, go bored after three and delete the other twenty.

Don't worry. Soon permanent storage space will be so big that nobody deletes anymore. After a while, rm will be removed from Linux distros. You'll just revision the data on your drive, never actually deleting anything. Ha-ha, only serious.

If you're not writing x86 assembly by hand, you have no right to complain. Then an even older guy goes, "if you're not punching cards, you have no right to complain". Then an even older guy goes, "If you're not flipping switches and soldering wires you have no right to complain". Finally, the oldest man in the room stands up and says: "Before there were machines called computers, there were people who did calculations by hand. They were called computers. Most of them were women. If you didn't marry her, you have no right to complain".

it's all about advertising, page views and the sale of your personal data.

I've attempted to coin the term "surveillatizing" for this; but I'm not famous. Many companies are on the spectrum between surveillance and advertising. Anything labeled "security" tends to get corrupted into surveillance. It has become a cliche that when the product is free, you're the product. Most of the casual gaming, cute little app companies are shoving ads at you in some way. IMHO, there's no such thing as pure advertising apps though. Print ads would be an example of pure advertising, since the ad can't pull data from the reader. The aggregation and monitoring aspects of web/mobile ads throw in the element of surveillance. Surveillatizing.

It was really hard for me to get passionate about surveillance or advertising. I've dropped out.

If wiki is to be believed, you're not going to have much luck. I was aware that "wardriving" came from "wardialing" but didn't know that the "war" part was a War Games reference. TIL (Today I Learned, for those not familiar with Reddit).

This reminds me of ls.bat and various other little .bat files people put on DOS and Windows machines for obvious reasons.

bugs per kg of code

That code is heavy, man /hippie.

Before the Internet, Chinese in their villages wondered what was happening in the world. After the Internet, Chinese in their villages looked at their mobile phones and wondered what is happening in the world.

Even painting would be completely incapable of producing realistic "colors," and we'd all just have to agree than the ochre blob really looks like a rose.

You could still mix the paint to be the color of a rose, since the rose's color is also just a pigment. Worst case, you get an actual rose and try to find some way to stabilize the pigments. We might have developed sophisticated organic chemistry at an earlier stage, simply so we could produce art. More likely, the artist's palette would simply have a lot more colors on it. Mixing would take more time and skill. Paintings would be more expensive. High-end painting was always for the wealthy anyway though, so I don't think art would have been hurt too badly. If mixing colors was too difficult, then the worst case is that art might have been dominated by grey scale techniques for a long period of time.

The task of developing a decent computer monitor sounds harder. Even then though, there would be some binning of frequencies. How much spectral resolution do you need to appreciate music? If I can barely tell the difference between C and C#, I will never be a great musician... but I might still be able to appreciate it on some level. If each pixel had 16 different frequencies and 16 levels, it would obviously not look real to people with high spectral resolution. OTOH, it would probably look better than monochrome. It might be like listening to a scratchy old AM radio--better than nothing.

If you passed the standard screening test in school, you probably thought you were perfect in this regard. Actually, most of us have some weakness and there are tests for that. Try this one. It was rather tedious for me; one of the hardest perceptual tests I've taken. You need patience, so set aside some time. I got a TES (Total Error Score) of 12. YMMV because of monitor quality and other factors. The official version of this test uses actual physical tiles, and specifies what kind of lighting to use in the room.

The spec said 18 meters, not 1.8 mm!.

You can't grow much food either. If you're lucky, you can grow a few tomatoes in pots on the balcony. You knew that going in. The trade-off is that you can walk to a farmer's market.

I have no sympathy, assuming that you're actually serious about looking at things this way. Aside from that, power companies aren't the only thing that we have to pay into. If you moved back to suburbia, you're buying more gasoline, you're having to figure out what to do with grass, trees, and garden pests.

Trade-offs. Life is full of them.

I'm guessing it's because the BBS operator didn't sell that as a reliable service. You knew those machines were there. You knew you could route through the BBS to those machines. You had passwords for those machines.

If your BBS's sysop had known a teacher or something, gotten a password, and then re-sold that service... TROUBLE.

FWIW, I was a bit taken aback by TFA because I was under the impression that there was no commercial dial-up Internet until some kind of law was passed in the early 90s, and that AOL and/or CompuServe had something to do with lobbying for it.

Requisition item 453/67-A2NX, drag buoy and speedboat package. Secure an ordinary ski rope to the drag buoy, and detail personnel to effect rescue with speedboat if you lose your grip. Don't you guys know anything?

Raise your hand if you never heard of it. There's just too many people that want to do this kind of thing. I don't think it would have helped them, but the site design sucks too. 1. Metro-like on the front page, always a bad sign. 2. Read the article on Zanskar, which is interesting except that the borderless wall of photos that fill the window is too hard to scroll through on my machine... It jerk, Jerk, JERKS and I have to play finger games to maybe get it to line up right. Don't make it hard on your users like that.

I suppose it all looks great on an iPad, but really... writing code that accomodates different (and not nearly as uncommon as you think) browsers really shouldn't be that hard.

Of course none of that would have saved them because like I said, there's too much of this stuff already.

I look forward to more $unknown_site is shutting down articles on /. in the future.

This makes me wonder if Carl Sagan ever built his own telescope. If you don't grind your own optics, then the level of difficulty is comparable to building a PC since you're just assembling components. When I was into astronomy I never built a scope.

There is a quote that goes something like, "computer science is about computers like astronomy is about telescopes". Googling that is left as an exercise. Wait, maybe I should build my own search engine.

In other words, don't worry about it. The NC should remain in your possession.