When most people use the term "serial port" they're referring to a DB-25 or DE-9 port you find on older computers or USB dongles. It's also seen in 8P8C (aka "RJ45") form sometimes, especially in industrial equipment. It can send and receive "characters" (anywhere from 5-8 bits each) one at a time at a fixed rate, either half duplex or full duplex. They usually implement one or more of the RS232, RS422, or RS485 standards.

Originally, you communicated with the computer using a teletype or video terminal connected to a serial port. Whatever you typed went to the computer, and whatever the computer sent back was printed on your terminal screen (or paper in the case of a teletype).

The UNIX (and thus, Linux) command line environment still works this way, except the serial line is virtual.

The joke was of all the jobs a person might get after attaining a mathematics degree, "pope" usually isn't on the list.

96% of the world does not consider "America" to be a continent. A large chunk of the world considers North America and South America to be separate continents. Similarly, some countries teach that Europe and Asia are distinct continents while others teach that Eurasia is a single continent.

Spanish speaking countries tend to treat America as one continent. English-speaking countries tend to treat North America and South America as separate continents, which is convenient since when speaking English, America means "the United States."

That's not exactly a "gotcha." The church's official stance on women has changed drastically over the last couple millenia. It's reasonable to suggest that its stance on same-sex couples might eventually change as well.

Emacs' configurability is hard to describe to anyone who hasn't immersed themselves in that sort of environment. There's a small portion of the program written C, but the bulk of it is written in elisp. When you evaluate elisp code, you're not in some sandboxed extension system - you're at the same level as Emacs itself. This allows you to modify nearly any aspect of Emacs.

It'd be a security nightmare if it was more popular, but fortunately the community hovers around being big enough for serious work to be done but small enough that it's not worth writing malware for.

I don't know if it's a security nightmare any more than other editors that have "plugins" (or the like).

One advantage for Emacs is it's both easy and common read the code of the plugins you are using. I can't tell you the last time I looked at the source code of a plugin for VS Code or any other editor. The last time I looked at the code for a plugin in Emacs was today.

That last line was totally unexpected, yet deeply familiar. Took over a minute to recover from that rofl.

I don't think it's a security nightmare per-se. Most of the time, you're not installing a lot of packages (the built-in are extensive) and most of these are small and commonly used.

It's like saying the AUR is a security nightmare. You're just expected to be an adult and vet what you're using.

I'm not sure I agree with the number and size of packages people install (unless you're comparing them to, say, org-mode), but that's not really what I'm talking about.

Emacs runs all elisp code as if it's part of Emacs. Think about what Emacs is capable of, and compare that to what a browser allows its extensions to do. No widely used software works like that because it's way too easy to abuse. Emacs gets away with it because it's not widely used.

I don't know the first thing about VSCode but I'm willing to bet there are strict limits to what its plugins are allowed to do.

I don't know if that's changed since last I wrote an extension for a web browser, but the API is pretty open for the current context (tab) that it's executing in. As long as it's part of the API, the action is doable. Same with VSCode or Sublime. Sandboxed plugins would be pretty useless.

We don't have treaties with half the world mandating body cams.

(I want weed legalized too, but it's a thorny issue.)

You missed the "for now" at the end of that sentence.

You might look into vigor, a mean-spirited version of clippy for the vi editor.

Why do you suppose that chicken quality would be tied to price? Do you know where your chicken comes from? If you buy expensive, high quality chicken, do you know it's actually high quality and not just a fancier package with a higher price tag? Do you want to research every single product you eat to make sure it's safe?

I sure don't.

Afghanistan is more complicated than that, due to the collective shock of a successful attack on US soil. Bush had to do something or the American people would have lynched him.

Iraq, though? There was tons of opposition to the Iraq War. It was only approved because people were lied to about the "weapons of mass destruction." Once the truth was out, a lot of us felt betrayed.

Iraq is a large part of why that particular segment of the Republican party (the neocons) lost its power. Which is a shame, really, given who replaced them...