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afiler's comments

afiler | 6 years ago

When you say it's "obvious why this happens" are you referring to racism or something else?

afiler | 6 years ago | on: Auto-Antonyms

"The activity was sanctioned because of the oversight" seems to work for me with both meanings of 'oversight'

afiler | 7 years ago | on: Business networking is overrated (2017)

I think that's called interacting with people over the normal course of business, and isn't something that's thought of as requiring specific targeted effort.

afiler | 8 years ago | on: The Internet That Wasn’t: Review of “The Friendly Orange Glow” by Brian Dear

In the late 90s, my high school used a system called NovaNET, which was based on PLATO. It was used for individual learning, special education, etc. I learned a bit of Russian with it, other kids did remedial math and English, and some just played games. It used a Windows client to connect to the NovaNET "mainframe"(?), had some color graphics, and supported Cyrillic. It only shut down in 2015: http://www.platohistory.org/blog/2015/08/august-31-2015-the-...

afiler | 9 years ago | on: Four Column ASCII

EBCDIC seems elegant in its own way: http://www.quadibloc.com/comp/cardint.htm (scroll down) -- apparently it's descended from IBM punch card formats. The discontinuity in the alphabet seems inconvenient for sorting, but it looks like it shares some properties (like bit-flip to make lower case) with ASCII.

afiler | 9 years ago | on: George Lucas Can’t Give a $1.5B Museum Away

«“It’s an epic act of generosity and altruism,” says Don Bacigalupi, the museum effort’s president. “George Lucas, as with any person of great resources and great success, could choose to do whatever he wants to do with his resources, and he has chosen to give an extraordinary gift to the people of a city and the world.”»

There's an attitude here that's a bit... off-putting.

afiler | 12 years ago | on: The Case Against ISP Tolls

103 years ago, the UK government nationalized the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Telephone_Company. Within two years of that, the US justice department managed to extract from AT&T the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment. In this, AT&T, unlike NTC, was allowed to keep ownership of its respective telephone network in exchange for interconnecting fairly with its competitors.

There were fights at the municipal level too, but by that point, only a few medium-sized places like Hull in the UK, and Rochester, New York had phone companies that weren't owned by NTC or AT&T.

All of this seems strikingly familiar today, except that there seem to be a lot fewer politicians willing to propose any of the real profound changes like the ones that came a century ago.

afiler | 12 years ago | on: LibreSSL

It seems ever-so-slightly ironic that support for exotic architectures is considered a plus in this case, while support for exotic architectures is being ripped out of the OpenSSL/LibreSSL codebase. (Though probably not deeply ironic, since CVS is comparatively simple.)

afiler | 12 years ago | on: Homeless Lose a Longtime Last Resort: Living in a Car

Selective enforcement can be a big problem in lots of areas, especially anywhere where race or class come into play.

The flipside is that if people gradually move into parking overnight in industrial areas, and nobody there cares, then homeowners are happy and people saying in their vehicles still have a (perhaps less convenient) place to go. Yet trying to get a rule passed explicitly allowing that in areas zoned industrial would be a lot harder than a rule that sort of evolves on its own.

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