...if they unknowingly hired the people blogging about the school as the lawyers to file suit?
Except that the persons taking the case would then know that there were a conflict of interest, because they would know that they are the defendants. So, maybe it might be hilarious, but the lawyers representing Cooley would be handing the school their disbarment on a silver platter, and thus likely to NEVER happen.
Same with all the no-knock raids that end up killing innocent people. It is perfectly reasonable for the resident to have a gun in hand when responding to someone busting into his house at night. It is also perfectly reasonable for a cop to defend himself. The problem is the idiots in the police department that think it is a good idea have our cops act like soldiers in a war-zone, just to enforce laws which aren't a life-and-death matter.
I can get behind this. Police should only perform no-knock raids when the people are suspected of being an illegal paramilitary group... namely, unless you expect to barge in there and shoot everyone on sight, don't barge in there without notice.
Any item with mass possesses gravity. Light consists of photons, which are massless, and therefore do not exert gravity.
Technically, gravity is the curvature of space-time. As any item moves through space-time, it follows the natural curvature, which affects its trajectory. Thus planets could be said to move in a straight line through curved space as they orbit stars. Light, too, must move through space time, and if it enters the event horizon of the singularity, it cannot escape.
Photons have a zero REST MASS. But by having velocity, they have relativistic mass.
You might take a look at compilers. Most university-level compiler courses are either dropped from the syllabus or so horribly out of date that they're irrelevant (I think UUIC may be an exception, but I can't think of anything else. The compilers stuff I learned at university was obsolete before I was born). There is currently a huge skills shortage, and a lot of interesting architectures appearing (GPUs, DSPs on SoCs) with really bad compiler support. Companies like ARM, Qualcomm, nVidia, and so on are hiring like crazy, and there's a lot of contract work floating around.
Well, I am already deeply into that topic as well. So... I suppose I have even more backup. Of course, I'm a bit like Larry Wall, in that all the linguistics that I know makes me develop complicated languages that grant far too much syntactic sugar than most programmers ideally would like.
Given that the Americans are insisting that these scanners are used globally[1], at least the Germans are concerned with the health and privacy of their citizens.
[1] and you thought the TSA situation stinks - now Washington is bullying the EU into using them too. Citation? RTFA
Well, civil and human rights are Article 1 of their constitution... but anyways, it seems like this is less about privacy and health, and more about effectiveness. You know, those silly Germans insisting on things actually working well.
You know what I use to think your way. I still remember how to write windows 98 vxd in MASM. I have hacked linux on two 486 with 16MB of RAM in 1998 to make a tunnel to play Diablo with my friends. And you know what, I am now the senior Java architect at my place. Business software writing sucks, most of the time, but the job stability, the pay and the pension plan are way better.
I plan on the job security once I'm one of the only people who can actually do the work, lol. But yeah, I hear what you mean. I got used to writing Perl in my last job, and now I primarily think in perl first. I can still do my hardcore C, and my assembly, but I still think prototyping in perl.
Why would you say that? ZeniMax have to defend their trademarks. Obviously, they would never take actual legal action against Notch for this, but they have to send a cease and desist in order to protect themselves during potential future litigation against companies that DO infringe upon their trademarks in a way that COULD harm ZeniMax. Why this is newsworthy beats me.
There, fixed that for you.
If you're gonna be an egotistical jackass posting simply to correct my grammar, perhaps you should actually correct it. Way to fail.
I wasn't correcting grammar at all, and never intended to do so... I was adding appropriate emphasis to make it absolutely positively crystal clear and without doubt that they really didn't have any good choice in the matter to let the issue slide.
Why would you say that? ZeniMax has to defend their trademarks. Obviously, they would never take actual legal action against Notch for this, but they have to send a cease and desist in order to protect themselves during potential future litigation against companies that DO infringe upon their trademarks in a way that COULD harm ZeniMax. Why this is newsworthy beats me.
So your particular skillset has fallen out of vogue for a while; it happens. If this stuff is useful, it'll come back. For instance, a lot of the hardware related skills mentioned are still around, they're just considered to be a specialisation these days, in most situations it's safe to assume that the hardware either performs within spec or that the lower layer (OS etc) is dealing with any irregularities.
I'm actually a youngin' who took interest in the lower layers, and developed my skill set around that. I'm kind of waiting for the oldies to retire/kick the bucket and open up more openings for people like me. I anticipate that I'll be one of the hawt shite programmers once the population of systems programmers starts dwindling...
I'm sorry I was talking about compiled tables used to implement fast regexp and searches, not direct implementations of character matching.
An example of a lookup table like I was saying is if you wanted to match all characters in a character class, you could make an 8-bit lookup table for the first UTF-8 byte. Each entry either points to another lookup table for the second byte, or an "all true" or an "all false" indicator. In fact any practical method of matching subsets of Unicode works something like this which is why I really don't see any advantage in translating to UTF-32. The UTF-8 bytes are actually somewhat balanced toward frequency so that the most common characters are found with fewer lookups.
As I said, you can reinterpret a match for a single unicode codepoint into a match for the UTF-8 sequence that would be equivalent. However, it would fail to match overlong sequences, so if you slip up, one might be able to get around your regex blocking access do any http path that includes ".." by using overlong codes. I know of at least one implementation that made an error of this sort, and introduced a vulnerability. True scrubbing overlong codes probably isn't as resource (cpu time) intensive as transcoding to UTF-32, but they are still in the same O(n) category. The LUTs you're talking about vs the LUTs that I envision being available for UTF-32 still both have O(1) efficiency as well. (One can use a LUT on the MSB of a UTF-32 value as well (or rather knowing that no UTF-32 value over 0x10FFFF is valid, (codepoint >> 13) for a 9-bit index and an upper bound of 272). Of course, chopping up the pie can be done any number of ways to be more efficient for the specific data set intended.)
You're also making an assumption about frequency that is deeply dependent upon Latin-1 being very common. There are a number of languages for which this assumption does not apply. Specifically, if we were running lookups on Gothic, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, etc, the process would actually perform 4 times more lookups than simple Latin-1 for nearly every character in the string.
Then you don't go posting about it online... Free speech is the ability for you state your beliefs without having to worry about the government jailing you for saying it. Nothing about doing it anonymously. Free Speech is something to be valued and not used anonymously. If you are going to stand out and say something important then you should do it so people know who you are, and realize that even in a place of Free Speech there is risks.
In Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960), the Court struck down a Los Angeles city ordinance that made it a crime to distribute anonymous pamphlets. In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995), the Court struck down an Ohio statute that made it a crime to distribute anonymous campaign literature. However, in Meese v. Keene,, 481 U.S. 465 (1987), the Court upheld the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, under which several Canadian films were defined as "political propaganda," requiring their sponsors to be identified.
Argument by analogy, replace privacy of personal information with privacy of person, the protecting right against unreasonable search and seizure:
Criminals and thieves hate allowing people to search their property. Most people properly own all their property and have no need to refuse searches.
No one said communities have to be safe for people with embarrassing property. In fact, were I in that situation, hiding my property would be the LAST thing I would do.
The argument "good people have nothing to hide" is ridiculous, and wrong-headed. There are tons of good, legal, moral, and ethical reasons why someone would want to keep their information private, just as there are good, legal, moral, and ethical reasons why someone would want to keep their privacy of person intact from unreasonable search and seizure.
I suppose that it is true that one can decompose any multibyte code range match into an 8-bit match sequence...
But LUTs don't have to be the entire range, and the LUT doesn't need to exceed the size of the Unicode space. Why can't I use a LUT that is based on character_class[codepoint >> 7]? And then only contains 0x2200 elements?
It's not the police, it's the prosecutor. The police may have agitated for this, but the prosecutor is the person who should know better.
I saw a judge berate a lawyer for asking him to sign a prior-restraint TRO on his opposing party. The judge should have known better as well... but their claim is that the person is harassing and posting this with intent to embarass... which I can see (whistleblower laws protect you from reporting incidents to the proper authorities, not airing it on youtube) but the fact that the allegations aren't false, means the material isn't defamatory... so... good luck sticking this prosecution all the way to conviction... of course, they don't need it to last that far, they just need it to get far enough to identify the individual and then fire them for cause.
If it effects the surface tension of the water (which surfactants do) then it should be able to identify it. It may not be able to register definitively what the surfactant is, but it should be able to identify the presence of one.
I don't know what the OP actually meant, but assuming the interpretation which makes most sense usually leads to the most interesting discussion.
Right, but your unstated assumption results in some people (i.e. at least me) not understanding your context, and telling you that you're wrong... when the truth is we were just working from different unstated assumptions.
Honestly, I assumed that the company wouldn't be idiots enough to break the law... or at least that they had lawyers that would advise them not to break it at least so blatantly.
"The incompatibility I speak of is the hypothetical one switching from 1-byte fixed-length length encoding to variable-byte length encoding."
So you're comparing one thing that didn't happen to another thing that didn't happen, and calling that an incompatibility? Seems like a pointless exercise.
Someone else presented the original hypothetical... I just pointed out that the second hypothetical would have occurred and produced incompatibilities.
I was actually going to comment about all this myself, then after I had written a whole paragraph of convoluted backtracking based on what is a glyph vs. character vs. codepoint, I decided to give up. lol.
Are you sure Perl does not just store 8-bit strings?
Transcoding UTF-8 to UTF-32 is a huge WASTE of processing time, not a saving. You are seriously over-estimating the number of times that somebody needs to get to the N'th code point without looking at the N-1 code points before it. Possibly by many orders of magnitude. All other operations on a string do not take any more time with UTF-8 than UTF-32.
After digging around a lot, I came across the answer, using Devel::Peek, I was able to determine, no. You're correct, it uses UTF-8 internally.
There are other reasons to transcode to UTF-32 beyond just getting the N'th code point though. For instance by using UTF-32 internally, you ensure that you don't generate any overlong representations when generating UTF-8. As well, you don't have to constantly spend time composing characters from UTF-8 to compare to regex values and such. (Testing for the property IS_HEBREW means you have to turn each character into an integer value and then test the character properties.)
First, there's anachronism here. The "char foo[];" notation is new, far newer than the first C implementations were.
Also, the size_t (or rather, "int") in the original implementations was 16 bits, and the distinction between "short" and "long" did not occur until they introduced 32-bit machines. I mean, really... when the processor had 8-bit and 16-bit registers, why do you need two flavors of "int"?
What Torvalds seems to prefer, in KDE3.5, Gnome2, and now XFCE, is a more Windows-like metaphor for multitasking. I'm with him. I think that's one thing Windows did right.
Last time I installed XFCE on OpenBSD, it came with essentially an OSX dock right there at the bottom of the screen.
But you ARE arguing that point, by definition. If it was shown to work, then it is shown to be not false.
Only things that can be shown to be false or not false are falsifiable. Either one will do.
Are you just being willfully ignorant, or are you just completely unaware of what "falsifiable" means? Let me break it down for you. ("false" + "ify") + "able". It means "able to be proven false." This does not mean that showing that it works means it's falsifiable. Asserting that "it has been shown to work, therefore it is valid" is actually falling prey to confirmation bias. You need to be searching for that which would invalidate your theory, and prove it false, otherwise you simply continue to assert constantly, "it's true, it's true, it's true".
I can demonstrate quite easily how creationism can be shown to work. This does not make it falsifiable, because the precise way that it is shown to work is that it can literally explain any and all evidence to support itself. Thus, it is not falsifiable.
Showing that your theory predicts an event correctly is actually in fact worthless... nearly every theory works at first. Caloric theory provides useful and valid predictions that work (under specific conditions). The problem is that there are experiments that can be done to show that they do not work in all conditions, and thus the theory is actually wrong, despite producing some models that work.
What experiment can you think of that you could run that given a certain specific and clear result, would prove that Austrian school is false. The experiment doesn't have to actually produce the given specific result, it just has to be a possible outcome. Note, that such experiments can only produce definitive results in the negative. There is no way to yield a definitive positive result for a scientific theory. Either a theory stands falsified, or it stands yet-to-be-falsified. We have no theory at all that is known and proven to be true, and I certainly hope you are not asserting that Austrian economics has been proven true, because it's the biggest red flag of pseudoscience out there.
If we were to switch now, is that the compatibility you're referring to? Well sure.
But nobody's talking about switching now, the point of the topic is that C should have been designed differently. In those days there was very little backwards compatibility to worry about.
And if it had been decided to be 1-byte length + data, and everyone used it like that, and assumed that the full 8-bits are available for the length, then when we switch to variable-byte length encoding, it would create an incompatibility. The incompatibility I speak of is the hypothetical one switching from 1-byte fixed-length length encoding to variable-byte length encoding.
"They could have just used variable length encoding from the beginning." Sure, and they could have programmed everything in Java from the start... the idea of a variable length encoding would have been over-engineering the problem that they were facing.
Slashdot Mirror
...if they unknowingly hired the people blogging about the school as the lawyers to file suit?
Except that the persons taking the case would then know that there were a conflict of interest, because they would know that they are the defendants. So, maybe it might be hilarious, but the lawyers representing Cooley would be handing the school their disbarment on a silver platter, and thus likely to NEVER happen.
Same with all the no-knock raids that end up killing innocent people. It is perfectly reasonable for the resident to have a gun in hand when responding to someone busting into his house at night. It is also perfectly reasonable for a cop to defend himself. The problem is the idiots in the police department that think it is a good idea have our cops act like soldiers in a war-zone, just to enforce laws which aren't a life-and-death matter.
I can get behind this. Police should only perform no-knock raids when the people are suspected of being an illegal paramilitary group... namely, unless you expect to barge in there and shoot everyone on sight, don't barge in there without notice.
Any item with mass possesses gravity. Light consists of photons, which are massless, and therefore do not exert gravity.
Technically, gravity is the curvature of space-time. As any item moves through space-time, it follows the natural curvature, which affects its trajectory. Thus planets could be said to move in a straight line through curved space as they orbit stars. Light, too, must move through space time, and if it enters the event horizon of the singularity, it cannot escape.
Photons have a zero REST MASS. But by having velocity, they have relativistic mass.
Wasn't much of a "fix" then, was it?
The phrasing came from the meme, not the actual applicability of the semantics to the situation.
You might take a look at compilers. Most university-level compiler courses are either dropped from the syllabus or so horribly out of date that they're irrelevant (I think UUIC may be an exception, but I can't think of anything else. The compilers stuff I learned at university was obsolete before I was born). There is currently a huge skills shortage, and a lot of interesting architectures appearing (GPUs, DSPs on SoCs) with really bad compiler support. Companies like ARM, Qualcomm, nVidia, and so on are hiring like crazy, and there's a lot of contract work floating around.
Well, I am already deeply into that topic as well. So... I suppose I have even more backup. Of course, I'm a bit like Larry Wall, in that all the linguistics that I know makes me develop complicated languages that grant far too much syntactic sugar than most programmers ideally would like.
Given that the Americans are insisting that these scanners are used globally[1], at least the Germans are concerned with the health and privacy of their citizens.
[1] and you thought the TSA situation stinks - now Washington is bullying the EU into using them too. Citation? RTFA
Well, civil and human rights are Article 1 of their constitution... but anyways, it seems like this is less about privacy and health, and more about effectiveness. You know, those silly Germans insisting on things actually working well.
You know what I use to think your way. I still remember how to write windows 98 vxd in MASM. I have hacked linux on two 486 with 16MB of RAM in 1998 to make a tunnel to play Diablo with my friends.
And you know what, I am now the senior Java architect at my place. Business software writing sucks, most of the time, but the job stability, the pay and the pension plan are way better.
I plan on the job security once I'm one of the only people who can actually do the work, lol. But yeah, I hear what you mean. I got used to writing Perl in my last job, and now I primarily think in perl first. I can still do my hardcore C, and my assembly, but I still think prototyping in perl.
Why would you say that? ZeniMax have to defend their trademarks. Obviously, they would never take actual legal action against Notch for this, but they have to send a cease and desist in order to protect themselves during potential future litigation against companies that DO infringe upon their trademarks in a way that COULD harm ZeniMax. Why this is newsworthy beats me.
There, fixed that for you.
If you're gonna be an egotistical jackass posting simply to correct my grammar, perhaps you should actually correct it. Way to fail.
I wasn't correcting grammar at all, and never intended to do so... I was adding appropriate emphasis to make it absolutely positively crystal clear and without doubt that they really didn't have any good choice in the matter to let the issue slide.
Why would you say that? ZeniMax has to defend their trademarks. Obviously, they would never take actual legal action against Notch for this, but they have to send a cease and desist in order to protect themselves during potential future litigation against companies that DO infringe upon their trademarks in a way that COULD harm ZeniMax. Why this is newsworthy beats me.
There, fixed that for you.
So your particular skillset has fallen out of vogue for a while; it happens. If this stuff is useful, it'll come back. For instance, a lot of the hardware related skills mentioned are still around, they're just considered to be a specialisation these days, in most situations it's safe to assume that the hardware either performs within spec or that the lower layer (OS etc) is dealing with any irregularities.
I'm actually a youngin' who took interest in the lower layers, and developed my skill set around that. I'm kind of waiting for the oldies to retire/kick the bucket and open up more openings for people like me. I anticipate that I'll be one of the hawt shite programmers once the population of systems programmers starts dwindling...
I'm sorry I was talking about compiled tables used to implement fast regexp and searches, not direct implementations of character matching.
An example of a lookup table like I was saying is if you wanted to match all characters in a character class, you could make an 8-bit lookup table for the first UTF-8 byte. Each entry either points to another lookup table for the second byte, or an "all true" or an "all false" indicator. In fact any practical method of matching subsets of Unicode works something like this which is why I really don't see any advantage in translating to UTF-32. The UTF-8 bytes are actually somewhat balanced toward frequency so that the most common characters are found with fewer lookups.
As I said, you can reinterpret a match for a single unicode codepoint into a match for the UTF-8 sequence that would be equivalent. However, it would fail to match overlong sequences, so if you slip up, one might be able to get around your regex blocking access do any http path that includes ".." by using overlong codes. I know of at least one implementation that made an error of this sort, and introduced a vulnerability. True scrubbing overlong codes probably isn't as resource (cpu time) intensive as transcoding to UTF-32, but they are still in the same O(n) category. The LUTs you're talking about vs the LUTs that I envision being available for UTF-32 still both have O(1) efficiency as well. (One can use a LUT on the MSB of a UTF-32 value as well (or rather knowing that no UTF-32 value over 0x10FFFF is valid, (codepoint >> 13) for a 9-bit index and an upper bound of 272). Of course, chopping up the pie can be done any number of ways to be more efficient for the specific data set intended.)
You're also making an assumption about frequency that is deeply dependent upon Latin-1 being very common. There are a number of languages for which this assumption does not apply. Specifically, if we were running lookups on Gothic, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, etc, the process would actually perform 4 times more lookups than simple Latin-1 for nearly every character in the string.
Then you don't go posting about it online...
Free speech is the ability for you state your beliefs without having to worry about the government jailing you for saying it. Nothing about doing it anonymously. Free Speech is something to be valued and not used anonymously. If you are going to stand out and say something important then you should do it so people know who you are, and realize that even in a place of Free Speech there is risks.
Apparently, you are unaware that Free speech includes a right to anonymous speech:
In Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960), the Court struck down a Los Angeles city ordinance that made it a crime to distribute anonymous pamphlets. In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995), the Court struck down an Ohio statute that made it a crime to distribute anonymous campaign literature. However, in Meese v. Keene,, 481 U.S. 465 (1987), the Court upheld the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, under which several Canadian films were defined as "political propaganda," requiring their sponsors to be identified.
Argument by analogy, replace privacy of personal information with privacy of person, the protecting right against unreasonable search and seizure:
Criminals and thieves hate allowing people to search their property. Most people properly own all their property and have no need to refuse searches.
No one said communities have to be safe for people with embarrassing property. In fact, were I in that situation, hiding my property would be the LAST thing I would do.
The argument "good people have nothing to hide" is ridiculous, and wrong-headed. There are tons of good, legal, moral, and ethical reasons why someone would want to keep their information private, just as there are good, legal, moral, and ethical reasons why someone would want to keep their privacy of person intact from unreasonable search and seizure.
I suppose that it is true that one can decompose any multibyte code range match into an 8-bit match sequence...
But LUTs don't have to be the entire range, and the LUT doesn't need to exceed the size of the Unicode space. Why can't I use a LUT that is based on character_class[codepoint >> 7]? And then only contains 0x2200 elements?
Streisand effect, HO!!!!
It's not the police, it's the prosecutor. The police may have agitated for this, but the prosecutor is the person who should know better.
I saw a judge berate a lawyer for asking him to sign a prior-restraint TRO on his opposing party. The judge should have known better as well... but their claim is that the person is harassing and posting this with intent to embarass... which I can see (whistleblower laws protect you from reporting incidents to the proper authorities, not airing it on youtube) but the fact that the allegations aren't false, means the material isn't defamatory... so... good luck sticking this prosecution all the way to conviction... of course, they don't need it to last that far, they just need it to get far enough to identify the individual and then fire them for cause.
Employment is a horrible mess of a contract. :(
If it effects the surface tension of the water (which surfactants do) then it should be able to identify it. It may not be able to register definitively what the surfactant is, but it should be able to identify the presence of one.
I don't know what the OP actually meant, but assuming the interpretation which makes most sense usually leads to the most interesting discussion.
Right, but your unstated assumption results in some people (i.e. at least me) not understanding your context, and telling you that you're wrong... when the truth is we were just working from different unstated assumptions.
Honestly, I assumed that the company wouldn't be idiots enough to break the law... or at least that they had lawyers that would advise them not to break it at least so blatantly.
So you're comparing one thing that didn't happen to another thing that didn't happen, and calling that an incompatibility? Seems like a pointless exercise.
Someone else presented the original hypothetical... I just pointed out that the second hypothetical would have occurred and produced incompatibilities.
I was actually going to comment about all this myself, then after I had written a whole paragraph of convoluted backtracking based on what is a glyph vs. character vs. codepoint, I decided to give up. lol.
Are you sure Perl does not just store 8-bit strings?
Transcoding UTF-8 to UTF-32 is a huge WASTE of processing time, not a saving. You are seriously over-estimating the number of times that somebody needs to get to the N'th code point without looking at the N-1 code points before it. Possibly by many orders of magnitude. All other operations on a string do not take any more time with UTF-8 than UTF-32.
After digging around a lot, I came across the answer, using Devel::Peek, I was able to determine, no. You're correct, it uses UTF-8 internally.
There are other reasons to transcode to UTF-32 beyond just getting the N'th code point though. For instance by using UTF-32 internally, you ensure that you don't generate any overlong representations when generating UTF-8. As well, you don't have to constantly spend time composing characters from UTF-8 to compare to regex values and such. (Testing for the property IS_HEBREW means you have to turn each character into an integer value and then test the character properties.)
struct string
{
short length; // two bytes
char buffer[];
};
First, there's anachronism here. The "char foo[];" notation is new, far newer than the first C implementations were.
Also, the size_t (or rather, "int") in the original implementations was 16 bits, and the distinction between "short" and "long" did not occur until they introduced 32-bit machines. I mean, really... when the processor had 8-bit and 16-bit registers, why do you need two flavors of "int"?
What Torvalds seems to prefer, in KDE3.5, Gnome2, and now XFCE, is a more Windows-like metaphor for multitasking. I'm with him. I think that's one thing Windows did right.
Last time I installed XFCE on OpenBSD, it came with essentially an OSX dock right there at the bottom of the screen.
But you ARE arguing that point, by definition. If it was shown to work, then it is shown to be not false.
Only things that can be shown to be false or not false are falsifiable. Either one will do.
Are you just being willfully ignorant, or are you just completely unaware of what "falsifiable" means? Let me break it down for you. ("false" + "ify") + "able". It means "able to be proven false." This does not mean that showing that it works means it's falsifiable. Asserting that "it has been shown to work, therefore it is valid" is actually falling prey to confirmation bias. You need to be searching for that which would invalidate your theory, and prove it false, otherwise you simply continue to assert constantly, "it's true, it's true, it's true".
I can demonstrate quite easily how creationism can be shown to work. This does not make it falsifiable, because the precise way that it is shown to work is that it can literally explain any and all evidence to support itself. Thus, it is not falsifiable.
Showing that your theory predicts an event correctly is actually in fact worthless... nearly every theory works at first. Caloric theory provides useful and valid predictions that work (under specific conditions). The problem is that there are experiments that can be done to show that they do not work in all conditions, and thus the theory is actually wrong, despite producing some models that work.
What experiment can you think of that you could run that given a certain specific and clear result, would prove that Austrian school is false. The experiment doesn't have to actually produce the given specific result, it just has to be a possible outcome. Note, that such experiments can only produce definitive results in the negative. There is no way to yield a definitive positive result for a scientific theory. Either a theory stands falsified, or it stands yet-to-be-falsified. We have no theory at all that is known and proven to be true, and I certainly hope you are not asserting that Austrian economics has been proven true, because it's the biggest red flag of pseudoscience out there.
If we were to switch now, is that the compatibility you're referring to? Well sure.
But nobody's talking about switching now, the point of the topic is that C should have been designed differently. In those days there was very little backwards compatibility to worry about.
And if it had been decided to be 1-byte length + data, and everyone used it like that, and assumed that the full 8-bits are available for the length, then when we switch to variable-byte length encoding, it would create an incompatibility. The incompatibility I speak of is the hypothetical one switching from 1-byte fixed-length length encoding to variable-byte length encoding.
"They could have just used variable length encoding from the beginning." Sure, and they could have programmed everything in Java from the start... the idea of a variable length encoding would have been over-engineering the problem that they were facing.