In one version of the story there's an additional factor, namely that Microsoft wanted to pay a fixed, one-time, fee for the license whereas Kildall wanted to follow his usual practice of getting a royalty on each copy.

I used ZIP drives extensively in the 90s. I still have a drive and some disks. As far as I know they still work though I haven't tried them in quite a while. They were a huge improvement for people like me who had relatively large files (speech data).

To me the hoops that smoothbrains will jump through to avoid IPv6 and stay on legacy IPv4, especially when hosting, is pathetic. NAT, port forwarding, tunnels, blah blah blah blah.

I have something like ~1.2 trillion times the number of routable addresses that the entire IPv4 space has. Not all are reachable, of course, just the services that need incoming access and they're each on their own isolated DMZ.

Forgot to add: if you enable IPv6, be sure to use the browser extension IPvFoo. It shows a small 4 or 6 in your URI bar to let you know what protocol you're connecting to. Once enabled, you'll see just how much stuff out there actually is IPv6.

Started the move about 18 months ago when I decided to get off my lazy ass. My ISP gives out a /56 prefix, so that lets me run 256 /64 subnets/VLANs in the house, currently there are ~10 in use. Everything get a GUA through SLAAC and I use RAs (Router Advertisements) to give ULAs to everything. Any external facing services get their own VLAN and /64 for the system(s) as needed. Firewall blocks all incoming as they usually do by default and I punch a hole for the external-facing systems. They can't reach back into the network, they only answer the phone. All the systems update DNS dynamically if the prefix or full address ever change.

I have an SSH bastion set up. In all this time there has not been a single SSH attempt from the internet. On IPv4 it was constant background noice.
For those legacy IPv4-only systems on the internet, I set up NAT64. I have an IoT VLAN and IoT 2.4 GHz wireless network that are only IPv4 because a lot of IoT network stacks are junk.

I'm still farting around with it, but man oh man, there's no way I'd go back to IPv4. It was one of the best moves I've done in ages.

This is interesting but it is only half-true that the use of consumable chemicals has been the barrier to the creation of scent emitters. The other problem is that no orthogonal basis for olfaction is known. In the case of color, for example, we know that you can combine red, blue, and green to form any desired color. There is nothing comparable for scent. We don't know that you can use, say, rose, bitter almond, and sandalwood to create any desired scent.

The article mentions the state's tax revenue as if it would lose it if liquor sales were privatized. Really? States manage to collect taxes on all sorts of privately sold products. As far as I can see, privatizing liquor sales need not mean giving up any tax revenue.

That's already the case. The so-called National Security Law is used against any kind of political dissent.

Agreed. This sounds like a useful feature for me.

Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

Not sure of the specifics, but it is possible to measure the senses of non-human animals, measure various aspects of cognition and memory, and to detect anxiety etc.

He financed, produced, starred in, and distributed the film completely independent from the "Hollywood System". For God's sake, how much less "sucked in" can a person be and still have the means to do it at all???

Give the man some credit.

There have been studies of the reactance of bananas. It apparently decreases as they ripen.