Yup. I don't think I ever met him in person (not positive about that, given that this was roughly 25 to 35 years ago), but as soon as I saw the name, I immediately recognized it both from MkLinux and from NetBSD-mac68k before that. Good times.

For context, I think the last thing I did for MkLinux was hack up the timezone files for the DST changes in 2007.

Pretty sure if anybody tried to actually run it now, it would be a security nightmare. But on the flip side, nobody would still remember how to compile code for it, so maybe not. :-D

Either way, it was cool seeing a familiar name again after so many years.

Completely serious. Native American groups are pretty pissed about this.

But you're right. Calling it racist is a bit of a stretch, because I doubt our POTUS even knows that it's a Native American word, and probably thinks that it was named after a Canadian province, so by changing its name, he's "sticking it to Canada" or some such nonsense, completely unaware that the lake's name came first.

So in retrospect, I should have said that it displays an absolutely ridiculous level of cultural insensitivity and ignorance.

Either way, the effect is still the same, whether it was deliberate or just through a complete lack of bothering to actually learn anything before making decisions.

That theory relies on a very highly questionable interpretation of the meaning of the English language that is rejected almost universally by all but the most extreme wing-nuts.

Yes, it's being served by a Mac Mini in my TV room closet. :-D

Long time, no see.

The constitution is clear. Trump is ineligible to become president after January 20, 2029 unless he becomes Speaker of the House (the highest line-of-succession post in which he can legally take office) and both POTUS and VPOTUS resign or die, or unless he takes some post even lower in the line of succession and an even larger number of people resign or die. And even that path to the presidency isn't clearly constitutional; it just isn't absolutely black-and-white unconstitutional.

So no, Trump cannot win a third term. He cannot even legally appear on the ballot for a third term, short of him somehow managing to get a two-thirds majority of Congress to pass a constitutional amendment and subsequently getting three-fourths of all states to ratify that amendment, or somehow managing to get two-thirds of all states to call for a constitutional convention, neither of which is much more likely than him winning the lottery.

He might, however, be able to win a Senate or House posting, in which case he could continue to be a distracting thorn in the side of proper governance for years to come.

The Gulf of America Act didn't make it through the Senate. It was never codified into law, and the name will be reverted by executive order on or around January 20, 2029 unless the next Congress has enough of a Democrat majority in the house to formally reverse it sooner.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the president the authority to rename bodies of water by executive order. And constitutionality questions aside, this will likely be overturned; it's only a question of whether it happens now or in the first week of the next Congress.

Compounding that is the racism problem. The name Ontario is a Native American word that means "Great Lake". So not only is our president (illegally) renaming the great lake of the Great Lakes, which is bordering on idiotic on the surface, but he is also replacing a word that has meaning to the cultural heritage of Native Americans with the name of a dead white guy from Europe. You can't get much more offensive and flagrantly racist than that.

This is Mt. McKinley all over again, but without decades of historical precedent for the non-native name, and I find it to be an utterly disgusting, contemptible name change by an utterly disgusting, contemptible president. I have never looked forward to any day more in my life than I look forward to January 20, 2029, when all of this racist insanity can start being rolled back.

If any president, regardless of party, declares a national emergency and that the only way to stop it is to block imports of something that we critically must have and cannot produce in adequate quantities for our country to not fall apart horribly, we will question that president's judgment, intellect, and/or character, because at least one of the three almost certainly must be compromised in some way to reach such a flawed decision.

Look, it's really simple. The word emergency means that something A. is sudden and unexpected, and B. must be dealt with right now, or else the consequences will be immediate and severe. This is not an emergency.

The U.S. power grid requires large quantities this hardware continually, both for expansion and repairs, on an ongoing basis. Not having adequate quantities is a national emergency with immediate implications for the country. Not having the manufacturing infrastructure to build critical power infrastructure hardware in this country could *eventually* be a national emergency if, for example, China decides to declare war on the U.S., but right now, it is just a long-term *risk* of *future* national emergency, not an actual emergency, because doing nothing will not necessarily cause immediate harm to the country.

You can't solve a long-term and likely mostly hypothetical risk to the country by creating an *immediate* national emergency. You can't put the entire country in *more* short-term, medium-term, and potentially long-term peril in the hopes that it somehow causes people to reduce some future risk that might never even materialize.

Basically, this policy is the import/export equivalent of saying, "My neighbor might steal my car someday, so I'm going to push my car off a cliff so he can't take it away from me in the future. Sure, I'll lose my job because I can't get to work, but having a car that he can steal is an emergency." See how stupid that is?

Worse, if this were an actual emergency (e.g. if China invaded Taiwan and the U.S. decided to shut down all imports from China in retaliation), there would still be a bigger problem, which is that it will take years to build the infrastructure to make the hardware needed in the United States.

What this means is that unless the emergency is so severe that every party agrees to maintain the ban, the minute the next president takes office, the policy will immediately be overturned in the name of national security, and it will no longer be financially viable to keep building those plants, and they won't ever get finished. Moreover, in the absence of such an exigent threat, the companies know that this is the case, and will drag their heels as much as possible before they even start building anything, so at best, all he will get in the next two years are a bunch of promises that will be soon broken.

So a policy like this cannot realistically have a positive impact on anything. If he had done it in the first year of his first term in office, it might have produced some success, but at this point, it's almost a decade too late.

That said, if he doesn't stop those imports, then companies might build wind turbines off the coast that he'll have to look at, so I can see why banning those imports could be an emergency for the president, and thus a "national emergency". [rolls eyes]

Ooh. I've always wanted to be a Geocities warlock. Or is that Geocities Warlock(tm)?

But seriously, loving the irony of Elon's petulant rebranding coming back to bite him in the a**.

The fact that twitter.com still exists as a redirect actually strengthens and weakens their claim to abandonment. A mere URL with no content does not generally qualify as use in commerce. And the existence of that redirect without Twitter branding on the resulting site makes it clear that abandonment is willful, because it indicates that the old name is no longer intended to be used, and that they don't have any future product plans with that name (because otherwise they would have a landing page saying that the new Twitter was coming soon).

IMO, X clawing back the Twitter trademark should be rather difficult for them at this point, famous or not, barring concrete documentation created prior to the 3-year limit showing future plans to reintroduce the mark in the very near future.

In relative terms, they're marking it up more. But ask yourself which hurts people's pocketbooks more: the $110 that the cheap Android tablet maker takes as profit or the $400 that Apple takes? Consumers don't care about percents. They care about dollars. And Apple's profit margin on their tablets is almost 4x that of their cheapest competition.

Alternatively that's three spare tablets for when the first one breaks. As soon as you're more than 2x the price of the cheapest competition, unless users absolutely have to have the capabilities of the expensive one, a lot of stuff like build quality ceases to matter, etc.

I was in the market for a tablet a couple of months ago because I needed something for reading sheet music.

Cheapest 13" Apple Tablet: $949

The generic Android tablet I bought instead: $179.99

I'm not saying they aren't being impact by memory prices, but they're either incompetent at supply chain management or they're milking this for much higher profits. Either way, there's a reason why this Mac and iPhone user uses 4 Android tablets and zero Apple tablets.

At this point, if I weren't locked into the Apple platform by the software I use, I'd probably be looking for alternatives on the Mac side as well. The prices have simply become absurd when compared with the rest of the industry. It actually seems worse now than in the beleaguered period when everything was custom hardware assembled by hand.

Case in point, I was seriously considering upgrading my M1 Max MacBook Pro, which cost me about $6k when I bought it. The base model of MBP ostensibly starts at $2999, but to get 8 TB of storage (which I could add externally for just $900), between all the forced upgrades that I don't care about and the whopping $3,000 for the SSD upgrade, the price leaps to a jaw-dropping $7,549, or $4,550 total just to get $900 worth of extra storage. And really, less than that, because an 8 TB SSD would give you 9 TB of storage, and that's only 8.

Apple pricing is just plain nuts now. I mean, it was painfully high before, but even as a software engineer, I'm having trouble justifying the cost of staying on the Mac platform now, with a 25% increase in prices since 2020, and I think even higher increases for some configurations.

First, searches of their persons and effects does not mean reading and making a copy of their letters and books. It means looking in the trunk and verifying that it is just letters and books.

Second, there were no border agents in 1789. You could walk or swim into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico freely for (statistically) most our nation's history. The first border patrols began in the 1920s to restrict immigration from certain countries. There were laws in the late 1700s regarding import of *cargo*, and that was handled by the folks who ran each individual port, but again, that's not the same thing as searching a passenger's person and making copies of their letters. Those laws applied only to identifying goods that were likely intended for sale, for tax policy/import duty reasons.

This bastardization of border policy to include searching the contents of people's papers and devices is a late 1900s perversion of the Constitution.

So no, pretty much everything you said is wrong.

It still is if you do it yourself and don't have ChatGPT do it for you. But it isn't a useful indication for parents or teachers, because the kids can just have ChatGPT do it for them, and moreover are encouraged to do so by the pressure to get good grades. By making the homework be graded only on adequate participation (which may be per-student) rather than on correctness, you shift the focus back to the homework being a way for students to get ready for the test and make it clear that having an AI do the work will prevent the teacher from knowing how well the student is doing, and will likely result in a lower grade on the test. Once the motivating factor of grades is eliminated and, in fact, reversed, they'll stop doing it, or will use it only to help them understand or to check their work, rather than using it as a crutch to actually do the work.

Any child gifted with high motivation and broad interests wants to practice stuff they already understand less so that they can do other things and learn other things. A child's time is a zero-sum game. The more time they spend doing things that are less useful, the less time they have for doing things that are more useful.

The ones who mindlessly work more problems because they are motivated to get good grades are the ones who aren't doing band, orchestra, chorus, or theater, who aren't going on field trips to learn about the world, who aren't getting the breadth of education that will prepare them for the real world, and will mostly end up in boring (but probably reasonably well-paying) jobs for the rest of their lives. They won't ever be the rockstar in their field, but they probably won't fail horribly. And I guess that's okay, but IMO it's not what we should try to inspire kids to become. The motivation should be to learn for learning's sake, and excess repetition is the opposite of that.

Meh. If that's your experience, then there's no hope for improving anything, because the kids who don't do well are going to pass anyway. This is how we end up with a bunch of graduates who can't actually do anything. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you're right, then it's critical to fix that at the same time.

They're overlapping, but not the same group. Some smart kids are hard-working and eager to learn. Some are rule-following. Some are both. Some are neither. What I think you meant is that they are not dependent variables.