Technically the name _start is not special either. The binary lists its entry point address in a header and that’s where the OS starts execution from. That symbol is just called _start by convention by C and other languages, which is what the linker uses to set the entry point when writing the ELF headers, but if you’re writing your own linker scripts you could call the entry point whatever you want.
Technically it doesn't even need to be in the .text section, it could be anywhere in the address space. You'll get a segfault if it's not somewhere executable though (assuming you're on a system with an appropriately configured MMU)
yes and then you'll have a bad time, but at the same time per convention _start is where .text begins. You can see where it starts with readelf --file-header <executable> and look at Entry point address field. You can change it, yes.
No, it's not even a convention, _start is most commonly not where .text begins.
Compiling a static hello world binary on my system (aarch64 fedora 39, gcc -static hello.c -o hello), .text starts at 0x410080, e_entry is at 0x4103c0, and the _start symbol is also at 0x4103c0. This is not unusual at all.
A common hack to reduce ELF size is actually to start the first section (possibly the .text) right on the elf header, as this circumvents the alignment requirements.
It's not about physical distance but social distance, i.e who talks to whom, and how many degrees of separation there is there between who's making the decisions and who's doing the company's core work (for Boeing that's building & designing planes).
In a company with offices, social networks will mirror the physical layout because people will tend to talk to people nearby them in the building and not people in different buildings. By moving management further away physically, they also moved them further away socially.
But in a fully remote company it's not so clear, and more about the org chart and who's in the same Slack/Teams rooms or meetings.
Mandatory naming systems are pretty common around the world. Many countries, for example, have a list of permitted given names, and requirements around what family name can be used (e.g father's name, if father is known).
I've walked on the ones at Toronto Pearson before. I was a bit surprised the first time that it wasn't moving at full speed like I expected when I stepped on, but after that the second time I knew what to expect and it worked well.
I actually found it better when disembarking because it gives a better transition to the stationary surface when stepping off.
If you went into most restaurants or bars or similar spaces, and you started talking publicly about pro-Nazi stuff, you’d have the owner of the establishment come over and ask you to leave. I don’t see how anyone can think this is unusual or new or not expected.
In practice you will be able to talk about whatever you want in most restaurants or bars, because the owners aren't in the business of listening in on their customer's conversations and picking fights with them.
That’s why I said “publicly”, as in you’ve called attention to yourself in some way, enough for the staff to be aware and to see that the other patrons are also generally aware of you and what you’re saying.
If you go into a restaurant or bar and start yelling at strangers about pretty much anything you're going to be kicked out, regardless of topic. Exception: during a football match.
Sure, but without going too deep into hypotheticals, think of a group of neo-Nazis talking in the middle of a restaurant dining room or at the bar, sufficiently loud enough to be overheard by staff and patrons.
You would get kicked out for the same reasons as if you were a group of fanatical libertarian anarchists talking about politics sufficiently loudly to be overhead by staff and patrons.
You seem to be badly missing the point here. A forum for eating is not a place for broadcasting political views. A newsletter platform is. The two aren't comparable.
> A newsletter platform is [a place for broadcasting political views]
I'm not saying that your assumption is wrong. I'm asking:
1. Why is it reasonable to make that assumption?
2. How much say does the platform owner have over the extent to which the platform is "a place for broadcasting political views"? Put another way, how much leeway should a general purpose newsletter platform have to ban certain topics/speech, including spam?
I think our understanding of the world is so far apart that it'll be hard to make progress here. It's like asking me "why is it reasonable to assume that the purpose of the printing press is for the dissemination of views". I don't even know where to begin answering that because I can't comprehend the worldview that would lead up to asking it.
Spam isn't newsletters, so that seems like a non sequitur. Newsletters are meant to go to people who signed up for them.
As for how much say does the owner of the "printing press" have, the answer is that in a civilized society they should have the final say. In less civilized societies than the USA the government thinks it's smarter than the populace, and should control their information. History shows us that governments which smash up the printing presses were rarely smart.
> I think our understanding of the world is so far apart that it'll be hard to make progress here. It's like asking me "why is it reasonable to assume that the purpose of the printing press is for the dissemination of views". I don't even know where to begin answering that because I can't comprehend the worldview that would lead up to asking it.
Sorry, I was just too vague with my first question. A newsletter can be used for broadcasting political views. But it doesn't have to be used for broadcasting all political views, and can be used to broadcast views that aren't directly related to politics. A newsletter can broadcast only views the owners of the service tolerate (not necessarily want) on the site. It's not reasonable to assume that Substack is a place for all political views, and Substack is fully in the right to ban certain ones without banning others. I bring this up due to my personal speculation: Substack decided not to remove articles openly advocating Nazi beliefs, but had Substack gone the other way then a loud subset of anti-censorship believers would paint the opposite decision - to remove such articles - as "giving in to the mob" (or less likely, giving in to nonexistent coercion from a government) rather than as an equally voluntary, valid, and democracy-compatible decision.
> Spam isn't newsletters, so that seems like a non sequitur.
You're right. Spam was a terrible example. A better example would've been articles advocating something extreme such as complete destruction of Ukraine. Or a topic on a different axis, such as advocacy of sexual gratification (which Substack does ban).
> Newsletters are meant to go to people who signed up for them.
The Substack moderation controversy is not about who gets newsletters. It's about authors on Substack who don't want to associate with certain beliefs posted by other authors. (In this context, spam was relevant if only tangentially; I wouldn't want to write a newsletter using a platform too notorious for user-generated spam newsletters. Nonetheless, I was wrong to use spam as an example.)
> In less civilized societies than the USA the government thinks it's smarter than the populace, and should control their information. History shows us that governments which smash up the printing presses were rarely smart.
Agreed. What bothers me about the Substack controversy is that people are emphasizing the government in the conversation even though the critics of Substack's moderation policy aren't trying to make the government do anything and aren't forcing Substack's hand. Just because the complainers are forceful in their language doesn't mean they are coercing Substack into agreeing with them (unless someone's been Machiavellian enough to doxx Substack employees or threaten the employees' safety; even then, guilt generally wouldn't apply to the entire mob). An online mob is part of the populace just as people who oppose the mob are. Non-governmental requests to moderate in a certain way are equally democratic as non-governmental requests not to moderate in that way as long as Substack gets to make the final decisions. Boycotting is not coercion and is democratic. Advocacy of boycotting are not coercion and are democratic. Criticism of boycotting is not coercion and is democratic. Doxxing is coercion. Threats to personal safety are coercion. The mob did not control Substack's decision here. This would be true even if Substack had decided to agree with the mob's moderation policies.
> Substack decided not to remove articles openly advocating Nazi beliefs
They actually did. Look at my other post on this thread that examines the Atlantic's cited examples. The only one that is actually clearly Nazi is suspended for ToS violations. The others are all nothing to do with Nazis, but it's a Tuesday so the left is claiming otherwise to try and censor their opponents.
> It's about authors on Substack who don't want to associate with certain beliefs posted by other authors.
And if they succeeded then it'd be "we don't want to be on the same internet as those other authors" and so on. Those people will never stop trying to shut down people who disagree with them and will certainly lie in order to get that outcome. Never trust censors!
> the critics of Substack's moderation policy aren't trying to make the government do anything
Remember that many governments outside of America ban websites for vague reasons like "hate speech". It's not just about the USA.
> Boycotting is not coercion and is democratic
They didn't want to do a boycott, they wanted their opponents to be denied the right to speech. They might end up trying a boycott now but it's not clear what it means to boycott a service like Substack, because they weren't receiving the material they were objecting to in the first place.
> the owners aren't in the business of listening in on their customer's conversations and picking fights with them.
Customers can complain about other customers to waiters and restaurant owners. That can happen in person, in reviews, or on customers' blog articles (you know, like the articles they post on Substack, if Substack lets them). "I overheard that other customer saying that waiters get paid too much." "4 stars. I'm reluctant to keep going to the restaurant though, because the waiters do nothing about loud customers." "That restaurant doesn't kick out people wearing Nazi symbols. Boycott it." A customer's suggestions can be unreasonable. The owner can ignore (un)reasonable suggestions. The waiter can ignore (un)reasonable suggestions and decide not to let the owner know about them. But kicking out a customer on the basis of customer complaints isn't necessarily less valid than kicking out a customer who hasn't attracted complaints from other customers or letting a customer who has attracted complaints stay.
Except that these are “actual Nazis” who have shown up. We’re talking about publications that, in some cases, use terms like “national socialist” and “reich” in their name and/or bio.
Not so. Look at my post that goes through their examples, which HN being the bastion of well moderated tolerance that it is, is now at -1 and flagged. Only one meets your description and it's suspended for ToS violations. The ones that aren't suspended are just ordinary US politics that's being described as Nazis by the left.
> One of the problems with labeling your political opponents Nazis is that no one believes you when actual Nazis show up.
That's certainly true, but it sure is weird when a certain political leaning causes one to minimize the fact that actual Nazis showed up, which casts a hefty shadow on this perceived boundary between "actual nazi" and "not actual nazi". At what point does one stop imagining that enablement isn't a real thing? Shrug emoji, though, I guess.
You shouldn't be able to simultaneously be a network operator providing wholesale connectivity for retail ISPs, as well as a retail ISP yourself. I'm looking at you, Bell Canada and Rogers.
It's more the other way around. There's a defined band plan, because historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio, so it inherited the broadcast TV band plan. Then digital TV inherited the analogue cable band plan and added higher-frequency channels.
To answer your question, cable TV uses frequencies between about 55MHz to 1GHz, but mostly starting at about 500MHz for digital cable. So if I wanted to transmit Ethernet over cable, I'd use a 2GHz band or something to avoid interference.
> historically cable TV was just transmitting radio signals over coaxial cable instead of radio
Well, to be pedantic, that is still how it works. And it's how cable Internet works. And it's also how a lot of techniques over twisted pair work, too.
The conductor is used as a waveguide and a very-much-analogue signal encoding a digital signal is what is sent over the line. DOCSIS 3 uses up to QAM-4096, which can encode 12 bits in a single symbol on the line, by using multiple steps of amplitude shift and phase shift, to encode bits. Quite similar to how FM radio works, just digital steps, rather than an analogue continuum between 0 and 100 amplitude and 0 and 100 phase, at the decoder.
This has even started showing up for links within a single computer, now. The latest revision of PCIe uses modulated RF (4-level pulse amplitude modulation) rather than simple binary voltage levels.
