"internet is full of shitbags" isn't on topic. Corporations are full of amoral, cocaine soaked greedy, selfich bastards with absolutely no empathy is.

the corporations are full of shitbags, news at 11

FTFY. Oh, and an offtopic educational link for you grocers and foreigners and others who don't understand English:
https://www.angryflower.com/24...
I see enough of that shit on Farcebook. Note, I've been staying away from /. for the same reason, the normals have taken over the site.

That's why they changed it from "Unidentified Flying Object" to "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena". The one I saw a half century ago was certainly not a space ship, unless Douglas Adams was right about scale, because it was smaller than a basketball. It was bright and fuzzy, rode next to my car for a couple of miles until I crossed a stream, when it zigged at 45 MPH at a right angle and followed the stream.

I wondered what it was for years before I learned about ball lightning, which is what it had to have been. My guess is ball lightning is a lot more common up there where the fighter jets play.

That key sits right off to the side of the A ... easy to hit with the left pinky. Not sure what is the least bad option.

As caps-lock, accidentally hitting it so that aLL OF A sudden there are capitals can be annoying, and when doing something with vi where all the letter-commands are case-sensitive and sometimes really dissimilar, it gets even worse. And as noted, the problem of passwords where a common part of the design includes not showing what is being typed in.

Control isn't that much better: accidentially hitting it along with A so there is the control-A for select all, then (*pop*) all text goes away because of replacing the selection with the next letter typed. Hopefully ctrl-z can bring it back... but having stuff disappear suddenly like that is scary and breaks the flow of writing.

There is a reason why I have removed the key altogether on some of the keyboards here...

Yes, unfortunately too much of a mad scientist with some seriously deficient marketing skills -- but there wouldn't have been the suspense and story otherwise.

It does make me wonder, what can be seen using a wide-band ultrasound microphone and a spectrum analyzer.

Actually, many plants have what is known as antiherbivoral compounds, bitter-tasting and even poisonous chemicals that are supposed to discourage animals from eating them.

Back around 1979-1980, I was talking with my mother about the various minicomputers that were available; I was using a PR1ME at the college, and she had some kind of HP equipment (HP3500 ?) at work. Some of the early home computers running BASIC were available, but it was already obvious that these things were like toys compared with the multi-processing and multi-user big iron. Considering how much larger and complicated programs could be made in FORTRAN, compared with the line-number BASIC of the time, I speculated, that some day, we would have small home computers that could run the same kind of FORTRAN programs.

She said she thought that was unlikely.

As few years later PCs became powerful enough to actually be able to do this (PC/AT, with the 80286 running Xenix). And these days, there are the pocket-sized Raspberry Pi, Rock 64, and others, that are more powerful than all that large hardware from the 1970s.

The 74LS244 is powered at 5V as it must be. Then its inputs are driven from a GPIO line. Low voltage is the same for both the R-Pi and the LS-TTL chip; they are in perfect agreement of that, High voltage thresholds of LS-TTL (2V) are compatible with the High voltage outputs of the 3.3V CMOS outputs from the Raspberry Pi.

The GPIO output does not have any problems driving the 0.2 mA LOW input current, nor the 0.02 mA HIGH input current required by the 74LS244 input. So a direct connection here is good to go.

Is it some of both? Muscle memory for when typing on a keyboard without having to look down, as in the fingers "remembering" where the various letters and other characters are.

And spatial memory, remembering the order of the letters -- noticeable when a screen or keypad has the letter keys in a different order. Using a check-in terminal or parking payment terminal, where there is a keypad or screen with the letters organized in alphabetical order is noticeably harder than if the letters are in QWERTY order -- I've encountered both, with the alphabetical order requiring me to stop and search for each letter much more than with the QWERTY-ordering I've been becoming used to for the last 40 years of near-daily exposure.

UTC or Zulu is great for data-logging and timestamping things, for later retrieval and reference. And also as a basis for figuring out when someone else in another time-zone is likely to be available, given the difference between UTC and their local time, as defined by the timezones. For scheduling any activity that involves people in different parts of the world it makes it unambigious when this activity is to take place. This is actually even more useful during the periods in spring or fall when the Daylight Saving changes go into or out of effect at different times in different places. So for example, deciding on a meeting at 15:00 in Oslo and 9 AM in Houston, by agreeing on this happening at 1400Z removes the ambiguity as to whether Daylight Saving is in effect or not at either of these places.

But as for a wall-clock time for general universal civil use, it is useless. Disregarding for the moment the general public's massive reluctance to this kind of change (compare with the less-than-great success changing to the metric system has been), the biggest problem is that each day will have one date in the morning and one in the afternoon. In timezone UTC-7 for example, such as found in the western US, this date changes happens at 1700 local time (or 5 PM), right in the middle of the afternoon. And since people mostly sleep during the night everywhere, there is still the need for others elsewhere in the world to be able to figure out when night and day occurs, in order to, for example, be able to schedule online meetings. The present-day tiimezone system, with all its warts and sillinesses, does a good job handling ths.

The original problem is that the twice-annual clock-changing caused by Daylight Saving is inconvenient, possibly minimally dangerous, and doesn't seem to serve much of any useful purpose. Any fix other than just leaving the clocks set to the same local time year will be worse than any of these, admittedly minor, problems that Daylight Saving has.

If it were this undocumented, why have there been many successful companies manufacturing and selling time-keeping devices (clocks, controllers, timers, etc) using this as the primary timekeeper source, for the last 70 years or so? Now, whether this is still the optimal way, in the age of solar panels, crystals and electronic frequency-dividers can be open to discussion. But there was, and still is, a promise and even a guarantee made, that the long-term stability of mains AC frequencies corresponding to the exact number of cycles per second in a 24-hour period is something that can be relied upon.

Agree on the big transformers. But there is no big magic to the 60 Hz vs 50 Hz as far as gearing goes. Main difference seen in equipment such as hour-counters and clocks that use the small synchronous motors, is that the 60 Hz model might have a gear with 10 teeth driving another gear somewhere, and the 50 Hz model has a 12 tooth gear in the same place. Or some other, similar difference, generally, a reduction ratio of 6:1 in a 60 Hz model is replaced by 5:1 in a 50 Hz model.

The MM5314 and similar clock chips that National Semiconductors made back in the 1970s were designed for taking the 60 Hz or 50 Hz from the mains as the time-reference; there was a selection input that changed the divider ratio from input to second-counting, between 50 and 60.

Then there is this, which is also bad, in several ways:

The computer has had a malfunction. Press any key to continue

[A]

Do you want to save the work done? [y/n]

[N]

Do you want to exit the program now? [y/n]

[Y]

(darkness follows)

These aren't heated significantly by whatever heat might be trapped by slightly more CO2 -- despite what politicians say, seeing as this whole Environment business has become more of just that, with excuses for taxation and making life more difficult for everyone. Unless you pay extra of course.

Instead, just the other week, there was news about some large hot magma plumes being present underneath the Twaites Glacier and other nearby areas, and that is what is heating up this ice. So it may still break out and put a lot of water into the ocean but for different reasons.

This ME thing is like a door on the back of the house. It is painted so as to not be easy to tell apart from the wall, but it is not impossible to discover. And it even has a lock, with a key that has a funny and strange shape.

And this backdoor is present on every house on the street. And although the key is of an obscure and not readily available design, it is the same one for all these houses. So once you find out how to open up one of these doors, opening any of the others on all the neighbors' houses from the same manufacturer iis easy, with the knowledge of the design of this key.

Some other houses may have been made by a different manufacturer. Some of these have similar doors with a different key that works on all of them, in much the same way. Then there are still a number of houses that are either too old, or made by a manufacturer that doesn't include this back door.

Point is, once the presence and nature of the back-door and its lock are known, the house is wide open, and security by obscurity has failed.