It seems right that since I announced the BBS Documentary production on Slashdot, I should also take the time to give testimony to one of its primary interviewees that took it from side fun project to meaningful historical work.

My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.

They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.

There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.

Some notes:

https://github.com/microsoft/w...

It's basically a Wayland implementation that is exported via RDP protocol.

Amazing how quickly morons adopt the terminology propagandized by their party's political officers. "Insurrectionists" indeed.

Though I did enjoy your Beautiful Mind-level tapestry of innuendo, projection, and theorizing utilized to support it.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

I'm no fan of corporate welfare, but $50B is cheap.

Half of the federal budget is actual welfare, about $2T, which doesn't exactly go into the pockets of Americans either. It's a big trough where lots of other corporations feed, and millions of middlemen wet their beak.

Returning the silicon to Silicon Valley (or, more likely, Texas) is a good thing all around for America and Americans. If we can keep our chips from even having a whiff of NSA fingers, that's a competitive advantage to the rest of the world. And it makes a home for the technically inclined so they have a career path that doesn't end in yak shaving in the bowels of some high-frequency trading company to gain an extra nanosecond. Offshoring our manufacturing is 100% the worst thing our leaders, both corporate and government, has done to the country.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

What is the endgame of these transparently partisan articles? Do they really think that people are so gullible they'll read the headline and say, "I guess Trump is the worst thing in the entire world. Literally Hitler."?

It's all so tiresome.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.

That's daft. Entering into the search market when Google did is a completely different animal than entering into the search market now. Google's one good idea--PageRank--was so much better than the other methods that it quickly dominated. From that it built a market valuation with very few rivals. During that time, the Internet grew exponentially, and the technology required to keep up has grown commensurately. Google may have started as a box under Sergei's desk, but you can't do that now. There's simply too much.

Even if you have a killer idea to revitalize Internet searching, good luck getting the kind of funding you would require. Your best bet is to bootstrap it, hope Google doesn't patent-troll you to death, and have getting bought out by Bing (or Google) as your exit strategy.

In any event, the quality of Google's primary product (that isn't slurping your personal data) isn't what it used to be. Trying to find something using Google is no longer the go-to. You have to use Google, Bing, DDG, whatever else you can find in order to get what you're looking for. Google's taken their dominant platform, and using political correctness as cover, to mold reality. Search terms for things Google doesn't like aren't suggested. Sites that Google determines are "untrustworthy" are deranked. And Google likes it that way.

If your instinctive reaction to anything Google touches isn't "how is this bad for my personal data and good for Google," you have to turn in your nerd card. Google is worse than '90s Microsoft on every metric, with the added insult that they think they're still an upstart with noble goals.