Hah! I wrote my own VisiCalc program for a computer science class I was taking. I wrote it in C and it ran on a minicomputer but it was the slickest thing I'd ever written up to that point. It even supported algebraic precedence in computing cell formulas. I wish I still had the code for it because it worked very well and it did everything I use spreadsheets for today.

Why? Because it looks better. Besides, when I learned to type (in 1976) with a real "manual" (meaning not electric) typewriter, the standard practice was to append to a period at the end of a sentence two spaces. It looked better than and it still looks better now.

I don't think water reclamation is any fancy new technology. Expensive to be sure....

Indeed, it is not new technology. Municipalities have been doing it for decades. But it is not expensive. The water that is discharged into rivers, streams, and oceans (at least in California) from sewage treatment plants has long been drinkable.

I seem to remember a story from years ago where the folks in Humboldt County in northern California needed to build a new sewage treatment plant and elected to recreate some wet lands instead to do the job. It does the same things that a conventional sewage treatment plant does, just at a much slower pace, and it's much better from an environmental standpoint. However, the swamp did have some chlorination equipment at the outlet where the treated water drained into the ocean because it was required by state law even though it was unnecessary.

I wonder if these new schools will feature lessons on Elon Musk's penchant for arrogance, mendacity, bigotry, foolishness, and idiocy. His actions since he took over ExTwitter have certain borne out these aspects of his character. The man's intelligent but he seems to have a peculiar ability to sublimate his gifts when running X as his actions there have brought out the worst in the man.

I thought I was a television addict when I was a teenager. With my addictive personality, if I were a teenager today I would be doomed. I'd go through withdrawal pains every time I put the phone down. Word of warning: never give a teenager a smart phone! So they'll be unpopular because all their friends have the smart phones. It might keep them from getting pregnant, fathering children, or catching STD's. Also, feed them lots of food so they get fat and no one wants to have sex with them. Well, maybe that logic wouldn't work with girls because from my experience it was the fat girls who were "easy."

Both DeSantis and Haley are fucking political whores who will say and do anything to get elected. I don't trust them and neither should you. Having said that either one of them just might be preferable to the Orange Menace, who is demonstrably incompetent and completely untrustworthy. At least DeSantis and Haley can act like grown-ups if they want to. The Orange Menace is a narcissistic, petulant man-child. Biden is more competent and honorable than any of them but even he I believe would attempt to ban anonymous speech through social media or any other medium if they thought it would benefit him politically.

What politicians really don't realize is that the right to anonymous speech is absolutely necessary to a well-functioning free society. Even that idiot Clarence Thomas recognized this in his concurrence in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995). He probably wrote it in crayon but they are likely his ideas. It's worth reading.

I had the privilege of using Nikolas Worth's original Pascal compiler written for the Control Data 6000-series supercomputers from the mid-1960's. Well, not the first version of it but one of its revisions (bug fixes and such). This would have been in the mid-1980's. It was a very nice compiler, written, of course, in Pascal and it was pretty fast. The compiler, however, did not generate object code that would allow you to debug programs using the operating system's interactive debugger for reasons I never learned. Its custom runtime, if it was turned on, did perform a variable dump to the output when the program threw an exception. One of the puzzles about Pascal I never figured out might have something to do with the CDC 6000-series machine instruction set: why the integer divide operator was DIV instead of /. The CDC 6000-series machines and their successors had no integer divide instruction. Instead, you used an instruction that converted the low 48 bits of the 60-bit integer to floating point format, performed a floating point divide, and then use the reverse instruction to get the result back into integer format.

I really don't believe this conclusion that regular Internet use does not cause mental problems. This is based upon my own person experience. I'm a self-described news junkie (why else would I be regularly refreshing this site?) and I think I am at least mildly addicted to a regular news feed. Furthermore, as a person who used chat rooms before the Internet I can tell you that those kinds of things are very addictive. As a result, I don't use any form of social media at all with the exception of YouTube because it really isn't part of that spectrum even those some put in there. I'm not going to give up the news feeds, however. I need to know what is going on in the country and the world.

My first real experience with Windows was version 3.1. I learned how to write Windows app in that using the Borland C++ IDE. It was not the most stable thing and it was fun to watch it crash it with my stupid mistakes that overflowed the program stack and ate the OS.

But then Windows 95 came out and everything changed. Yes, as an operating system it was a piece of shit. But it was also perhaps the most incredible software engineering hack in history. Microsoft was have been then and still is today a shitty company and it has produced a lot of crap over its history but, man, they spent a hell of a lot of time, effort, and money to make sure that the OS worked with every hardware configuration and device they could possibly think of and they mostly got it right. They did a fantastic job.

And then there is the introduction of "plug-and-play", which to me was the best thing since sliced bread. No more having to reconfigure the OS so it could learn about the presence of some new card or device attached to the computer. Windows 95 just figured out what was there and did the appropriate configuration. Of course, it didn't always work right, hence the term "plug and pray ." Still, it was much better that what we had to do in "the old days." Today, the most prominent Linux distributions do plug-and-play and the youngsters today think nothing of it but in 1995 it was something very new and special.

He'll have to exchange the business suits sans a tie and trade them in for prison uniforms, but at least they won't be orange. In Federal prisons, the clothes are khaki, or so I am told by people I know who have been unfortunate enough to have lived in such places.

As for the to-be-convicted-Orange-Eminence-soon-as-next-year is concerned, it's a shame that he won't have to wear orange either. It would go so well with his coloring. Of course, I doubt they wear khaki in Georgia prisons which it seems he will end up first.

I'm not so certain that running Sonoma on old hardware is such a good idea. I recently upgraded my shiny, month-old M1 iMac to Sonoma. Big mistake! Aside from the fact that it still have has the incredibly stupidly designed and badly thought out DVD player app inherited from the rewrite performed for Mojave a few years ago, and now it has issues when playing DVD's. However, those problems are due to the OS itself, not the player because they also occur with VLC. These problems did not exist with Ventura. I'm debating downloading Ventura and moving back to it. Sonoma is the shittiest version of macOS I've yet to use.

Really? Like South Africa, probably the most advanced country economically in Africa that has a woefully inadequate and aging electrical infrastructure due to lack of investment in it by the government? It's had persistent blackouts for twenty years. You are a fool, you know.

I don't give a rat's ass about the fate of the oil-dependent Arabs or for that matter the non-Arab Iranians. They are all a bunch of seriously repressive regimes who deserve to die a hideous death. What happens to the people who live under those regimes is a different matter, however. But I'm not going to lose too much sleep weeping over their fate because the prediction that OPEC is doomed is wrong.

How many countries in the developing world actually, or will ever have, the electrical infrastructure to support EV's? Not many!

386BSD was available a decade before that as well. BSD's vastly predate Linux AND BSD was open source. RMS and FSF didn't invent open source and the "GNU System" is irrelevant.

Hogwash! First, while good chunks of BSD were open-source, important parts of it were AT&T proprietary code, in other words, not open source! This problem was not rectified until after the lawsuit, the resolution of which did not occur until after Linux had been introduced and was a viable alternative to 386BSD.

Second, while BSD predates Linux by a decade, 386BSD does not. It was released in 1992, a year after Linus's first attempt at a Linux kernel. Now it is true that 386BSD was more functional in 1992 than Linux was at the same time, Linux quickly caught up. Linux is really, in the end, just a Unix-like kernel; the GNU compilers and Unix-like utilities made the rest of Linux as a Unix-like operating system possible.

And I would posit that the GPL is a better open-source license in that it requires any changes made to the code to be shared with others, whether they are made by a paid employee working for some corporate entity or a volunteer. The earlier open-source licenses did not have this requirement.

So get your facts and your timeline straight, dude!

I should have written "Unfortunately for them".