Then maybe, as a highly visible public official, he should have kept his mouth shut until he'd consulted the public health people who actually know what they're talking about. I suspect he knows how to use a telephone.

God forbid that some poor kid ever accidentally knock a softball over the White House fence. He'd never escape Gitmo.

while there were various decent, proprietary, dialects that let you actually write code that did stuff, *standard* Pascal was as much use as a chocolate teapot

And that's still a problem today. There's no standard for OO Pascal, and the ANSI Pascal standards have been moribund since 1990.

That's why I abandoned Pascal (and Modula-2): I didn't want to get locked in to a single vendor.

More to the point, Android is an open source and freely redistributable platform.

There was no GPL purge.

Thanks, Baghdad Bob, but I've been monitoring the purge for some time.

Samba is no longer used in Mac OS X.

Apple got rid of it as part of their GPL software purge.

Check the single-threaded performance - AMD is 50% faster than Intel.

(Not often you get to say that these days....)

Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend. Speech that offends no-one needs no protection.

Not having gone to MIT myself, I always wondered if the MIT phone system really had the following error recording?

Others have already mentioned the dot-matrix printer, but there was a big one before that: the high speed line printer. They were too expensive for individuals, but they certainly were a familiar sound to 1970s programming students like me.

There were two main types: the drum printer and the chain printer. The drum printer was cheaper and therefore much more common. The drum, which contained all the characters in a given font, rotated once for each row printed. An entire row was printed simultaneously; a separate solenoid-driven hammer in each column fired at the right instant to print the desired character in that column. You could easily tell from across the room whether your program had failed to compile or if execution ended with a core (!) dump. The burst pages between jobs had their own highly characteristic sound.

A related sound is that of ripping fanfold line printer paper to separate jobs. Who uses any kind of fanfold paper these days? Or even paper...?

Oh, and let's not forget the sound of the Hollerith (IBM punch card) reader...

It may be illegal to lie for gain, particularly for a corporation, depending on the precise details of the case. They're opening themselves up to criminal charges, not to mention civil lawsuits.

Is NK still off the net? About a half hour ago I had no trouble reaching the sites www.kcna.kp - 175.45.177.74 / 175.45.176.71 naenara.com.kp - 175.45.176.67 / 175.45.177.77 According to https://www.northkoreatech.org..., both sites are physically hosted inside North Korea. I see that both are in the 175.45.176.0/22 block that whois says is assigned to North Korea, and traceroute shows an extra latency (satellite hop?) for that network past China. Is that their only net block? A /22 is 1024 addresses, which I keep hearing is the total number for the entire country.