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Brings back memories. I worked at DEC when Ethernet first came out and I remember a few ocmpanies producing great benchmarks by not backing off.


Ignoring fair use and countries other than the US we see that Copyright in the COnstitution said to promote science and useful arts, works should have protection for a limited time. Shortly after COngress defined "limited" as 14 years plus a renewal for 14. Then it was 28. plus a renewal and after more lobbying it reached today's time of the Authors lifetime plus 70 years. And since Mickey Mouse protection expires next year, we will probably see another extension. How life of the author plus 70 can be considered "limited time" just shows how the courts have trampled our Constitution.


Indeed so. It's only limited if you subtract out the human experience from policymaking. Given that the average lifespan in the US is 77 years, the reality is that you have to wait until you're almost at the end of your life for legally unrestricted access and use of material by someone who died the same year you were born.

The cake is a lie.


I have lived in English and Metric countries and have had no trouble with formats or units. I think it is because I didn't try to convert anything, just learned it as a new system. My wife on the other hand had a bunch of mental trick to convert between Metric and English, but she also never had any trouble with date or time formats.

The biggest problem to me is time zones and summer/winter time. I wish we all used UTC.


Many years ago I did some work at a large race track and they were very concerned about money laundering. They worked closely with the local authorities to recognize any potential issues. I guess it all depends on the companies leaders as to what they want to risk.

There are many opportunities to be complicit. Illegal exports, selling customer information, aiding money laundering, ... It seems wrong that petty criminals server harsher penalties than corporate leaders (or politicians) even though the corporate leaders commit worse crimes.


> I guess it all depends on the companies leaders as to what they want to risk.

That's my experience as well. I've never worked in banking, but I've worked with igaming companies before, and some are basically ignoring regulation and will just stop something if a regulator catches them while others are 100% by the book.

I've once asked the COO of a fully compliant company why they're competing with their hands tied behind their back and his reply was simply "because I don't want to go to jail". I'm guessing the folks at other companies had a different risk-reward analysis.


Itanium didn't kill off Alpha. Intel x86 pricing did. But the most important unheeded lesson in those days was software compatibilty. We went from the days of each computer having its own word length, instruction set, heck, even data format (remember the endian wars?) to source compatibility to binary compatibilty. We learned that for most useage, software stability that allowed taking advantage of Moores law, was seriously more valuable in most cases than gaining a bit more performance or price/performance by changing architectures.

Intel kept the X86 price at a point where no bean counter would favor investing in new architectures. Fortunately AMD broke the headlock on x86.


Well Intel's original plan was to keep x86 32 bit, forcing anyone that needed more into IA64. Fortunately AMD came out with x86-64, and when it was clear that IA64 wasn't going to be competitive, Intel brought x86-64 to their chips.


I first leaned lisp in college (1964) and have not touched it much since then. But now that I am retired I am going to give it a shot. What extensions in vscode should I use? I installed steel bank and quicklisp. Thanks,


If you go the therapist route, please change therapists until you find one that works well for you. Not all therapists work well with all people. Theoretically they should, but practilally they don't and the wrong therapist can be worse than no therapist.


Good disclaimer. I 100% agree.


All Americans completely understand the metric system. We can convert anything to anything in our heads. By the way, we all speak a dozen foreign languages fluently, just choose not to. It is because we are so humble that you do not know this.


I was with you till you asserted we only speak a dozen languages.


FOr me, if I write it down I will remember it and do not need to refer to my notes. But if I don't write it down I am likely to forget. So I did some testing and found that it isn't only the act of writing that helps me, it is quickly looking at what I have written. I think, for me, writing in my own words, and then reinforcing by going over what I have written, is the secret to remembering things.

As far as handwriting versus keyboarding, I find them to be equal in my case.


I'm in the same boat. In university, folks would ask how much I study to get good grades (20 years ago). I would write my notes and review them once or twice. When looking at the written word, I recall where I was sitting, what was going on in the environment, and often a lot (a lot a lot) of context that I would have otherwise forgotten had I not reviewed the note once or twice.

However, for myself, the keyboard creates some disconnect when reviewing notes. It's got to be hand written and, like mentioned, I usually only need to review it once or twice over the span of a week or two and then I'll retain the info. Lots of scaffolded and reinforced-by-association information.


I'd hypothesise that typing would be as useful for recall if it stayed out of the way as handwriting does (for most people)?


> But if I don't write it down I am likely to forget.

Anecdotally, I have probably 4-5 full note books of scribbles and sketches as part of my project. It's not meant to look good or be finished thoughts, and I rarely look at old notes. So for me, the primary purpose is enriching the thinking process, so it's closer to the next step – prototyping. This lets me weed out flawed ideas earlier, so when I actually build something, I have higher confidence it'll work well.


I'm actually the opposite, I discovered very early in my college experience that taking notes just hindered my ability to retain the information (I guess because the process of writing and structuring my writing took attention away from listening.) So my undergraduate and masters was all done without notes at all.


I understand what you are going through. Am in my 70's and took a long time to get past it. A few thoughts. While it is great to love your job, it is even better to have a job that you don't hate and that gives you the most money and free time to do what you figure out you want to do. I also suffered from very low self-esteem which really sucks.

I went to a few therapists and I did find one I could relate to, but it didn't make miracles happen. I do not think it is worth it.

I found a hobby I really liked - it is photographing birds in flight. It is hard to do well, but easy to do. I am not suggesting that, but as an example you can meet people through photography clubs, through Audobon field trips, through going to places where birds are spotted (ebirds.org). I am also, because of the birds, engaged in environment where I work with a community group of chemists, geologists, interested people. My skills in programming help with charting and anazlying results of samples we collect. Maybe you want to get in shape and meet people are 10K;s or play pickleball or rugby or whatever. Maybe you want to write and can get brave enough to expose your work at a writers club.

My point is that if work isn't it now, it pays the bills and use it as a means to make enough money to do something you think you really like. So photography, bird watching, running, team sports, teaching (think helping high school robotics team), any community group for any cause needs web designers, collecting things, model railroading, drones, flying. (My first non-work activity was flyiing and until I busted my medical was a great thing for me).


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