Notices by Clifton Royston (cliftonr@wandering.shop)

"Over 50 years ago, NASA was able to get its Saturn V, a rocket nearly as large as Starship, to fly without ever having a failed launch over its 13-launch, six-year operational lifespan. This was a rocket designed with computers less powerful than a Casio watch, built with far less accurate techniques and materials, with check systems and procedures infinitely less sophisticated than anything today. Yet, engineers were able to ensure it never had a launch failure [...]"
https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/spacex-has-finally-figured-out-why

@skinnylatte

I was going to suggest this too. I researched jackets etc. a lot when I got into backpacking.

BTW, I recommend strongly against Patagonia's breathable waterproof jackets/shells. In my experience, whatever they use for the lining material lasts a couple years and then starts disintegrating completely. If you call their service to try to get the warranty honored, they'll start making up bogus reasons that it was your fault it happened. I saw this with 2 jackets (or was it 3?)

I don’t understand how anybody could be surprised that Trump has appointed a suspected Russian intel asset as head of US national intelligence, or that he’s preening himself about getting to be Putin’s errand boy in demanding Ukraine surrender.

Have they forgotten his first term?

Have they forgotten that over 12 years ago, even before he was first nominated, GOP politicians were talking in private about how Trump was probably working for Putin and treating it as a big laugh?

Among those, the disastrous effects the “banned word” list will have on the NSA or CIA, by banning words used technically in computer security, are fully intentional. If it wasn’t the primary reason for it, then they (and the FSB) would view it as a highly desirable secondary effect.

The US government has been effectively overthrown and subverted in ways we are particularly vulnerable to, through playing on our longstanding bigotry and prejudices, as our CIA did in so many other countries.

As for Musk, he’s likely one of Putin’s assets too - he’s praised Putin repeatedly, he’s said he thinks Ukraine should just fork over their territory to Russia, and earlier in the war he personally ordered Starlink service cut to sabotage a Ukrainian drone mission using it for navigation.

My conclusion from these openly available bits of info:

Every bit of disruption their activities cause the US, the collapse in US science research, all the deaths they are causing, are intentional.

Here's someone else I respect, talking about the same thing from a slightly different angle:

https://mstdn.social/@Npars01/113992464219763119

@GossiTheDog

It was just some loser replying to a couple of your posts with a boilerplate request for *somebody* to help him move some funds out of this great big trust account he can't access...

I happened to notice it when I hit the "Report this as spam" on someone else he replied to.

I thought it was pretty funny who he'd pick as his potential sucker.

I think somehow that choosing @GossiTheDog
as one of your initial test cases for a 419 spam could be seen as a poor choice.

But regardless of what's coming to that poor sucker, I reported him anyway.

At this point we all need to put some heavy pressure on mastodon.social.

Spam is ramping up and almost 100% of what I see is coming from there. If I personally block it, however, I'll lose a number of people I am following and really value.

This really is the Usenet spam story all over again.

@Infoseepage @lilithsaintcrow

There was once a late evening I was very *very* tired, so much so that when setting up the coffee maker for the morning, I began pouring the full carafe of water into the electric coffee grinder, while it was plugged in.

It's a wonder I didn't electrocute myself, but I didn't. For even more of a wonder, the coffee grinder survived, once I had taken it apart to dry out completely and then reassembled it. It was never the same though.

@StillIRise1963

Unilateral surrender?

@timberwraith @FlashMobOfOne

I remember from the late '70s and my lesbian friends then, that "wimmin" was another popular alternative. The idea of course was to bypass the linguistic implication that woman and women are subcategories of man and men.

Spelling it womyn or wimmin isn't and wasn't the problem, it was identifying physical gender as the source of our societal "masculinity" problems.

That both interferes with recognizing men as its other victims, and promotes "gendered" exclusion.

@timberwraith @FlashMobOfOne

Back then I found that it was perfectly possible to have lovely conversations with a number of dedicated lesbian separatist feminists - the ones who wanted to establish a separate society without men - because they had nothing against men as people, only against socially "masculine" behavior.

Even back then, I was able to understand the difference and not take it as a personal attack, and for them that made it clear enough that I wasn't invested in it.

Y'know, I was wondering how the media and FBI could be so quickly and confidently describing the New Orleans attack as 'terrorism'. Other instances of crazies - usually right-wing crazies - driving trucks into parades, pride marches, or pro-Black rights rallies have instead been met with extreme caution and warnings not to assume it's terrorism.

Then I saw the suspect has an Islamic sounding name.

I'm so damn tired of this shit.

Jimmy Carter was the only US president in my lifetime who I am comfortable saying was a good human being.

I'm not sure how good a president he was, although a lot better than he was made to look through deliberate sabotage of his presidency by the Republicans, but AFAIK he seems to have genuinely been a good person all the way through.

I believe he is the only President in recent years under whom the US didn't invade or participate in a war against another country.

Edit: fixed typo

@skinnylatte

Those might be the best taro puffs I have ever seen!

@xgranade @ireneista

Exactly so.

@cstross @Infoseepage @Steveg58

It happens that I did some work on a similar system for the Tongan govt when I was living in Tonga, in the early 1980s.

MP/M was pretty nifty - the system I coded on, from a small Australian company, had shared disk storage, but a separate CPU board for each terminal/user, so users had no contention for RAM or CPU resources. That's quite the achievement for a system built on 8-bit CPUs!

Well into the '90s Tonga was still running the invoice app I wrote them.

@Steveg58 @cstross

I had a pair in the early '80s.

They were pretty common in the earliest home computing days when the only "home systems" were S-100 boat anchors, but once luggable computers came along (Osborne, Kaypro) and then PCs, they became a thing of the past.

You could however fit just over 1 MB on a double-sided double density 8" disk. It was a long time before smaller floppy disks caught up to that.

@Steveg58 @cstross

BTW, an interesting trivia bit about the 8" floppy is that it actually came out in 1971, but originally just for a specific niche use as boot media for IBM 360s and 370s.

A couple engineers at IBM invented it because IBM wanted something fairly simple and self-contained as mainframe OS boot media, to replace booting from tape reels.

(I had thought I remembered that but checked it on Wikipedia to be sure.)

@xgranade

Well. This is very sad to see.

I was expecting something like this would happen eventually from the moment Microsoft acquired it. Microsoft ends up killing anything good it touches, especially anything involving FOSS, and it's only a question of how long it takes them.

But that's no consolation for all the people who have contributed to it or depended on it.