Perl for all its foibles, and it had many, is still a mainstay of programming language history. Amazon was originally written in mod_perl. Lincoln Stein's torture.pl was written in Perl. Hell, the file type suffix .pl means Perl and, really, it always will mean Perl.

When someone first handed me the Perl O'Reilly book, my reaction was, no way am I going to program in a language whose reference manual is that thick. And indeed, Perl contains many baroque constructs enough to make me wonder if Larry wall had a computer science background in programming languages. I suspect he did not but I could be wrong.

All that being said until Python came along I always felt that Perl was far superior to sh, bash, etc. and the language of choice for scripting.

Please Larry, retract your approval.

Dennis Allard
Ocean Park
October 13, 2029

Agile is New Age bullshit. Do you think Ken Thompson used agile in inventing snd developing UNIX? Do you think Linus Torvalds and the hundreds of developers that are developing Linux use agile? If you do you're wrong.

  Instead they use good design and communicate when necessary, not in some prescribed pre-formatted way.

  There's a lot to say on the subject but if you can take agile as a way to not do things then you're getting a good start.

The so-called "AI" machines actually only do pattern recognition. The logic component of AlphaGo is programmed.

Even Hinton the pioneer of neural nets thinks that the current AI is not really intelligence and that we need to "start over"

The libertarian fundamentalists who argue that the solution will not work unless it is less costly than the alternatives ignore the cost of extinction of the human species. In general libertarian fundamentalists ignore costs to society that are indirect such as the effects of pollution.

The thing not understood by Fundamentalist Libertarians (yes, it's a religion) and other's who believe Capitalism is the only answer is that socialists (socialist has many meanings, I will unapologetically stick to mine) are not against ownership of property, they are for finding a system where MORE people have property and ownership and control of their lives. Capitalists make most of their money by virtue of what they own. I believe we could convert all renters into home owners, for example. That would require new laws making it impossible to rent a property to a person as their primary residence. And it would require replacing for-profit banks by nationalized distribute-profits-back-to-the-tax-base banks that, over a few decades buy out all current land lords (lords being a feudal concept), and replace that system by a system of much more equitably distributed ownership. Same goes for companies. Fine that a top notch PHP programmer was able to become a billionaire by being in the right place at the right time and making the right moves. In a socialist economy he would still be very well rewarded but laws requiring all employees to own part of the company along with much more progressive taxation would also help level the playing field.

Systems like in Denmark, Norwayt, and Germany just go a small step toward my above-hinted-at concept of socialism, but they are a start. Germany is a net exporting industrialized country with tax-base paid education for all and health insurance for all. If they can do it, the U.S. could do it.

See: http://oceanpark.com/blog/2013/10/no-rent-and-distributed-ownership/

Dennis Allard
Santa Monica
July 16, 2018

Rei wrote (incorrectly):

> For a bit more ($104k) you can get a 2-seater a Pipistrel Alpha Electro [wikipedia.org] with a cruising speed of 200 kph and a range of 600km.

Rei, your citation is incorrect - the above speed and range numbers are for the gas-powered trainer.

The Electric version has a one hour flight time and the article you cited does not indicate airspeed for the Alpha Electro.

Bummer, but please be careful when citing specs.

Dennis Allard
Santa Monica, California
http://oceanpark.com/

I first brought up oceanpark.com on Slackware Linux in 1993. I seem to recall it was running on an 80386 but I may very well be mistaken. It was using a 14.4 modem running gopher and FTP 24x7 and later of course served web sites. I recall when I later converted from acoustic model to DSL -- I remember doing that in stages where at first inbound packets came in through the acoustic modem and outbound went out through the faster DSL connection (I don't recall the routing and DSL shenanigans involved just now). I do recall that all that was configured without having to reboot the machine (something unimaginable for a Windows server). Those were the days man.

> asked her [my mom] if there were guns in the house, how they were stored, and who (including names and relationships) had access to them

And the appropriate answer to that would be: "None of your business".

Good = Ken Thompson (contemporary of both Gates and Jobs)
Bad = Any app (e.g. GMail iPhone app) that displays just the time or just the date or just "N days ago"
Bad = Blog posts with no date of publication shown in the body
Overrated = Apple GUIs
Bad = Windows shortcuts
Good = UNIX symlinks

When I compose or reply in iPhone GMail, there app inserts a space character to the left of the first character I enter. I am forced to manually go back and remove that space in order to avoid an ugly single character indent of my first paragraph.

slew wrote:
> Because no-one has ever in history designed a machine that could...
> * operate switchboards better than a human could
> * compute ballistic trajectories better than a human could
> * transcribe documents better than a human could
> * assemble electronics better than a human could
> * sort mail better than a human could
>
> This stuff has been going on for a couple centuries now displacing lower-middle class workers.
>

But those technologies were not Turing machines and, most importantly, they were not Turing machines that are on the verge of being able to create other Turing machine that can do *any* task done by humans now or in the future.

To look at the extreme (and so far hypothetical case), suppose we do reach a point where an AI is created that can create other AIs to replace all existing human workers? If those AIs are owned by a small number of humans, then those owner humans will, progressively, obtain all wealth since they will own the work done by all of the new AI machine workers. Society and most human work is already owned by the Capitalists but in this hypothetical extreme case, there would be no need for all but a handful of Capitalist owners (let's call then neo-Kings). What reason would the owners, the neo-Kings, have to share wealth with the no-longer-working humans (the rest of humanity)?

Basically, this is the ultimate Capitalist end point. It can't be reached unless the humans (almost all humans) that no longer have work are given enough to prevent them from removing the owners and taking ownership of the machines and putting social mechanisms into place that assure a reasonable (to be defined) distribution of wealth. Capitalism would have reached an end point where it was no longer capable, per se, of assuring that reasonable distribution of wealth.

Dennis Allard
Santa Monica
December 5, 2016

Cramer, you may be right, but one must try. You'd think that with the likes of Amazon and Netflix being affected last Friday that might rattle some cages. Cheers - Dennis (Dennis G. Allard)

PEIP marks IP packets, so UDP is also handled.

Thanks Don, the above reply was obviously from you (Don Cohen).

PEIP and Fair Service require implementation on a cooperating network of routers in which case what is encoded in each router only requires space proportional to the number of hops to the router times the number of ancestor routers of the router.

As stated in http://www.cs3-inc.com/pubs/el... :

The longest paths in the Internet are currently about 25 hops. The average is actually much less. The routers that forward packets are typically connected to no more than 16 other routers. Therefore a typicalhop should take no more than 4 bits. This gives a total of about 16 bytes for the longest paths in IPv4 (including the 4 byte explicit address) and 28 bytes in IPv6 (where the explicit address is 16 bytes).

Of course, in packets with an extra path, the expense could be twice as high. However, as noted above, these packets make up a small fraction of the traffic in the Internet. To give an idea of the value of the bandwidth being used, it is relevant to mention that the smallest possible IPv6 header is 40 bytes, whereas the smallest possible IPv4 header is 20 bytes. Most IPv4 headers are actually the minumum length. Anyone who wants to move from IPv4 to IPv6 therefore must be willing to pay 20 bytes per packet.

The time it takes a router to add its data to the path is a small constant. This should pose not a serious problem. If expanding a packet is problematic for specific routers, it would be possible to pre-allocate space. A more serious problem is that this extra data might require fragmentation. For non-attack traffic this does not seem like a major problem. TCP traffic, which comprises most of the traffic in the Internet, avoids this problem by using non-fragmentable packets to find a Path MTU. Attack traffic is discussed below.

A reasonable question is what maximum size of paths must be supported. Both IPv4 and IPv6 limit paths to 255 hops. As noted above, this is far more than any real paths. Of course, legitimate paths must not be cut off since that prevents source tracing. On the other hand, there are good reasons to limit the length to the maximum realistic path length. Something in the range of 30 hops or 16 bytes (for IPv4) seems like a reasonable limit.