* Look at it within a few minutes = text

The school bus is going to be 25 minutes late, yes I'd like to see that notice from the school letting me know this in a timely fashion.

It's not my fault you lack the ability to not to look at your phone every time it goes buzz buzz in your pocket.

There are several allocations for radio astronomy across different bands that correspond with spectral lines for various elements and chemicals.

See the list of allocations here: http://www.naic.edu/~rfiuser/s...

Also, the Military Academies need to be training people they can order to pick up a gun and run into a free fire zone.

That's how the new Lieutenant gets himself shot in the leg and the enlisted grunts have to go and pull his stupid ass out of a ditch.

I noticed that some of the songs I was listening to did not match up with CD recordings of the same songs I own. The versions playing on Sirius were shortened.

They play the single edits instead of the album versions. This is not unusual at all. This is done to a LOT of songs to fit in a 3 minute or so time period for radio. I'm not entirely sure how you've never noticed this.

First it was Dire Straights - Money For Nothing. An entire verse was
removed (I initially chalked it up to SJWs).

There are multiple versions/edits of this song.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Length

        8:25 (Album version)
        7:04 (Vinyl LP Edit)
        4:38 (Official Single Edit)
        4:06 (Promo Single Edit)

Then it was Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear The Reaper. Almost the entire instrumental part was cut.

Check out the length on the single for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Length
  5:08
  3:45 (single edit)

There is your missing instrumental.

Then it was Boston - Don't Look Back.

Also from wikipedia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Length
5:58 (Album Version);
4:05 (Radio Edit)

You seriously never knew about singles often being different?

The difference is ethanol being added to the gasoline. Ethanol is hygroscopic. That means you're going to end up with water in your gasoline, not good. In some parts of the US you can still get ethanol free gasoline, especially marinas.

Ethanol free gasoline with fuel stabilizer will last just like it did back in the old days.

In this case, bauxite.

The PDF linked from the article has a FAR better explaination:

http://www.imo.org/en/MediaCen...

Well the DCC protocol itself isn't actually a part of the IRC protocol itself. It's an informal add-on to the protocol, that involves the clients speaking to themselves.

As far as traversing NAT goes, unless you have a specific protocol handler for IRC, like you would for FTP, it doesn't. If you had a file send protocol that was based on UDP, you could use IRC as a replacement for a STUN server. However, that is a completely client side issue, its not something the IRC protocol itself addresses directly, maybe it should though.

Is there such a thing as "the" IRC code, I was under the impression it was a protocol not an implementation.

It's both. There are many IRC daemons out there, most of them written in C, thats what the clients connect to. The protocol presented to the client tends to be mostly compatible across implementations, with various minor quirks here and there.

But in any case I think the DCC code would need a major workover.

As far as DCC goes, thats a client side protocol, that really doesn't involved the ircd at all beyond passing the messages between the clients exchange the IP/port info.

Or really any non-text case, today I'd probably go for JSON or XML,

One of the nice things about the IRC protocol itself is that it is rather fast to parse. You can pretty easily parse it with something like strtok(). Given the time period the protocol was designed, speed of parsing is very important. Especially since most IRC daemons single threaded event driven processes.

I'd 100% agree with you that trying to turn IRC into something modern like Slack just doesn't make sense. I know I certainly wouldn't try doing it.

Things like channels and nicknames, really don't work so well in modern contexts. The fact that it is an ephemeral medium, that if you're not connected to IRC, you don't have any chat history.
Trying to use IRC on a mobile device is even worse, nothing like getting a ping timeout and not realizing it for a few minutes because you hit a dead zone. Then you disconnect/rejoin rinse and repeat.

The one thing about working on an IRC daemon is that you learn a lot of lessons on how NOT to design a modern chat system.

At least that's the viewpoint of this jaded ircd-ratbox coder ;)

Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet, but EFnet is still dying.

You've obviously never had the misfortune of using satellite internet. Max out your cap in one evening. God forbid you need to SSH to something, yay latency. MOSH is a lot more pleasant at least if you have to do an interactive shell over it, local echo and all. I will say this, satellite internet is never going to be anyone's first option, it's pretty much their last option(or dialup I guess).

Make everyone at your office use IRC with Microsoft Comic Chat.

That's pretty much what Teams is anyways, without being as much fun.

The 2.5" form factory has been around since the early 90s if I recall correctly. Pretty much just for laptops back then.

I've got a 2008 VW Jetta with 255000 miles on it...

Are there places where I can type a VW part number and get the equivalent alibaba part or somesuch ?

Well you are likely not going to find third party parts for many things in a VW, especially electronics related. However, you can find a lot of used parts on ebay just by searching for the part number alone. However there is often a compatible part number that is slightly different too, depends on the part etc. So you'd need to be careful.

Partslink24 is a good resource(if a bit spendy for a subscription) to look up part numbers based on VIN. Though things like your transmission control modules might need to be recoded with something like VCDS if you buy a used one.