Larry Tesler extended to computers the existing terms used in manual text composition (cut, paste, etc.) that described physical actions for laying out things like newspapers. You literally cut text out with scissors and pasted it down with glue in pre-production. This is still being done today although it's less and less common.

Extending the well understood cut and paste paradigm into the world of computers as a UX metaphor and paradigm was brilliant and deserves recognition. But surely I'm not the only one who finds it deeply weird that this man's notable and worthy contribution to computer user interface technology should be mischaracterized as "inventing" cut and paste? Talk about dumbing down the news, oy.

I wonder what he himself would have thought about the reporting of his work today - facepalm or laughter?

If you are a regular person who needs a phone to receive phone calls and text/email messages, a $50 phone is fine.

If you also want pocketwatch and camera functions without having to carry extra devices, a $200 phone is fine if you can spare $200.

If you are a tradesman who uses his phone as a flashlight, in-wall inspector, magnifying glass, level, and web parts lookup reference, a pixel3a makes sense if your business is successful.

But if you think you need a $1400 phone, hopefully you either have money to burn (you probably drink Starbucks instead of Maxwell House if you know what I mean) or you want/need other people to think you have money to burn. If not, you are foolishly profligate.

Idiots who buy this aren't going to understand that, they'll think they're getting a SDC kit for their econobox for $1000.
Then the deaths start happening.

So the normal American business cycle?

Practicing archeologists have told me, perhaps slightly in jest, that our day will be recognized by future archeologists by the ubiquity of ceramic coated drywall and deck screws. The hardened steel ones will be mostly degraded, but the ceramic coated ones and stainless ones are going to form a recognizable artifact layer.

"Cloud" is a marketing buzzword. What it means is whatever the marketeer thinks you want to hear. That's sadly the reality, but let's put the real-world cynicism aside a moment.

Many companies are using their own resources to basically duplicate the commodity infrastructure and software ecosystem that Amazon, Microsoft, &etc. sell, and calling it their "private cloud". The nomenclature keeps the PHB types from having an impotence crisis, lol.

For programmers and end users it is functionally identical to using a cloud service. They type the same code or commands in that they'd type in if the service was on a public cloud. Either way, they have no idea where the computers are physically located or what the hardware is doing.

So: If I make something that is exactly like your rental car, in every functional aspect, except that I own it instead of renting it - is it not still a car? Ownership is not the salient character of the cloud, abstraction is.

I don't mean to be rude, but can you provide some sort of proof of your statement that "Most WiFi chipset vendors (including Intel) prohibited changing the MAC address in software nearly a decade ago"? This directly conflicts with my lived experience.

I mean, I routinely change the MAC addresses on my personal machines as part of initial setup. I've never once run into a system where this was not possible.

PS: Not inexperienced. I'm a working computer scientist today, and wrote my first code shortly before PARC patented Ethernet.

Sick and insane has always been the steady state; you just long for a fantasy world you're mistakenly convinced existed in the past.

I'm quite old, and I can tell you your opinion is nothing new. Insisting that some small group of people who deviate from the norm is simultaneously not important enough to accommodate but also so important they can "turn civilization on its head" is a troll as old as time.

If humanity survives another 80 years, people will be able to trivially change genders - and I don't mean surgically alter themselves into a semblance of another gender, I mean literally rewrite their DNA and become another gender.

It would be wise to get ready for that day, and it won't hurt you to exercise some compassion. Just be nice to people instead of looking for excuses to spew venom, regardless of what side of any issue you are on or what political party you favor.

Captcha: Crankily (how apropos!)

The "intermittence problem" is pretty much just a brown energy talking point.

Pumped water being the usual solution, but you if you're in a totally flat desert you could just winch a bunch of rocks to the top of a tower and it'd work fine. Gravity and electric motor/generators are the solution.

There is no intermittence problem, just anti-environmental propaganda from the usual sources.

The only difference between a process and a thread in the NT kernel is the protection boundaries. Threads are just faster in general because you can share objects between threads without serializing them. This is why threads are easy to work with in any modern programming language, and processes ... aren't.

None of that is really accurate. It's almost jaw-droppingly wrong.

I have worked with kernel interactive code on linux, DEC RSX-11 and RT-11, VAX-VMS and post-NT Windows. That experience is what informed my earlier post.

For those looking for a rule of thumb, use fork() on *nix, and use threads on Cutler kernels. Take advantage of each platform's strengths and weaknesses.

Unix derived systems like Linux use a lightweight process creation model (the fork() system call is blazing fast) but the (post-NT) windows kernel is derived from DEC's VMS, and as such has such heavyweight process creation that threaded code is actually a good idea.

So Microsoft will simply brand and develop their own Linux distribution (they are already well down that path) and sell it in parallel with Windows. It's extremely unlikely that they'll try to replace the NT kernel, it's not worth the level of effort required when they can just sell linux at the same time.

Yeah, well, somebody had to go there! I'll see myself out.

The original reason there is some sort of expiry is to limit the size of the revocation lists. For example, all certificates in revocation that have expired can effectively be removed since they have expired. Without that limitation, every 'revoked' cert must remain on the list forever.

Hmmm, as I recall, x.509 certs had expiration dates built in from the original spec, and SSL/TLS capable browsers were always able to detect expired certs, but revocation lists were an afterthought that the browsers took forever to implement... am I remembering that wrong?

I'm pretty sure a lot of people will happily supply completely fake information (throwaway email addresses are available for a few clicks) for a doughnut with those pink sprinkles on it.

It is known, and is the subject of several important scientific studies.

A modern city may have fewer beneficial micro-organisms and more harmful ones, but even just having potted plants and occasionally walking in the park improves mental health - and not just by decreasing stress!

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F993258%2Fdirt-has...

If you live in a modern house in the countryside for a while, you won't have to be very observant to recognize how staying inside all the time affects your mood, health and stress levels. If you garden or farm, it's even more noticeable.

This is part of the rural/urban divide that politicians and pundits love to exploit. City people tend to be more stressed and neurotic as a group, country folk tend to be less cultured since they've less access to things like museums, opera and ballet (although individual exceptions are literally everywhere).

Well, one can ignore the actual ruling (which seems to be on the technicality of the wording of the laws) and invent plausible-sounding reasons that ignore the ability of deaf people to drive, the standard inclusion of loud radios in cars, and the existence of vehicle soundproofing, but in the end isn't that just apologetics for bad laws? Or thinly veiled and perhaps instinctive toadying to authority?

The cars of the richest are soundproofed. I have ridden in old, cheap cars with road and wind noise too loud to allow normal conversation at highway speed. Almost literally everyone has a car radio loud enough to drown out environmental noise.