I'm typing this on a Lenovo laptop from 2015 running Xubuntu.

I got my first Sharp MZ-80K Personal Computer (released in kit version in 1978, and in assembled version in 1979) in 1980. It has a 2MHz Sharp LH0080A CPU (Sharp's Z80A version, under license by Zilog) with 48kB RAM and a build-in black and white CRT and a cassette drive. I still have two of those, which are fully functional. I now use the z88dk assembler/compiler to program it, and a cheap MP3 to cassette interface to load the binaries. I also have a hardware emulator of those on MiSTer FPGA

For quick calculations, I often use my Hewlett-Packard HP-85 (released in January 1980). It has a 613 kHz HP Capricorn CPU, 32kB RAM and a build-in black/white CRT, thermal printer and a proprietary HP tape drive. This machine does all calculations in decimal (using BCD) with a 12-digit mantissa and exponents up to ±499. It is fully functional, except for the tape drive - I should get an EBTKS SD-card reader for it. I also use a software emulator of this machine.

In 1987, I bought an Acorn Archimedes A305 with an 8MHz ARM2 CPU and 512kB RAM (upgraded to 4 megs). Unfortunately I do not have this machine anymore, but I still run RISC OS and the software I wrote at the time, natively on Raspberry Pi and under hardware emulation on the MiSTer FPGA.

My most recent PC is an Udoo Bolt V8 (2019) with a 3.6Ghz AMD Ryzen V1605B CPU, 32 gigs of RAM and an on-board ATmega32U4 (Arduino Leonardo compatible GPIO).

A RISC-V MCU is currently sitting on my breadboard, but I'm getting off-topic since that is not a PC.

No, there exists no procedure to expel a country from the EU.

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."
– Alfréd Rényi

I am not convinced that non-teleological reasoning is as ingrained in their thinking as they would like to believe.

I can understand biologists using shorthand when talking informally among themselves, and being hand-wavy while developing ideas.

However, we are talking about a published peer-reviewed paper here, using formal language and notation. The main target public of the paper may be other biologists, but here we are: lay people (on /. where many of us have a scientific or technical background) discussing on the basis of that article why zebras have stripes using concepts from Aristotelian causality rather than Darwinian insights.

To be fair, the scientists titled their article "Why don't horseflies land on zebras?" rather than "Why do zebras have stripes?". However, in the paper we read:

It is not just this paper, in fact I unfortunately see this quite often. Those researchers spread what they themselves would consider misinformation, and that is at least sloppy writing.

OK, let's assume that the researchers did a good job, and that zebra stripes do indeed repel horse flies.

As I understand it, mutations happen at random. A mutation makes the organism "fitter"(*) if it increases the chance of survival, but this is also dependent on random circumstances - a mutation which would be good in some situation might be bad in others (e.g. developing gills is only good for an organism living in water).

I have a fundamental problem with "why did some kind evolution happen" explanations, as if the random mutations have some kind of purpose or advantage in mind(**). However, and this I find confusing, it seems that this kind of teleological (i.e. goal-oriented) thinking about evolution is prevalent among biologists (who should know and understand the above better than anybody), so what am I missing here? Is it just sloppy and oversimplifying vulgarizing language or is something else(***) going on?

(*) Also note there seems to be some circular reasoning (bad!) or tautology (acceptable, I guess) at work: an organism is fitter because it survives (definition of "fitter"), and it survives because it is fitter (cause and effect).

(**) Whose/which mind? The mind of the organism? The mind of the genes or the DNA? As far as I lnow, none of these would have a notion of probability calculus. The mind of nature as a whole? God's mind? But then we are outside the realm of science...

(***) Lamarckism anyone?

No, it is brilliant: imagine when the current AI spring is over and marketing discovers that they can sell this stuff again as "VVLDB Technology" and everything is new once more.

Here I was hoping that we would get an operating system with the same GUI as Blender for all applications.

Roger Zelazny is an excellent example of Sturgeon's Law "ninety percent of everything is crap". However, in Zelazny's case, the other ten percent are masterpieces.

I'm currently rereading Lord of Light (in English, I read the Dutch translation 40 years ago), but I would not read the Amber, Changeling or Jack of Shadows books again.

Editor: please correct the spelling of Zelazny's name in the title.

You can run CDE and IRIX Interactive Desktop on Linux.

I used a 1979 Sharp MZ-80K from 1980 until 1987, when I bought an Acorn Archimedes 305 with a 32-bit ARM2 CPU - skipping the 16-bit era.

I bought and repaired two broken MZ-80K's this year, I'm now writing a game engine for it in Z80 assembly.

Tennis For Two: 1958

Pong: 1972

Well, not for ages, but for 4 years: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PDP1_MiSTer

Imagine a programmable digital device without algorithm...

The change of the meaning of the world "algorithm", and the near mystical and magical connotations it has got the past few years due to (I guess) how marketeers and influencers use the word, actually bothers me.

Such a simple and hard question!

Philosophy originated in the Greek world, about 2500 years ago, with Tales of Miletus (Turkish coast city) and the people around him. (I'm talking from the perspective of Western philosophy here, since that is the tradition I belong to.) It was a radical change in thinking, moving away from mythical, religious and magical thinking. Older texts trying to explain the working of things usually included gods as causes and incantations as solutions. There were some predecessors, such as the Egyptian high priest and architect Imhotep, but in Miletus it started to become a structured and organized approach. The world was no longer explained as being the body or the creation of the gods, and earth quakes were no longer explained as the wrath of those gods. In stead, they introduced a material cause, e.g. water (because it was important for our life as such, and also because it was known as a solid, a liquid and a gas, and therefor a good candidate for being the substance out of which everything else is made), to explain the world. They imagined the earth as being a piece of ice floating on an ocean, and earth quakes as merely being caused by turbulence in the water. They also considered other possibilities to be the "first substance", or combinations thereof (water+fire+earth+art(+ether)), and Anaximander suggested a more abstract first principle (the "boundless").

Those early philosophers were also mathematicians (e.g. theorems of Thales and later Pythagoras), cartographers (Miletus was located at a crossroads between cultures, Anaximander created a map of the world and cosmology) and scientists. Philosophy and science as systems of knowledge came into existence together, they were originally indistinguishable.

The study of philosophy is the study of ideas and of ways of thinking as those have evolved since then. It classically includes sub-disciplines such as metaphysics (the study of the first causes), axiology (the study of values), logic (the study of reasoning), aesthetics (the study of beauty), epistemology (the study of knowledge), ethics (the study of what to do as an individual) and political philosophy (the study of what to do as a group). Many of the sciences have split off from philosophy, for example physics and biology from natural philosophy or psychology from the philosophy of mind - usually by shredding what is being considered as being metaphysical baggage (and thus creating a new implicit metaphysics along the way, which is why even then the study of metaphysics remains relevant). Philosophy is in constant flux: parts split off, parts become obsolete and new issues (discoveries, societal changes, fashions, problems) lead to new parts. That is why I believe that philosophy remains relevant.

Now in my personal case: if there existed something like a major in logic, I would have studied that. However, logicians are now divided over the departments of mathematics, computer science, linguistics, law (e.g. deontic logics, and also the theory of argumentation) and I know logicians in physics, music and other departments. I have considered studying mathematics, computer science and physics (and I intend to enroll on those when retired), but eventually opted for philosophy because I consider it to be at the same time the most profound and the broadest approach. The possibility as a philosophy student to choose a lot of mathematics and physics classes, in combination with all the other subjects, was ideal to create my own curriculum of what I found interesting. The people I work with for my research are mostly mathematicians, because mathematics goes deeper into logic in other aspects than philosophy. In philosophy we learn the modes of thinking from Aristotle over the Christian medieval and Arab (influenced by both the Greek and the Indians) thinkers, to modern symbolic logic (not just classical proposition or predicate logic, but also modal logics, paraconsistent logics, many-valued logics, etc...). Not just how it works, but also ethical and epistemological aspects, and effectively any other aspect deemed relevant, and their implications.