There are a couple of odd postings here about C being deficient
for string-handling. Unless you are talking about comparison with
SNOBOL, C is wonderful for strings!

E.g. for Berkeley Unix, I jammed in C/shell-based code 'locate'
(née 'fastfind') for file finding, non-numerical code for LZW-based 'compress',
and GNU [ef?]grep for hybrid Boyer-Moore regexp search, and did
samizdat work on fast anagram generation (see Scientific American
for October 1984). Some of it is still around or is otherwise
runnable on your Mac using Terminal.

Lastly here is some trivia about Webster's 2nd Intl. (1934) cited by Kernighan
in his lecture, which I snuck over to BSD after Dennis Ritchie handed me
a 9-track tape at NASA Ames Research Center.

Although I intimated (see /usr/share/dict/README on your Mac)
that "the supplier" (Ritchie, via Doug McIlroy) thought it might be
out-of-copyright, 'tis not so! A search of copyright renewals at Stanford
shows that it was renewed in 1961, so that orig. date + 95 years
still applies, or until 2029. But shhh, don't tell anyone!

... as bandied about in university philosophy departments for years.

Only it's the reverse, where messages are passed into the room
in English, processed in Chinese, then spit back into English.

... From national treasure Tom Lehrer's song "Wernher von Braun",
note the last stanza. (All lyrics are now dedicated to the public domain
by Tom, himself):

Lyrics
And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations?
And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money
to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know how, that's what,
as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,

A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi, " says Wernher von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.

Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.

You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.

Wrong. Grunt-level AI has already saved Amazon $260M. That's real money:
https://accelerationeconomy.co...

...but they use Linux all over the place. See:

https://lwn.net/Articles/54036...

Just put it six-feet under right away. Seems like a lot of unnecessary energy spent to make bricks,
then bury. I know, the greedsters will say, why not burn the deadwood first to get energy out of
that (modulo pollution), then bury the charcoal briquettes instead.

It's in all new (non-Peltier cooled) U.S. residential refrigerators, by law.

Nice to see Pliny the Elder referenced in the Science Advances paper
as a scholar who helped draft the specific instructions for construction sites.

Aside: I see now that the Hoover Dam used some kind of "hot mix" concrete --
it's supposed to last 1,000 years, maybe even longer than Lake Mead.

Mos def. Taking off where Arthur David Olson left off, Eggert is reprised
at (google keyword top hit) "time zone king ucla"

As spelled out here:
https://www.eenews.net/article...

"But there’s a catch: The EV supply chain required for the tax credit doesn’t exist." (!!!)

Minerals required to make market-ready EV batteries — lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel — are primarily mined, refined and processed in China and Russia or in less adversarial nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia that aren’t parties to U.S. free trade agreements (Greenwire, Feb. 24). .... 'These things aren’t in place, and might not be for more than a decade,' said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines."

When I retired years ago as a lowly knowledge worker / Unix bit-pusher
there were folks called "project managers" who seemed to exist
just to call office staff meetings. Either that or constantly be reminded
that a technical problem (outside their limited understanding) would
be impossible to solve by next week due to it being R and not D.

When the office meetings were slotted for 8 am everyone groaned. Or,
if your co-workers were in Bangalore (or vice versa vis-a-vis Silicon Valley)
then you got to pick 6 am or 6 pm being twelve time-zones apart.

What folks actually manage to accomplish in these downtown
(phallus-shaped like Salesforce) or isolated (spaceship-shaped like
Apple campus) monstrosities is beyond human ken.

Further, peeps who work behind a computer screen especially don't
need physical offices and rarely need personal interaction except at
a bar to trade gossip. Even induced with free coffee or free food it
wasn't worth a CO2-laden commute and time away from family.

Glad I got out of that racket, but maybe it's time again for
paper-pushing bureaucrats to rejoice again!

Further, Tesla gamely tries to address this "joint planning" problem
at approx 1:17:00 into https://www.youtube.com/watch?....

Now that Waymo is offering robotaxi rides in our beloved Frisco, just ask for
a drop-off to Miguel Street or thereabouts!

A yes, ye olde Cornish lorry problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Solution (pending better path planning) is for robotaxis is to blacklist that road segment,
then drop off the customer at the nearest corner.

Nice to see supply-side shame here. However, I'm
always interested in what low-hanging fruit gains
are possible on the demand side.

For example, we know that LED lighting replacement
is super, but has already been done. Or that driving at 55mph in
the U.S. will gain a lot, instantly.

What about having a national (or international) flash mob
do something like washing laundry using cold water, possible
in 90% of all cases. How many quads saved? Or
getting folks to use swimming pool covers, always. Or ...

In olden times, I wrote Unix code at a NASA research center.
It was picked up by Berkeley, FSF, and assorted different companies.
(I date myself with the phrase "real men program in C".)

As a (somtimes-co) author and free-spirit, I always said, sure, if
you insist, I'll sign anything (and did), but what did it really mean?
Like, do programmers even have "legal" authority do even do this?
My NASA boss didn't even care, because government work is
basically public domain. If code had certain value, it was supposed
to be reported to the "COSMIC" program. Nobody cared, so
nothing went to any government lawyers.

It's like folks who created tangled-up contracts over music publishing
rights, by "assigning" the rights to multiple agencies. Ala
Captain Beefheart, or George Clinton/Parlament/Funkadelic.
The bean counters had all sorts of fits if they even knew about it
but many of us just happily made music or wrote code.