That's amusing. It's definitely possible to interpret the text the way you describe, and looking again, I'm sure that's what the author intended. But not only is the preceding phrase describing 123 on the top, so is the following phrase. So the parenthetical phrase refers to the 123 on the bottom, but in "it made for more accurate dialing," "it" flips back to 123 on top.

Yes, the upside down keypads are his "fault." The obit has the info wrong. Adding machine keypads always had the lower numbers at the bottom, and so do computer keypads. You can google for about this, but I think he figured that American phone users (who mostly weren't adding machine users) were used to reading from left to right and top to bottom, hence the order.

These high-tech mystery machines — 29 feet long — are about one-quarter the size of NASA's old space shuttles and can land automatically on a runway.

The X-37B is not one-quarter the size of the Space Shuttle, it's one-quarter the length of the Space Shuttle. The launch weight of the X-37B is 5.5 tons. The launch weight of the Space Shuttle is 125 tons. This ignorance about the meaning of dimensions reminds me of the Stonehenge scene from Spinal Tap.

Guns can be used for attack and defense. They can be used for killing innocent people, they can also be used to protect innocent people. It has been said, "God made men, Samuel Colt made them equal."

From tfa:

Inspired by the dictate within its Japanese parent company Rakuten to have all its employees become fluent in English, Jaconi decided to have everyone, from himself down to the interns, learn to code.

In other words, if anything, he should really be inspired by his parent company to force all his employees to learn Japanese, but JavaScript is easier.

re paying for a script, the value of a software product is not determined by whether its code is compiled or interpreted. re running old anti-malware, i assume you'll be able to update the control files for that over the web. re USB devices being writeable, I think a call to "mount -o ro,remount" on the stick solves that, doesn't it? re web surfing on an infected machine, usually it's the hard drive that's infected, and this system won't be using the hard drive as source for program files. if the nvram was corrupt, i assume this tool would be smart enough to deal with that too.

LISP had MAPCAR 50 years ago.

Articles mentioned him copyrighting the term EMAIL (and I repeated that non-fact), but his claim is really on the name EMAIL and his copyright, which was on his program and user manual, as noted on his web site here.

http://www.inventorofemail.com/

He calls himself the "inventor of email" which is silly. He registered a copyright with the US copyright office. Again, there did not seem to be any innovation involved. He wrote an email program, and registered his copyright. The only remotely interesting thing about it is that it was named EMAIL. If he had produced a television and called it TELEVISION, and it was after other people had already produced and refined televisions, it would be false to claim to be the inventor of television.

The guy wrote a program called EMAIL, and he copyrighted the name EMAIL. If he wrote a program called FMAIL, he could have copyrighted the name FMAIL. That doesn't mean he invented anything or did anything innovative. Again, saying he "invented email" is silly.

RFC 524 proposed a networked mail protocol in 1973. It notes that there was already a MAIL command for sending networked mail (on the ARPANET).

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc524

I agree that the guy's claim is dopey, and I'm not paying careful attention to Chomsky's claim, but I suspect that here he is playing some semantic game that he finds relevant in theory, but serves no useful purpose in fact.

A photo image like this tends to have pixels that each store 24 bits of RGB color (one of about 16.7 million light colors). A color laser printer pixel usually has one of four pixel ink colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, or black). You can compare the pixels, but you shouldn't compare them one to one.

so this glass has really bad rabies?

How will I decide whether I want a right ARM or a left ARM? If they are ambidextrous, will it matter?

The fact that NASA went to the moon in 1969 was interesting, exciting, and fun. I remember where I was that day. At the dentist, with a portable tv from home, and when we put it in back the trunk of our car, we smashed the rabbit-ears antenna that we forgot to fold down before we shut the trunk lid.

That said, the question isn't "was it cool?" or even "was it worth it?" It's "what if Apollo never happened?

Most of us agree that it was cool. Was the expenditure to get a man on the moon worth it? Let's say it cost 40 billion 1970 dollars, which is like 100 billion today dollars (that's not exact, but in the ballpark). Was it that much money's worth of cool? Hard to say, but that's not really important to the "what if" question. And I bet if Apollo were a new project today, it would cost a trillion dollars. Especially considering that it cost the USA 15 billion dollars to reroute 10 miles of highway under Boston.

People who are saying that we wouldn't have the internet or tang or teflon are mistaken, because the moon money might have been spent on other science projects. As it was, the space program was allied with the techno-military-industrial complex already, so other innovation would have happened even without a moonshot.

I'm not a moon landing hoax person, but I know enough about science to understand that the cost of doing stuff on the moon and especially on distant celestial bodies, because of the distances and the hostile environments, makes it all rather impractical. Doing stuff in weightlessness, sure. In geosynchronous earth orbit, sure. On the moon? Maybe. But sending people to Mars or Jupiter or Alpha Centauri is more of a sucker's bet.

If the space program hadn't happened, that would be an outcome of events contrary to what was. The act of discussing it isn't ironic or contrary to anything, it's just a discussion. If the LA Lakers beat the Chicago Bulls in a basketball game with a last-second basket, and I say, "what if they missed that last shot," it's not ironic.