rcpt.to/2012/02/13/debian-wheezy-us19-bil...

Saying it's an update of this article. In case you don't like reading URLs, the newer blog post says Debian "wheezy" is worth $19 billion.

I consider this a simplistic analysis, because a closed-source Linux with a straightforward monetary pricetag would be worth a lot less in practice, since it would cease to be the de-facto OS for pretty much all new hardware products. Like BSD before it, which got ported to most workstations because it was freely available, Linux derives a good deal of its value from the fact you can port it to anything that doesn't run away quickly enough without having to pay money or even negotiate to license it from anyone.

Also, this pinged a few neurons deep in my memory, so I found what it made me remember. Back in 2004, some random named Jeff V. Merkey tried to buy a special license to the then-current kernel for $50,000.00:

https://dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html

In response, Molnar did some quick sloccount math and estimated the kernel as being worth $175,974,824 at that time.

Evidence it works: This was planted by some company that sells copper nostrums.

Similar to an old idea I had about how every programming language needs three books:

1. Basic introduction.

2. Reference tome, which has absolutely everything.

3. Cookbook with style advice for the more advanced student, which assumes you've read 1 and can look up various details in 2.

These days, 2 would be a wiki and 1 would likely be a bunch of pages on that wiki, but it's still good if you have someone sit down and write 3.

> the misses would rather have an induction burner, microwave, and an ice chest running off a solar panel.

Those would definitely be hits.

Also, solar panels are old. Bell Labs demonstrated the first practical silicon solar cell in 1954. At some point, you're just trying to split (possibly nonexistent) hairs for an aesthetic, as opposed to making a principled stand against technology.

https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2009/04/bell-labs-silicon-solar-...

Ah, sans-serif, where you can't tell the difference between "Weird Al" and "Weird AI" because who needs letters that don't collide, right?

OK, let's do this:

It isn't a hard drive. What's being driven, your mom? It definitely isn't a hard disk in most cases, either, because SSDs are so common.

It isn't a screen. What's being screened out? Is it a monitor? I don't know, is it? Are you monitoring things? If not, then it isn't.

It isn't a mouse. Mice have tails, and also are small living mammals with respiration and without buttons.

It isn't a touch pad. It is touched, but it's also stroked and tapped, so calling it merely a touch pad is inaccurate.

My point, of course, is that language is purely convention, and trying to nitpick all of those conventions quickly leaves us with nothing. There's polysemy and semantic drift and as long as there isn't confusion there also isn't a problem.

"Rate Limit Exceeded"

Does anyone have an archive?

Forgetting the infelicities of Patrick Russ is reasonable because he's both dead and his estate isn't (to my knowledge) funneling money from the sale of his books to odious causes. Would that I could say the same about other authors.

There's two maxims:

You get what you pay for.

If you're the customer, you're the product.

"You get what you pay for" means if you buy proprietary software, you get software from proprietary vendors who act like modern proprietary vendors act these days, which is using every avenue to maximize profits. There's no recourse, because it is proprietary and, therefore, belongs to the software maker, and not you. It is not your property, it is theirs.

Which leads into...

"If you're the customer, you're the product" because customers are valuable products. You willingly bought the service, so your data is data from someone who is interested in the company and probably willing to buy more from it and its partners if the company can target you. Your data, therefore, has resale value, making you a product to be sold.

> In 2020, Congress passed the No Surprises Act, which banned surprise balance bills for most parts of emergency care. But by necessity, it exempted ground ambulances from the law: actually restricting the practice would have rendered much of the EMS industry insolvent.

Right, but air ambulances are subject to the No Surprises Act, and we somehow still have those.

Also, ERs are subject to the No Surprises Act, and they do some pretty damned expensive things. Plus, if you're seen by an out-of-network practitioner in an in-network hospital or ER, no you weren't: No Surprises Act forces them to accept QPA and not balance bill. Somehow all of those out-of-network anesthetists and radiologists are still in business.

Here's a PDF about the No Surprises Act:

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/a274577-1a-training-1-bal...

There are a couple of games like this on Android I play:

https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.vayunmathur.gam...

https://github.com/plhosk/wordtracer

They're both on FDroid

Yeah, I got "TUNS" as a bonus word.

> knowing the difference between lay and lie.

I'm guessing you're not a linguist, and have no knowledge of academic linguistics.

OK, here's my problems with space data centers. How many of them has China solved?

1. Space is terrible for heat regulation. It's a perfect insulator for everything except radiative cooling, which is the least efficient. Hot things stay hot.

2. Space is full of radiation. Everything has to be radiation hardened, which makes it heavier, more expensive, and, yes, more difficult to cool.

3. Space is far away. Well, farther than a data center on Earth can be. I know China hasn't solved the speed of light.

We put up with it with satellites because it still has some advantages over trying to run cables literally everywhere, but we do, in fact, still use cables laid on the bottoms of the oceans.

So, is physics wrong, or is a country known for making dumb decisions some times making a dumb decision?

> Is embedding executable code into a file a security risk?

Yes, which is why nobody uses PDFs.

Maybe that's why it's called 'C' in the repository.

Note that this isn't written in C but in 'C'.

/s

In addition to having to pick a size for the length counter and then, later, having to differentiate between lengths in bytes, codepoints, and glyphs, you can't subdivide a Pascal string using pointer arithmetic. To pass just the end of a string into a function, you have to either copy the tail of one Pascal-style string to another with a smaller size value, or your string has to be a struct with an integer and a pointer to the actual data instead of just an integer stuck on the beginning of the string. The first is a lot of copying in some cases, the second raises the specter of structs with invalid pointers. That's not to mention the potential problems that would cause with caches.

Technical problems give way to philosophical differences but the over-arching problem is that the people behind ATProto really want to make a social media ecosystem that attracts lots of average people who will refuse to understand that the solution you're giving them can't do things Twitter could do back before Musk bought it. People get angry enough at Bluesky not having an edit button, and it's at least possible to talk about how editing can be abused.

> No but you said there was only a single reason to agree with "Neo-Nazi" propaganda as if agreeing with any propaganda is rational. There's a reason it's called propaganda after all. It's not like there weren't deplorable crimes being committed by the Soviets / US / France / Britain and they certainly had their fair share of propaganda during WWI and WWII depicting Germans as barbarians / sub-human / etc...

We're only talking about one political group here. The group that published The Turner Diaries. The group that can't help but mention who's Jewish. Bringing up other groups is a distraction tactic, aside from how dishonest it is. Yes, we are taught that everyone did morally questionable things in WWII. But only one group ran a Dachau.

> How is the owner of the second largest publisher of textbooks in the US, and the fact that he served in a Zionist intelligence organization in the US, irrelevant when it comes to what people learn about WWII and propaganda? Please explain.

OK, let's get down to brass tacks: Do you think people only believe the Holocaust happened and was bad because a Jewish man published a lot of textbooks?

> Are you disputing the well-recorded fact that tens of millions of innocents were killed by the Bolsheviks over the span of about 40 years?

Are you disputing the fact eleven million people were killed by a concerted effort on the part of Nazi Germany to eliminate people it considered subhuman for various reasons?

I don't dispute the vile stain on the history of state Communism. I hate Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Hoxha and Kim Il-Sung just as much as the next normal person. But we're talking about why someone wouldn't distribute The Turner Diaries and, I have to say, the Communists didn't commit that little literary peccadillo.

> Why don't we learn about the Holodomor in the US in grade school?

Because there are fewer people waving hammer-and-sickle flags around than there are spray-painting swastikas on synagogues and Raising Questions about whether the Holocaust was so bad after all.

> I never said you did - but if it were me, I'd want to make sure I considered both sides of a historical event before deciding which direction to aim my hatred, if I was into such endeavors.

That's funny, the more I learn about WWII the less I feel the Nazis had a legitimate side. They were a bunch of losers lead around by a drugged-up corporal who ran his country into the ground with gross mismanagement to the point Germany, once the jewel of European science and industry, was split in half and lived a shadow existence as the puppet of two world powers for a half century after his reign.

> I personally believe that war is a racket, and that there are no good guys in evil and corrupt wars (WWII was definitely one of those, same with WWI).

The corruption in WWII was the starting of it, which falls directly at the feet of the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Self-defense is not corruption, and neither is ending the reign of expansionist tyrants. Or do you think people don't have the right to defend themselves from your pet dictators?

> I'm also not naive enough to believe that there wasn't atrocious behavior on both sides of either war.

Only one side ran death camps. Both sides imprisoned people unjustly, but only one side turned them into ashes. It doesn't balance out.

> Nor am I going to label anyone who has the gall to question the prevailing narrative or say it is incorrect in some capacity, a Neo-Nazi.

No, the only people I call Neo-Nazis are the ones triggered when I say the Nazis were, on the whole, bad for everyone around them.

Someone named tinfoilhatter replied but that's gone now. Not one to let a response go to waste:

Well. I seem to have triggered something.

> Ah yes, because the only people that have ever spread propaganda are Neo-Nazis

Not something I ever said or implied.

> and we should only ever learn about the sanitized and approved version of history from our Robert Maxwell (Ghislane Maxwell's Mossad agent father / McGraw Hill co-founder) published textbooks.

I find it interesting who just happens to know who else is Jewish, and then feels the need to interject that into utterly irrelevant contexts.

> Never mind that there are two sides to every story, and when it comes to history, only the victors get to tell theirs.

No, I'm pretty sure a lot of losers have been able to have their sides heard. It's just that, well, people lose for a reason, and losers tend to be less popular among normal people. Ranting about subhumans can do that, you know.

> We don't even learn about the 23+ million massacred by the Bolsheviks in school.

I would be interested to know who exactly you call a Bolshevik, but I did get taught the history of the USSR in school, at least, and "One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich" is not a ringing endorsement.

However, nobody was talking about Bolsheviks until you decided to use them as a distraction.

> But yeah - only one reason to consider a different perspective other than the one forced down your throat by the public education system.

I didn't need the public education system to teach me to hate genocidal racists, thank you.

> Note that I don't necessarily agree with the subject matter of these titles

Y'know, there's really only one reason to be coy about whether you agree with Neo-Nazi propaganda.

OK, how is manual memory management relevant to writing a program to get weather information from an Internet API and display it to the user? In that context, "relevant" is the domains of getting the data (network communications) and displaying it (console vs GUI, converting units to the user's preferences, determining how much to show) and how the program internally manages its buffers is a distraction from those important concepts. Every line of code I have to write to ensure I have the space to store the data I need to work with is visual and cognitive noise, which is why programmers developed garbage collection.

I can, but what annoys me is people saying "Well that technically isn't champagne because it isn't from the right region of the right country" and acting like being able to quote obscure regulations makes them "technically correct" in any context outside of a courtroom.