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Uh? Not a single one.

That is something I wouldn't have thought I'd hear one day ;-)

I guess you forgot about the semicolons which must or must not be there depending on location. And the final dot.

And, if we move a bit away from pure syntax, strings, even modern ones, which start at 1 for backward compatibility reasons with the original very limited Pascal strings, while dynamic array start at 0 (and original limited pascal arrays start wherever you like).

One more case of mistakenly presenting 'Europe' as an homogenous entity, whereas it depends on countries like anywhere else.

In France anyone can claim an engineer position, it is not licensed. You just cannot tell you hold an engineer degree if you haven't one; and that's pretty theoretical, because basically nobody uses the proper formal title (unlike for example in Germany where they always use the words Dipl. Ing.), so you can always fall back on claiming you are talking about the position and not the degree title.

Well, it can turn every one into a bad pupil :-)

I wish people would take a look at what happened in other countries which followed a somehow similar path of dumbing down courses and lowering requirements.

Here is what 25 years of dumbing down achieved in France:

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xHQ532qyiek/XJ8kH-PnVTI/AAAAAAAAH...

This extremely telling graph about the level in the end of primary school is taken from an official note from the Ministry of Education itself: https://www.education.gouv.fr/media/22373/download

It is about maths (calculus) but we have somewhat similar drops in other matters, notably in French language.

You can easily see on the graph how the above average pupils from now perform as bas as the below average pupils from 30 years ago. Only a small part of pupils perform as the average pupil used to perform. You can also note that the 'excellent' pupils have basically disappeared: there is no bump (and no long tail) on the right of the curve any more.

Furthermore, every social category performs much worse: http://centre-alain-savary.ens-lyon.fr/CAS/documents/documen...

Not a single category got something positive about it. The lower social classes for which this dumbing down was intended actually suffer badly from it; the upper classes didn't find ways to escape it either.

It is estimated that when they reach the end of high school, pupils' level is late by 1 or 2 years (depending on the matter) compared to what it was in the last two decades of the XXth century (when high school access was already expanded massively, we're not talking about the 50s-60s-70s). And yet the high-school pupils are basically automatically all given the degree: 95% success rate compared to 75% in the 90s (and in those days that was after many had repeated 1 or more years, which they don't any more, they almost all pass all classes automatically, even though they didn't assimilate the necessary knowledge and understanding to follow next classes ).

Another troublesome consequence is that it propagates. Very recently, universities, which for a long time tried to keep the same level as before, started to dumb down their courses an lower their requirements for passing years too, because the first years of university had become a slaughterhouse for a mass of students who were coming with a completely insufficient level (the high-school graduation serves as an automatic entry ticket for universities, there is no entrance exam). So the same effect as in primary and secondary education is about to happen, and selection is pushed to the Master level, but that last barrier will probably very soon break too (we already hear complaints about it).

Vaccinated people are not submitted to the same constraints (such as mandatory tests for accessing this and that) so carry the virus in more places favourable for transmission. They also don't worry as much about getting the virus (at the same time rightfully so and not rightfully so), so they give up on taking the precautions they took the previous year, and they also do not take a test when symptoms arise but remain light. All this unfortunately compensate for the fact that, individually, they are less subjected to spreading the virus.

Over here, when a vaccinated person tests positive, their pass is not even revoked :-/ Also, in order to promote vaccination, tests which were free have been made paying for non-vaccinated people; so as a perverse result, non-vaccinated people now test less, thus spread more too.

Basically, the current attitude (both individual and official) seem to imply that it does not matter any more to care about spreading the virus, so long as you are relatively/fairly protected against the consequences. I don't think this is going to turn well, but...

In my country, where the same phenomenon happened ('divertissement' is now labelled 'culture'), I would say it was less than 10 years ago, perhaps closer to 5 years ago for a systematisation of the use.

During Covid-related lockdowns and other limitations, it reached new highs: how dared we limit access to the vital need which 'culture' is, how dared we forbid 'culture' people ('culture' producers (!)) to work for some time, and so on.

Well, La Boétie's "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" dates back to 200 years before Rousseau, and I wouldn't say it was inspired by American Indians. I am not saying that the discovery and then the deep relations that France did have with American Indians did not play an important in the literature and reflections: on the contrary just a bit after La Boétie's time, Montaigne integrated them in his thinking. That was still over 150 years before Rousseau.

Edit: There were other major transformations at work, like the fact that before 1500, writers would either be lords or strongly depend on King or lords both for their income and for being allowed to publish. It was a Middle Age organisation, with a chivalry based nobility; writing essays was not a thing, the number of themes was as reduced as the number of forms. Then society organisation changed, bourgeoisie and nobles started mixing more and more; writing was more long-form (technical reasons come into play too) and of course expanded the number of themes it dealt with.

I did succinctly, just a couple of minutes before you did :-)

You are right nobody else had mentioned it yet at that point. Perhaps that's because Americans were more concerned about the BBS itself and purely local usage on BBSes with a large number of users, and less interested into FidoNet (or similar networks). Or a difference in eras.

Modems were expensive, and well, computers were not cheap either.

You had to pay the communications time, but well, as a final user, with local calls + night rate, it wasn't a big deal. Probably more so for sysops which had to rent an extra line and do the interconnect between BBSes for networks like FidoNet (but again, at night most of the time). It also depended on your country's pricing policy for lines and communications. Americans for example had it better than French in that respect. Each country developed a different subculture based on communication price and organisation, hardware price and so on.

Still I'd say modems where the main hurdle. They were really expensive until 14.4k became popular and cheap knock off appeared.

> what were the entry barrier for an average person to join

First, you had to be into computers. It was mostly before the family computer explosion.

Then you had to hear about BBSes and buy yourself a modem that you would basically only use for that purpose, just to try and dive in an unknown world.

Also, in France we had the Minitel, which was provided for free, so on one hand that piece of hardware was given, available in most households and gave access to a variety of services, and on the other hand you had to buy an expensive modem for ???. Hard sell for a long time. So when the BBS scene finally kind of took off, it was very late, almost already time for it to shutdown because Internet (web, Usenet) was taking over.

> How similar was it to current social media networks

Not much :-)

Personally, I was more into FidoNet than pure local BBS (over here a BBS would only have a small number of users); FidoNet was pretty much like Usenet, a collection of thematic discussion forums anyway.

It also meant I didn't often connect to the BBS graphic/terminal interface. My 'mail' program (Terminate) would simply connect to the BBS, and automatically send my messages and retrieve the conferences content that had arrived since my last connection.

https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2...

https://dedicatoafidonet.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2...

> How big the industry around it actually become

There was no such thing over here; perhaps it was a thing in the USA.

Last time I built X by hand, there was one... one single X element the building of which depended on Python amongst the many, many components of X: XCB. So I had to install Python just for that one module; let me tell you I wasn't happy at all with such choice. Icing on the cake, the Python scripts were not compatible with Python 3, and also mixed spaces and tabs for indentation, so I had to write patches to get the stuff to compile.

Most likely, straight to the comments section.

This is some creative math!

We were granted a notable exception, which allows us to keep a distance with parked cards in areas where speed limit is 50km/h or less.

If I stay at home and walk around I have troubles breathing when it's over 35°C, I have been several times on the verge of fainting when it lasts a bit too long over that temperature.

But I don't have a problem biking at that temperature or above. I've ridden for hours in temperatures near 40°C with no shade. As long as I get plenty of air, it's OK: it lowers the temperatures and I can breath. I mean, I prefer if it is 15°C lower :-), but it feels much better than walking.

Now in such circumstances you'd better not get caught in a climb, when your speed drop under say, 8 mph, because then you don't get any wind, while being on max effort. That's horrible. It happened to me once in a small mountain pass, on a road which looked like it had been painted black to make things worse. I had to climb down the sharp slope on the road side as I could, to find the shade of the few bushes which were around and stay there a few minutes, because I felt my temperature was rising way too much. Never again.

It can also be a bit self-documenting, or be a place-holder if there is for example stuff to delete in a loop (elements of an array) before releasing the pointer itself (the array).

I don't know, when you read it, sometimes it feels natural and meaningful, and sometimes you know that the author didn't know that free() handles NULL all right.

The landscape of dumb/features phones is worse now than it was 10 years ago, which is a pity. For example, jut imagine that it is hard these days to get one which does predictive typing right... or that the cameras are worse than 10 years ago.

The difference it makes is that with such tech, I wouldn't have been born because my grand-parents would have been executed and my mother sent to a KZ, for they couldn't have easily forged various more or less believable identity papers and they couldn't have benefited of hard to cross-check databases.

But what is it, in regard of the convenience of going 2 minutes faster through customs check during the yearly holiday across the ocean, after all?

Don't worry about choosing, little by little the Linux ecosystem (distros, applications) is/will be catching up with these horrific anti-patterns too. After all, it is now in the hands of the same type of guys, who apply the same reasoning (1. how could I improve my piece of software if I don't put telemetry everywhere? 2. Security! Security! Security! Please let me auto-update 3 times a weeks, put a camera in your house, oh and by the way, give me your car keys, it's for your own good.)

Solar/wind, when it products, crashes market prices. Nuclear is supposed to produce at those hours too, except that if it does, it sells at a loss; and if it doesn't, it blows its load factor which is supposed to be its strong point. In both cases, because of the destabilisation of the production equilibrium, caused by solar and wind, the balance of nuclear is endangered.

Yet nuclear is needed to deal with the very common lacks of solar/wind. Hence the global result: prices getting higher. The irony is that the State itself subsidies solar/wind, both directly, and indirectly by forcing the electrical company (which is mostly State-owned, and which also owns the nuclear plants) to buy solar/wind electricity at ridiculously high prices, which is killing its balance and forces it to raise consumer prices.

There was no such problem when there was not a market like the present one, and when there was no solar/wind. Production was OK, prices were low. All was going fine. The problem was introduced by a liberalisation dogma that "had" to be applied to everything and the kitchen sink + a pro-renewable/anti-nuclear dogma (renewable is not bad per se, but the consequences of its rushed development have been ignored, despite being very foreseeable).

I wish they hadn't updated their forum software indeed. I share your opinion about it: very slow, lots of wasted, white space, and stuff which may or may not be displayed correctly depending on your browser; in a word: modern.

As in other kinds of software, even traditional "*BB" pieces of software follow the fads: add tons of Javacript and heavily revamp interfaces to look trendy. So you can't trust the same piece of software on which you've been relying for decades not to become like that one day.

If I am not mistaken, it used to be running vBulletin. Now it seems to be running Xenforo (which some posts in this thread seem to praise). The problem in SSC's case was that they had let the former piece of software and database rot (the former owner had lost interest/energy for some time, and then sold to a company which didn't do much about it for some more time), so there were frequent troubles, and that justified a big jump "forward".

Luckily I have been banned from there enough times that I don't bother recreating accounts and write there any more, I just browse it 3 times a year nowadays. :-)