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Comment Re:Heh (Score 1) 134

Back in the day, I remember the local Bell main switching center being a very non-descript, completely unmarked mysterious building.

I imagine that also was for security reasons.

Yeah, the enemy would never guess that a large office building completely devoid of windows might possibly be a telephone switch.

Comment Re:Despite (Score 1) 275

It has been a while since I've used Word, but I remember it was really good at propagating tiny changes through a document that made it important that you keep an extra copy around because some seemed to have no easy way back to what you wanted.

This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.

I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given that they had no real source control and mainly juggled each update amongst themselves over email and random impoossible-to-find folders on Sharepoint.

Since all the docs had the same basic layout and they were mainly trying to make them look consistent with whatever corporate branding was being promulgated that week, it could easily have been done by writing them in "markdown" and having a script that converted them directly to PDF. Or maybe even learn LaTeX. Then the docs could all be maintained and diffed in github like all the other project artifacts. I didn't even bring that up because I knew that their heads would explode.

Comment Re:why not just block internet connectivity? (Score 1) 93

Maybe you went to a technical school with no humanities. Tech classes usually handed out exams with questions and response areas mixed together. Humanities classes with essay answers often used the blue books and separate question sheets. I assume that this is because essay answers vary more in length than technical computations so they didn't have to leave the maximum space after each essay question. Also, they probably wanted the notebook-style blue lines to try to improve the odds that the longhand writing was at least partially legible. (Back then, the available copy machines were all monochrome.)

Comment Re:Sure glad the Bell System was destroyed (Score 2) 157

OK, but do you really want to go back to paying the current equivalent $10 per minute for the privilege of using a piece of dedicated copper for a cross-country call?

BTW, "nine 9s" is one just second downtime out of 30 years continuous service. I was there back in the day of analog long distance, and I can assure you that reliability was nowhere near that. For example, if you tried to make a call on Mother's day after dinner, your chances of actually getting through were often less than 50%.

Getting a "fast busy signal" when you picked up the phone was also a thing that happened at a couple of other random times per year for no apparent reason. I hate to admit it, but my current VoIP service piped over the crappy cable company's coax is probably just as reliable as our POTS line was 50 or 60 years ago.

Comment Re:Energy (Score 2) 245

This compromise along with the Electoral College for presidential elections help keep that balance....and more populous states can't run roughshod over the less populous states.

Political power is a zero-sum game. In our system, less populous states run roughshod over more populous ones.

In this way, more people get shafted with policies they don't want than if smaller states had the appropriate amount of political power for their population. (In particular, this system was originally set up largely to ensure that slavery would not get banned).

You're just happy because you probably like these widely unpopular policies, but that still doesn't make it fair.

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