It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

-- Nineteen Eighty-Four

Clueless troll is clueless. And also punctuates poorly.

So "this one is deterministic" seems like a weak complaint.

By your standards, this PRNG isn't so bad.

"Now" is an expensive luxury. Don't be surprised it's priced rather luxuriously.

All of that means that you're buying your discounted hardware with your personal information and your willing agreement to be another statistic in their advertising numbers.

I suspect that's a fair trade for a lot of people, considering how little they actually value their privacy.

Fallout New Vegas has a man-portable 25mm automatic grenade launcher. It has an on-screen display scrolling what looks like code while the weapon is firing.

The code? It's a piece of BASH scripting. With a crippling syntax error ("if" without closing "fi").

If this was the height of alternate-history pre-war embedded software technology, I can understand why derelict car engines can explode in a nuclear explosion.

TBH, we grub all kinds of dirt out of the ground and make the highest of high tech with it, so your statement is misleading. It's not strictly a dark ages thing. More like a "civilization on Earth" thing.

If you have a meaningful argument, that wasn't it.

True. Oldtimers like me don't really look back fondly on the birthday of the Web.

We did just fine with FTP and Gopher and NNTP. The 'net had a moderately high intellectual entry barrier. It was hard, and it was complicated. It was its own intelligence test. We didn't have to suffer fools gladly; fools couldn't even work the doorknob, let alone enter and sully us with their foolishness.

If I'm going to bravely cheer the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web, I may as well applaud the first day of the September that Never Ended. Damn dirty AOL'ers.

Berners-Lee is an Englishman, a Londoner for God's sake. You'd think he'd know the history of his own city and country.

You're right. The Magna Carta was practically signed at swordpoint. And, more importantly, it wasn't a charter of rights for all humanity: it was principally a charter of the rights and powers of the nobility: the barons on the non-pointy end of the swords. In this sense, perhaps the megacorp oligarchs could get a Magna Carta, but it wouldn't make a damn sniff of difference to us peasants.

At the very end of the 5 1/4" floppy era, the "High-Density" floppy used the same data rate, tracking, and recording density as the 8" 1.2M floppies. They were, in fact, 1.2M 5 1/4" floppies. Which is why their formatted capacity was different from 3.5" "high-density" equivalent, 1.44M.

Other than electrical needs (as 8" floppies often had their spindle motors directly powered by 120VAC line current), the high-density 5 1/4"s were used as a drop-in replacement for 8" floppies in the hobbyist retrocomputing community. (Not collectors, though; they'd want to keep the gear as cherry as possible.)

I'm wounded. I'm a troll, but not that kind; I'm the kind that lurks in caves or under bridges, but harmless because sunlight is an existential threat to me.

I wasn't really kidding, either. Those were my exact thoughts 30 years ago as I sat at my Z-100 computer logged into my local DEC machine (across the flight line) through a 300 baud acoustic modem, manually updating the system's HOSTS file from the latest "master copy" I FTP'd down from ISI.Good time... good times.

So you invite everyone in the world to submit their domain name and IP address on postcards?

Yes. HOSTS files. Exchange HOSTS files. Manually merge and edit them.

TBH, I thought DNS was going to be a fad.

(Yes, I'm capitalizing HOSTS because that's what it was called on the pre-historic TOPS-20 system I was using. I also thought that commie-pinko "unix" thing was also going to be a fad.)

Wait, isn't that when it turned into a poorly-concealed marketing vehicle for its corporate owners?

I'm guessing it's differences in copyright regimes. At the very least, negotiating streaming rights with major rights-holders in one country must be exhausing and traumatizing. Having done that for one major country (your own home country and primary market), I could understand being hesitant about doing the whole damn thing over and over again in one tiny* country after another, in the face of borderline-chauvinistic media-corporation protectionism (not to mention "cultural protectionism"... I'm looking at you, France).

*Yeah, tiny. USA is a big market. The individual nations of Europe are proportionately little, with correspondingly less return on investment, even leaving aside internal incumbent competition.

I'd be more inclined to believe GPP if I saw all this material in a Powerpoint presentation. It just loses some of its credibility and impact without one of Microsoft's standard templates framing it.