For companies, they're basically pirate ships populated by people who think of themselves as laws unto themselves, as glorious buccaneers .

Ok. Who else read this sentence and visualized the Crimson Permanent Assurance sailing the Bounding Main (Street)?

I had to smile, even though the real topic is depressing as hell.

You don't believe in "chilling effects?" Threats regarding non-disclosure often include themselves in their subject matter... "you can't disclose X, Y, and Z, and you also can't disclose that you can't disclose X, Y, and Z"... and the threat can be sufficiently onerous to be credible.

I think you overrate the intimidating power of nominally legitimate instruments of judicial power, and underestimate the power of simply dragging someone through the courts for years on end. The process is its own punishment, and the threat of the process is quite often enough.

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.