ncphil

7 ms·

31.
by ncphil 3y ago
Or, govern this stuff under international treaty. Internet traffic _is not_ like truck traffic. It's more like radio (in some places it is radio). It's the Ross Sea, not I-95. What gives any one nation (or subdivision, like a cert
32.
by ncphil 3y ago
Heh. Lots, actually. I'm one of them. Been at my current job for 25 years. Started in tech as a second career when I was 41. A colleague who is actually a year younger than me has been at it for well over 40 years (came on while still
33.
by ncphil 3y ago
No kidding.
34.
by ncphil 3y ago
Because New York City is like deep space: fundamentally hostile to life, especially human life. Once people get past their sensory overloaded twenties (or luck into the kind of wealth that triggers syncophantic personalities to suck up to t
35.
by ncphil 3y ago
Well, the analysis at the engineering level was correct. Problem is, the engineers weren't allowed to confirm it. That was a management decision, made on the grounds that, "There's nothing we can do".
36.
by ncphil 3y ago
The novel was terrible, at least as art. But it was great fun. I used to think Hubbard was trying to emulate those stories we read in the pulp scifi mags of the 50s and 60s. Now I think that was just his usual style. It _was_ big. And long.
37.
by ncphil 3y ago
It's the addiction of staff officer ranks (mostly Colonels, Generals), as well as senior agency executives and politicians, to paper hardcopies. They all want their briefing materials printed out so they can scribble in the margins and
38.
by ncphil 3y ago
I _was_ a lawyer for a decade before going into tech. One of the good habits I acquired in practice was making sure to read all the way through every document, no matter how boring it got. I agree with you completely, except the article isn
39.
by ncphil 3y ago
One intriguing line of analysis in _The Dawn of Everything_ is how people in early settlements would often just pack up and leave when their leaders started acting like a*holes (think human sacrifices in Mesoamerica). That reminded me of ho
40.
by ncphil 4y ago
The salary range in a professional track does not _have_ to be too low. That's a choice, a value judgment, by management. Some companies do things differently. In at least one company I know, the professional track runs parallel to the
41.
by ncphil 4y ago
As someone who has owned or rented homes heated with oil, gas and heat pumps (the latter two in the SE US), my experience has been that the gas and heat pump systems cost about the same same to operate. But when the gas system in our curren
42.
by ncphil 4y ago
Something many have advocated for decades. But keep in mind that there are tens of thousands of elected offices in the US, most of them nonpartisan, local positions that cost little to contest: yet it's incredibly hard to find people w
43.
by ncphil 4y ago
What I used to call "grandious" or "pretentious" language when critiquing my kids' college papers. The voice of an FM radio announcer or a politician. For me it has the opposite effect intended: sounding insincere a
44.
by ncphil 4y ago
I subscribed to the NYT and a few magazines like The Atlantic when Kindle originally launched and really enjoyed the experience, but got out of the habit of reading them and dropped those subs long before prices went up. It was "too go
45.
by ncphil 4y ago
When Kindle first came out my kids were just starting to get into reading more, so I wrote a perl script to poll various RSS feed that emailed their own personalized "newsletter" to the Kindle for each of them. It was a fun projec
46.
by ncphil 4y ago
Because he was competing with a private military contractor, and the US government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the MIC: or often acts like it is. Customs should have told RSA "no", "this is a private contract dispute&quot
47.
by ncphil 4y ago
Ha! My experience exactly, although I have to admit that this was for personal use at home where my patience is usually thin to non-existent. Docker CE on the home server saved me a lot of aggravation, where podman got me wondering if virtu
48.
by ncphil 4y ago
Well, I _might_ be able to teach an AI how to do effective legal research and writing, or even to do pre and post trial discovery, but representing someone at trial? Not without full immunity from malpractice liability. It would be fun to s
49.
by ncphil 4y ago
Mastodon is great, but it really isn't a Twitter substitute. https://wordsmith.social/elilla/mastodon-for-twitter-users-i... . Thank goodness for that.
50.
by ncphil 4y ago
"No longer support writing on papyrus, in favor of more modern vellum based media." And then, the Dark Ages. Of course, backwards compatibilty will be maintained: at least to the end of the century? Digital culture is already so e
51.
by ncphil 4y ago
Nothing stops anyone from celebrating a stray (or neighboring) dog's birthday. The difference between a dog and a chair in that context is the dog will wag its tail in an expression of happiness if given a birthday treat. The chair won
52.
by ncphil 4y ago
This is exactly what I'd do if I was still teaching. It's an opportunity to give students a different perspective, while at the same time improving their critical thinking skills. Also, like 80% of what you find on stackoverflow,
53.
by ncphil 4y ago
Damn. I _knew_ there was something I forgot to do setting up Tbird this time!
54.
by ncphil 4y ago
Was just thinking that the other day. But Eudora, like Tbird until a short time ago, had issues with HTML mail (_1997_ era HTML maiil). Still, if you ever do dive in I'm up for doing some beta testing!
55.
by ncphil 4y ago
I avoided learning SQL in the client-server training program that got me started in tech back in the late 90s, only to have to learn it on the job during a global ERP deployment a decade later. Should have taken the class, would have meant
56.
by ncphil 4y ago
A friend had this very same machine, causing me much envy. Meanwhile, I got through college and law school with a government refurbished Underwood that was the polar opposite of portable. By the time I went back for my masters (in history,
57.
by ncphil 4y ago
"The volcano gods". Best phrase of this thread.
58.
by ncphil 4y ago
I think Louis Rossmann said they'd worked on that bill for over 7 years, desperately trying to keep it from being compromised into oblivion. Then, on the eve of passage, the legislature amended away everything that mattered in it by ad
59.
by ncphil 4y ago
... because back in the 70s it was decided that disclosure (a/k/a "transparency") was all we'd ask of private companies (with exceptions, as in, some companies aren't even expected to disclose). Who do you thin
60.
by ncphil 4y ago
Huh. So basically these guys got access to stuff that thousands of companies and governments who subscribe to Experian already have, but didn't pay for it. Color me outraged.

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