jhbadger

24 ms·

511.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Of course, someone could argue (analogously to this article) that the problem with the phrase is that the members of the People's Temple in Jonestown didn't drink poisoned Kool-Aid as often thought, but rather a different product
512.
by jhbadger 2y ago
This is the sort of hysteria that got comic books censored in the the 1950s and "violent" video games in the 1990s. The argument that fictional depictions of undesired behavior cause real cases of it just isn't supported by e
513.
by jhbadger 2y ago
They still are. The issue is not many people read newspapers (whether paper or online) these days.
514.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Because of this posting, I found the "1.0" version at Macintosh Garden and started playing with it in an emulator. It is pretty neat and advanced for the time -- while it supports the traditional line number/goto/gosub s
515.
by jhbadger 2y ago
True. And even C has one. I guess you could write "spaghetti code" in Pascal if you really wanted to.
516.
by jhbadger 2y ago
To be fair, he was talking about classic BASIC which didn't even have user defined procedures but just goto and gosub similar to jumps and calls in assembly language. I remember when I started learning Pascal after BASIC on the Apple I
517.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I do think that for good faith arguments the Internet has been very successful in removing unintentional falsehoods -- there's a lot less of the "Eskimos have 100 words for snow" nonsense than there used to be because people
518.
by jhbadger 2y ago
That's what people said about IBM in the 1980s -- that it didn't matter that they were just playing catch up with more innovative companies because they were so huge. Things caught up to them, and while they still exist (primarily
519.
by jhbadger 2y ago
It's important to realize that even while this was published in a book in 2000, it was originally published in 1987. Many, many people were still using typewriters in 1987.
520.
by jhbadger 2y ago
This is based on Byrne's famous translation/illustration of Euclid published in the 1840s, which did use the long s (although it was beginning to fall out of favor even then) See this example page from the book https:/&#x2F
521.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Interesting that there was a port of Speedscript to the VIC-20. That was a word processor originally published in Compute! magazine and ported to most 6502-based computers (and MS-DOS, but that was a rewrite in Turbo Pascal as the original
522.
by jhbadger 2y ago
The mathematician Giuseppe Peano even suggested a simplified Latin without declensions as a scientific/mathematical language in 1903. He even wrote several of his works in it, although not many others adopted it. https://en.
523.
by jhbadger 2y ago
>Do you believe that the United States is in decline today? Now imagine you asked an American this question 30 years ago. How would they have responded? No one would have even talked about it with you. Every American citizen was, first a
524.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Nevil Shute was an engineer and he wrote some well respected novels like the nuclear war story On the Beach (made into a movie twice), A Town like Alice (made into a film and TV series), and No Highway (sometimes called No Highway in
525.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I think there is a big difference between learning a living language versus a classical language like Latin or Ancient Greek. The point of learning a living language is to learn practical ways to communicate. While there are tiny communitie
526.
by jhbadger 2y ago
But surprisingly true to the actual Roman source material (it is basically several comedies by Plautus stitched together). Romans had a rather crude sense of humor by today's standards.
527.
by jhbadger 2y ago
>First, private insurance shouldn't exist at all. It is rent-seeking of the highest order. There's no need for it. The US is the only country that works this way. Some other countries have private insurance as an option . For
528.
by jhbadger 2y ago
But before the current tech boom in the mid 2000s, there was the "dot-com" boom in the 1990s and many early Web companies were in SF in the 1990s. And in the 1980s there was the financial sector boom as SF was the west-coast finan
529.
by jhbadger 2y ago
There's also "Yinz", these days mostly used in Pittsburgh (and even then mostly by older people). It is unfairly dismissed as "regional" in the article, but so are the others, really. https://en.wikipedia
530.
by jhbadger 2y ago
They need to be careful with the spinach mention! As noted in the article, the public domain version of Popeye is the version before he ate spinach. It's like how people got in legal trouble for showing Mickey with white gloves as the
531.
by jhbadger 2y ago
They (and the Asterix books) were pretty common in language learning classes in the US. Obviously, primarily French as that was the original language, but because both series have been translated into nearly every European language (and bey
532.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I'd argue that 1-based indexing is the "natural interpretation". Mathematics is inherently 1-based, and it isn't surprising that languages designed to do mathematics like R, Matlab, Mathematica, Julia all do 1-based arra
533.
by jhbadger 2y ago
And not only the beginnings of the CRPG. The 1977 PLATO game Oubliette definitely was the model for the 1981 Apple II/C64 (and later NES) gane Wizardry and the later games like The Bard's Tale and Might & Magic .
534.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Yes, I remember Multimate -- it had a very weird user interface but that was because it was designed to be similar to the dedicated Wang word processors of the late 1970s/early 1980s. When I was working in a university library in the 1
535.
by jhbadger 2y ago
There have been successful cases like this though. The Ho-Chunk of Wisconsin, more popularly known as the Winnebago (which is what a neighboring tribe called them), officially changed their name to Ho-Chunk (which is what they call themselv
536.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Or rent a movie for a couple of bucks. Or check out a DVD for free from a public library.
537.
by jhbadger 2y ago
>There doesn't seem to be a lot of fiction that features the Pinkertons prominently. One exception is the (excellent) HBO TV series Deadwood There's also The Tall Target , a 1951 movie that sometimes gets played on classic mov
538.
by jhbadger 2y ago
True, but "programmer's intuition" is because most programming languages are more or less based on formal logic so they agree with the formal logic interpretation even if many programmers have never studied formal logic.
539.
by jhbadger 2y ago
I think you must be very young to make that last point. Basically you are saying that your whole retirement life will have no value. As someone who will probably retire in 10 or 15 years, I definitely hope to have a reasonably long and heal
540.
by jhbadger 2y ago
Don't know about distemper crossing over from dogs, but avian flu (also viral) is a serious problem among seals and other marine mammals -- it's possible for viruses to have wide cross-species infectivity. https://e360.

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