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The youtube video linked has the toasters going north west to south east - they canonically travel from north east to south west. Did they flip the video to avoid a copyright claim?


Bill Stewart was by no means the author of after dark or the flying toasters[1] He did do the windows port of the screen saver engine and some modules, but that was years after they'd first shipped as part of the Mac version of After Dark.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Dark_(software)


I used to have a registered port (in the 3000s) - didn’t get a lot of spam, but once I got a very angry phone call (!!!) from someone that tracked me down because their firewall blocked an incoming request in that port. They did their own research and decided it was my fault.


Years ago I got a job through a recruiter, left company A for B. She called me after a few months and asked me for the Compsny A internal directory - which I declined to provide and she got kind of nasty about it. Maybe ten years later I was at company C and my manager mentioned hiring a recruiter - same person. I mentioned our previous interaction (not out of spite, just a naive narrative) and they stopped working with her immediately. My point being - your behavior has a long tail, so don’t be trying to take advantage.


People asking for company directories amuses me so much, especially when most company email patterns are completely guessable.


it's more the name and the org chart?

maybe the phone number too


This reminds me of the trump lawyer who’s defense was “no reasonable person could’ve believed what I was saying”.

Was it only an insurrection if they succeeded?


Just because they were incompetent doesn’t mean they weren’t criminal.


One possible result of this that sounds dystopian cool - script kiddy kids < 16 spinning up mastodon server instances and creating their own very leaky insecure rolling social networks. Unless it suddenly becomes illegal to run a server without a license.


Kids could use a social network hosted in another country. Imagine how quickly the US will erect a national firewall, especially since they can plausibly say it's to protect the children.


There was a rather silly 1976 thriller “Raise the Titanic!” predating it’s actual discovery by about 10 years. They made a movie from it too in 1980. Based on a premise that there was something valuable the government wanted on board)


Then Arthur Clarke wrote "The Ghost from the Grand Banks" in 1990 (after Ballard discovered it was in pieces) with a slightly more plausible approach to raising the bow. The wreck has deteriorated now to the point where raising it would probably destroy more than what would be recovered.


In various Discworld books, Pratchett sort of unified Golumns with Asimov’s three laws robots.


I want to say it was at Sun in the mid 80s, most code lacked comments but there was one idiosyncratic data structure with field names having specific prefixes - with the comment “She’s Hungarian!” (Hungarian notation, presumably - and who was “she”?)


> and who was “she”?

The structure, probably. In gendered languages objects have a grammatical gender, and "structure" is feminine in at least French, Italian, and Spanish (they all derived from Latin "structura", which is feminine). Non-native English speakers will sometime carry over a noun's gender when writing in English.


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