Not to question your memory, but the "IBM 8080 machine" sounds more like an Intel development system. In 1977, a friend took my brother and me to his office at NASA's GSFC, where he designed 8080-based experiments which flew on high-altitude balloons (with $200-at-the-time military-hardened 8080 chips). He had an Intel 8080 development system, all blue boxes. In 1984, I worked on a project using an Intel 8086 development system, again all big blue boxes and 8" floppies. (We were using 80286 processors running in 8086 mode.)
Does anyone know if IBM ever produced an 8080 computer? The original IBM PC appears to have been 8088-based (an 8086 with an external 8-bit data bus).
I remember, in 1995, a new employee telling me I was crazy for having gotten a 1200-baud modem for my Commodore 64, his reason being that nobody can type faster than a 300-baud modem can handle. Ahh, BBSs and QuantumLink, my memory of the former being of dialing an obsolete number and having the guy on the other end cursing about getting all these crank calls (I could hear him because the Commodore modems had a speaker), and my memory of the latter being that it was nerve-wrackingly slow (perhaps because of its semi-graphical UI)!
Unrelated to DOS, but back in the mid-1980s, we used iRMX-86 on 80286 single-board computers in 8086 real mode. Our computers were going out to lunch when returning from an interrupt service routine. Our local Intel representative had never heard any similar complaints and we even got an official Intel 80286 hardware emulator in-house to try and debug the problem. We finally had a conference call with some Intel engineers and they told us, oh yeah, there's a bug in the return-from-interrupt instruction (all interrupts were briefly enabled before the prior interrupt mask was restored from the stack) and they gave us an RTI macro to get around the problem. Then, a couple months later, Jerry Pournelle mentioned the bug in his BYTE column! Aarrgghh! A lot of wasted time and effort--and Pournelle knows all about it!
Back in the 1990s, on the comp.lang.c or comp.os.unix USENET news group, there was a knowledgeable poster who also was a COBOL evangelist. He once posted a 4-line, portable COBOL program that sorted a file. (All those divisions people make fun of are optional in COBOL..) Let me repeat: 4 lines to sort a file and portable to any system that has a COBOL compiler. You can't do that in C; remember that system("sort...") (or even "sort" from a command line) is not portable. Of course, COBOL has a standard, internal SORT function. As with any language, COBOL is useful in the appropriate circumstances.
Robert Kuttner on government regulation (The Washington Post op-ed page, December 12, 1995):
[In medical care, for example,] the consumer may have no practical alternative. Caveat emptor is pretty thin armor. An elderly patient in a nursing home with a feeding tube is not exactly a sovereign consumer.
And Amy E. Schwartz on Dr. Paul Ellwood, "who is credited with laying the intellectual basis for managed care" and who began "admitting children with learning disabilities for diagnostic stays that would be paid for by insurance." Schwartz quotes Ellwood from a December 8, 1996 New York Times Magazine article, "But What About Quality?, (by Lisa Belkin): "I had done this not because it was best for the kids, but because of the perverse incentives in that system." (The Washington Post op-ed page, March 17, 1997)
Perverse incentives? As opposed to, say a perverse response to existing options? [Regardless of your views, one can't help but] be spooked by this image of a man who could decide - for whatever financial "incentive" - to fill his clinic ward with children he knows don't need to be there. If the right amount of money will induce a person to hospitalize kids who should be home, how much money is the right amount to keep him from doing so?
David Gelernter was another target. He was co-creator of the Linda language, later more popularly known as tuple spaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And we are already doing it that way - makers of the military hardware and supplies are all private (and competing with each other).
And NASA doesn't already do this? Since I went to work for General Electric's Space Division in 1982, the NASA projects I worked on were bid on by and awarded to private contractors. For the most part, NASA provided contract oversight, not hardware or software expertise. (In the case of GE, 3 or 4 years after I started, the defense side of the Space Division was caught doing "creative" bookkeeping. The Space Division was prohibited from bidding on government contracts and our NASA branch finished up a commercial system and closed up shop. A similar case happened in the 1980s when Rockwell or someone went overbudget on their defense contracts and started charging the overages to their Shuttle contracts. Oh, those wonderful private defense contractors... let's privatize everything!)
Furthermore, NASA makes their technology available to private companies at no or little cost. In the case of the GE commercial system I worked on, we reused the entire image processing ground system software we had developed for NASA. (It was a very large system with an incredible amount of intellectual property in the image processing software alone--and NASA gave it away.) At a later company I worked for, we built our company's flagship product (used both on military and commerical projects) on satellite control center software we had previously developed for NASA. (And other companies made use of the original software as well. It's funny how companies aren't strict ideologues about "We Built That!" when it comes to getting something for free.) Do private military contractors offer such a return on investment to the private sector?
I don't see how it is constraining. The URL format can systematically mean what you want it to mean. There is no presumption of "running on an IP-like network before the first character". In the original specification of a URL by Tim Berners-Lee, RFC 1738, the initial component of the URL is called a "scheme", not a "transfer protocol". In the RFC, there is a list of proposed schemes including, for example, "cid" (which is elaborated upon in RFC 2111). A "cid:" URL references the content ID of a MIME body part within the message in which the URL is found; the "transfer protocol" would, I guess, be some sort of in-memory search. (The example given in RFC 2111 is an HTML email message containing an img tag whose src field is a "cid:" URL pointing to the image data MIME part in the message.)
A URL can access anything that filesystems, device drivers, and pseudo-filesystems can access. And in a more cleanly manner than having to resort to ioctl()s as you sometimes have to do. Perhaps a "gpio:" scheme for accessing the I/O pins on a Raspberry Pi, and so on...
You do realize Ivy-League "intellectuals" were also among those doing the research, however misguided, on SDI?
And Reagan was going to give the Star Wars technology to the USSR, presumably to prevent the "early use" problem? Is Cruz also going to give away this technology to North Korea et al?
Reagan, the man who brought battleships out of mothballs to shell Lebanon and then put them back in mothballs.
Lastly, if SDI had been completed under Reagan and had the Soviet Union launched an attack, the timing of our response probably would have been governed by Nancy's astrologer. A cheap shot? Yeah. Mocking? Yeah. True? Who knows. Go read Colin Powell's autobiography published in the 1990s. When he worked for Reagan, he noticed the strange timing of events; his colleagues clued him in to the reason why. Wow, a Hollywood astrologer had a significant influence on the most powerful nation on earth... well, at least she probably wasn't a Hollywood liberal--they're the worst.
That might explain the VT100-based Space Invaders game I saw in the early 1980s in our VAX/VMS shop! Also, I remember one of my colleagues coming in with the latest DECUS tape, excited that it had a Z80 cross-assembler implemented using macros in the VAX assembler.
No. In your scenario, whether the 64-bit time is positive or negative, the called function will attempt to write the full 64 bits back into the 32-bit variable, thus overwriting the following 4 bytes. CPUs don't think to themselves, "Hmm, this is a positive 64-bit value that could fit into 32 bits, so I'll only store 32 bits."
In reply to one of your replyers (!), there are CPUs (most CPUs?) that detect and signal both floating-point and integer errors in hardware. Unix has broadened the meaning of SIGFPE to include any type of arithmetic error, but do any current OSes actually raise exceptions for integer errors? (A quick check on an x86_64 Linux showed integer overflow not being reported, but integer divide-by-zero causing a SIGFPE.)
I remained on 11.64 for years, but too many of my favorite sites stopped rendering correctly, so I had to try out other browsers, finally settling on PaleMoon. Your (and my) using IE11 on certain sites reminded me of the early Opera days, when I had to keep a copy of Netscape(!) around for sites that didn't work on Opera way back then. And, like you point out, Opera had a lightweight, speedy feel about it, not the ponderous feel of current browsers.
Exactly, too! I began using Opera back in the version 3 days (3.12?)--paid for both the Windows version and, when it later came out, the Linux version. (Version 3 supported server-push, so I could monitor our system using a homebrew embedded web server that pushed out updated indicators.) Hung on to version 11.64 as long as I could (version 12 had some problem or another for me), but finally switched to PaleMoon a year or two ago.
In the latter years, what I really liked about Opera were, aside from its speed, (1) the bookmarking system and (2) middle-clicking on a link to open up and transfer focus to a new tab. I've tried Vivaldi and Otter, but neither one was close to the classic Opera experience. No other browser I've tried has matched the ease of use of classic Opera's bookmarking system. PaleMoon (and, I guess, Firefox) is not bad in this regard, but still a little clunky.
Sour grapes warning (!): Regarding middle-clicking on a link, apparently I'm in a minority; Chrome made a conscious choice to open up tabs in the background because users preferred reading an article all the way through, clicking on the links as they go, and then looking at the linked sites. (I know there is a Chrome add-on that adds this functionality, but there are other reasons Chrome is an awkward browser for me.) PaleMoon largely gets this right for me except in the case when I right-click to Google the highlighted text and the Google results tab is in the background.
This has actually been going on a long time and not just for websites. Magazines have been doing it for ages. For example, I remember when BYTE computer magazine (for those who remember it!) changed their font to a real lightweight font. A lot of people complained, but BYTE responded, like everyone does, that user testing had shown that readers preferred the lightweight fonts. My problem was that if the light was reflecting off the page at the wrong angle, the text was unreadable. (And most places you can't control the location of the lighting.) I agree with you, though, that the trend with websites is especially aggravating.
"... voting in some guy advocating we cut our losses and run, before the Iraqis where able to defend themselves."
The withdrawal and its timeline were negotiated by the Bush Administration. The Iraqis wanted us out anyway and Obama, like Bush and all True-Blooded Americans®, wouldn't, in the event of an extension, consent to our troops being held accountable to Iraqi law enforcement and justice should they happen to break the law.
Besides, "cut our losses and run" reminds me of Reagan and Lebanon...
In the mid-1980s, I worked with a lady who had previously programmed a VIC-20 to replace a Telex machine. In the late 1990s, we were building a ground system for a communications satellite; the company building the satellite supplied us with test telemetry from the yet-to-be-launched satellite on a tape cassette along with a Commodore cassette storage device. (Not the earlier device I had for my VIC-20 that looked like a Kleenex box, but the later one that was about the size of a book and had rounded corners and edges.)
I largely agree with your points except... My eReader is an old, non-eInk Aluratek Libre that still works to my satisfaction. (The screen is like a monochrome Palm Pilot with smooth page transitions, unlike the eInk readers I looked at when I bought the Libre. The saleswoman at Borders tried to tell me that the seizure-inducing flashing between pages on the eInk readers was a feature intended to give me the experience of turning the page in a real book! I gave her credit for trying!) The Libre can read EPUB, PDF, and text files, but it doesn't handle hypertext links. When reading sequentially, the Libre is quick and smooth. Trying to go to "footnotes" or a glossary at the end of a book (or worse, at the end of a chapter)--and then returning back to the main text--is so painfully slow and awkward that it's not remotely feasible.
Are newer eReaders better/faster at this? I've looked at public-display-model NOOK readers at Barnes & Noble and, when reading pages sequentially, they weren't noticeably faster and were definitely less smooth than my Libre (in my subjective impressions). I don't remember the sample books on the display models having footnotes, so I didn't check that capability out.
(And, of course, real books are great for jumping back and locating a section you read earlier in order to refresh your memory, looking at appendices, skipping around in endnotes, looking up something in the index, etc.)
The following article describes the legal rise of arbitration eliminating class action suits.
Washington Monthly, June/July/August 2014 "Thrown Out of Court: How corporations became people you can't sue." by Lina Khan http://www.washingtonmonthly.c...
Interestingly, a recent post at Washington Monthly reported that we have "Sharia" law in the U.S., as some companies require that arbitration be through religious mediators. (In the cases mentioned, Christian and Scientology arbitrators.)
Yes. I was a long-time Opera user; used to pay for it on Windows (version 3?) and then, when it came out, I paid for the Linux version. I loved the bookmark system in the 12 and below versions. Like you, I had themes: folders and subfolders for certain topics. For example, a programming folder with different language/platform subfolders. Nearly everything was possible with just the mouse. To bookmark a page, you simply moused down to the desired sub-sub-folder, for instance, and clicked the bookmark-current-page-here entry. Ditto for locating and visiting a bookmarked page. I very rarely had to type anything: very rarely to search for a bookmark and just occasionally to rename the title of a page I was bookmarking.
I stayed on Opera 11.64 (there was some annoyance in 12) until about 6 months ago, when, because of an increasing number of page-rendering problems, I began trying out various browsers (including Vivaldi and Otter), and finally settled on Pale Moon (on Windows and Linux). I imported my Opera bookmarks and I can get close to the Opera bookmarking experience, but it's still not as smooth as the old Opera was.
I recently got a Toshiba Satellite laptop with Windows 10 factory-installed. Installed Linux Mint Mate 17.2 a week ago. At first, the laptop wouldn't boot either OS, but disabling Secure Boot brought up Grub like a charm (no pun intended) and I now dual-boot Linux and Windows 10.
I feel compelled to defend grade-school teachers. I remember reading a small book by Alfred North Whitehead in which he said that mathematicians were notoriously bad at arithmetic (i.e., basic math). (If you aren't familiar with Whitehead, he and Bertrand Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, published beginning in 1910.) Teachers are obviously in good company. And, in my experience back in the 1960s and early 1970s, my grade-school teachers were quite good at their subject fields.
I'm reminded of a letter to the editor in the Communications of the ACM back in the 1980s when a computer person (who generally had and have remarkable salaries) complained (i) about the salaries teachers were getting paid and (ii) that some math teachers, for example, had the gall to describe functions as lenses. As a former avid photographer, I had come to view functions the same way--on my own, it was not something I had ever heard anyone else say, not even a teacher; i.e, a function focuses values from the domain onto values in the range. It's not an exact analogy, but I still picture it in my head that way.
(Of interest to photographers perhaps: back in the early 1970s, Popular Photography, I think, sliced a 35mm SLR in half, shone lasers into the multi-element lens, blew cigarette smoke into the SLR to make the lasers visible, and took a photograph of the laser beams being focused on the focal plane. Not exactly on the focal plane because the lens elements had been knocked slightly out of whack in the process of cutting the SLR in half. It was pretty cool!)
When I got seriously interested in computers back in the late 1970s, among the first books I read were the late Daniel McCracken's books on Algol, Fortran, and his classic on COBOL. I actually used Algol (NU-ALGOL) in our file processing course at the University of Maryland (my fellow students used Fortran-66) and COBOL for our database course circa 1980 (to create and access network databases--Codasyl?). COBOL wasn't bad and certainly wasn't terrible (like Java, I'll agree!). Although my favorite languages are probably C and Scheme, I've got a healthy respect for other languages and will note, like Donald Knuth did in his response (Computing Surveys?) to Dijkstra's"Go To Statement Considered Harmful", that good programmers write good code in any language, even assembler.
I also remember a frequent poster/COBOL evangelist on one of the USENET groups (comp.lang.c or comp.lang.unix?) back in the late 1980s who posted a *portable* 4-line COBOL program to sort a file. The sections in a COBOL program are optional and, in fairness and perhaps to the point, standard COBOL has a SORT function. In C and other languages without a standard SORT-like function, you can't simply do a "system ("sort...")" call, because system() and sort(1) aren't available on all platforms.
Years later, Donald Knuth wrote a literate Pascal program to do something and a couple of Unix legends famously responded with short shell scripts or whatever. I love Unix and often reach for awk(1) (which is ingrained in my brain despite having also used Python and Perl before). However, Knuth's Pascal program could be built and used on any platform with a Pascal compiler, while the respondents' scripts only worked on platforms that had the Unix tools available (GnuWin32 or Cygwin on Windows, for example)
Now, let me get back to replacing those mercury delay lines with bubble memory...
Slashdot Mirror
Not to question your memory, but the "IBM 8080 machine" sounds more like an Intel development system. In 1977, a friend took my brother and me to his office at NASA's GSFC, where he designed 8080-based experiments which flew on high-altitude balloons (with $200-at-the-time military-hardened 8080 chips). He had an Intel 8080 development system, all blue boxes. In 1984, I worked on a project using an Intel 8086 development system, again all big blue boxes and 8" floppies. (We were using 80286 processors running in 8086 mode.)
... fondly remembering the days when a PC was any personal computer and not just an IBM PC or its derivatives ... :(
Does anyone know if IBM ever produced an 8080 computer? The original IBM PC appears to have been 8088-based (an 8086 with an external 8-bit data bus).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
even at 1200 baud
I remember, in 1995, a new employee telling me I was crazy for having gotten a 1200-baud modem for my Commodore 64, his reason being that nobody can type faster than a 300-baud modem can handle. Ahh, BBSs and QuantumLink, my memory of the former being of dialing an obsolete number and having the guy on the other end cursing about getting all these crank calls (I could hear him because the Commodore modems had a speaker), and my memory of the latter being that it was nerve-wrackingly slow (perhaps because of its semi-graphical UI)!
Unrelated to DOS, but back in the mid-1980s, we used iRMX-86 on 80286 single-board computers in 8086 real mode. Our computers were going out to lunch when returning from an interrupt service routine. Our local Intel representative had never heard any similar complaints and we even got an official Intel 80286 hardware emulator in-house to try and debug the problem. We finally had a conference call with some Intel engineers and they told us, oh yeah, there's a bug in the return-from-interrupt instruction (all interrupts were briefly enabled before the prior interrupt mask was restored from the stack) and they gave us an RTI macro to get around the problem. Then, a couple months later, Jerry Pournelle mentioned the bug in his BYTE column! Aarrgghh! A lot of wasted time and effort--and Pournelle knows all about it!
Am I missing something, or is it fair to say that if you were a Democrat, you would know how to spell?
Doesn't anyone read Slashdot? manishs, who made this post, posted the same story, with the same links, on June 15: Intel x86s Hide Another CPU That Can Take Over Your Machine -- You Can't Audit it.
Back in the 1990s, on the comp.lang.c or comp.os.unix USENET news group, there was a knowledgeable poster who also was a COBOL evangelist. He once posted a 4-line, portable COBOL program that sorted a file. (All those divisions people make fun of are optional in COBOL..) Let me repeat: 4 lines to sort a file and portable to any system that has a COBOL compiler. You can't do that in C; remember that system("sort ...") (or even "sort" from a command line) is not portable. Of course, COBOL has a standard, internal SORT function. As with any language, COBOL is useful in the appropriate circumstances.
Robert Kuttner on government regulation (The Washington Post op-ed page, December 12, 1995):
And Amy E. Schwartz on Dr. Paul Ellwood, "who is credited with laying the intellectual basis for managed care" and who began "admitting children with learning disabilities for diagnostic stays that would be paid for by insurance." Schwartz quotes Ellwood from a December 8, 1996 New York Times Magazine article, "But What About Quality?, (by Lisa Belkin): "I had done this not because it was best for the kids, but because of the perverse incentives in that system." (The Washington Post op-ed page, March 17, 1997)
David Gelernter was another target. He was co-creator of the Linda language, later more popularly known as tuple spaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And NASA doesn't already do this? Since I went to work for General Electric's Space Division in 1982, the NASA projects I worked on were bid on by and awarded to private contractors. For the most part, NASA provided contract oversight, not hardware or software expertise. (In the case of GE, 3 or 4 years after I started, the defense side of the Space Division was caught doing "creative" bookkeeping. The Space Division was prohibited from bidding on government contracts and our NASA branch finished up a commercial system and closed up shop. A similar case happened in the 1980s when Rockwell or someone went overbudget on their defense contracts and started charging the overages to their Shuttle contracts. Oh, those wonderful private defense contractors ... let's privatize everything!)
Furthermore, NASA makes their technology available to private companies at no or little cost. In the case of the GE commercial system I worked on, we reused the entire image processing ground system software we had developed for NASA. (It was a very large system with an incredible amount of intellectual property in the image processing software alone--and NASA gave it away.) At a later company I worked for, we built our company's flagship product (used both on military and commerical projects) on satellite control center software we had previously developed for NASA. (And other companies made use of the original software as well. It's funny how companies aren't strict ideologues about "We Built That!" when it comes to getting something for free.) Do private military contractors offer such a return on investment to the private sector?
I don't see how it is constraining. The URL format can systematically mean what you want it to mean. There is no presumption of "running on an IP-like network before the first character". In the original specification of a URL by Tim Berners-Lee, RFC 1738, the initial component of the URL is called a "scheme", not a "transfer protocol". In the RFC, there is a list of proposed schemes including, for example, "cid" (which is elaborated upon in RFC 2111). A "cid:" URL references the content ID of a MIME body part within the message in which the URL is found; the "transfer protocol" would, I guess, be some sort of in-memory search. (The example given in RFC 2111 is an HTML email message containing an img tag whose src field is a "cid:" URL pointing to the image data MIME part in the message.)
...
A URL can access anything that filesystems, device drivers, and pseudo-filesystems can access. And in a more cleanly manner than having to resort to ioctl()s as you sometimes have to do. Perhaps a "gpio:" scheme for accessing the I/O pins on a Raspberry Pi, and so on
You do realize Ivy-League "intellectuals" were also among those doing the research, however misguided, on SDI?
... well, at least she probably wasn't a Hollywood liberal--they're the worst.
And Reagan was going to give the Star Wars technology to the USSR, presumably to prevent the "early use" problem? Is Cruz also going to give away this technology to North Korea et al?
Reagan, the man who brought battleships out of mothballs to shell Lebanon and then put them back in mothballs.
Lastly, if SDI had been completed under Reagan and had the Soviet Union launched an attack, the timing of our response probably would have been governed by Nancy's astrologer. A cheap shot? Yeah. Mocking? Yeah. True? Who knows. Go read Colin Powell's autobiography published in the 1990s. When he worked for Reagan, he noticed the strange timing of events; his colleagues clued him in to the reason why. Wow, a Hollywood astrologer had a significant influence on the most powerful nation on earth
That might explain the VT100-based Space Invaders game I saw in the early 1980s in our VAX/VMS shop! Also, I remember one of my colleagues coming in with the latest DECUS tape, excited that it had a Z80 cross-assembler implemented using macros in the VAX assembler.
No. In your scenario, whether the 64-bit time is positive or negative, the called function will attempt to write the full 64 bits back into the 32-bit variable, thus overwriting the following 4 bytes. CPUs don't think to themselves, "Hmm, this is a positive 64-bit value that could fit into 32 bits, so I'll only store 32 bits."
In reply to one of your replyers (!), there are CPUs (most CPUs?) that detect and signal both floating-point and integer errors in hardware. Unix has broadened the meaning of SIGFPE to include any type of arithmetic error, but do any current OSes actually raise exceptions for integer errors? (A quick check on an x86_64 Linux showed integer overflow not being reported, but integer divide-by-zero causing a SIGFPE.)
Isn't that Henry?
I remained on 11.64 for years, but too many of my favorite sites stopped rendering correctly, so I had to try out other browsers, finally settling on PaleMoon. Your (and my) using IE11 on certain sites reminded me of the early Opera days, when I had to keep a copy of Netscape(!) around for sites that didn't work on Opera way back then. And, like you point out, Opera had a lightweight, speedy feel about it, not the ponderous feel of current browsers.
Exactly, too! I began using Opera back in the version 3 days (3.12?)--paid for both the Windows version and, when it later came out, the Linux version. (Version 3 supported server-push, so I could monitor our system using a homebrew embedded web server that pushed out updated indicators.) Hung on to version 11.64 as long as I could (version 12 had some problem or another for me), but finally switched to PaleMoon a year or two ago.
In the latter years, what I really liked about Opera were, aside from its speed, (1) the bookmarking system and (2) middle-clicking on a link to open up and transfer focus to a new tab. I've tried Vivaldi and Otter, but neither one was close to the classic Opera experience. No other browser I've tried has matched the ease of use of classic Opera's bookmarking system. PaleMoon (and, I guess, Firefox) is not bad in this regard, but still a little clunky.
Sour grapes warning (!): Regarding middle-clicking on a link, apparently I'm in a minority; Chrome made a conscious choice to open up tabs in the background because users preferred reading an article all the way through, clicking on the links as they go, and then looking at the linked sites. (I know there is a Chrome add-on that adds this functionality, but there are other reasons Chrome is an awkward browser for me.) PaleMoon largely gets this right for me except in the case when I right-click to Google the highlighted text and the Google results tab is in the background.
This has actually been going on a long time and not just for websites. Magazines have been doing it for ages. For example, I remember when BYTE computer magazine (for those who remember it!) changed their font to a real lightweight font. A lot of people complained, but BYTE responded, like everyone does, that user testing had shown that readers preferred the lightweight fonts. My problem was that if the light was reflecting off the page at the wrong angle, the text was unreadable. (And most places you can't control the location of the lighting.) I agree with you, though, that the trend with websites is especially aggravating.
"... voting in some guy advocating we cut our losses and run, before the Iraqis where able to defend themselves."
...
The withdrawal and its timeline were negotiated by the Bush Administration. The Iraqis wanted us out anyway and Obama, like Bush and all True-Blooded Americans®, wouldn't, in the event of an extension, consent to our troops being held accountable to Iraqi law enforcement and justice should they happen to break the law.
Besides, "cut our losses and run" reminds me of Reagan and Lebanon
In the mid-1980s, I worked with a lady who had previously programmed a VIC-20 to replace a Telex machine. In the late 1990s, we were building a ground system for a communications satellite; the company building the satellite supplied us with test telemetry from the yet-to-be-launched satellite on a tape cassette along with a Commodore cassette storage device. (Not the earlier device I had for my VIC-20 that looked like a Kleenex box, but the later one that was about the size of a book and had rounded corners and edges.)
I largely agree with your points except ... My eReader is an old, non-eInk Aluratek Libre that still works to my satisfaction. (The screen is like a monochrome Palm Pilot with smooth page transitions, unlike the eInk readers I looked at when I bought the Libre. The saleswoman at Borders tried to tell me that the seizure-inducing flashing between pages on the eInk readers was a feature intended to give me the experience of turning the page in a real book! I gave her credit for trying!) The Libre can read EPUB, PDF, and text files, but it doesn't handle hypertext links. When reading sequentially, the Libre is quick and smooth. Trying to go to "footnotes" or a glossary at the end of a book (or worse, at the end of a chapter)--and then returning back to the main text--is so painfully slow and awkward that it's not remotely feasible.
Are newer eReaders better/faster at this? I've looked at public-display-model NOOK readers at Barnes & Noble and, when reading pages sequentially, they weren't noticeably faster and were definitely less smooth than my Libre (in my subjective impressions). I don't remember the sample books on the display models having footnotes, so I didn't check that capability out.
(And, of course, real books are great for jumping back and locating a section you read earlier in order to refresh your memory, looking at appendices, skipping around in endnotes, looking up something in the index, etc.)
The following article describes the legal rise of arbitration eliminating class action suits.
Washington Monthly, June/July/August 2014
"Thrown Out of Court: How corporations became people you can't sue." by Lina Khan
http://www.washingtonmonthly.c...
Interestingly, a recent post at Washington Monthly reported that we have "Sharia" law in the U.S., as some companies require that arbitration be through religious mediators. (In the cases mentioned, Christian and Scientology arbitrators.)
http://www.washingtonmonthly.c...
Yes. I was a long-time Opera user; used to pay for it on Windows (version 3?) and then, when it came out, I paid for the Linux version. I loved the bookmark system in the 12 and below versions. Like you, I had themes: folders and subfolders for certain topics. For example, a programming folder with different language/platform subfolders. Nearly everything was possible with just the mouse. To bookmark a page, you simply moused down to the desired sub-sub-folder, for instance, and clicked the bookmark-current-page-here entry. Ditto for locating and visiting a bookmarked page. I very rarely had to type anything: very rarely to search for a bookmark and just occasionally to rename the title of a page I was bookmarking.
I stayed on Opera 11.64 (there was some annoyance in 12) until about 6 months ago, when, because of an increasing number of page-rendering problems, I began trying out various browsers (including Vivaldi and Otter), and finally settled on Pale Moon (on Windows and Linux). I imported my Opera bookmarks and I can get close to the Opera bookmarking experience, but it's still not as smooth as the old Opera was.
I recently got a Toshiba Satellite laptop with Windows 10 factory-installed. Installed Linux Mint Mate 17.2 a week ago. At first, the laptop wouldn't boot either OS, but disabling Secure Boot brought up Grub like a charm (no pun intended) and I now dual-boot Linux and Windows 10.
I feel compelled to defend grade-school teachers. I remember reading a small book by Alfred North Whitehead in which he said that mathematicians were notoriously bad at arithmetic (i.e., basic math). (If you aren't familiar with Whitehead, he and Bertrand Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, published beginning in 1910.) Teachers are obviously in good company. And, in my experience back in the 1960s and early 1970s, my grade-school teachers were quite good at their subject fields.
I'm reminded of a letter to the editor in the Communications of the ACM back in the 1980s when a computer person (who generally had and have remarkable salaries) complained (i) about the salaries teachers were getting paid and (ii) that some math teachers, for example, had the gall to describe functions as lenses. As a former avid photographer, I had come to view functions the same way--on my own, it was not something I had ever heard anyone else say, not even a teacher; i.e, a function focuses values from the domain onto values in the range. It's not an exact analogy, but I still picture it in my head that way.
(Of interest to photographers perhaps: back in the early 1970s, Popular Photography, I think, sliced a 35mm SLR in half, shone lasers into the multi-element lens, blew cigarette smoke into the SLR to make the lasers visible, and took a photograph of the laser beams being focused on the focal plane. Not exactly on the focal plane because the lens elements had been knocked slightly out of whack in the process of cutting the SLR in half. It was pretty cool!)
When I got seriously interested in computers back in the late 1970s, among the first books I read were the late Daniel McCracken's books on Algol, Fortran, and his classic on COBOL. I actually used Algol (NU-ALGOL) in our file processing course at the University of Maryland (my fellow students used Fortran-66) and COBOL for our database course circa 1980 (to create and access network databases--Codasyl?). COBOL wasn't bad and certainly wasn't terrible (like Java, I'll agree!). Although my favorite languages are probably C and Scheme, I've got a healthy respect for other languages and will note, like Donald Knuth did in his response (Computing Surveys?) to Dijkstra's"Go To Statement Considered Harmful", that good programmers write good code in any language, even assembler.
I also remember a frequent poster/COBOL evangelist on one of the USENET groups (comp.lang.c or comp.lang.unix?) back in the late 1980s who posted a *portable* 4-line COBOL program to sort a file. The sections in a COBOL program are optional and, in fairness and perhaps to the point, standard COBOL has a SORT function. In C and other languages without a standard SORT-like function, you can't simply do a "system ("sort ...")" call, because system() and sort(1) aren't available on all platforms.
Years later, Donald Knuth wrote a literate Pascal program to do something and a couple of Unix legends famously responded with short shell scripts or whatever. I love Unix and often reach for awk(1) (which is ingrained in my brain despite having also used Python and Perl before). However, Knuth's Pascal program could be built and used on any platform with a Pascal compiler, while the respondents' scripts only worked on platforms that had the Unix tools available (GnuWin32 or Cygwin on Windows, for example)
Now, let me get back to replacing those mercury delay lines with bubble memory ...