visiblink

That really is the worst thing: that they discovered the cure and then lost it.

This is a good point. They had issues years ago that they had to deal with.

If you want to set up slrn -- as suggested in another post -- I can help. It's not particularly intuitive. I first used Claws Mail and Thunderbird and then set up slrn.

I still use Thunderbird most often.

Past definitions of creation were more careful.

Most "creation" in the past involved transforming matter. No one ever "created" matter (well, except God in their intellectual universe).

It may be accurate to say that intellectual activity can be creative (though it's undoubtedly derivative most of the time), but in the physical world, creation is most likely to be an inaccurate term.

I agree that a liberal society and the profit motive create an environment that fosters creativity. Freedom of movement between jurisdictions is important too.

But people are down on corporations for good reason. They're a poorly-regulated entitlement.

This is completely speculative, but Suncor was filthy rich in 2011, so a temporary stoppage wouldn't have hurt the bottom line too much. Also, because of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, dinosaur fossils have become a part of Alberta's identity. The miners would have talked about the find and the company would have faced bad publicity if it had acted differently. Oil sands companies don't really need any more bad publicity than they already get.

Speaking of great little BBS-like communities, Solderpunk is actually the admin of zaibatsu.circumlunar.space.

There is! I read this on a gopher mirror of the Hacker News, so I thought I'd better come on over to the web version to respond...

In fact, several regular gopherites have commented on this thread.

Funny that this came up on the Hacker News on the weekend that the server is going down. Probably a good thing, since it only has 128MB of RAM.

For those who are interested in The Day the Universe Changed, you can find copies of the episodes at the internet archive or on Dailymotion. It really is well worth watching.

If you read the Globe and Mail (Liberal) and National Post (Conservative), you'll see a similar -- though not quite as extreme -- phenomenon.

I remember playing that game at the arcade as a kid. It was a lot of fun. If I recall correctly, some versions (or levels?) had pretty intense gravity effects.

I don't know, but I was really happy when I found it too. See you on the oldschool side...

You can register with eternal-september.org for a free usenet account.

Then you can set up Thunderbird, Claws Mail or another email app (even slrn or alpine on the linux command line) to read and respond to newsgroups.

I still hang out on usenet. comp.misc has a great little community -- and most of the discussion revolves around stories that are also found in places like HN, Slashdot, Soylent News, etc.

Read this: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_s...

It appears to be a corrupt inside job.

Have a look at The Register's article on the subject:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/20/org_registry_sale_s...

We were forced to 'upgrade' years ago from WebCt to BlackBoard. The worst part was not the feature set, but re-learning all of the things you already knew how to do.

So when the administration decided to hold focus group sessions on whether to purchase a new system (because the prices were suddenly raised, IIRC), a few of us got Moodle included among the choices, and then managed to convince our colleagues and the institution to accept it with the most convincing rationale: the price would never change and since open source software tends to be evolutionary for the most part, we probably would not face having to re-learn how to use the system again.

I don't think you would be surprised to learn just how easy it was to convince users to accept a system that's unlikely to experience massive change.

In any case, we've been using Moodle for years now. It's basically the same as when they set it up, and all my labour-saving import-export tricks have remained consistent over the years.

It's a little odd to characterize these volunteers as 'Canadians,' and Cook should know it. The majority of the recruits were first-generation immigrants from the British Isles. Few native-born Canadians volunteered. So whatever was going on over there was the product of that recent immigrant experience. That's interesting in itself, but puts a different gloss on this than we might get from those who would like to say something about Canadians, the Canadian mentality, and Canadian nationality from this.

Most Canadians stayed home during WWI. Most recently-arrived Brits went to Europe to fight for their country.

It's strange to say this, since I'm a gopher user and everyone else seems interested in popularizing or resurrecting the protocol, but I hope that never happens. Gopher today is a cool, thoughtful, and quirky place. I think that's because it is a niche. Add the masses and it would be bland-ified.

My LifeDrive is about to meet the modern web!

That would be annoying. Fortunately, I have never experienced call drops/power downs like that. If I had, I'd be using a different device too.

I have this... in the form of a Bold 9900. It calls, it texts, it has great simple apps for calendar, tasks, memos, podcasts and music.

The browser sucks. The camera is a joke. There are almost no other apps. And I can't circumvent the limitations.

It's perfect.

My roommate in 1990 was a journalist and he had one of these.

There's an emulator here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualt/

I really don't like that they used Joe Beef's name for this kind of restaurant (exclusive, expensive, and pointlessly excessive).

Joe Beef was the definition of a working-class hero: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mckiernan_charles_11E.html

You're already on this build? If so, that's great news.

I suspect this might screw up Classic shell...

Like PaulHoule, I have an old house, but with a new electrical system. It was proudly rewired by yours truly, with GFIs and AFCIs all over -- and an added subpanel.

Anyways, I use a set of powerline adapters with a second wifi router at the other end because the walls in my house are very thick (the studs are covered in shiplap on both sides). The throughput is fast enough to stream video on the other end, but I haven't put it to any measured test.

In the summer, I often take the whole setup to one of the outdoor plugins, so that we have solid wifi on the deck. So it can work quite well. Whether it will in any given circumstance is uncertain I suppose.

Found a very good one. In case anyone's still reading this thread: searx.me

I used to use dogpile back in the day. I'll give it a try again. Thanks!

I have been noticing (what appear to be) truncated search results in Google for some time now. At first I thought that was because I was accessing Google through Startpage. But that's not the case.

Anyways, I find myself using Bing more and more often these days, because the search results dig more deeply into the 'obscure'.

I'm not at all upset by this. It seems to me that as Google's results are not completely satisfactory, more people will make use of various alternatives. Maybe one day, search will become decentralized again, somewhat like it was in the 1990s, when you regularly made use of many search engines, like Altavista, Lycos, Excite, and Yahoo.

I would imagine that there must still be metasearch sites out there somewhere that submit your query to several search engines. I need to find one again and would appreciate recommendations.