I bought an Osborne 1 when they first came out... what an amazing deal! To quote Wiki, the bundled software "... had a retail value of more than US$2000." Both WordStar and SuperCalc were excellent applications... The screen refresh was amazingly fast for its time, since it was memory-mapped.

The small screen sucked, but you could buy a Mondapt to use a larger monitor, though you still had to scroll horizontally to see a full 80-character row on the 52 column display. The keyboard sucked... but I hacked a replacement out of a high-quality keyboard I picked up for $20 at Rad-Tronics (which gave me a much better keyboard than I could get with my 128K Mac, which caused me to develop RMS.) After buying a $1,200 dollar 40cps TEC daisywheel printer I was in the word processing business, and produced a number of graduate theses and dissertations with that system...

And the thesis editor at Cornell loved the quality of the product...

I affixed a slogan to my Osborne 1: "Ideolatry is the bane of perception".

Ah, kids these days... just don't appreciate what can be done with a 4MHz Z80 and 64KB RAM! GET OFF MY LAWN!

I'm reminded of Nassim Taleb's alternative-universe story about unsung (or worse, derided) heroes in The Black Swan: A congressperson pushes through legislation mandating reinforced aircraft cockpit doors in 1998: as a consequence, 9/11 never happens, because would-be hijackers know they're not going to be able to break down the cockpit door.

The congressperson loses the next election because, hell, hundreds of millions of dollars were thrown away on a non-existent problem!

Q: "What do you think a tie actually is?"

A: "A serpent-like symbol of evil worn by humales."

Aliens, annoyed by movies portraying them as dumsheets obsessed with Blowing Sheet Up, blanket earth with pathogens.

More at 11!

Here's an email I sent to my bro back in March:

I've been trying to decipher the SNOCAP contract... ... it's pretty abysmal in quality:

"All The Other Things A Contract Need To Have.

Modification: we reserve the right to change all or part of this Agreement. Notice of any such changes will be provided through the Enabling Interface or in the manner detailed in Paragraph 7(h). It is your responsibility to check the Enabling Interface for any notices of modifications to this Agreement. If you do not consent to any such proposed changes your sole recourse will be to terminate this Agreement by written notice to us, and your failure to do so within ten (10) days of the date of any such change notice in the Enabling Interface will constitute your acceptance of such changes."

Of course the paragraphs aren't numbered, so what the hell is Paragraph 7(h)? They aren't obligated to notify you of contract changes via email: you're supposed to check "the Enabling Interface" to make sure nothing's changed, like something on the order of "All Your Digital Masters Are Belong To Us!", and failure to terminate the agreement which ten (10!) days of "notice" will "constitute your acceptance of such changes." NB: they require "written notice", which I don't think includes email.

Equally baffling, their application form requests either 1) a credit card or 2) the last 4 digits of your SSN along with an Experian credit check to "verify" your identity. How the hell can they make payments without a FULL SSN or TID? ???

I think this is an organization sadly lacking in competent legal advice...

The jurors wrongly believe that an innocent-by-insanity decision puts a dangerous person back on the street the moment he temporarily starts taking pills...

... when in fact insanity acquittees are usually hospitalized for periods longer than the prison sentence for the offense.

Jurors are not informed of the consequences of a finding of insanity, since they're supposed to be concerned only with deciding the facts of the case at hand.

THERE ARE THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW! HERE ARE A FEW!

"So did you hear the story about Gregg and Tolos? Anyway Tolos ... he's this Rottweiler, you see ..."
[details omitted]

"Alone at home, Gregg's excitement grew and grew... he grasped the cord and thrust the plug home! Soon he would be plugged IN... consequences be damned! As the drool of long-suppressed anticipation of THE FORBIDDEN ACT dripped from his lips, the electric shock from the amplifier chassis coursed through his brain like a million electric eels, annihilating the very substance of his grey matter, and even so he REACHED FOR THE GUITAR to COMMIT THE ULTIMATE SIN ... "
[In compliance with the Federal Communication Commissions' Good Neighbor Noise Reducation Ordinance of 1993, the remainder of this passage has been squelched.]

"And so there was the master tape for 'Back From Samoa', but there no longer, so where was it? Maybe I a..."
[transmission broken]

And to boot Gibson offers a scene involving an interactive, immersive cyber-reality in Count Zero (1986, nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards) six years before Snow Crash was published (1992).

Snow Crash is amusing but has some amazingly stupid bits in it. Scenarios in Gibson's books maintain some relationship to plausible realities...

Huh, but the .454 Casull is endorsed by Alucard.

... of Lola vs. Powerman and The Money-Go-Round!

Peter Leeson makes the argument that Somalis are Better Off Stateless, and it's an interesting argument. Life under "Scientific Socialism" was not a salutary experience for Somalians. The Islamic Courts Union and its successors seem to be intent on establishing an Islamic state, so it's not as if all the violence in Somalia is the result of "statelessness"--a lot of the conflict arises precisely from those who wish to establish a powerful, unified government.

On the other hand, suh, when you impugn fans of the great Lynyrd Sknyrd by likening them to fools who think any government is better than no government, you negligently insult a broad mass of the populace. Just a month ago I myself was at an Angry Samoans show shouting "FREE BIRD!" and maintaining to those around me that if only they would hold their lighters aloft and shout "FREE BIRD!" for 30 minutes, the Samoans would surely come out for an encore!

I'm not really a rabid Eno fan... but 801 was an amazing band.

(Please excuse me for posting on this ridiculous thread!)

Section 740.13 (e) "(6) "Knowledge" of a prohibited export or reexport. Posting of source code or corresponding object code on the Internet (e.g., FTP or World Wide Web site) where it may be downloaded by anyone would not establish "knowledge" of a prohibited export or reexport. See Section 740.13(e)(4) of the EAR for prohibited knowing exports to Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. In addition, such posting would not trigger "red flags" necessitating the affirmative duty to inquire under the "Know Your Customer" guidance provided in Supplement No. 3 to part 732 of the EAR."

Just to establish that this is really... not news. Just PR, move along folks, nothing to see here.

Ho-hum. Unrestricted export of open-source products incorporating encryption from the US has been legal for quite a while. All you have to do is file an application with the Feds under the Export Regs Section 740.13 "TECHNOLOGY AND SOFTWARE -- UNRESTRICTED (TSU)" before you make the source and binaries available, and you don't have to screen downloads or worry if the Officially Designated Bad Guys download your code: your ass is covered.

This war was won a loooong time ago by Philip Zimmermann when the Feds wanted to crush him for releasing PGP. All props go to Phil!

And Xenu spelled backwards is...

Dammit, I smell a conspiracy!