cicero

I use cash to do my part to slow down its disappearance. I like the fact that it is difficult for central powers to control, and its existence means that people can more easily live off the grid. I like the ability to hand someone a tip without accessing the Internet. At the same time, I think the Bitcoin Lightning Network is pretty cool. I guess I like options.

Now he can move onto the next phase of his plan for world domination.

I would guess the anti-globalist sentiment of MAGA is shared by people throughout the world who prefer local control.

I've always thought of nano as simplistic, but reading the discussion here, I see there is more to it than I thought.

I learned vi (precursor of vim) in the 1980s and the commands became second nature to me. However, as window-based systems and applications became the norm, I found it difficult to switch between vim and Windows or Mac applications, including the web. A good example of my problem involves the use of the escape key in vim to switch out of text entry mode, but many other apps use escape to cancel an action. I got tired of typing a paragraph, hitting escape, and then having to retype the paragraph because I had cancelled my input.

Nevertheless, it's great to have an editor I can easily invoke from the Linux command-line, so I still use vim for that. However, I will consider moving to nano for that purpose. At my age, I may never know it as well as the vi/vim I learned in my younger days, but it should still be useful.

Upvote for mentioning WordStar. I only used it some in the Texas A&M computer lab. I went from my dad's Apple II, to a Commodore 64 I bought in college, to a Macintosh after I graduated. None of them were WordStar platforms, but I remember it was very popular in the CP/M and MS-DOS world before WordPerfect took over.

I used to use ed when all I had was a single terminal screen/window and a compiler error message. Ed doesn't clear the screen, so you can still see the message. Vi or emacs would clear the error message away. Of course, in a multi-window situation, the compiler output is usually in one window or pane and the editor in another, so this is moot now.

An alternative hypothesis does not rule out the other possibilities, even if it provides a better explanation. What matters is what actually happened, not what provides the neatest explanation.

So they appear to have mutually agreed to remove content to conform to the prevailing pressure to restrict public discourse to only politically correct content. While it is certainly their right to make any business arrangement they want, it is distressing that open conversation continues to shrink in our world, whether it be through unilateral cancelation or mutual agreement for the sake of money.

Modern people often portray the Middle Ages as a time of dullness, ignorance, and misery, such as depicted in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I think this makes us feel better about how superior we are today. The truth is that medieval life was much richer and more beautiful than the stereotype implies.

Does it work in Hypercard?

Humans understand these things because they are persons. Where did their personhood come from if not another person? How personhood can arise out of non-personhood is unexplained.

When shame is used as a weapon and tool of manipulation, a measure of shamelessness becomes a useful defense. As the demands of popular morality increase and change on a daily basis, at some point, some of us will give up trying to conform.

Clinton is quoted in the second line: “I was the candidate that they basically stole an election from,” Clinton said Monday on the New York Times podcast “Sway.”

Trump did win 4 years ago, and Hilary Clinton claimed the election was stolen from her and that there is a specter of illegitimacy over his presidency. This is the exact kind of talk that people are now saying is dangerous and must be suppressed.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/26/four-years-later-bitter...

If both of the candidates are crooked liars, how do you choose? I picked the party that I think is closer to being right.

When I was a kid, my dad connected a Model 19 teletype to our Apple II computer for amateur radio teletype (RTTY). He used an opto-isolator to protect the Apple II from the 60 ma loop that the Model 19 used.

When I was a kid, any stories of the CIA doing bad things were labeled "conspiracy theories." How could they possibly be true?

This site exposes too many complexities of history that do not fit the simplistic narratives that are popular today. Nothing to see here. /s

I remember being very excited about this announcement. I had been learning about Java, but I only had an HP workstation, which ran HP-UX Unix at work, and a Macintosh at home. Neither of them had a Java implementation yet, but I could run Netscape Navigator with JavaScript. I gave an enthusiastic talk on JavaScript at the next meeting of our local Java Users Group.

However, as I got to know the language better, my enthusiasm dwindled due to what I thought to be a strange type system. Also, I got access to Java implementations on HP-UX and Macintosh, so I never went back to JS. This has always limited my ability to do web front-ends, but now I'm looking to using Blazor for that.

PDF is ultimately for paper when you care about how the content fits on each page. A reflowable format will have to at some point be rendered to pages if one is to go to paper, and I can't think of anything better than PDF for storing that rendering.

He didn't say objective science is political, but banning is. Science promotes the free exchange of ideas with the hope that the truth will be established and falsehood will be disproved.

In January 2018, when a lot of people at the school where I teach were getting flu and colds, I got a "stuffiness" in my left ear that I figured would just go away. I talked to other people, including my dad, who had similar symptoms and then got better. Then I developed dizziness symptoms, so I went to an ENT and started treatment. Apparently, an unidentified virus caused permanent damage to my left ear resulting in hearing loss and dizziness. After about 18 months the dizziness has gone away as my brain readjusted, but I still have the hearing loss.

All of this is to say that while viruses were going around causing cold and flu symptoms for most people, for some reason it hit me differently. These things happened in the pre-COVID world. I think that COVID-19 is undergoing unprecedented scrutiny, so it may be appearing more unusual than it really is.

It's the same reason why those concerned about climate change inform the public rather than just tell Congress. If our food supply is in danger, that is as concerning as climate change, is it not? Or is this different because it is a corporation warning us rather than a scientist or former Vice President?

I became a teacher, so now I get to share the joy of programming with kids. I also manage the technology at my school, so I do some programming to enable that, which is enjoyable because I am pretty independent. I work at a great school with good kids, so my gig is not a common one, but it works for me.

I support 4 different individual content creators through Patreon or their own platform at levels between $5 and $10 per month. What they produce is informative, unique, and much more important to me than anything on Netflix, which is just entertainment. Unfortunately, I don't think Patreon is a very good content delivery platform, so I hope Floatplane takes off and has a better UX.

Enclosed patios provide some protection from the weather, but they are not the same as the insulated interior of a modern house. I've been to a house in Texas that had an enclosed patio that was unusable in the heat of summer. It acted like a hothouse.

I think it likely implies ASCII Cinema. For best results, start by assuming more positive intentions.

I remember OKI Data printers from the 1970s and 1980s. They weren't the cheapest or most popular, but they were fast. I got a brochure from OKI today and saw that they still make dot-matrix impact printers that use a ribbon. They will work with multi-part forms and continuous feed labels. They also appear to have a very low operating cost, and I suspect they have a lower environmental impact compared to laser printers. They would only be good for text output, though.

Free will exists, but as spiritual masters going back at least to Jesus have observed, the free will can become enslaved.