As I remember it, Boisjoly and a couple other engineers told their management "if you launch lives will be lost." The Mormons (which is what we called corporate upper management after Morton Salt bought out Thiokol) called NASA and said "our engineers say you mustn't launch" to which the NASA boys replied "we know what we are doing, don't worry about it". The Mormons told the engineering staff "we talked to NASA, they say it's OK, they will launch". Boisjoly, believing that the Salt Boys (another nickname for corporate) hadn't conveyed the severity of the situation to NASA, then called NASA himself and said "if you launch lives will be lost". At which point NASA said "sure, sure, thanks for calling" and then immediately called the Salt Jockeys and said "You have a loose cannon and you need to tie it down immediately, shut this asshole up". Then they launched and killed seven astronauts, which ruined the President's speech celebrating the first teacher in space, but luckily Peggy Noonan was able to quickly plagiarize John Magee's poem High Flight to provide a new speech in response to the disaster.
Of course it was a long time ago, but that's how I remember it going down. I was working at the Elkton plant, so I wasn't directly involved with shuttle SRBs.
You cannot physically enforce security of code sources you are allowing people to see - unless you are going to have them work entirely naked, under constant physical observation, with full body cavity searches every time they enter or leave the workroom.
Hire someone trustworthy, pay them well, and have them work on-site. That is the path to success. Anything else is almost guaranteed to create the situation you're trying to avoid; paranoia breeds dissent and distrust breeds subterfuge.
Delaware? The state that's home to every 30 percent credit card in the country?
I'm afraid I don't know if that's true or false. Is there a reason I should care either way?
I'll note in passing that libertarians usually support the idea that lenders should be able to charge whatever interest the customer agrees to pay, though.
Most other CAs have cert lifetimes of a year (or longer). Then the question surfaces - how useful is cert revocation? Do all TLS clients check for cert revocation?
Most SSL/TLS clients do not check for a relevant CRL. The few that do (such as Firefox and other web browsers) typically require configuration and won't check for revocation by default out of the box.
In contrast, nearly all SSL/TLS clients that I am aware of (certain MTAs being an exception) will refuse to use an expired certificate unless specifically instructed to do so by the end user. So expiration is more likely to have an effect than revocation.
I don't know what situation would really require a switchblade, either, but I think that's a poor reason to make them illegal. Needing to have a compelling reason for things to be legal is a shitty way to run a society. Things should only be made illegal if there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason to do so.
Base principle of effective government right there.
Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and when laws are most numerous, the state is most corrupt (with sincere apologies to Alan Robertson, Tacitus, and Sun Tzu).
The Georgists who moved to Arden, Delaware with the same basic idea as the Free Staters (that is, to go to a small state where their ideas would have more impact on society) had a long-term positive effect on the area, reaching even beyond Delaware's borders. People who are willing to pull up roots and work in order to achieve their ideas - people who are willing to strive towards their goals - sometimes build vibrant, dynamic and productive communities... although not always, as the ruins of Salubria and Icaria attest.
The "many small batteries" approach is what makes it possible to get a decent charge in a Tesla in around 20 minutes... instead of 80+ hours.
If you charge 7,000 small batteries in parallel you'll do it roughly 1000 times faster than charging seven huge batteries with the same total capacity.
ve said this before -- if you want labels to differentiate, then add a label to non-GMO food (and obviously, enforce truth-in-advertising laws on that). That's not something that a producer of GMO food can reasonably lobby to prevent.
"Reasonable" has nothing to do with it.
In Pennsylvania the big dairies tried to make it illegal to use a "no BGH" label on milk, regardless of whether such a label was accurate or not.
Similarly, the so-called "DARK act" (stupid name) would allow genetically engineered organisms to be marketed with "all natural" labels, in order to defeat negative labeling.
It seems to me that this whole thing smells like a clever attempt by certain corporate powers to undermine a hundred years of consumer information law. They probably don't really care about GMOs so much as they care about regulatory capture.
They want to go back to the caveat emptor era. This is just a skirmish in that ongoing war. They've already crushed the USDA, after all, now they are going after the FDA.
...expecting to read Bill slamming NASCAR, but in reality he acknowledges the excitement of speed in a race and the level of engineering involved which is why he suggested a fuel limit to spur advancements in fuel consumption (due to the competitive nature of the race and the engineering component that already exists).
Oh, stop interfering with the narrative. It's important to discredit Bill Nye because he might believe in global warming or something equally non-slashdottish. He probably doesn't even get a woody whenever nuclear power is mentioned! You shouldn't be telling people that he's actually suggested a way to make NASCAR more of an engineering challenge, you're messing everything up with your "facts" and "objective viewpoint".
Mealworms are the larvae of darkling beetles. They have legs. Darkling beetles are those black elongated things, kind of like a cockroach only not as flattened and with harder and darker wing covers.
All the downsides of a small rural community (everybody knows everything you're doing and they all gossip so you live inside a potentially absurd reputation maintenance loop) combined with all the downsides of city apartments (you don't really own anything and are subject to the arbitrary decisions of the owners and politicals).
America was for many immigrants a chance to escape the tenements of Europe and carve a new life out of the American Indian...
But if you hate and fear the challenges of freedom, and want to live your life in a totally safe space, maybe tenements are perfect? I dunno.
It should be a plugin. I don't want it, don't need it, and it gets in my way because it's on by default. I've deactivated it on three systems this week alone.
I find it pretty useful.
That's exactly why it should be available to you as a plugin.
Firefox was created because Mozilla (now seamonkey) was too bloated. The stated design philosophy of FF was that a browser should browse the web, and have no other features except as provided by way of rich plugin support.
I don't run FF without SDC and Noscript. But I wouldn't dream of inflicting my needs on everyone else who runs the browser... apparently the devs of sync, pocket and hello feel differently.
The people promoting the Delaware data center lied to everyone at nearly every possible opportunity, which is why it was so easy to rouse the community against them.
For example, they claimed that their data center would employ lots of local people, when this simply wasn't true. The whole place was going to be nearly lights-out - there'd probably be as many janitors as technicians.
They also misstated the entire purpose of the plant - the so-called data center was always a trojan horse intended to allow them to gain exemptions from zoning laws and secure taxpayer funds to build a noisy, polluting power plant in a totally unsuitable location. That power plant was purposely outsized for the data center in the original plan, and more than doubled in size after it'd gained its initial approvals, and probably would have been built even bigger given the size of the property they were going to put it on. The intention was always to use tax dollars to undercut existing energy providers and sell electricity to local citizens and businesses, the data center was never anything but a front operation.
How do I know all this? Well, I do live here, and I have built three data centers professionally. The whole thing was a total con job from start to finish. That's the reality, and the University of Delaware's investigation revealed this and caused them to withdraw their support from the project (the other backers withdrew their support only because public outcry was calling attention to the many secret side deals they'd made with the power plant builders, that are protected by non-disclosure contracts).
I can't comment on Paris or other places where similar things have happened; maybe those data centers were real. The Delaware one was a power plant disguised as a data center and the people proposing it were liars and con men who were trying to loot the public tax coffers.
but how is this different from/better than, say, putty?
PuTTY is an excellent windows SSH client supporting a limited but growing subset of the SSH protocol. PuTTY's author, Simon Tatham, also publishes a fine SFTP client for windows. The only real problem with these programs is that they store settings in the registry instead of simple text configuration files.
OpenSSH is a superb implementation of the entire SSH protocol suite, both client & server, available for multiple operating systems - now including Windows. It's significantly superior in both performance and capability to proprietary servers such as Tectia (I use both every day, so I can compare).
And why should I trust this over putty or running openssh inside cygwin?
You should not trust any of the above if you're running a closed source OS, because either way, you will be forced to run code you cannot audit or verify. Arrange your affairs so that trust is unnecessary, or switch to an OS you can audit, or to an OS that is audited by people you trust.
So a vote against nuclear is really a vote for coal, oil, and natural gas. Is that ok with you then?
Ah, the fallacy of the excluded middle. I'm afraid that's complete bullshit.
If you look at any reputable analysis (that is, ignore the fake nuke shill ones put out by Fred Singer and pals) you'll find that solar and wind would be quite possible - as long as you are OK with the same kind of massive public funding and international co-operation that nukes also require. And while tens of thousands of windmills are an attractive military target, a single fission plant is even more so.
But personally I'd rather have a distributed, agriculturally based carbon-neutral methane power scheme. We've already got most of the infrastructure, including coastal pipelines that feed huge natgas power plants. Generate jobs and eliminate pollution at the same time, and go completely coal, nuke and frack gas free in a single generation - all for less than the total amounts spent on the last eight years of war.
The cost/return ratio is, pardon the pun, out of this world.:)
So, exactly the same as nuclear, only with less fetish-stroking.
Nuclear fantasies are a staple of Slashdot forums, but I personally think fission technology is both quaint and unsuited to observable human behavioral patterns. Thank god I live in a country with some pitiful semblance of democracy, so that the majority will occasionally prevails, despite insanities like the Cheney energy policy.
My teenagers were taught how to drive in (taxpayer funded, feeder pattern, majority-minority) public High School. They were also taught epistemology - and also how fuel injection works, and also basic coding...
Apparently kids in the elite schools don't get a thorough education? Weird. Guess they don't need it, though.
For those of you in the community who have similar positions, what is your experience? Do you have unfettered access to the environment?
Yes. I have root or root equivalent on all company-owned equipment. In the instances where vendors did not grant root access to systems they sold us, I cracked them and gave myself access, with the full knowledge and prior permission of the company's CIO. You cannot audit or analyze a system without full access.
Are purely architectural / advisory roles the norm at this level?
In an organization like yours, where the performance of the chief architect has been visibly unsatisfactory, it is probably normal. In my organization I am trusted not to abuse my privileges, and trusted never to change anything without informing all relevant parties, so nobody minds that I have the ability to monitor and analyze everything that's going on everywhere in the infrastructure.
You have to build trust. I recommend that you never, ever change anything without discussing it with responsible parties first (you don't have to follow their advice, but you have listen, and then you tell them what they are required to do, and don't just do it for them) unless it's a critical emergency, and if you make emergency changes you have to make damn sure that every interested party is informed afterwards of why and when and what you did.
You're asking for them to place absolute trust in you. They won't do it unless they think you deserve it - not as a technical expert, but as a person.
Point your Berkeley Internet Name Domain server at the root nameservers.
All the services that provide intermediaries to the real DNS are in the business of directing your traffic for their profit. If you are happy being a clueless end-user, the best you can do is 8.8.8.8 (Google) since they are at least built to a reasonable scale.
But it's still not really DNS... it's asking somebody else to do your DNS for you. Which is OK for non-geek end users.
Is there anything that uses Ethernet without using */IP?
Yes, tons of stuff. Dozens of protocols.
Is there anything that uses Ethernet without using */IP that also uses IP addresses??
Yes; there are a number of "companion" protocols that interoperate with IP when it's on an ethernet. You've probably heard of ARP and ICMP, to give just two examples. Neither of those is actually part of the Internet Protocol, and they don't ride over it, but they do use IP addresses on an Ethernet.
Isn't the general idea that light has all the properties of each?
Some of the properties are mutually exclusive. For example, a wave requires a medium of transmission (such as water) but a particle doesn't (boats exist independently of water).
File extensions were originally something that humans put on files to tell each other what they were. Around 1974, for example, I might have a file called "phlist.txt" on an PDP-11 and my cow-orkers would know that was a phone list in raw ASCII format. The OS did not care, labels were for humans. If you wanted to tell the OS to execute a program, you typed "run filename" and if it wasn't an executable you'd get an error message.
Then unix and friends came along, and put an "executable bit" in the metadata for each file, so that you didn't have to type "run" any more. If you typed the name of a file, and it had the executable bit set, the system treated that as if you'd run it. Saved some ink on the teletype, don't you know.
Well, 8-bit micro computers running CP/M and DOS came along, and they sort of half-assed the concept. They still didn't have very much metadata on files, but the extensions.exe and... hmmm... something else I forget right now... were designated as "special". If you typed a word that the system did not recognize, it would look for a file with that name followed by.exe, and try to execute it.
But then Apple came along and built resource forks into their file system metadata, so they were able to associate information about what applications and/or utilities were used to create a file, and give some recommendations on what should be done if a user simply clicked the file. A really significant advance for filesystems, at least in theory.
Now, Microsoft wanted to make people believe that their OS and file system were as capable as the early Apple Macintoshes (pre-OSX) so they faked up a sort of back-alley version of the resource fork using file extensions. They were already checking for that.exe extension anyway, so most of the infrastructure to do this was already in place, they just jammed some hacks in to generalize the mechanism for all file extensions. And then they hid the extensions, so that to a clueless end-user it looked exactly like an Apple mac - you clicked on a file named "phone list" and the phone list application opened up.
This hare-brained scheme doesn't really work like Apple's, of course, because instead of including extra information about the file in the file metadata, instead they have built a separate list of file "types", designated by extension, and actions to associate with those types. In terms of the required slashdot car analogy, this is the difference between having the name of your state or country blazoned on your license plate, or having a giant book where you can look up the number of a car's license and see what state the car was registered in. Obviously the latter is inefficient and scales poorly as well as being fundamentally less capable and having no consistency across individual machines. Using the Apple method, if someone gives me a file with a resource fork, I get the resource metadata with the file. Using the Microsoft method, somebody gives me a file and maybe - if I'm lucky, and have the same applications installed - I will have the same resources associated with the file extension that the person giving me the file had on their machine.
But people who grew up after all this was invented can rarely see how stupid this all is, and always has been. It's like the idiocy of having the label of the volume MFD being the same as the subfolder separator character - nearly all of you young folks think that actually makes sense, in the same way that people brought up in the Westboro Baptist Church think raving bigotry makes sense. You've been conditioned to accept it.
This is only one of several giant steps backwards in computer technology. We used to have automatic file versioning but now programmers are so thoroughly conditioned they don't even seem capable of understanding why that was so awesome.
Wireless charging schemes are totally awesome, because I am heavily invested in Texas and Arab Oil.
If you are a non-billionaire, remember profligate waste is super patriotic, and be sure to do your part! For AMERICA! (Or for the heathen foreign ideals of your benighted snail-eating nation, should you not be American.)
If you're a billionaire, I'll see you at the club later. Today we're using Tea Party congressmen as ponies for the polo match, and later we're having naked petroleum jelly wrestling featuring network anchor-babes. It'll be great!
Slashdot Mirror
As I remember it, Boisjoly and a couple other engineers told their management "if you launch lives will be lost." The Mormons (which is what we called corporate upper management after Morton Salt bought out Thiokol) called NASA and said "our engineers say you mustn't launch" to which the NASA boys replied "we know what we are doing, don't worry about it". The Mormons told the engineering staff "we talked to NASA, they say it's OK, they will launch". Boisjoly, believing that the Salt Boys (another nickname for corporate) hadn't conveyed the severity of the situation to NASA, then called NASA himself and said "if you launch lives will be lost". At which point NASA said "sure, sure, thanks for calling" and then immediately called the Salt Jockeys and said "You have a loose cannon and you need to tie it down immediately, shut this asshole up". Then they launched and killed seven astronauts, which ruined the President's speech celebrating the first teacher in space, but luckily Peggy Noonan was able to quickly plagiarize John Magee's poem High Flight to provide a new speech in response to the disaster.
Of course it was a long time ago, but that's how I remember it going down. I was working at the Elkton plant, so I wasn't directly involved with shuttle SRBs.
You cannot physically enforce security of code sources you are allowing people to see - unless you are going to have them work entirely naked, under constant physical observation, with full body cavity searches every time they enter or leave the workroom.
Hire someone trustworthy, pay them well, and have them work on-site. That is the path to success. Anything else is almost guaranteed to create the situation you're trying to avoid; paranoia breeds dissent and distrust breeds subterfuge.
I'm afraid I don't know if that's true or false. Is there a reason I should care either way?
I'll note in passing that libertarians usually support the idea that lenders should be able to charge whatever interest the customer agrees to pay, though.
Or you could call them The Control Population.
For Science!
Most SSL/TLS clients do not check for a relevant CRL. The few that do (such as Firefox and other web browsers) typically require configuration and won't check for revocation by default out of the box.
In contrast, nearly all SSL/TLS clients that I am aware of (certain MTAs being an exception) will refuse to use an expired certificate unless specifically instructed to do so by the end user. So expiration is more likely to have an effect than revocation.
Base principle of effective government right there.
Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and when laws are most numerous, the state is most corrupt (with sincere apologies to Alan Robertson, Tacitus, and Sun Tzu).
The Georgists who moved to Arden, Delaware with the same basic idea as the Free Staters (that is, to go to a small state where their ideas would have more impact on society) had a long-term positive effect on the area, reaching even beyond Delaware's borders. People who are willing to pull up roots and work in order to achieve their ideas - people who are willing to strive towards their goals - sometimes build vibrant, dynamic and productive communities... although not always, as the ruins of Salubria and Icaria attest.
The "many small batteries" approach is what makes it possible to get a decent charge in a Tesla in around 20 minutes... instead of 80+ hours.
If you charge 7,000 small batteries in parallel you'll do it roughly 1000 times faster than charging seven huge batteries with the same total capacity.
"Reasonable" has nothing to do with it.
In Pennsylvania the big dairies tried to make it illegal to use a "no BGH" label on milk, regardless of whether such a label was accurate or not.
Similarly, the so-called "DARK act" (stupid name) would allow genetically engineered organisms to be marketed with "all natural" labels, in order to defeat negative labeling.
It seems to me that this whole thing smells like a clever attempt by certain corporate powers to undermine a hundred years of consumer information law. They probably don't really care about GMOs so much as they care about regulatory capture.
They want to go back to the caveat emptor era. This is just a skirmish in that ongoing war. They've already crushed the USDA, after all, now they are going after the FDA.
You must be new here.
Oh, stop interfering with the narrative. It's important to discredit Bill Nye because he might believe in global warming or something equally non-slashdottish. He probably doesn't even get a woody whenever nuclear power is mentioned! You shouldn't be telling people that he's actually suggested a way to make NASCAR more of an engineering challenge, you're messing everything up with your "facts" and "objective viewpoint".
Mealworms are the larvae of darkling beetles. They have legs. Darkling beetles are those black elongated things, kind of like a cockroach only not as flattened and with harder and darker wing covers.
Here's a video of the darkling beetle life cycle, from worm to beetle to egg.
All the downsides of a small rural community (everybody knows everything you're doing and they all gossip so you live inside a potentially absurd reputation maintenance loop) combined with all the downsides of city apartments (you don't really own anything and are subject to the arbitrary decisions of the owners and politicals).
America was for many immigrants a chance to escape the tenements of Europe and carve a new life out of the American Indian...
But if you hate and fear the challenges of freedom, and want to live your life in a totally safe space, maybe tenements are perfect? I dunno.
It should be a plugin. I don't want it, don't need it, and it gets in my way because it's on by default. I've deactivated it on three systems this week alone.
That's exactly why it should be available to you as a plugin.
Firefox was created because Mozilla (now seamonkey) was too bloated. The stated design philosophy of FF was that a browser should browse the web, and have no other features except as provided by way of rich plugin support.
I don't run FF without SDC and Noscript. But I wouldn't dream of inflicting my needs on everyone else who runs the browser... apparently the devs of sync, pocket and hello feel differently.
The people promoting the Delaware data center lied to everyone at nearly every possible opportunity, which is why it was so easy to rouse the community against them.
For example, they claimed that their data center would employ lots of local people, when this simply wasn't true. The whole place was going to be nearly lights-out - there'd probably be as many janitors as technicians.
They also misstated the entire purpose of the plant - the so-called data center was always a trojan horse intended to allow them to gain exemptions from zoning laws and secure taxpayer funds to build a noisy, polluting power plant in a totally unsuitable location. That power plant was purposely outsized for the data center in the original plan, and more than doubled in size after it'd gained its initial approvals, and probably would have been built even bigger given the size of the property they were going to put it on. The intention was always to use tax dollars to undercut existing energy providers and sell electricity to local citizens and businesses, the data center was never anything but a front operation.
How do I know all this? Well, I do live here, and I have built three data centers professionally. The whole thing was a total con job from start to finish. That's the reality, and the University of Delaware's investigation revealed this and caused them to withdraw their support from the project (the other backers withdrew their support only because public outcry was calling attention to the many secret side deals they'd made with the power plant builders, that are protected by non-disclosure contracts).
I can't comment on Paris or other places where similar things have happened; maybe those data centers were real. The Delaware one was a power plant disguised as a data center and the people proposing it were liars and con men who were trying to loot the public tax coffers.
PuTTY is an excellent windows SSH client supporting a limited but growing subset of the SSH protocol. PuTTY's author, Simon Tatham, also publishes a fine SFTP client for windows. The only real problem with these programs is that they store settings in the registry instead of simple text configuration files.
OpenSSH is a superb implementation of the entire SSH protocol suite, both client & server, available for multiple operating systems - now including Windows. It's significantly superior in both performance and capability to proprietary servers such as Tectia (I use both every day, so I can compare).
You should not trust any of the above if you're running a closed source OS, because either way, you will be forced to run code you cannot audit or verify. Arrange your affairs so that trust is unnecessary, or switch to an OS you can audit, or to an OS that is audited by people you trust.
The Gypsies (AKA 'gyptians) stole it, which is why they have permission directly from God to steal and it is not accounted a sin for them.
(You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. See Mieczyslaw Dowojno-Sylwestrowicz, in Gypsy Lore Journal, i. 1889, p. 253.)
Ah, the fallacy of the excluded middle. I'm afraid that's complete bullshit.
If you look at any reputable analysis (that is, ignore the fake nuke shill ones put out by Fred Singer and pals) you'll find that solar and wind would be quite possible - as long as you are OK with the same kind of massive public funding and international co-operation that nukes also require. And while tens of thousands of windmills are an attractive military target, a single fission plant is even more so.
But personally I'd rather have a distributed, agriculturally based carbon-neutral methane power scheme. We've already got most of the infrastructure, including coastal pipelines that feed huge natgas power plants. Generate jobs and eliminate pollution at the same time, and go completely coal, nuke and frack gas free in a single generation - all for less than the total amounts spent on the last eight years of war.
So, exactly the same as nuclear, only with less fetish-stroking.
Nuclear fantasies are a staple of Slashdot forums, but I personally think fission technology is both quaint and unsuited to observable human behavioral patterns. Thank god I live in a country with some pitiful semblance of democracy, so that the majority will occasionally prevails, despite insanities like the Cheney energy policy.
My teenagers were taught how to drive in (taxpayer funded, feeder pattern, majority-minority) public High School. They were also taught epistemology - and also how fuel injection works, and also basic coding...
Apparently kids in the elite schools don't get a thorough education? Weird. Guess they don't need it, though.
I know, man. If it wasn't for all the NIMBYs, we'd have put men on the moon by now!
Yes. I have root or root equivalent on all company-owned equipment. In the instances where vendors did not grant root access to systems they sold us, I cracked them and gave myself access, with the full knowledge and prior permission of the company's CIO. You cannot audit or analyze a system without full access.
In an organization like yours, where the performance of the chief architect has been visibly unsatisfactory, it is probably normal. In my organization I am trusted not to abuse my privileges, and trusted never to change anything without informing all relevant parties, so nobody minds that I have the ability to monitor and analyze everything that's going on everywhere in the infrastructure.
You have to build trust. I recommend that you never, ever change anything without discussing it with responsible parties first (you don't have to follow their advice, but you have listen, and then you tell them what they are required to do, and don't just do it for them) unless it's a critical emergency, and if you make emergency changes you have to make damn sure that every interested party is informed afterwards of why and when and what you did.
You're asking for them to place absolute trust in you. They won't do it unless they think you deserve it - not as a technical expert, but as a person.
Point your Berkeley Internet Name Domain server at the root nameservers.
All the services that provide intermediaries to the real DNS are in the business of directing your traffic for their profit. If you are happy being a clueless end-user, the best you can do is 8.8.8.8 (Google) since they are at least built to a reasonable scale.
But it's still not really DNS... it's asking somebody else to do your DNS for you. Which is OK for non-geek end users.
Yes, tons of stuff. Dozens of protocols.
Yes; there are a number of "companion" protocols that interoperate with IP when it's on an ethernet. You've probably heard of ARP and ICMP, to give just two examples. Neither of those is actually part of the Internet Protocol, and they don't ride over it, but they do use IP addresses on an Ethernet.
Some of the properties are mutually exclusive. For example, a wave requires a medium of transmission (such as water) but a particle doesn't (boats exist independently of water).
File extensions were originally something that humans put on files to tell each other what they were. Around 1974, for example, I might have a file called "phlist.txt" on an PDP-11 and my cow-orkers would know that was a phone list in raw ASCII format. The OS did not care, labels were for humans. If you wanted to tell the OS to execute a program, you typed "run filename" and if it wasn't an executable you'd get an error message.
Then unix and friends came along, and put an "executable bit" in the metadata for each file, so that you didn't have to type "run" any more. If you typed the name of a file, and it had the executable bit set, the system treated that as if you'd run it. Saved some ink on the teletype, don't you know.
Well, 8-bit micro computers running CP/M and DOS came along, and they sort of half-assed the concept. They still didn't have very much metadata on files, but the extensions .exe and... hmmm... something else I forget right now... were designated as "special". If you typed a word that the system did not recognize, it would look for a file with that name followed by .exe, and try to execute it.
But then Apple came along and built resource forks into their file system metadata, so they were able to associate information about what applications and/or utilities were used to create a file, and give some recommendations on what should be done if a user simply clicked the file. A really significant advance for filesystems, at least in theory.
Now, Microsoft wanted to make people believe that their OS and file system were as capable as the early Apple Macintoshes (pre-OSX) so they faked up a sort of back-alley version of the resource fork using file extensions. They were already checking for that .exe extension anyway, so most of the infrastructure to do this was already in place, they just jammed some hacks in to generalize the mechanism for all file extensions. And then they hid the extensions, so that to a clueless end-user it looked exactly like an Apple mac - you clicked on a file named "phone list" and the phone list application opened up.
This hare-brained scheme doesn't really work like Apple's, of course, because instead of including extra information about the file in the file metadata, instead they have built a separate list of file "types", designated by extension, and actions to associate with those types. In terms of the required slashdot car analogy, this is the difference between having the name of your state or country blazoned on your license plate, or having a giant book where you can look up the number of a car's license and see what state the car was registered in. Obviously the latter is inefficient and scales poorly as well as being fundamentally less capable and having no consistency across individual machines. Using the Apple method, if someone gives me a file with a resource fork, I get the resource metadata with the file. Using the Microsoft method, somebody gives me a file and maybe - if I'm lucky, and have the same applications installed - I will have the same resources associated with the file extension that the person giving me the file had on their machine.
But people who grew up after all this was invented can rarely see how stupid this all is, and always has been. It's like the idiocy of having the label of the volume MFD being the same as the subfolder separator character - nearly all of you young folks think that actually makes sense, in the same way that people brought up in the Westboro Baptist Church think raving bigotry makes sense. You've been conditioned to accept it.
This is only one of several giant steps backwards in computer technology. We used to have automatic file versioning but now programmers are so thoroughly conditioned they don't even seem capable of understanding why that was so awesome.
Now get off my damn lawn, you whippersnappers!
Wireless charging schemes are totally awesome, because I am heavily invested in Texas and Arab Oil.
If you are a non-billionaire, remember profligate waste is super patriotic, and be sure to do your part! For AMERICA! (Or for the heathen foreign ideals of your benighted snail-eating nation, should you not be American.)
If you're a billionaire, I'll see you at the club later. Today we're using Tea Party congressmen as ponies for the polo match, and later we're having naked petroleum jelly wrestling featuring network anchor-babes. It'll be great!