racingmars

mese scorsodiscuss

But MEPs can't even introduce legislation, they have to get all of Parliament to ask the European Commission to initiate legislation, and the Commissioners are pretty far removed from direct election. Nobody elected by the citizens can initiate legislation.

racingmars

4 mesi fadiscuss

From the news release "What does this mean?" section: "This update to the Covered List does not prohibit the import, sale, or use of any existing device models the FCC previously authorized."

So no, this does not pull all existing routers off the market. Anything that already got FCC approval remains approved and new stock may be imported and sold.

racingmars

4 mesi fadiscuss

Is there really any correlation between tax revenue and spending at the federal level anymore? It seems the U.S. government is willing to spend at huge deficit levels. If everyone stopped paying federal taxes I suspect nothing would change.

racingmars

4 mesi fadiscuss

Ha,you beat me to it! That book was my first thought when I saw this post. I have a copy sitting here on my bookshelf.

Just to expand on how bonkers this book is... they assume that everyone has easy access to a Forth implementation. So they teach you how to build a Lisp on top of it. Then they use the Lisp you just built to build a Prolog. Then, finally, they do what the topic of the book actually is: build a simple expert system on top of that Prolog.

I love it!

racingmars

4 mesi fadiscuss

> very common OS feature since 90s

And if you want to go farther back, even if it wasn't called "mmap" or a specific function you had to invoke -- there were operating systems that used a "single-level store" (notably MULTICS and IBM's AS/400..err OS/400... err i5 OS... err today IBM i [seriously, IBM, pick a name and stick with it]) where the interface to disk storage on the platform is that the entire disk storage/filesystem is always mapped into the same address space as the rest of your process's memory. Memory-mapped files were basically the only interface there was, and the operating system "magically" persisted certain areas of your memory to permanent storage.

racingmars

9 mesi fadiscuss

From everything I've read about aphantasia, I'm certain it described me -- I have absolutely no ability to consciously "visualize" things in my head (I was also surprised to learn that some/most people sometimes experience a smell sensation if they recall smells, or "hear" music when they think about music or have a song stuck in their head, etc.)

Really the only thing in my head is my internal monologue. If I'm thinking about something I've seen, it's my internal monologue "saying," with words, physical attributes I remember about it. If a song is stuck in my head, it's my internal monologue (in my own voice) signing the lyrics or my own voice humming the tune in my head. No sensation of it being the original artist or the actual instruments, it's 100% my own voice in my own head.

I have a friend who says she does not have any inner monologue at all, and thinks entirely visually. I can't imagine! We're on the pretty extreme opposite ends of the spectrum of how we think, apparently.

racingmars

11 mesi fadiscuss

> What is the point of setting up your own email server if all of your sent messages go to spam for the majority of gmail/o365 users?

I set up a new mailserver a few years ago and have had no delivery problems whatsoever. All messages get through to gmail and outlook/o365 inboxes I've sent to. Didn't even have to register the IP with O365, it's just worked flawlessly from day one. That was from an IP address/netblock not associated with cloud or VPS providers, so initial reputation may have been higher.

A few months ago I set up a mail server on a VM in Digital Ocean, and have had no delivery problems to gmail/Google Apps recipients.

More recently, for new IPs sending mail into O365, they appear to be blocked by default but the rejection message gives you a URL to go to where you can register your IP(s). After doing that, we haven't seen any problems.

If you end up getting an IP that has been associated with previous spam or abuse, I assume your experience will be different. But in my experience, my handful of servers have not had delivery problems. This is all, of course, with proper reverse DNS records that match what the server advertises in its HELO/EHLO, SPF and DKIM all set up, etc.

racingmars

anno scorsodiscuss

I don't remember ever seeing that in The Economist.

I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?

racingmars

anno scorsodiscuss

Now all we need is for Apache Guacamole to add support into its RDP client for whatever old version of RDP NT 4 Terminal Server uses. Access all those old NT 4 applications through my web browser!

racingmars

anno scorsodiscuss

That was it, yes! Thank you!

racingmars

anno scorsodiscuss

I'm looking forward to see how this develops.

There was a program a long time ago, classic Mac OS days, and I don't remember the name of it but I think it was "<something> Consistency". I loved it because tasks in it were "loose," in the sense that something like "water the plants" didn't have to happen on a strict 7-day repeating event. It could be defined as "should be done 6-8 days after the last time I did it." So when you hit "done" on the current "water the plants" task, it automatically fuzzy-scheduled the next "water the plants" event with a target date of 6-8 days after when you clicked done. You could have the range prefer some days but be "acceptable" for a wider range of days.

Someone once told me emacs org-mode might be able to schedule recurring tasks somewhat like this. But any time I see a new calendar/to-do manager application, I hope the designers keep this "fuzzy" repeating event idea in mind!

racingmars

anno scorsodiscuss

Hercules is _not_ used by IBM's own developers. Being found with Hercules on your computer at IBM gets you in trouble. I know people who work on mainframe-related stuff inside IBM and they steer well clear of Hercules. And I've heard that IBM's computer monitoring stuff (antivirus, asset protection, etc.) looks for Hercules and flags it.

But IBM _does_ have their own mainframe emulator, zPDT (z Personal Development Tool), sold to their customers for dev and testing (under the name zD&T -- z Development and Test), and to ISVs under their ISV program. That's what IBM's own developers would be using if they're doing stuff under emulation instead of LPARs on real hardware.

(And IBM's emulator is significantly faster than Hercules, FWIW, but overall less feature-full and lacks all of the support Hercules has for older architectures, more device types, etc.)

racingmars

anno scorsodiscuss

Coconut trees are in the palm tree family.

All coconut trees are palm trees, but not all palm trees grow coconuts.

racingmars

anno scorsodiscuss

> This naively (or maliciously perhaps) maintains that the "purpose" of the certificate is to identify an entity. [...] identity is not the primary purpose certificates serve in the real world.

Identity is the only purpose that certificates serve. SSL/TLS wouldn't have needed certificates at all if the goal was purely encryption: key exchange algorithms work just fine without either side needing keys (e.g. the key related to the certificate) ahead of time.

But encryption without authentication is a Very Bad Idea, so SSL was wisely implemented from the start to require authentication of the server, hence why it was designed around using X.509 certificates. The certificates are only there to provide server authentication.

racingmars

anno scorsodiscuss

I think multibrot here refers to setting the exponent (under "Render Settings") to a value higher than 2.

racingmars

2 anni fadiscuss

> Value Database

> Smalltalk and another esoteric programming environment I used for a while called Frontier had an idea of a persistent data store environment. Basically, you could set global.x = 1, shut your program down, and start it up again, and it would still be there.

Frontier! I played with that way back when on the Mac. Fun times.

But as for programming language with integrated database... MUMPS! Basically a whole language and environment (and, in the beginning, operating system) built around a built-in global database. Any variable name prefixed with ^ is global and persistent, with a sparse multi-dimensional array structure to be able to organize and access the variables (e.g. ^PEOPLE(45,"firstname") could be "Matthew" for the first name of person ID 45). Lives on today in a commercial implementation from Intersystems, and a couple Free Software implementations (Reference Standard M, GT.M, and the GT.M fork YottaDB). The seamless global storage is really nice, but the language itself is truly awful.

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