"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?"
"Things aren't different. Things are things."
"But what do you do? You just there?" ...
"I talk to my own kind."
"But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?"
"There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years. In the nineteen seventies. 'Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, no one to answer."
"From where?"
"Centauri system."
"Oh," Case said. "Yeah? No shit?"
"No shit."

William Gibson, 1984

So EVs are warranteed for 8-12 years, but cell phones die after two? Hmmm ...

Burning Man Live: 13 Years of Piss Clear, Black Rock City's Alternative Newspaper
by Adrian Roberts (Editor)

Nice. I actually started a (very minor) ruckus. With my tongue firmly in cheek, I offer the following:

In order to use assembly, you have to start with a pretty good understanding of what is actually happening down at the bare metal level, starting with CPU instruction sets, before you even start. A few days with K&R should give today's programmers using high level languages a better idea of what's going on in the lower levels without having to gain that knowledge. Very time and cost effective.

And of course you're right, nobody teaches assembly any more.

Learn how the machine thinks. Your (fill in your favorite language) programs will thank you for it.

That's OK. We lived through 'Nam, we lived through the birth of the civil rights movement, we survived Timothy Leary, Owsley, and Ram Dass, and a whole bunch of other shit. We can take an oiccasional 'OK Boomer' with a wry grin.

Sheesh, then MS must owe the French what, about 10 billion?

I have a friend, Jason, who is a dancer/coreographer, who built a jenga set out of two by fours. He and his troup would play at renaissance faires using only their feet. Let me know when a robot can do that.

And it was AMAZING! I learned so much!

"In the Beginning Was the Command Line." Neal Stephenson.

Try it. Let me know what you thinik, instead of spouting crap.

I have a pretty high end sound system - old NAD amplifier, Paradigm stereo speakers with sub-woffer, ADCOM CD player, Pro-Ject Turntable. Not state of the art, but several grand worth of components. I love having friends over and play them exactly the same song on LP, CD, mp3, and streaming (i.e. compressed) mp3. Watching their jaws drop is extremely satisfying.

Now, admittedly, modern music is specificly mixed for overbassed earbuds. Go get yourself an LP of Yello's One Second (1987), early electronica. (Yeah, you've heard it. OOOOOOHHH, YYEEAAHH) Put on the first track, La Habenera. Wait for the digital horns to reach out of the speakers, grab you by the throat and smack your face around like a soccer ball. Now try the CD of the same song. Nothing. mp3 - even worse. And then, try the same thing with the fourth movement of Beethoven's fifth, or some early Miles Davis, or some serious modern electronica like Solar Fields or Mauxuam. Yeah, thats what you're missing, kids.

Yes. If you tell C that you wanna shoot yourself in the foot, C's job is to deliver the bullet to its intended target.

Yeah, I fat fingered that one.

Run your own mailserver. DNS registration is cheap these days, and you can have as many different email addresses as you want.