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Greta was the subject of the OP I originally responded to. I think she is relevant, since she is the #1 figurehead for climate change responsibility at the moment.

Anyway, I hear your point about Germany, but .. so? We can't go back and fix this. We must look forward to our own futures and do something effective about it NOW.

Myself, I'm divesting myself of all oil-based energy sources. I get my electricity from renewable (wind) sources, and live in Austria where we have been managing renewable energy projects for centuries.

"Okay, the climate is burning .. but can we please calm down and stop throwing water on the guys starting the fires .." - doesn't seem like a very productive response.

I think, also, you have to temper your hatred of Greta for being an uppity pre-teen, with the realization that Oil companies have known about the climate problem since the 70's and have actively worked to obfuscate the issue in order to protect their yearly profits. For DECADES.

Without taking that into account, any discussion over the 'appropriate behaviour of Greta' is certainly ingenuous, if not downright specious...

Who is shutting down discussion? As far as I can see, Greta is promoting more and more discourse than there ever was before..

You might change your ways. If enough of us do that, we might have a chance to survive. Currently the ship is sinking - do you want to pull out a deck chair and behave as if everything is just fine, sipping on cocktails while the sharks float by?

OR would you rather help out those of us who are manning the lifeboats and trying to get folks to safety? You're going to have to put down the cocktail, sir.

Perhaps you ought to be afraid. Massive climate change is going to disrupt everything we take for granted today.

I had the realization yesterday while waiting for a train that the Notes app on iOS contains all the functionality I'd need in order to be able to build a small organization/business .. as long as I standardized my form of note-taking and rigorously applied policies on how Notes are transformed from one Folder to the other - and on what conditions I send the Notes to others using Airdrop.

In other words, all I really need a computer for, is formatting and forwarding rules. ;)

Anyway it was an interesting experiment to come up with some standard Notes that would be productive for a small office - and I realized, part way through this hacking on the rails, thats how people used to do it: plain old ink and paper, and a standard system for routing things around.

I started to wonder what happened? I guess HR departments got tired of having to train workers, and came to rely on computerization as a way of 'training in the chair' - or, outright, replacing peoples ability to apply standard techniques to their workday.

Even today in a computer-savvy environment, people still seem to resist the idea of having standard ways of doing things. Everyone has this idea that they are unique and special individuals who have more to contribute to the world than they end up taking - but give them pen and paper and tell them thats the only way to do things from now on, and all the hubris falls apart and the excuses come out.

It has been true for 40 years, and I think it'll long be true for another century at least: if you can't do it on paper first, you're not ready to computerize the problem.

He did all that. The judge decided he needed to pay child support anyway. The rights of the child were greater than that of my friend.

Anyway, he fought back and is now a very dedicated father. He has visitation rights, and soon enough the childs decision to move in with her Dad, because her Mom is a criminal, will be ratified in court ..

He did go to court. She lied and said she got pregnant by him when they were dating.

My friend didn't lie. The reason he is liable is because he dated her, a fact she kept evidence of, in order to present at the alimony hearing. The judge assumed this was enough to prove his responsibility for the child she then conceived (without him). That's the crux.

Here in Vienna, it works great. Its often quite amusing to me, as I ride a slow moped - about horse speed - and get passed by irate drivers all the time. However, I ride that green wave, while they are constantly stopping/starting at the lights ...

Why should he care? Because there is clearly a lack of regulation over the sperm-donor industry. It is extremely dangerous for men to make these deposits.

A friend of mine made a deposit in a sperm donor bank prior to getting a vasectomy. Two years later, he met a woman, who he dated for a few weeks before breaking it off.

9 months later, he was presented with child support demands from the state. She had stalked him, determined he had made a deposit in the sperm bank, then specifically chosen his profile to get pregnant.

He is now liable for child support, whether he likes it or not, for the rest of his life (California, in case its of importance). They didn't have sex - she stalked him, got artificially inseminated, and then went to the state to extract money from him. He now has a kid he never wanted, and is resigned to being a father to the child, even though he never planned it and it was forced upon him by a criminal stalker.

This highlights just how dangerous it is for men to use these services. Clearly, more regulation and oversight is required - especially if sperm banks are making their own decisions about how their resources are applied.

Why should Iran be sanctioned while Saudi Arabia isn't?

This double-standard is precisely why people don't trust the USA any more.

I was once in the hackrrspace in Pristina, Kosovo, where ingenuity and DIY-culture reign supreme.. the group has a beer-brewing project, which turns out to be quite popular, and as a result the freshly brewed batches don't last long.

So they did the hacker thing and wired up the keg to an EPS8266, and gave everyone an RFID chip with which to gain their weekly beer rations.

I found this immensely amusing. Truly a wonderful hackrrspace .. if anyone ever gets a chance to visit Pristina, check them out .. and bring them some hardware to play with, while you're at it ..

Another great way to learn 6502 computing: get a retro-computer back up and running.

I have a suite of Oric-1/Atmos machines that are in use for precisely this purpose. Its wonderful to return to a simpler era of tooling and methodology, and the feeling once you get it all up and running and building new apps .. for 30 year old computers .. is quite rewarding. Feels good to have done something productive with what would otherwise have become landfill ..

Nice! Yeah .. I've found as I've aged, I really need scenery somewhere, scrolling by in the background, if I try to travel-work. I guess I get claustrophobic without it ..

Just look at history, its very clear: safe spaces are unsustainable. The petroleum-economy is a safe space, and its rapidly killing us all.

There's nothing more inherently 'trustworthy' in HN than there is in Fark. What there is, is a downvote button and an understanding that, if someone says something 'unpopular to the community', the community will deal with them.

This definitely speaks to the subject of the article and is very telling in and of itself: most online communities are comfort-communities. This seems to be bleeding into offline life at a rather rapid clip ..

Love these trains ..

I've taken similar train rides as you describe, albeit all over Europe.

Trains are a delightful way to travel - and as well, get some good work done. Some of my happiest code was written while castles and rivers and villages scrolled by on the window ..

In my opinion the 'long slow travel .. while sleeping/working' method of getting around is far more preferable to the 'jet age tin-can' mode, no matter how far and fast. I'd happily take a train anywhere in the world, were such a thing feasible ..

We have well and truly defined cake.

I mean, words have meaning don't they? Or, if not, then what's the fucking point?

Until we can define intelligence, we cannot create artificial intelligence. We still do not know what intelligence actually is - bloviating academics clambering for subsidies to support their habits, notwithstanding.

I completely concur. I've been programming since I was a teenager, practically grew up with computers, and I'm 50 now.

I'm still just as productive as I was in my 20's, but now I've got decades more experience than my peers and can see things that the hubris and arrogance of youth never let me see before - like, how important it is to be able to work with others, not hold onto projects selfishly .. how important it is to check oneself before one wrecks oneself, and so on.

If I had a way, there'd be so much advice I'd give to my younger self...

In those days, having a clocking mechanism which produced consistent time - i.e. a monotonic clock - was of quite high value. On boot up, it was typical to ask the user what time it was, and continue with the program.

But then how do you measure time since boot? With simple hacks like this of course. Also, this hack allowed a form of multi-tasking, an 8-bit feature quite well targeted back then.

Consistency was key in such clocks, not necessarily accuracy. The fact of the drift is not important, since it was consistent and could be accomodated for in software - as many peripherals of the day, indeed, required.

Wow, congratulations. I was 11 years old when I read this article, and many others like it.

I learned to hack in a shop called Computerland, in Perth, WA. Immediately after school, I'd march through the heat from school down and into the shop, which had great A/C of course, insert my floppy (most valuable thing in the schoolbag), and continue typing in code, reading mags, and so on. As long as I was actually doing stuff (i.e. not just playing games), the sales guys were cool with me hanging out, every day for weeks, hacking code.

So, BYTE and all the mags I could buy, pretty much got me booted up - and for that I have to say: a) very well done on a great article, b) thank you for showing up here and now, and what have you been up to since?

:)

My first (and best) 8-bit machine cost me $400, but I had to literally drive across the nullabor to get it (Perth->Melbourne). I suppose the fuel costs could have been put into a full-blown Apple system, but then I wouldn't have driven across the nullabor with my first computer (Oric-1), plugging into every TV I can find along the way ..

No, the Apple was expensive, and you still had to wire up this cheap junk to get a working clock.

He's literally taking the piss out of Apple, because it was expensive even then.

This is why I never work in a technical capacity where I am being 'managed' by lawyers and other non-technically competent means of business org.

I truly do believe, as do you, that the TOS and Warranty world is another desperate subject from where the execs/lawyers/owners of the company desire to eek every penny.

There are many other realms where the TOS is simply: use the thing, have fun with it, if you want to tell us about yourself, press this button/fill in this card. For sure, consumers 'never read the TOS', because - hopefully - the device is now set up, everything works, it is time to rock ..

For sure, tech can be used against the user. But it can also work for the user, too.

I build software systems which integrate a software front-end app with hardware, and I don't think I agree with the supposition that using an app to set up hardware is a negative.

Its just that I think that an app/hardware integration ethic definitely has a place in the world. For example, hardware which works with Apple, without allowing third-party (not even Apple) involvement, is a battle being fought.

Hardware vendors should be encouraged to ensure their hardware remains useful for generations, in my opinion. Apps always go stale while the hardware remains operational.

Of course: none of this forgives the vendors using it to spy on its customers.

Hardware like this, anyway imho at this market, is a platform battleground. In all honesty, we have more computer vendors battling it out now, than ever before.

More than likely, putting "compatible with iOS" on the box of an expensive speaker means more shelf-shopping customers. Alas, Bose and Apple probably have, at least, MFI-level involvement...

>a lot more than just a clock, it's a cheap way of doing a lot of expensive things, right in line with Apple tradition.

Ah, for the Apple of 1981.

I have been a regular visitor to the USA, and lived there for some time in between, and seen it over most of my life as a visitor. A time period of 45 years, almost.

Whenever I'm 'back in Cali', one of my favourite places to visit is Skid Row.

From here, you truly see what is rotten in the state of Kansas.

Of course, we can go to all of the major American cities, but there is nothing more sobering from the glitzy side of downtown than to go work in a soup kitchen, if they still have them, just a few short blocks away from the wealth.

It is a sad memory of America. But always an honest one.