I figured someone would notice this. The system was designed around 1980, well before I started there. I'm not sure why the Z80 was chosen over the 6809. The explanation I was given was that the Z80 was more capable than the 6809. The Z80 was also less expensive, though given how much we sold the boards for I don't think a $20-ish difference in CPU price would have made a difference. It could have just been that the people designing it were more familiar with the Z80 and could design faster for it.

Ah, my first job out of college. Circa 1989, I got hired at Motorola to code Z80 on their EMX series of cellular telephone switches. But this was no ordinary Z80! This was a Z80 with blackjack! And hookers!

The board had an external MMU and a bank register gave it an effective 24-bit (16 MB) address space. There was an active processor and a standby processor, and 4 MB of the address space was shared between the active and standby. The MMU even had an NMI mask, so we could mask out non-maskable interrupts. I was super proud of myself that I taught our HP logic analyzer to understand the bank register and actually decode the full 24-bit address bus.

So many fond memories. Like counting clock cycles to make sure a task would run in the time allotted. Or the time a co-worker thought the I register was just another general purpose register. (It was actually the interrupt vector. Hilarity ensued.) Or the fact that we only had half a dozen machines in the lab, so lab time was scheduled 24 hours a day and you grabbed a slot whenever you could. Or the two weeks I spent all night, every night, sitting on the floor of a customer site in a refrigerated Bangkok switch room with a microfiche reader and stack of fiche about the size of a brick, typing opcodes into the debugging terminal on the running production system.

Wait, did I say fond memories? I meant nightmares.

Not really, most of us use Macs because we find Windows a disgusting cesspool of GUI abomination. Linux GUIs are equally as bad.

In all honesty, so is the Mac GUI. And I say this as someone who has used a Mac by choice for work for the past 15 years or so.

It's just a matter of taste. Do you personally prefer the taste of pig shit, cow shit, or horse shit? There's no point in arguing about which is better. At the end of the day, they're all shit.

Define: "Protect". If you play a game for more than about 10 hours it still becomes one of the cheapest forms of paid entertainment you've had, and you will have gotten your money worth out of it.

"Protect" means to defend against some undesired outcome, in this case the publisher making a previously purchased game unplayable. If you don't buy the game and don't play the game, they can't take it away from you. You could argue that this doesn't count, it's only "protection" in the sense that never visiting Asia is "protection" from wild tiger attacks. You're not at risk, but you don't get the benefit either. Fair enough.

But as you said, games are one of the cheapest forms of paid entertainment available. This has a relevant side-effect: Entertaining games are plentiful. Foregoing a particular game or even a particular publisher doesn't mean going without games completely. There are thousands of other titles out there, some just as fun as this game, which don't put you in danger of having the game arbitrarily removed from your library. There's no need to reward a publisher for their nonsense. Give your money to one of the many other publishers out there that make single-player games which run locally without requiring a connection to their server.

The article lands on a resounding "it depends". It depends on what you mean by "derivative", and it depends on how you measure "more".

I'm sorry, was there supposed to be a point to this article? If so I've missed it completely.

There could be microbes on Mars that Earth life has no immunity to. The chance is small, but not zero. Why take a say 1 in 500 chance of doomsday?

It's actually pretty darned unlikely, probably many orders of magnitude less likely than the 1 in 500 chance you suggested. The "has no immunity to" thing cuts both ways. The generalization of the statement is "has not evolved to affect" life from another planet. If Earth life hasn't evolved to defend against a Martian microbe, why would a Martian microbe have evolved to prey upon Earth life in the first place?

But we've already done sample returns from the Moon and asteroids, and we examine them in clean rooms with very tight controls. To be sure, the main reason is to keep Earth stuff from contaminating the samples, not the other way around, but there's still as complete a separation as possible in a lab. Scientists have read or seen The Andromeda Strain too.

It's way, WAY more likely that an existing Earth microbe would mutate into something we have no immunity to than it would be to find a random alien microbe that just randomly happens to be perfectly evolved to kill us while being able to completely dodge our immune systems.

No, the most ethical way to protect yourself is to simply not purchase (and not play) games which require you to always be online even for the single-player experience. Maybe if such games stop making money publishers will give up that stupid, stupid service model. If they continue to make money they'll continue to give us the shitty product we're so clearly willing to pay for.

They may not be right, but the fact that they've existed for as long as they have is evidence that they are not illegal. As for your car or any other thing which updates the T&C, I'm sure there's a clause buried in there that says you don't have to click anything, that if you reject the terms you need to discontinue use of the product. By continuing to use the product you've given your implicit consent to the T&C.

I'd love to see this kind of bullshit struck down in court someday, but I'm not holding my breath for it.

USAian here. IMHO, the bigger problem in US politics (I don't know about Canadian) is that the first-past-the-post electoral system by its nature polarizes the country. The system encourages it by penalizing anyone who votes for a moderate. Say that A and Z are the extreme candidates, and a moderate called J enters the race. J is closer to A in ideology, so will pull more voters away from A than away from Z. This splits the A vote and practically guarantees a win for Z, even if there's a sizeable majority who would have voted A if J wasn't an option. So, that's the first problem I see. We need an electoral system where you can vote for a moderate without fear of throwing the win to the candidate you like the least.

I'd go after political parties next. People here in both parties are actively demonizing the other. It's simply become cheering for your team. A lot of that is related to the problem above, but a lot is that we seem to like team sports. People are very loyal to "their" team. So, take away team membership. Demote political parties to the advisory level, no more or less powerful than any other group. Candidates wouldn't belong to a party, wouldn't have an (R) or (D) after their names. Instead, candidates would be endorsed by a party, just like candidates are currently endorsed by, say, the Teamsters or the NRA. The endorsement says "This candidate's goals currently align with ours." rather than "This candidate belongs to us." Just like the Teamsters and the NRA could (in theory) both endorse the same candidate, a middle-of-the-road candidate might actually get endorsed by both the Republicans and the Democrats. The aim here is to lessen the cheerleading section who think, "We want this guy to win because he's our guy!" without actually examining the candidate's actual positions or qualifications. I also want to stop the ridiculous "majority party is in charge" situation in Congress. That's just plain dumb. Remove the party identity, remove the disproportionate benefit of having a single person more in the majority party. Maybe congress will vote their consciences rather than voting strictly to score a win for their party or worse, voting simply to stop the other party from scoring a win.

It's probably hopelessly naive, but maybe it'll work for the next 250 years before it unravels like the current system has.

How is slinging fries, or any kitchen work for that matter, not manufacturing? At the very least it's assembly. What do you think of when you say "making things"? Do you mean creative or artistic work? If so, does the guy bolting together the same car parts all day qualify as "making things"? If so, why doesn't the guy stuffing the Happy Meal box qualify?

I'm not conservative by any measure. I just think there's a really weird distinction being made here, especially when you're discussing taking pride in one's work. And when it comes down to it, why don't you think people in the service industry take as much pride in serving others as people in manufacturing take pride in making things?

Immigrants from Latin America do not share our commitment to rule of law - corruption is commonplace, patronage and cronyism is expected, bribes and extortion is just cost of doing business. This is why these countries are so poor and people are fleeing them for US.

Doesn't that imply that the people who are immigrating do share a commitment to the rule of law? They're trying to leave the places with corruption to come to a country that values the opposite. The ones who are thriving in the lawless environment are staying where they are.

The trouble is, the American values you describe aren't even shared universally across Americans, right here and now. There's a huge battle going on right now against the separation of religion and state. People are making laws based on Christian scripture. There are people who think prayer (but only Christian prayer) belongs in schools. And rationality? Were you here for the past four years? COVID brought out the biggest wave of irrational science deniers and people fighting against evidence-based decision making. And strangely, whether you're pro-vaccine or pro-ivermectin you can look at the other side and claim that they're the irrational ones refusing to believe the evidence.

But let's talk specifically about freedom. Sure, you won't find any American who says they're against freedom. But what does freedom mean, specifically? Very few people actually believe in absolute freedom - the freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want, and to whomever I want. Most people would say I shouldn't be free to punch someone I disagree with. There's a huge rift right now over whether women should have the freedom of bodily autonomy regarding pregnancy, with a lot of the loudest advocates for freedom coming out against it. Or the freedom to choose your own pronouns and gender. The freedom to marry someone of the same sex. The freedom of people to smoke in public. In fact, your original post seemed to be opposed to the freedom to immigrate to this country. (At least, you stated that "I think collapse due to mass economic migration is more likely." That seems to be an argument against immigration, but who knows? Maybe you're pro-societal-collapse.)

Freedom is the quintessential American value - so vague that everyone can claim to be in favor of it while fighting tooth and nail to deny it to the people they don't agree with.

My point to all this is simply that "they don't share our values" is a not a valid reason to oppose immigration. There's no such thing as "our values". Half the people in this country already don't share the values of the other half. Or like "freedom", only share the ideal of it but not the practice. Immigration certainly isn't going to inject more chaos into what we already have.

Okay, Spanky, I'll bite. What are "our" values? I assume you're an American. So am I. Born and raised here. Parents and grandparents all born and raised here. And yet, I'm guessing that you and I don't share a lot of values. From your first example it sounds like you place much more value on gender conformity than I do. So do tell, which of "our" values aren't shared by immigrants? What views on the rule of law and community do you assume that we as Americans share?

(If you're not an American, I apologize. I'm sure that your country, whatever it is, is every bit as homogeneous in its beliefs as you've implied.)

Won't somebody please think of all the poor chemists and materials engineers that will be put out of work by these nasty job-stealing AIs?

Definitely. I have a friend in that category. A meteorite fell near where he lives and hit someone else's house. He offered to pay for roof repairs if he could have the meteorite -- and the section of roof that it hit. He's now the very proud owner of a space rock and about a 2 foot square section of residential roof with a hole in it. He has both mounted in a nice display.

I'm sure the batteries are worth more than just the salvage value, and probably worth more than the purchase price when new. (Not sure about that, space-rated stuff tends to be pricey.)