So, what actors are attached to your reboot of Demolition Man? :)

WAP!

So the Windows CE phone can only do simple text-based pages (though the display is an alphanumeric one, so no real loss). The pages are all controlled by operators, so everything is properly curated and most importantly billed on your phone bill.

It's nothing like the free-for-all of HTTP and HTML pages, where anarchy reigns and operators are reduced to just bit pipes.

You know all that stuff you write, about eldritch horrors, eating your eyes and tongue? Way less scary than this post.

So the mobile web resembles Minitel?

We could do worse ...

Meanwhile, the UK's Acorn Computers bought what was left of the NewtonOS intellectual property and continues to market the Newton Messagepad series as ruggedized retail and industrial data capture terminals in Europe, using the unique Graffiti text entry system from Palm Computing).

But Sophie and Steve's baby — the Acorn RISC Machine — still powered the Newton?

No PDF, but NeXT cubes are really good at DTP in pure PostScript. Plasma displays, of course, and really high-res b/w flat CRTs.

Lycos, Altavista or Yahoo - who publishes the ultimate phone book for the "web"?

Atari vs Amiga in the console and CGI market, aka multi-media works.

Oh, and don't get me started about e-democracy. All the promises became true - not only information at your fingertips, but also portable and personal digital voting. And even structured discussion fora to debate the public.

But what passes for video on the internet today is 100% Macromedia Flash, so things could be worse.

Realplabuffering

Didn't Atari build a Transputer workstation at one point? Oh yes, they did!

Atari vs Amiga in the console and CGI market, aka multi-media works.

So, does Motorola continue the 68000 line or do the Atari STs and Amigas run Acorn processors in the future?

Of course both have a multitude of co-processors so the CPU is more like an orchestrator.

Of course there is a social media network: Usenet is booming after it became an essential tool for celebrities to interact with their fans and for businesses and governments to communicate. Of course the MPAA got the binaries groups banned, which drastically reduced the burden for the server admins, but now with a significant portion of the population on Usenet there are constant complaints from the ISPs about the storage and bandwidth requirements

Its use by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq to influence the 2016 elections, said by many to be pivotal in the election of Boris Johnson as US president, is notorious.

And with proper kill-files it's even almost usable.

The post-grunge, post-techno scene swaps tracks on MD - that are micro disc. And if you want the full concert experience including vvvideo, a iOmega Zip disc is the medium of choice for your portable Atari WalkAndPlay station.

And the title is ‘The Invisible Hand’.

Of course there is a social media network: Usenet is booming...

As someone who was on Usenet in 1995, yeah, I could live with that.

Also, PostScript instead of PDF? Meh, six of one, half dozen of the other.

The NeXT was supposed to be pretty good in its day, it would be nice to see what might come out of that. But then, a few years before 1995 people were saying the same thing about the Amiga; if Commodore had had any clue how to market what they had the personal computer scene might have been very different.

The IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was replaced by the MSN Messenger. IRC was used for a bit in universities, but the Real Operators took one look at it and prevented it being used as it was too decentralized and could be used for distributing subversive material.

MicroSoft did step up with MSN and now you can talk to all your friends on the MSN Messenger! Servers provided by Microsoft, of course.

I am surprised you forgot to mention that virtually all electronic communication is now composed by Clippy, rather than actual people.

"Hey I see you are trying to write an outline civil case to stop Office Assistant taking over the world - would you like some help with that?"

Is it worth speculating as to where things might have ended up if Net Neutrality went in the other direction? There's no Netflix if cable channels are delivering your internet and they decide to throttle your bandwidth (but they have an alternate service that's merely $59/month!). I know there were predictions that we'd end up with multiple 'nets' and you'd need to subscribe to each one (historian Susan J Douglas made exactly such a prediction in her 2004 history "Listening In" by analogy with American radio stations).

If the idea that paying for content by microbilling through your ISP won out instead of advertising...

...that puts Visa/Mastercard in a far more robust content moderation role than they are currently. Which also means your ISP looks a lot like your traditional Cable operator, in that there are bundling tiers for what content you're allowed to access, outside content providers have to pay peering to gain access to your users, and there is robust incentives to build out competing trans-continental fiber networks for content distribution.

Want access to adult sites? (Meaning anything off the evangelical straight and narrow; remember Visa/Mastercard are governing what's allowed) Prepare for the sleeze fees and taxes if they can be accessed at all.

"Net Neutrality" is a specifically USAn shibboleth.

I thought we'd established that this was a British (specifically Scottish) blog?

Also that the USA has a population of roughly 350M people to the EU's 400M and China's 1.7M and India's 1.4M (and if you think India and China don't count, I have some lunar landers and a space station to point you at: they're not poor any more, and they've leapfrogged the USA in important and significant ways).

I focused on mostly-consumer tech and global coms rather than local regulatory hurdles because in the long run, local regulations will be bypassed by someone else, who will then steal a lead.

I know you are adamant that you don't watch TV or movies. Or at least not very much. And have not been involved in any production of such.

But what you have described as the current tech world is the setting for the Apple TV series Hello Tomorrow. Your post could be the elevator pitch for the show. Flying (well low flying) cars styled like around 1960. Video calls in B&W on tube TVs.

All tied together by a traveling crew hitting up medium sized town after town in the US selling lots and houses on the moon. With the first ship to take folks there being continuously delayed. And big piles of cash being moved around with refunds given when there is no other option.

A bit uneven at times but I found it fun to watch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Tomorrow!

The 90s OOP Future for programmers will look extremely familiar, except Python and Ruby never take off and their culture becomes the generation that writes backend code using each others' frameworks in Visual Basic 7.

The 70s/80s OOP Future continues to never actually happen.

I was in on the ground floor of the dot-com boom from 1995-2000, and the hype back then was absolutely bonkers: that may be part of why I'm so thoroughly soured on the current wave of bilge and bullshit.

The last word in this sentence brings back a strong memory of this time. A group of what had to be grifters or fools (or both) was proposing getting fiber internet to the masses (in large urban cities) by having small crawlers/robots climb up through sewer lines in high rises dragging a fiber line along. They would exit into homes so you'd have a fiber cable coming out of your toilet that would hook to your router.

What could go wrong? Who wouldn't want this? They raised a few $million before vanishing into the sunset.

Which is a lot like the actual architectures in the less batshit consoles in the incoming generation around '95 (say, the original Playstation) and the generation after.

I suspect it'd be less blatant but there'd be a significant price-based differentiator between machines you can do more than play games and write up your homework on and ones you can write more than slightly prettier versions of things you could do on 8-bit machines though. Leading to laws like the DMCA actively targeting the demo scene for repeatedly jailbreaking their kit.

Perl 6 never happens...

Oh, wait.

Oh, this is the future of weirdness like "Boots.co.uk, exclusively available through Mercury Communications!" Or in the US, "Sears.com, exclusively available through Rogers Networking!" And countries with telco monopolies will have near absolute government content censorship abilities from about day one.

The 90s OOP Future for programmers will look extremely familiar

Maybe more so, if IBM/Apple and Microsoft have things split up perfectly, there's less competition and thus something like OpenDoc might have actually happened. More components, fewer apps.

I do wonder where the underground computer nerds accumulate. Does Sir Clive get a second chance?

And what does Jobs do with Oracle?

Some very smart people I know where involved heavily in OOP back when it was the "next big thing". They basically said it would never really work. Until people spent 10 to 20 years getting the base objects well defined. But then they would be 5 to 10 years out of date. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Where’s my Gibsonian immersive cyberspace? Surely the neural interface works now?

I’m having flashbacks to how primitive cladistics was in the 1990s. Breaking cover for a minute, the Street, in this case the life sciences, has made tools from these tech bubble products in ways that I don’t think the technical folk realize. For example, in real life they stopped planning on publishing floras years ago, because it’s only practical to publish online, given the rapidity of changes, and only luddites like me use guide books instead of iNaturalist to identify just about any macroscopic organism.

In your alt-scenario, the Climate Crisis Will Not Be Televised. Nor will the Extinction Crisis. And people will still mostly ignore microbial diversity, because there’s so much of it and DNA sequencing is too expensive to get it all.

It really is a shame that Thefacebook.com died in its crib. As everyone who was invited to the site can confirm, it was a very friendly community, one that really lived up to its nickname as "the social network." Yes, I know that it blatantly violated the patents of SixDegrees. But I do wish that they had worked something out. It was so much easier to mass-mail your friends on Thefacebook than it is on SixDegrees!

Spot on for the 1995 to 2000 time slot would be the Network Computer. Instead of a beige box PC, running Windows 95, you'd have a thin client box, screen and keyboard. All the storage and some of the processing would happen at the other end of the telephone line. Come up with by a consortium with Sun Microsystems as a major player. My employers at the time made hardware for it. Despite the heavy promotion, it never took off, but it would have been a very different world if it had. People preferred the buggy, but more versatile WinTel PCs of the time, especially for games. The need for an always on network connection didn't suit the expensive dial up that was all that most had. You'd do as much as you could on the PC disconnected, then go on-line for the shortest possible time to send/receive email and messages, look up web sites and so on. Around 8 to 10 years too soon for common always on broadband that might have made it a goer.

you really should not have left us room to roam thru the collective unfulfilled realms of lost tech such as was brooded upon in "The Gernsback Continuum" by William Gibson...

but not 1930s worlds of wonder but 1990s blend of optimism and guile and blossoming erotica ... remember this is your fault when worms start crawling outta da virtual woodwork

so... starting with NeXT cubes running ultra slick 3D rending which allows Pixar to leap off every movie screen by way of churning out cartoon features at the rate of once a year (thus: Toy Story 23 premiers in 2006) and then as they gather momentum and seduce all the nerdy creatives from all over, they're cranking out three movies each month...

they raid the collective mythos of one culture at a time leading all sorts of wacky strangeness including a short-lived revival of Nordic Godlings with secretive neo-Nazi rituals and homoerotic art exhibits and the usual mass orgies in converted warehouses...

within ten years, Pixar is able to generate stuff that looks so realistic as to look BetterThanLife™ (which is one of their many trademarked chunks of intellectual property)

no need for flesh-n-blood human actors... in 2011 Tom Cruise is found having starved to death in a cardboard box in an alley and nobody bothers to claim his corpse...

MGM and other studios simply can no longer compete for mega summer movies involving booms, breasts, land battle massed charges by orcs on dinosaurs, blasting massive starships, et al, anything involving special effects Pixar outperforms and outproduces...

so MGM-Sony-etc are forced into producing slow paced, thoughtful rom-com's and anguish driven regret flicks... lots 'n lots of Swedish influences and every possible chick-lit adaptation they can find

in twenty years, Pixar scoops up Disney which is struggling, by way of a stock swap, in a hostile takeover described by the Wall Street Journal as rape-not-just-pillage... other studios soon follow as desperate institutional shareholders such as pension funds recognize their erroneous analysis and grovel on knees for Sony-MGM-etc to be bought out...

Pixar keeps the brand of DisneyWorld... opens up seventeen more upsized copies outside of the world's seventeen most populated major cities... with three subsections: kid-friendly, family-fun and adults only...

the latter being a blend of skin tight leather darkest-of-fantasy-themed rough housing by day and consensual Olympic -grade sexual cos-play by night...

meanwhile...

Flooz!

Like Howard says, this is Gernsbackian but for the 90s; perhaps the equivalent avatar of that techno-optimism would be Lou Rosetto.

WordPerfect successfully transitioned — painlessly — to running natively in Windows 98. By the time Microsoft released Office 2004, word processors all had fully-open data file specifications to enable the Show Codes view when importing files prepared on other machines, and Windows Vista abandoned both temporal release names and closed-interface systems. A thriving subindustry of affordable third-party add-ons for WordPerfect forced Adobe to retreat from early, virtually-nonworking versions of InDesign to support for hobbyist photo editing and printer drivers, leaving WordPerfect the dominant concept-all-the-way-to-print way to get words to people. LaTEX development stopped in 2004 because it was unnecessary. The concept of "coding presentation separately from substance, and allowing each to be edited separately in the same window" became the core interface; even PhotoShop "opened up" its pixel coding for individual-pixel manipulation. Meanwhile, Lotus 1-2-3 also transitioned — painlessly — to running natively in Windows 98.

These two developments stunted Microsoft Office, which became a specialty niche product for applications in the finance industry — the one place where all of its functions made any sense whatsoever for the data to be freely manipulable in any module (if, that is, you believe the finance industry's own hype). Microsoft went back to focusing on its operating-system and high-level-programming-language core, and all of the programmers whose efforts went into feature creep in Office instead developed a truly robust and secure kernel in Windows Cascadia.

My ipad is currently running a Posix shell with something that claims to be Perl 5 v. 36.

The TLDR is that "Perl 5" is not a version number of Perl, it's the Perl 5 Language, as distinct from any other language.

Perl 6 exists, but it turned out to be so different from Perl 5 that they renamed it Raku and it toddled off to do its own stuff in the corner.

Perl 5 development did not freeze back in 1997, it just suffered from an internal slaughterfest over what to call the language, resulting in incremental 3-digit version numbers of Perl 5 until a few years ago, at which point the community realized they'd shot themselves in both feet PR-wise because nobody outside the initiates realized the language wasn't dead.

Situation not aided by Larry checking out for a couple of decades to focus on Raku, and getting cancer halfway through. Good news: he made a full recovery and Raku happened. Bad news: the Perl 5.x ship drifted rudderless for too long for them to migrate the "Perl 6" brand to where it belonged, i.e. Perl 5.6.

The primary difference between Raku and Perl 5 is that Raku has a language spec and more than one implementation; with Perl 5, the spec is the language (although these days it is in principle possible to create a new implementation of it -- which ignores the question of "why would anyone do that?"). Oh, and Raku was designed to serve different purpose(s) from Perl 5. Perl 5 was the UNIX Swiss Army Chainsaw, with added decorations like references and an OOP mechanism and modules bolted on top. Raku adds a bunch of stuff to Perl 5, such as an optional static typing system, formal subroutine paramener lists, formal parameter passing modes, extra-powerful rules-based regular expressions (compared to Perl 5), macros ... if Perl 5 is analogous to C, then Raku is Objective-C or C++.

Spot on for the 1995 to 2000 time slot would be the Network Computer. Instead of a beige box PC, running Windows 95, you'd have a thin client box, screen and keyboard.

Nope.

I was working inside old-SCO in 1991-95 when the Network Computer fad hit. The NC was a reaction to two irritants -- the RAM famine of 1990-93, and the hard disk improvement plateau of 1991-94.

SCO OpenServer was delivered 2 years late (on what was originally an 18 month development timeline) because SCO bet on NCs -- or rather, on X Terminals and thin client PCs with RAM but no hard disks, booting over the network and running an X server with applications running remotely the OpenServer box. But by the time it was getting ready to ship business PCs were routinely being sold with 16Mb of RAM and a 500Mb hard disk, which was what you needed to run OpenServer locally, without the time delay of loading over 10mbps thinnet or 10BaseT.

NC was Sun trying to colonize the PC landscape from its base of operations in server land, only with Java/web technology and a dedicated thin terminal, and it failed for the same reason as old-SCO's play. Some elements survived (eg. the Sunray workstations) but the rest just left Sun vulnerable to Oracle's predation (Oracle wanted the server tech to run their DBMS).

»NC was Sun trying to colonize the PC landscape[…]«

Not quite.

NC was an Oracle idea to out-compete IBM mainframes, DB2 and 3270 with Sun servers, Oracle DB and thin graphical clients running a stripped and locked down FreeBSD.

Sun was not satisfied with that ambition, so they looked hard at the french MiniTel, and also pushed the NC client to be bundled with network access, pointing to the heavy support load the PC+MS platform imposed on the ISPs.

It's not clear to me if Java was already part of Sun's "vision" at that time, but it came in very soon after.

But I want to point out something else: At the point of departure of this counterfactual, the IETF were still committed to migrate to the OSI protocols, PTT monopolies were still monopolies, and ISDN was state of the art on the local loop.

I worked on an NC destined for Oracle while I was at Acorn. Larry specifically wanted an intuitive interface his grandma could use straight away and thought RISC-OS did that nicely so had hired us. For some reason the pre-production units were given to semi-experienced users instead of complete newbies and were declared to be "non-intuitive". Turned out the translation of this was "it's not exactly like Windows".

ANYTHING AT ALL manufactured or labelled: "Sinclair"

Jaws @ 32
Word Pervert? - Arrgggh!

Oh yes: Lotus 1-2-3 was an actual, useful working system.
IIRC squeezed out by MicroShaft?

Meanwhile:
More hype? Something in it? - wait & see, I suppose.

Fibre to the home exists, but it's designed for delivering content to the home, so upstream speeds are very limited (and possibly still carried by twisted pair).

ISDN is a thing.

Streaming media exists, in a sense, but it's pay-per-view delivered over fibre by cable companies, built on an architecture originally based around giant tape farms playing a limited selection of movies at offset intervals (typically five minutes).

(Based on the telecoms boom in the late 80s when i was working in the field, so possibly too outdated for your setting.)

Forget the Clipper Chip, it's the Clippy Chip! Mandatory in all consumer electronics.

Also, what is AI in the Laundryverse?

Atari had given up on computers and switched to games and consoles by 1995. But there was still development of the AmigaOS running on PowerPC. So like Apple, I think that would have been the likely architecture for non-x86 desktops. ARM was the niche low power option back then, whereas the bigger manufacturers were going faster and faster. You can afford to not worry about optimising to the last degree and getting the features out there if you know that next year there will be a faster processor to run your software on.

That question is explored in Down on the Farm (originally published on tor.com, but it's going to be reprinted in A Conventional Boy when it goes on sale next January 7th).

Just to be the skunk at the picnic. If we’re doing Alt-history 90s, here’s what should have happened:

Climate change is a technical problem with a technical solution, and all the petroleum companies are busily retrofitting their pipelines and distribution systems to work with hydrogen, while diversifying their petroleum production into plastics.

The first generation of hydrogen powered warships, tanks, and stealth fighters are expected any day now. Cars too.

Invisible flame is the phat new feature to have. Everyone’s got it in their new product lines.

Apart from one or two things, most of it doesn't sound too bad. Or indeed sounds better than the floods of frantic crap we actually are getting.

My wishlist item I think would be that the NSA et al were properly successful at clobbering the commercial/general use of strong encryption, and there was nothing available for the banks etc to use that they - or their customers - considered sufficiently secure. So none of this modern shite with payments over the internet and all the rest of it ever got off the ground, everyone would of necessity continue to deal with physical money as a matter of course, and people like me were not oppressed by the ever-increasing proportion of things which are being made difficult or impossible to do.

And for a bonus, the Tories lost in 1987 and didn't get to repeal the Truck Acts.

So,while Google with its 'search' powered page index and these wonky 'bigtable' ideas, Yahoo! employs a decent chunk of the Indian IT sector to keep its internet catalogue curated. The $bn it takes in from advertisers go into proper tech funding like 3D glasses and flying car startups while Flickr's share price is doing quite well. They are currently thinking about buying Motorola or that Finnish mobile phone manufacturer to get them tonbring out a real hi-rez feature phone. With the right contract, you can upload your pictures 'on the go' to your Flickr album and even order photo prints straight from your phone. In related news, Tomtom have just launched their own naviPad(TM) which comes with the maps for up to 3 major metropolitan areas pre-loaded.

Don't forget to coleect your Beenz on your internet shopping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beenz.com

$100 million up on smoke.

Hah! Due to a tiny mistake in their documents I got listed by Acorn as a US distributor, rather than simply a developer. For a while during the NC craze I would regularly get calls from people wanting to buy hundreds or even thousands of the Acorn NC machines. I did my best to pass them on but I suspect no actual sales resulted. Still, it did help me get really good support and prices when I wanted things from Acorn, so not all bad.

RISC OS lives on, largely on Raspberry Pi machines - see riscosopen dot org - you really should try it if you’ve never seen it. Drag and drop pushed hard.

Re: '... stunted Microsoft Office, which became a specialty niche product for applications in the finance industry'

No way --- everybody needs/uses PowerPoint!

like many victims of PowerPointless, there was the dream that one or another federal government agencies would declare it as a workplace hazard and deem its usage to never exceed more than 15 minutes (which is about 5 slides) per day... much as various toxins have upper limits of exposure...

...so visualize someone from HR standing the back of the room with a stopwatch counting down until the 15 minute limit is reached and waving a white flag

do we at least get Transmeta-powered webpads instead of the iPad? (that was the job I had briefly after graduating in 2000 before everything imploded in the crash)

I'd also love if SGI somehow survived in this future, but sadly I think they were already too deep down the itanium path in this timeline.

The first generation of hydrogen powered warships, tanks, and stealth fighters are expected any day now. Cars too.

Nope, hydrogen doesn't work as fuel for pretty much anything other than high-performance rocketry. There are numerous reasons, but primary ones are that its energy density per unit volume (and mass) is way lower than methane, never mind kerosene, that it requires insane cryogenic insulation on tankage and plumbing, it embrittles everything, and it leaks through solid metal. (Oh, and it's invisible and explosive in mixtures with air.)

The military investigated it as a possible fuel for hypersonic aviation in the 1950s and noped right out of there, even on the sort of cost-no-obstacle budget that gave us the SR-71 and the XB-70.

Weirdly, we did for a while around 1998-2003 have amazing Transmeta Crusoe-powered subnotebook PCs, notably the Sony Vaio CX-1 family!

But then Crusoe seems to have capped off around 600MHz and fell by the wayside -- I'm not clear why -- years before multitouch UIs came along.

as for powerpoint, I definitely remember using wordperfect's "Presentation Perfect" long before I was even aware powerpoint existed so I'm all for the wordperfect future... though that's apparently ungoogleable? I'm not imagining that software package am I?

I also had some Sun-adjacent friends back in the early 2000s who were convinced Sun should have bought Apple and would go on at great length about how it would have turned out.

Charlie, that's so wrong. IBM's OS/2 Warp got out before WinBlows, and before NT was usable, and had the killer app - that is, you could print while you were working on other stuff, fur real. And it didn't crash... So IBM managed to slap M$ silly, and they got down for consumers.

Then, after they courts in the US slammed M$ again, for unfair competition, someone not a complete idiot took the helm of WordPerfect, and nobody uses Dirt, er, Word anymore. And if that wasn't enough, that same CEO realized that alt-F3 on WP was another killer app, so that they could print perfect web pages.

Then Linux came up on the outside, and by 2000, IBM had embraced it, so there was no Z-90....

Almost forgot, AOL was slapped silly, and put some controls on their subscribers' posts to usenet.

Ruby never took off? PRAISED BE GHU (purple be His Name).

And yeah. I had one course in '94 on "OOPs and GUI" (which always sounded like you dropped an egg on the floor). OO design was interesting... but the closer you got to actual code, the fuzzier and less distinct it became.

Oh yes: Lotus 1-2-3 was an actual, useful working system. IIRC squeezed out by MicroShaft?

Yes. Totally. Accountants, bookeepers, number massagers of all stripes immediately demanded a dual floppy IBM PC. Then a 5MB or 10MB XT. Then expanded/extended/whatever memory cards. [OMG what a mess.] It was an incredible game changer.

Then they got stuck. And could not figure out how to move forward. C:/mydata/fredsnumber/... was the way things were linked. And no way to change them if you moved to a bigger system, wanted to put them on an external drive, or whatever. Not totally but it wasn't easy. And so many more things like this.

They had a total hit then couldn't figure out how to keep advancing the goal posts.

Microsoft came our with multi-plan. Or maybe before. But it was sort of smallish designed for CPM and similar.

THEN MS came out with Excel v1.0. On a Mac! And corporate demanded it on Windows. And then 123 was on the way down. It took a while. But it dies still tied to C: and D: and such.

"if you want a picture of the future, imagine an animated paperclip popping up in front of a human face - forever"

Beigepunk should also include nationalized telecommunication zones. Who want's to talk transatlantic? No need for global e-mail, usenet and the like - everything is better under control of the postal monopoly. Minitel in France, BTX in Germany, some bbc-whatever-system in the UK, and AOL across the ocean?

Oh yes: Lotus 1-2-3 was an actual, useful working system. IIRC squeezed out by MicroShaft?

DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run?

Seems to have been a myth in this timeline, but in an alternate?

http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done_t.html

On the data transport side, a combination of 16mb Token Ring and 25mb ATM-to-the-desktop throttled 100BaseT in it's crib. Efforts to merge the two triumphant technologies failed, however, so your 'luggable' laptop bag always includes two connector dongles.

Still, you are grateful for the opportunity to 'plug in' into a physical network. Wireless networks have never lived up to their hype, as the processing demands of ATM or TR circuit-based switching limited the number of 'channels' wireless hub could support.

But at least ISDN took off!

After the roaring success of ISDN BRI (Basic Rate Interface) for home usage, people got excited about 128kbps to their home! They could actually download a whole movie at SVGA resolution overnight! Of course, the wealthiest areas with their ISDN PRI (1.472mb data rate - 64kb for control) just chuckled as they switched their links between different V-BBS sites (Video - Bulletin Board Systems) and sucked down movies in an hour or so.

It a switched on world!

Charlie @ 52
YOU know that I know that ... now tell it to the fake techbros who are pushing ... "Hydrogen-powered Trains" arrgghhh!

David L
I wrote my MSc thesis in Lotus 1-2-3 ... It could do things with equations & graphs that (at that time) were impossible in standard MS products.

FWIW Cuecat still has at least one use, in small/personal libraries.

https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/CueCat_barcode_scanning

Radio shack had an impressive run of sales, from people building their own radio modems to communicate directly. Luckily a few big lawsuits took care of that.

ICANN was taken over by AOL.

Since I knew someone who drove a Honda Clarity hydrogen car (240 mile range, off a 10 lb tank of gas at 5000 psi), I can verify that yes, hydrogen can power cars. What killed that program was having one fuel station per county.

Since we’re now stuck with switching to EVs that are lugging hundreds of pounds of batteries for the same range out of everything from cars to warshipsI think an alt history where society sanely decided not to double down on petroleum or social media sounds like a refreshingly different kind of nightmare, really.

If you want nightmares, then ubiquitous hydrogen leaks, invisible flames, and scummy politics built around making hydrogen from methane more than fit the bill.

ISDN is a thing.

So the phone network is still circuit switched. And we get to the Internet via a peering point in phone company central offices. Modems on steroids?

I bet we have 1.5Mbps to the home.

someone not a complete idiot took the helm of WordPerfect

So the software comes on 3 DMR protected 3.5" floppies (the rigid ones) and the printer drivers on 8 DVDs.

were impossible in standard MS products.

Yep. 123 was a 1981 or 82 thing. Multiplan was what MS had. Excel didn't come out (again first on the Mac) until 86. I owned a copy of v1.0. $400. Ouch.

What would be very funny would that Lisp would still exist in this world, but be about as relevant as it is in ours: i.e. Paul Graham would still wax lyrical about it and its transformative and fundamental nature, adherents would be absolutely convinced that it is the best if not only true 𝕌-Language, and briefly wonder why no one fucking uses it before concluding that everyone else on the planet is simply too brain-damaged to use it, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Lisp seems to attract brilliant people who are unpleasant to work with.

What would be interesting would be where Lisp would be in all of these places, and what kind of horrific monstrosity 𝙴𝚂𝙲 𝟸𝚍𝚋𝚒 elegant construction would have taken Clojure's place.

I bet we have 1.5Mbps to the home.

Phone companies were laying dark fibre in the 80s. I worked on prototype projects back then. Circuit-switched because processing was the bottleneck rather than bandwidth.

Some had the idea that the phone company could replace the cable company, or compete with them by providing more choices than cable could support.

I worked in an organisation where the IT department reported to the CFO and the boss would only use 1-2-3. I think the prevalence of IT managers with a finance background accounts for the early popularity of Lotus Notes, though I guess it's totally possible it was ahead of its time and made the same mistakes Sharepoint didn't learn from.

...and now I need to go sandpapering my brain or otherwise drown that fracking paperclip with multiple liters of vodka

how about we be mashing up AI, bitchain, burning down the ecology with clippy... "I see you're trying to spawn a scam which will end up bankrupting the gullible and wreck forests; how can I help you in destroying the world?”

SkyNet's doom by way of MS Office Assistant... no need for Terminator cyborgs

I cannot find it, but there was a terrifyingly satisfying mock-game in the late 1990s wherein you chased down and sledgerhammered hundreds 'n hundreds of clippys...small ones with pointy teeth, medium with poison sacs, large orc-ish thugs... it got some CIOs so mad they wasted resources hunting down copies...

so yeah it all got a bit meta... paranoid hunting of a simulation of genocidal efforts to destroy a software-based approximation of a Renfield-esque henchman devoted to serving your every whim...

=+=+=+=

in terms of mass responses, here's some fuel for the virtual town square pyre...

[1] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-microsoft-clippy-paper-clip-loved-hate

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/clippy-the-microsoft-office-assistant-is-the-patriarchys-fault/396653/

or

https://archive.ph/WfOu1

...DirecTV's abortive efforts at serving up the web

you sent a request via narrow pipe landlines (basic modem or crippled rate ISDN) and two seconds later your computer when linked to the dish scooped out a single specific bucket of data (50K) from a firehosing GEO satellite spewing 300 gigabits per second

and everyone would wake up to find their customized version of a morning newspaper loaded along with a filtered selection of videos from various news outlets...

"MyNewsPaper(tm)" was one of the abortive brands, if my PTSD-damaged brain recalls correctly

Clippy. Again?

Keep this up, and I'll find an AI-enabled way to make: Clippy: MacGyver3.0's Schmoo.

Our post-Singularity Solarpunk Wagyu MacGyver goes around turning dystopias into ecotopias with two tools in his pocket: an antique multitool and something that looks like a large, old-fashioned paperclip. The solution to whatever problem problem he faces in an episode is solved using things he creates from the paperclip using his multitool. Miraculously, no matter how many times it is destroyed, the paperclip is always whole and properly bent at the beginning of the next episode.

There, I think that's enough of a prompt.

Pleasant dreams, Howard...

it has nothing to do with the fact that Lisp seems to attract brilliant people who are unpleasant to work with.

Thanks for that. That could be useful...

OVERLOOKED...!

war... or rather... reporting upon combat and conflict... which confrontations would not have happened over on that other timeline?

from our version of history...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars:_1990%E2%80%932002

semi-random selection ==> Nepalese Civil War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_Civil_War

what effect would alternative tech have upon it?

better comm's? cheaper vid cam's? faster reporting from the frontlines? raw footage directly viewed without filtering out gore?

for sure, lessened opportunity to edit it towards a deliberate political agenda?

would there be a better mode of intel gathering by the royalists? or would the rebel's guerilla tactics be more effective thanks to better intel on governmental forces movements?

what of every New Yorker's nightmare, 11 SEP 2001?

hmmm... Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: First Contact

so... Clippy gets infested by the Borg... or maybe more horrid... the Borg get taken over by Clippy and thus Bill Gates become the Borg Queen... there was a magazine cover of BG as Borg late 1990s... looked quite plausible

thus ==> Star Trek: First Contact is instead ends up titled Star Trek: Revenge of Clippy

tagline: "Resistance By Staplers Is Useless"

»what of every New Yorker's nightmare, 11 SEP 2001? «

Well, if all the promises of 1995 held, the president would have been Al Gore, so things would have been somewhat different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suv1hcBA3PY

"We are the Clippy Collective. Lower your firewalls and surrender your laptops. We will add your technological distinctiveness to our own. Your mocha-espresso foamers will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

"video unavailable"

fracking youtube censorship

try: http://phk.freebsd.dk/misc/SNL-Al-Gore-5-14-06.wmv

(I'll delete it again in some hours)

Instantly: Lotus Notes.

... That shoud be Lotus Notes by IBM (TM).

And: Microsoft Active Directory is not just a way of administering PCs, but an actual directory of people and organisations. And centralised. All your base are belong to the govt.

If everybody is carting CueCats around, it follows that there are no camera-equipped smartphones. Either no cameras, or no mobile computing-platform worthy of the name. This could be a result of no Apple.

Therefore, whatever internet social-media exists --- usenet was mentioned --- is not very visual...but all those cat pictures, selfies and self-promotion videos have to go somewhere, since they seem to be a metaphysical component of the universe. Is there then a network separate from the internet where pictures and videos are shared? Controlled, perhaps, by the device makers?

Therefore, whatever internet social-media exists --- usenet was mentioned --- is not very visual...but all those cat pictures, selfies and self-promotion videos have to go somewhere, since they seem to be a metaphysical component of the universe. Is there then a network separate from the internet where pictures and videos are shared? Controlled, perhaps, by the device makers?

Geocities for your cat pictures and selfies, I would think.

For video I could see alternative protocols dedicated to video, rather than the "everything goes over HTTP or a Websocket". Perhaps something Mbone-based? But I think this future presumes an MPAA that gets what it wanted when it came to restricting visual media distribution over the internet, so there might not be any real way of sharing personal videos - too hard to do legally, so it never took off.

"Geocities for your cat pictures and selfies, I would think."

Possibly. But the image source is compact cameras, not smartphones. Those were not (in our timeline) uniformly internet-connected before smartphones swept them away. They were WIFI connected (and later Bluetooth connected) and then you had to paint your bum blue and face west to do anything internetty with the output. In the alternate timeline, there's a niche for making it easier to share photos and vids. I still think that niche might be filled by private networks.

Separate, owner-controlled, web-sites al la Geocities, rather than content on shared sites run by malign people, is an interesting mutation. But maybe too utopian for this thread.

I remember the arrival of digital cameras and phone cameras.

Apple's Quicktake 300, their first take at a camera, could snap VGA-resolution images and stored a whopping 8 (or was it 16?) of them before you had to drain its turgid memory over an AppleTalk cable to your Old World power mac, circa 1995-96. It was not cheap. (My employer back then owned one for building commercial websites.) Sony's Mavica range saved photos on floppy disk, 3.5" disks to be precise, with not very many images at all depending on resolution.

CF cards (never mind SD cards) simply weren't capacious enough to be reasonable as removable camera storage until the very tail end of the 90s. Around 1998 I had a Kodak snapper that could take, I think, 1.6megapixel snaps? Display on a 2" screen, save on a CF card (64Mb back then was not exactly cheap but did the business). Cost about £400. DSLRs existed but not at any humanly sane price and real photographers turned their noses up at them. I got a 3.2 megapixel camera in 2002 (with actual telephoto lens) and that was about the start of useful image capture, or rather, of images that aren't cringeworthy when opened today.

Cameras on 2G phones were pathetic: 0.6 megapixels, store a handful on your phone, view on a 1.5" screen. The first reasonable cameraphone I had was an early smartphone -- a Palm Treo 650 circa 2004 or 2005 that could snap megapixel photos (no telephoto lens, though) and used an SD card for storage.

I think a combination of the time line for camera CCD development, FLASH memory card development, and finally available optics put the boot in on cameras being affected by this AU, in the absence of Zip disks or MiniDisks catching on for storage.

so... seemingly inadvertent (but by sly design) centralized identification profiles leading to federal level ID cards for all Americans whether they like it or not

with not only a social security number assigned at birth but also a lifetime phone number assisting in tracking down anyone with an over library book or attempting to avoid debt collection...

making it possible, by way of multiple small steps to start phasing out cash in favor of a centrally tracked cashless economy where if you do not toe the line you suddenly find yourself unable to buy groceries...

...not too paranoid

my thanks... ROFLing

"$11T surplus" <== LOL!

...finely etched upon goldleaf ribbon tape for indefinitely long storage? not magnetic but etched...

will survive anything short of blowtorching...

phasing out cash in favor of a centrally tracked cashless economy where if you do not toe the line you suddenly find yourself unable to buy groceries...

While there has been a push in this direction in the UK over the past decade, it always founders and gets pushed back when it runs up against an ageing population with a chunk at the high end in advanced cognitive decline: "grandma can't buy groceries or pay her bills" plays very badly in the press.

As it is, since COVID initially came with "may be passed by contact with contaminated surfaces" warnings I got out of the habit of using cash and probably make an average of one ATM withdrawal a year these days (deployment of contactless payments is almost universal now, and a lot of coffee shops and similar no longer take cash at all). But attempts to phase out cash have been on hold for years now, and even personal cheques are still kinda-sorta available.

You're welcome.

Many if my USAnian friends get really uncomfortable about that sketch, when I remind them about it before elections.

(File removed)

probably make an average of one ATM withdrawal a year these days (deployment of contactless payments is almost universal now, and a lot of coffee shops and similar no longer take cash at all). But attempts to phase out cash have been on hold for years now, and even personal cheques are still kinda-sorta available.

I haven't used an ATM since 2019. I only used them then to get cash for traveling. Now I carry around a few $100 so I can do tips or pickup something at a yard sale.

As to mailing checks, not for maybe 10 years. The few that I have needed I fill out a form on my banking web site and they send one. If they don't have a setup with the other end to just transfer the money. Germany has some sort of unique bank "pay for things" that I don't understand. When they I paid a document fee owed by a friend by giving a cousin the 30Euro and they dealt with it.

I have 3 "forever" stamps in my backpack that I've not needed for over 5 years. I may have to tape them to the envelope when/if I do use them.

And on a side note, I started watching the TV series last night about the Horizon accounting system scandal at the UK (English?) Post Office. Is/was it as bad as the TV series makes it out to be?

Phone companies were laying dark fibre in the 80s. I worked on prototype projects back then. Circuit-switched because processing was the bottleneck rather than bandwidth.

Yeah. My neighbor was the project manager for the first fiber CO-CO link in the US.

I have what was the beginning of fiber to the home across my front yard. It was put there in the mid-nineties. BTI basically spend themselves into having to sell the company. Earthlink flags show up if I "call before you dig". At the same time our regional power company decided to get rich running fiber along all of the grid (long and local) transmission lines. Turned out their prices were a bit off the charts and most businesses that didn't need a fire hose said "no thanks". I don't know if they sold the capacity for pennies on the dollar or just abandoned it. To work on it you have to climb poles that had 100KV or more at the top. I'm thinking that would scare off most customers.

My point was that the phone companies seems to NOT want packet switching. At all. Talked it down in private and public. Similar to IBM and Token Ring. Internally there the people were utterly convinced that coax and twisted pair with collision detection and cheap as twisted pair would literally NOT WORK. Mid to upper levels. Maybe not at the entry level but still. Then they all got sold to Cisco. I'm betting there were some nervous breakdowns due to the severe cognitive dissonance. (They reason for the sale was when Gerstner found out that 90% of the IBM networking sales were actually "blue" money. Not green money from an actual competitive sale.)

(I'll delete it again in some hours)

That was quick.

»...finely etched upon goldleaf ribbon tape for indefinitely long storage? not magnetic but etched...

will survive anything short of blowtorching...«

It's been tried, but it is easily strechable, which why gold-leaf can be "painted" onto pretty much any shape, so it is mechanically unsuitable for the task.

Palladium works better, but there are fundamental issues with metals which can have no solution, from making the holes without splatter to reflections frustrating the reading.

We actually have many good permanent storage solutions already, but they almost invariably involve polished geology and high power lasers, which makes them expensive and unhandy.

There's a Norvegian company which stores data and images on high quality archive-grade 35mm black-and-white movie film, and they will store the film for you in a permafrost underground vault below Svalbard, presumably safe from anything up to and including nuclear war.

dude, we are earth-1...

...talking about earth-2 ("worlds of wonder 1995 edition")

on that better timeline nasty, filthy cash is being squeezed out

simply by way of printing an ever shrinking amount of replacement bills 'n coins but that would rob the federal gvt of its Seigniorage[2] revenue

of course at some point all those 'foreign dollars'[1] (typically $100 bills) will come home... such as the month before any deadline for redeeming 'em prior to being declared valueless

=====

[1] which are an estimated 20% to 70% of all paper currency... federal gvt refusing to share intel on how much is really out there... given printing costs are about $0.07 to $0.23 per bill (again federal gvt is a bit coy) that means the implicit profit from each $100 bill is at least 99%... maybe 99.75% maybe as much as 99.93%

a sweet deal, eh?

[2] Seigniorage is the difference between the face value of money—both paper bills and coins—and what it costs to produce it. Seigniorage may be counted as positive revenue for a government when the money it creates is worth more than it costs to produce

From this morning's Washington Post.

Escaped army horses careen through London, crashing into vehicles

A number of horses from the king’s mounted bodyguard broke loose escaped their keepers and galloped through central London on Wednesday morning during rush hour, one of them apparently covered in blood. At least four people were injured.

So would this be more or less common in this alt future world?

I think a combination of the time line for camera CCD development, FLASH memory card development, and finally available optics put the boot in on cameras being affected by this AU, in the absence of Zip disks or MiniDisks catching on for storage.

There's also the possibility of intermediate storage being more popular. Sure, for us flash etc. became cheap and small enough that just switch cards was easy enough. But you could also download this to a bulkier device. Photographers already carry battery packs, lenses etc. around, so a belt-mounted hard drive wouldn't be out of line. You actually saw that a bit with video (due to its FireWire connector, even with iPods)

Without napster, that might also be a popular youth/counterculture device. Picture something between a Nintendo Gameboy DMG, Sony Watchman and early iPod Classic. Beigepunk's noombox and useful SneakerNet piracy storage.

The size of two paperback novels and you're able to carry almost 500 MODs!

A timeline where Nolan Bushnell runs Atari for another decade or two could be interesting. As well as one where M$ brings a 32 bit, NT kernel based, OS to the smart phone market ten years ahead of what they were able to do in this one.

The basic problem with chips based on Intel's x86 was, and still is, they are power hogs. So satchel / shoe phones would be the norm.

I definitely remember using wordperfect's "Presentation Perfect" long before I was even aware powerpoint existed so I'm all for the wordperfect future... though that's apparently ungoogleable? I'm not imagining that software package am I?

I suspect not. I used and enjoyed Word Perfect, but I wasn't doing presentations at the time. I do remember there were peripheral programs to do things that weren't word processing (memory fails me about how interchangeable the data files were) and some kind of proto-Power Point would be very easy to code up.

Ha! My Google-Fu is strong today! It was called "Presentations" and it was part of the Corel Office Suite. This page shows a box it came in (for Windows 95 and NT!). Wow, I remember when software came in boxes like that...

Lisp seems to attract brilliant people who are unpleasant to work with.

Since the filk song asserts that God Wrote in Lisp, the sample size of One-or-Three-depending-on-your-perspective supports the characterization of brilliant but difficult to work with. When was the last time He even answered His email?

Without napster, that might also be a popular youth/counterculture device. Picture something between a Nintendo Gameboy DMG, Sony Watchman and early iPod Classic. Beigepunk's noombox and useful SneakerNet piracy storage.

cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRiver_H300_series

Intel was not the only x86 manufacturer, and x86 was not the only CPU style NT was ported to, even back then.

I still expect anything designed to run Win NT would NOT be power light.

You missed my suggestion that the spooks clobbered encryption so there's nothing secure enough to do all this money-by-internet crap?

... there was a terrifyingly satisfying mock-game in the late 1990s wherein you chased down and sledgerhammered hundreds 'n hundreds of clippys...

I knew an engineer who made a half-meter tall physical model of Clippy, went out to the range, packed said model with tannerite and blew it up real good with a rifle. The open wire shape meant that he had to take a few shots before getting a good hit but everyone agreed it was a good use of ammo. I wasn't an eyewitness but I saw the video later.

(Anyone who wants to comment on Americans being a little crazy, well, fair enough. But if you'd had the toys, wouldn't you do the same?)

Star Trek: First Contact is instead ends up titled Star Trek: Revenge of Clippy

( * silently points you Badgey from Lower Decks... * )

M$ has made use of the NT kernel in other operating systems, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_8 Not exactly a power hungry application, and for myself, it and it's WIN 10 mobile descendant were the most pleasant varieties of that family of operating system, all built around the NT kernel.

"Separate, owner-controlled, web-sites al la Geocities, rather than content on shared sites run by malign people, is an interesting mutation. But maybe too utopian for this thread."

Those sites used to actually have useful information on them. People used to put up their own thoughts, so for any topic there was bound to be someone around who found the standard textbook coverage incomplete or incomprehensible for the same reasons you did, and posted up their own elucidation for the general enlightenment. So if you didn't get something you could mostly manage to find an explanation that you did get.

These days all you ever find is two (or maybe three, if wikipedia is one) variants of the same basic wodge of data, endlessly copied and recopied onto ever-more-dodgy/dysfunctional sites. Even though it's now easier, putting up your own thoughts seems to be far less popular and even those who do still do it mostly just repeat a subset of the same stuff.

So yeah, this "dystopia" is looking more and more attractive.

I think we've pretty much nailed down long-term storage in previous conversations. Or at least Charlie did. You have a bin of ¹²C and a bin of ¹³C and you use an atomic manipulation microscope doobrie to assemble a diamond lattice with atoms of the two isotopes representing 1s and 0s. You might have to use groups of a few thousand atoms in place of Charlie's original single-atom idea, for readability/robustness, but it was definitely the winner out of everything people came up with.

cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRiver_H300_series

That's way too tiny. You gotta go at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series

Portable devices weren't really that rare, it's all about ubiquity and use cases. I mean, the short wave of "wearable computing" would fall partially in the deviation point of this timeline, with MIT ultra-nerds carrying "small" computers on slings, using weird one-handed keyboards to control them and monokular displays to augment their daily lives with the power of Emacs or whatever...

With no internet file-sharing beyond comp.sources.* to speak of, my thoughts went to Cuban-style sneakernets, where all the latest streaming seasons are regularly traded via portable hard drives...

Of course, this also might happen on LAN parties, if the "IBM compatible" is still a thing in the Microsoft/IBM dominated era.

My guess is that a Clipper chip mandatory roll-out would be followed a few years later by a highly embarrassing exploit in the wild, caused by someone working for a foreign state-level actor's crypto agency deciding that Being Rich was better than Being Patriotic and filching a zero-day.

At which point the backdoor keys baked into semiconductors would render the entire system useless, so the banks and other crypto-dependent parties would hastily roll out non-backdoored software cryptography protocols (ahem: see also SSL) that could be layered on top of a Clipper-compromised link with no loss of security.

And the Five Eyes would be too embarrassed to ban it at that point because it would come with huge negative publicity and a massive banking exploit attached.

"And on a side note, I started watching the TV series last night about the Horizon accounting system scandal at the UK (English?) Post Office. Is/was it as bad as the TV series makes it out to be?"

It's worse. Since that series aired (and long since the series was filmed) there have been more revelations of utter fuckery. Essentially, those directly driving the prosecutions knew damn well that they were false, but proceeded anyway and then obstructed any process that might show their prosecution to be wrong. Those in Royal Mail (who were the parent company of Post Office Counters at the start) who might have intervened to shut all this down now claim not even to have known that prosecutions were happening. Fujitsu are now known to have lied about who could alter the accounting records.

It is sickening.

...am I misreading, or does the Archos' capacity not top out where the iRiver starts (20GB)?

I knew people who took the completely reasonable attitude that iRivers were a box around a hard drive + firmware, so took it apart and stuck in the highest capacity hard drive that'd fit...

for sure, lessened opportunity to edit it towards a deliberate political agenda?

Maybe, but don't bet on it. Your own government (and media) did an excellent job of controlling the narrative during the Gulf Wars and after 9/11. I don't think "national hysteria" is too strong a term, especially when compared to, say, Britain during the IRA bombing campaign.

If we're going for alternate history, maybe we could have America actually learn something about terrorism by observing other countries and rather than repeating their mistakes try to copy their successes?

it's all done via (permanent) 'one time pads' wherein each citizen is granted his very own chip containing a set of OTPs for encrypt/decrypt of secured transactions... chip is built into a triple-thick credit card...

it all flows into a single, centralized mega data center buried under 300 feet of solid rock processing up to a million transactions per hour

...as opposed to Britain copying the US response?

I don't know if they sold the capacity for pennies on the dollar or just abandoned it.

Interesting analogies can be made between the telecom capacity build-out and the expansion of railways (and earlier canals). There was rarely a first-mover advantage — successful companies got there by buying those who went broke building infrastructure, thus getting the infrastructure cheap.

Somewhere at home I've got a book written a decade or two ago that makes that point, with footnotes.

IIRC that was indeed one of the arguments used against Clipper, and it did get broken before they'd given up on it. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of the spooks being successful with the idea of making anything they couldn't get into illegal (which again IIRC they weren't too far off managing, and it wouldn't have needed the US government to be that much dumber about software distribution by internet to make the difference), so running a more secure protocol on top would never have been an option. (Not that I count SSL as "non-backdoored".)

Doesn't correlate AFAICS unless the other timeline leads to a state without royal bodyguards or to a lot of terrorism (because the other incident with bolted cavalry horses that I can remember was an IRA attack). Neither seems obvious.

BTW, some of those horses really shifted. Two were seen in Limehouse. That's miles from where they took off.

...as opposed to Britain copying the US response?

What would the world be like if Britain had responded to the IRA the way America did to Al Qaeda, say after they nearly got Thatcher?

A Shock-and-Awe campaign on Ireland?

No drone strikes on supporters in Boston, but maybe MI6 could do some selective assassinations of Irish-Americans who fundraised for the IRA?

Any countries that Britain wanted to attack that could be publicly blamed with the IRA attacks serving as an official casus belli? Complete with ginned-up 'evidence' to bring to the UN?

Ramant xenophobia in Britain, with anyone who 'looked Irish' harassed and maybe attacked? Having red hair or not speaking with the right accent being reason enough for suspicion.

I think you have to remember that alumni of the Nixon administration (Bush I on down) were very much of the “never let a good crisis go to waste” school of politics. Doing what was best for the US as a whole, let alone the whole world, was not a high priority for any of them.

Still, in an alt world, it’s worth playing with the idea of the US not deserting the Mujahadeen and also squelching Kuwait’s desire to use US side-drilling oil rigs to suck Iraqi oil. I don’t think the results in either case would have been wonderful, but they would be interesting.

The point is that it’s easy to say “if only this hadn’t happened, things would be better.” I’d suggest it would be more honest to say that “if this hadn’t happened, things would be different.” Regardless of what the US did, the Middle East would still be full of dictators mostly enriched by petrodollars fighting battles across borders imposed by European colonial powers whose dominance was fading.

In fact, to beat a dead horse, one might argue that developed countries might embrace a move to the hydrogen economy as part of growing isolationism after the Cold War. We don’t want our boys dying in the desert for oil, we don’t want hordes of dark skinned climate refugees swarming our borders so… how about hydrogen? Making it from American natural gas helps us put the Cold War behind us and provides a peace dividend.. I can almost see Clinton proposing this.

Yes, it was possible to stick a bigger hard disk in the Archos. It just shipped with a 20Gb drive because that was what was available in wholesale quantities at the time.

the deep pool of red ink from the Global Crossing whooopsie as case in point

We'd already tried a lot of that stuff in earlier eras; it didn't work. As in "shock and awe" campaigns still being a casus belli >300 years later. You could say that the British colonial model (eg. India) was based on and developed from the methods used in Ireland, but with the advantage of actually learning from the Irish results. But regarding Ireland itself we didn't learn, and kept opening fresh wounds instead. It took forever for us to begin winding our necks in.

And then what we had learned about reaction to terrorism we promptly forgot again under the US's influence after the WTC attack.

(And rather a lot of people thought of the Brighton bombing, "pity they didn't get her".)

Regarding railways: in Britain, what you say is very true of minor lines - indeed many were built with the expectation of that happening - but not of the principal routes. The country divided itself into regions (still discernible) which were dominated by the first bunch to build a major route (roughly, the same routes as the long distance motorways now) through that region, and they held onto it even long after they no longer existed.

What would the world be like if Britain had responded to the IRA the way America did to Al Qaeda, say after they nearly got Thatcher?

A Shock-and-Awe campaign on Ireland?

Cruise missile attacks on downtown Boston.

Hint: the IRA got a lot of money out of NORAID.

M$ has made use of the NT kernel in other operating systems, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_8

I know. But we just disagree. Windows Phones of all flavors all seemed to be not well thought out (fleshed out?) (never seeming to get to v3 or v2 at times) till a new vision was started and the old one abandoned. Given all of that it is hard to tell how well of a phone OS MS might have made with some consistent leadership.

Almost as bad as Google plans and projects for messaging over the last 20 years.

Cruise missile attacks on downtown Boston.

I was assuming that this alt-Britain doesn't want outright war with America, being the weaker partner and all that.

That's one of the reasons I have been in favour of nuclear power and alternative energy since it was still called that and "climate concern" meant worrying when the next ice age might hit. The Middle East is fucked up because we've been fucking it up for oil since the end of the Ottomans onwards; there is no way now to unfuck it without just making it worse; so the best we can do is stop fiddling with it and let them sort it out without our "helpful" "authority". Though I never remotely considered hydrogen as a primary source; it would be made by electrolysis of water, and used only for storage and only when there was no less sucky option (basically, transport that railways couldn't do).

I doubt it; the point about that sort of thing is it's something you do to people who can't do it back. I think something more or less like clandestine support of opposed local factions would be more like our style.

Charlie Stross @ 87:

I remember the arrival of digital cameras and phone cameras.

My introduction to "digital" photography came via a Nikon Coolscan IV ED that had Photoshop 5 bundled with it. I didn't get an actual digital camera until 2004.

I think something more or less like clandestine support of opposed local factions would be more like our style.

Which I will use as a hook to note that today marks the 500th flight of four LM-100J aircraft(1) from Ramstein to four small Eastern European air bases(2) since they began in early March 2022. The company that operates them, Pallas Aviation, does a very good job of looking like a CIA proprietary/front, but I have yet to figure out why 7,500-10,000 tonnes of US support to Ukraine should be all that clandestine.

(1) Tail numbers N96MG, N67AU, N71KM, N139RB

(2) Location and ICAO identifiers Nowe Miasto nad Pilicą (EPNM), Sliač (LZSL), Boboc (LRBO), Lielvārde, (EVGA), Šiauliai (EYSA)

A question:

Why is SF so rooted in tech/engineering rather than the many other disciplines in 'science' and did the personal tech that became affordable for just about everyone c. 1990s make this an impossible concept-fusion to break?

BTW - Just read this article (published Apr 5 2024) - interviewed authors in order of their appearance: Jemisin, Weir, Bujold, Brin, Doctorow and Stross.

Nautilus - 'Does Science Fiction Shape the Future? Conversations with visionary science fiction authors on the social impact of their work.'

I went down a somewhat different path than HowardNYC re: Pixar.

John Lasseter is taken to court in 1994 for sexual harassment and assault. He is found guilty and Pixar, already courting Disney, cuts him loose rather than risk such a nasty public image. Toy Story is half-finished, but crucial scenes remain imperfect. Desperate for their first feature-length film to succeed, Pixar turns to one of its founding fathers, beloved filmmaker George Lucas, to come on and finish the film. Lucas, rather than merely finishing the movie, makes drastic changes to the script and even the character designs. His attention split between that film and the Star Wars prequels, Lucas is said to have suffered numerous anxiety attacks while on set of the latter film. Toy Story is not released until 1997, and is met with... confusion. A mix of uncanny-valley and nonsensical story choices results in lukewarm reception. The movie makes back its budget, and sweeps the technical Oscars for animation, but the film is nevertheless deemed a failure. In a deep depression, Lucas steps away from the Star Wars prequels. They languish in pre-production hell for decades.

Its future as a filmmaking studio now in serious jeopardy, Pixar's leadership makes the drastic decision to stop going after Disney, and go after another sure-thing buyer who will secure the company's future: Boeing.

A successful prototype of a "true" virtual reality environment, developed jointly between Pixar's artists and engineers and Boeing's already-burgeoning autonomous warfare program, is shown off in 2001. The G4 channel, widely considered the most trusted and reasonable name in technology, entertainment, and business news (they bought Wired in 1999) carries the demonstration, and immediately orders begin flooding in from all over North America and Europe. The Christmas Craze of 2001 is the Pixar-Boeing Dreamhelm, which ships with such Interactive Narrative Experiences as A Bug's Life and RAH-66 Comanche, the latter being a "startlingly realistic" flight simulator for the stealth helicopter.

There are rumors, of course, that Boeing is using Dreamhelm user's data to train an autonomous version of the Comanche, but everyone knows that's impossible and almost certainly illegal. Right?

I should have said five Eastern European airfields, but one receives only infrequent flights and I tend to overlook it. Actual number of flights to date:

Nowe Miasto 233
Sliač 88
Lielvārde 84
Boboc 84
Šiauliai 11

Nowe Miasto nad Pilicą is clearly the leader and received 39 flights in March 2022, immediately after the war kicked off.

but I have yet to figure out why 7,500-10,000 tonnes of US support to Ukraine should be all that clandestine.

Maybe they just had the right planes at the right price and signed a long term contract. Or a continuously renewable one.

David L @ 93:

"probably make an average of one ATM withdrawal a year these days (deployment of contactless payments is almost universal now, and a lot of coffee shops and similar no longer take cash at all). But attempts to phase out cash have been on hold for years now, and even personal cheques are still kinda-sorta available."

I haven't used an ATM since 2019. I only used them then to get cash for traveling. Now I carry around a few $100 so I can do tips or pickup something at a yard sale.

I like to have a little cash in my pocket for walking around money, so whenever I get down to a dollar or two in my wallet, I'll refresh ($40/two twenties "fast cash"). And I pulled out $100 "just in case" money for my two trips out west in the last year.

I just hate using a card for a "less than a dollar" purchase (coffee) ... which hasn't been a problem lately 😕

As to mailing checks, not for maybe 10 years. The few that I have needed I fill out a form on my banking web site and they send one. If they don't have a setup with the other end to just transfer the money. Germany has some sort of unique bank "pay for things" that I don't understand. When they I paid a document fee owed by a friend by giving a cousin the 30Euro and they dealt with it.

I'm down to writing one check a year ... Last day to pay property taxes (without interest or penalty) is the first business day of the year.

I have 3 "forever" stamps in my backpack that I've not needed for over 5 years. I may have to tape them to the envelope when/if I do use them.

Somewhere around here I have ~half a roll (100 stamps to a roll) of 20¢ stamps & and a sheet of 4¢ stamps to make up the difference for the current postage (currently 3x20¢ + 2x4¢). They all still have the adhesive, because they're the peel off the roll/sheet type.

I probably should write some letters & use 'em up.

Why is SF so rooted in tech/engineering rather than the many other disciplines in 'science'

Easier to mass market to an audience about things they might have seen, touched, or used?

Microbiology is a neat field. But the number of people who MIGHT understand the difference between current and SF tech is small.

Pistols to phasors is an easy leap. mRNA vs a dead virus is harder. When you don't understand at almost any level what is real, the SF bit is harder to write into a story. I have relatives who are convinced that mRNA vaccines re-write your DNA and thus create mutated offspring.

how about hydrogen? Making it from American natural gas

AFAIK, that's "blue hydrogen".

CH4 is split into 2H2 + C. And where does that C end up? Again AFAIK, as CO2. Maybe there are reactions that would sequester the C as something benign -- anybody here know what those might be?

I keep saying I ought to buy one and scan my library.

Let's see, Hillary was not a hawk, and did NOT screw the pooch when she was given control on Bill Clinton's effort towards a single-payer healthcare system.

So W stayed on his show ranch in Texas, and Al Gore did NOT ignore the daily security briefing.

Oh, but wait, the GOP took such a shellacking after national healthcare that they were unable to try to impeach Bill, and did not stop him from going after Bin Laden in '98.

Maybe they just had the right planes at the right price and signed a long term contract. Or a continuously renewable one.

I think it could well be something like that. Pallas seems to have been created as a CIA resource to augment existing capabilities, and a very long term contract would be a reasonable way to do that. So if the resource is available, better use it in some way than not, no?

And to repeat; that Tesla is about the same weight as a BMW 3 series and lighter than several of the models. EVs do not inevitably weigh more than equivalent vehicles with reciprocating infernal confusion engines.

We've had this disagreement before. I write about half a dozen checks a month - bills. Oh, and after the US OPM breach in... was it '12? per Krebs (krebsonsecurity) I froze my credit ratings (meaning no one can get them unless I pre-approve). Oddly enough, there have been zero attacks on my checking account. Or credit cards.

And it's nice to have cash, esp. for dealers' rooms at a con, because that way, the dealers are not screwed by having to pay fees to the card companies.

And, of course, there's the old short story by... I think it was Harlan, about the person who grew up poor, and who made it a thing of never carrying cash (this is from the sixties)... and so when they were chased to a phone booth by an attacker, they had no dime to call for help.

NT has issues before 5. We had 4.3, I think it was, when I was working for Ameritech -95-'97. If you tried to save a file to a network drive, the PC would hang. Forever.

Had a young consultant who'd worked on a presentation for hours, and had that. Fortunately, he came to me (I was the "resourse"), I checked to make sure it wasn't early ethernet chain... and unplugged his RJ-45. 30 sec later, NMI (non-maskable interrupt) NT said, "Oh! Network connection lost! Save to local disk?"

I had an Apple QuickTake for a while and it was pretty cool that you could actually take digital images directly instead of using film and the tedium of scanning the photos. Assuming you had access to a scanner, of course. Mind you, the resolution was so poor it wasn’t even worth it for naughty pictures of girlfriends.

Also used a Mavica on a visit to a friend in Montana, where I ended up trying to boot it and change the floppy whilst in an inflatable dingy with a large bear swimming furiously toward us. I really ought to have been paddling...

My first decent digital camera was an Olympus all-in-one thing circa 2000 that did 2.3megapixel images, cost US$1000 or thereabouts and the 32Mb SD card was another $200. Mind you, it still works after more than a decade of being thrown around by the gaggle of nephews & nieces.

The last involvement I really had with digital image stuff was a 230megapixel sensor. I don’t imagine that will appear in a phone any time soon.

They would also want to do something about the "South Side Irish" in Chicago. REALLY.

And it's nice to have cash, esp. for dealers' rooms at a con, because that way, the dealers are not screwed by having to pay fees to the card companies.

As I've said, I carry a few $100 on me most of the time for such things.

Credit cards (the 15 or so I have) have 100% fraud protection. I and no one I know have never lost any money using "good" cards. (I did get a call, email, and text within seconds of each other about a card asking if I had really made a $900 pre-paid hotel reservation in the Philippines. Ah, nope. They sent a new card.) And even cheap ones limit the liability to $50 or so. But I do know people who have had their mail stolen and money stolen from their bank accounts. And it was hard to get back. If they did.

But again, to each their own. You're comfortable with what you do. So am I.

And oddly, I cancelled a very high value card the other day after the annual fee went up to $650/yr and I had no way to make use of the benefits. This was with American Express. The very next day I got a text asking if a Euro 16.00 charge on an Amex card of mine ending in xxxxx was legit. xxxxx was a card that had been replaced a year ago. But still I called them and they said don't worry it would not go through.

So do any of our European folks know anything about vibegames.net where the charge was attempted? Bozo? Legit gaming site?

What you said about railroads - yep. One of the first in the US was the Pennsy... that was pretty much the biggest in the world through WWII.

The last involvement I really had with digital image stuff was a 230megapixel sensor. I don’t imagine that will appear in a phone any time soon.

I know someone locally who bought a camera last year that generates 43meg raw files. I doubt that sensor would fit into a rationally sized phone either. And be wasted if you can't put it behind some nifty lenses.

I think the same of Africa, but the West has meddled less there, except in certain areas, because oil/no oil, and "non-white people".

I can think of a number of reasons.

1. Transferring NATO assets, which Putin would say was direct NATO intervention.
2. Transferring gray-market materiel, bought by the CIA (and I assume a lot of them are still anti-Russian, so pro-Ukraine). 3. Transferring DoD materiel, which is supposed to still be on the books for the DoD, as an end run around the MAGAts. In this case, I suspect there will turn out to be a lot of "misplaced" items, and out of warranty issues, and "used in training exercises" to show up, now that they finally rammed through the support bill.

I think the same of Africa

Most of Africa is messed up. Totally. More and more countries are switching from elected democracies to authoritarians. Either the last elected leader refuses to quit or the military takes over. Or a mixture of both.

And I have to wonder how much is a legacy of colonial empire building, modern day resource extraction money, and that's just how the local "tribes" work. With a dash of which big power do we suck up to to stay into power this decade. Their concept of the word "tribe" and ours are very different. And I don't want to be racist. But tribes there are a thing way more than our political parties in North America and Europe.

But I hate to pass judgement when I don't know 99% of the facts and history. But the 1% I do know is troubling.

But again this does loop back to the Middle East. Tribes and religion are much more important there than any silly political party identity. Unless the politics are tied to a "tribe".

Kardashev @ 134:

"I think something more or less like clandestine support of opposed local factions would be more like our style."

Which I will use as a hook to note that today marks the 500th flight of four LM-100J aircraft(1) from Ramstein to four small Eastern European air bases(2) since they began in early March 2022. The company that operates them, Pallas Aviation, does a very good job of looking like a CIA proprietary/front, but I have yet to figure out why 7,500-10,000 tonnes of US support to Ukraine should be all that clandestine.

(1) Tail numbers N96MG, N67AU, N71KM, N139RB

(2) Location and ICAO identifiers Nowe Miasto nad Pilicą (EPNM), Sliač (LZSL), Boboc (LRBO), Lielvārde, (EVGA), Šiauliai (EYSA)

Just a SWAG:

It's NOT clandestine, and it's not all going to Ukraine. In fact, I'd guess MOST of it is not going to Ukraine.

1• The U.S. outsources EVERYTHING nowadays ... like the way U.S. Army units don't have mess halls anymore, they've all been replaced by KBR "dining facilities", run by civilians at a profit. All of our supplies while I was in Iraq were brought in by commercial trucks. Critical, high priority parts would come in to Balad Airbase (LSA Anaconda - aka mortaritaville)
2• Those are all airfields in "front-line" NATO member countries. Much of this is logistic support for those front-line countries - countries that have passed on their old equipment to Ukraine and are having that old equipment replaced with NATO standard equipment. Some critical parts supply justifies delivery by air rather than being trucked in.
3• Aid for Ukraine won't fly directly into Ukraine because it IS a war zone. NATO aircraft in Ukraine's airspace would be a target; even commercial contractor's aircraft.

Russia is unlikely to attack those aircraft OUTSIDE of Ukraine, so supplies going to Ukraine are shipped through NATO front-line countries (primarily Poland which has rail & road links to western Ukraine) and trans-shipped by rail or truck.

But I suspect MOST of the supplies being flown in to those airfields are going to the host NATO member countries where the airbases are located (the one in Poland [EPNM] is a former military airfield, the others are still active military airfields or dual use civil/military).

Novell NetWare?

Beat me to it. The one thing I’d add is that last Friday, the Pentagon told reporters that they had fast ways of getting aid to Ukraine, and that they were prepping them as the log jam broke in Congress. I’d hazard a guess that those Pallas flights are part of what they were talking about.

The only reason for the CIA to get involved is if the DoD wants to sheep-dip some Air Force logistics crews as “non-military” government employees, for the sake of meeting legal obligations while maintaining continuity of operations to keep things moving fast. I kind of doubt this is happening, because there are lots of veterans out there who don’t need CIA cover and can do the job just fine.

It's NOT clandestine, and it's not all going to Ukraine. In fact, I'd guess MOST of it is not going to Ukraine.

Those are interesting points.

No, it's not really clandestine because the LM-100J aircraft fly with their ADS-B transmitters on. Otherwise we'd not be talking about it because we wouldn't know.

The other point is that of the five airfields, three are located in countries (Romania, Slovakia, Poland) that have a border with Ukraine, but two (Latvia, Lithuania) do not. They have eastern borders with Belarus and Russia.

I believe the time frame I had in mind was 2002ish, and was not suggesting an install of WIN NT desktop in a phone, but a mobile OS built around the NT kernel, like they released in 2012. Not at all sure if ARM had an appropriate SOC back then, but this is a speculative thread. isn't it? And M$ with a modernish smartphone 5 years before iPhone would be different then this timeline. OGH might appreciate delaying further discussion until after 300, I think.

The TLDR is that "Perl 5" is not a version number of Perl, it's the Perl 5 Language, as distinct from any other language.

Yep. I'm an old perl hack too, though slightly later than you I think.

My run as a perl dev was circa 1998 to 2010ish (things really get interesting once you reach about a quarter million lines of code), after that I transitioned to bofhing and merely used it to glue stuff together.

Mostly doing that in python nowadays, though perl is still there for me when I need to quickly smash some random text or output into some specific shape. Nothing beats perl for textbashing...

While it's true that perl is still around and being developed, it is really noticeable that "greater perl" aka CPAN is getting a bit long in the tooth.

But I remember perl 6 being a running joke ooh something like 20 years ago now. (Obligatory ouch.)

Re: 'I have relatives who are convinced that mRNA vaccines re-write your DNA and thus create mutated offspring.'

Okay - so there's no microbiology/biochem in high school whereas every kid from kindergarden on has daily access to a computer/smart phone. I'm assuming that familiarity is more important than understanding how the innards work because there's no way that all these kids actually understand how this tech works in detail.

Just remembered that most (all?) of the pre-high tech (pre-1990s) superheroes were some sort of mutant/alien life forms. Guess comic book characters aren't as inspirational or the billionaires interviewed as adults just didn't want to admit being influenced by them.

BTW - the trailer for the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie just dropped.

Wonder if your relatives have read this yet:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-retrovirus-myelin-speedy-nerves-evolve

Textbashing? AWK!

Another shakeout of something like this would be in image processing and graphics; photoshop would remain a bit of a novelty and the notion of folks making entire films in Unreal 5 on their PCs would be a non-starter.

Instead, film special effects would be the last thing propping up Silicon Graphics, Inc, as boffins at ILM and Rhythm and Hues ran giant specialized rendering farms.

Music production would be wildly different; general MIDI files and to a lesser extent Beatnik embeds would be the primary method for audio distribution outside of the CD racks at Tower Records. Virtual Studio plugin technology never really took off so the big studio system continues to dominate mixing and mastering. Pro Tools would still exist as the 800lb gorilla in the room, but aside from a few MIDI sequencers from Emagic and Opcode, direct-to-disk recording never flourished in the market at large.

Meanwhile, the wars continued to rage between Microsoft's Active Server Pages and Macromedia ColdFusion, with each vendor throwing progressively more lavish parties at the other's trade expos. A staunch faction of developers still insist that Java applets will win out in the long run, but nobody takes them seriously.

What I expect - and I use this in my current novel - is that Africa will come out of the total mess that the colonialists did to it, and there will be actual alliances, culminating in at least one equivalent to the EU.

Nigeria will be big in this - it's the most populated country in Africa, with (IIRC) about 220M people, half again that of Russia.

have read this yet:

Why would they want to read fake news?

Just heard on US NPR.

Apparently GPS jamming in the middle east just now is making the results from dating apps, ah, interesting. The apps are confused about where someone is located and are thus showing them possible hookups from, err, the other side at times.

Couldn't possibly be related to this... https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-long-range-missiles-4d2254639eb5a503d8b0a291ed0680e9

Couldn't possibly be related to this

Can't exclude it, but they've been flying 4-5 flights weekly since the war started.

And, since the US & friends have been hauling massively more stuff openly to Ukraine via Rzeszow during the same time, I still am struggling a bit to think of what the putative CIA flights are adding to the effort. David's suggestion that it's just a case of using capabilities that would otherwise go unemployed makes as much sense as anything, IMO.

In this alternative future, my Dreamcast 4 is now capable of playing 4k HD-DVDs and ChuChu Rocket 3 is about to be released.

That's roughly the same timeframe when I was using Perl for a living, though I was bofhing at the same time. When I stopped it was to work in project land, the only tools being Office and Visio, no longer hands on (so I left both my Leatherman and root shell at home, so to speak).

Re: Myelin ... virus '... fake news?'

That's pretty basic stuff as far as neuro & bio components go.

Wrt to the word "tribe", I think it doesn't make sense to talk about "our" and "their" meanings, we're talking across dozens (or hundreds) of languages after all, so the ontology behind each one doesn't necessarily map in a way that it makes sense to say it's the same word with two meanings.

Better just to express the concept in a way that has less of the colonial baggage. Nation is probably a better word. It doesn't have to align to a specifically post-Westphalian version (a language with an army, for instance), but it does need to avoid treating these cultural and ethnic groups as something that is qualitatively different to the various European groupings. You have to start from a position where the nuance and sophistication of the internal distinctions between and within groups are at least similar, and possibly more involved.

as much as "tribe" is an accurate term of art -- sociology, anthropology, biology -- it has become burdened with subtext

try instead, "faction"

and if you are not being hounded by thin-skinned snowflakes, prefix with modifiers: "political factions", "religious factions", "cultural factions", "cult factions", "bigoted factions", etc

when observing the US and the Middle East, it is a regrettable thing, needing to inventory activities by all the varied "religious factions" which are actually "political factions" cloaked in a thinly layered theology

with separation of church and state being seen as a flawed policy rather than a feature of rational discourse

...and now I'm having acid flashbacks

for a long, long time[1] there was chatter of Novell and Microsoft doing a joint venture because their corporate cultures were too diverse to ever make a merger feasible... MS-DOS (and later infant Windows) would integrate NetWare natively... with all sorts of yummies embedded into MS Word and MS Excel to allow for dynamically updated variables... especially of interest to day traders, portfolio managers, pension fund managers, etc

dreamed about wistfully by CFOs who craved a 'dashboard' which was updated every five minutes from all sections of a megacorp without fuss nor excessive sweaty effort... including location of trucks making deliveries/pickups (what we now do via smartphones and GPS) with realtime alerts of traffic, weather, bridge collapses, etc...

RIP NetWare

====

[1]"long, long time" in IT being twenty-four months which felt like a decade given the feverish pace

Nikon Coolscan IV ED

I've got one of those. Bought it to digitize my slides, as well as my father's slides I inherited. Was going to sell it after I was done, but as I haven't finished yet I still have it.

My first digital camera was a Canon Powershot of some type, bought for a trip to China in 2005. My first DSLR was a Nikon D80, which at 12 MP seemed so much higher resolution than the Canon's 4 MP.

Why is SF so rooted in tech/engineering rather than the many other disciplines in 'science'

Is it, though? There's a lot of that, but we have Asimov's psychohistory, Heinlein has psychology as a hard science on par with engineering in many stories, Le Guin had biotechnology…

More recently we have Watts, Butler, Kress, and many others who weave stories around biological ideas.

there's no microbiology/biochem in high school

Grade 12 biology has units in biochemistry and molecular genetics. Organic chemistry is part of grade 12 chemistry.

https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/secondary-science/courses-list?curriculum_discipline=biology

Better just to express the concept in a way that has less of the colonial baggage. Nation is probably a better word.

Up here we try to use "nation" when referring to Indigenous people, rather than "tribe". It can get a bit tricky sometimes with "nation", "tribe", and "band" all used.

My personal solution is the same as with pronouns: I try to use the one the people they refer to want me to use.

There's a lot of colonial assumptions embedded in our vocabulary. Another is Chinese languages, which are called "dialects" even though they are at least as varied as the Romance languages.

Every city was a microclimate.

What would changing the tech do to those microclimate?

Keep in mind, inefficient CPUs consume more electricity, require more cooling and thus yet more electricity. Output being waste heat in offices as well at the point of generation of electricity.

'butterfly effect' as more waste heat feeds into microclimate(s)... Chaos Theory includes notion that minor changes in basic inputs into complex systems have significant, possibly major, effect upon outputs...

So... biggest cities endure hotter summers and drier winters...?

Up here we try to use "nation" when referring to Indigenous people, rather than "tribe". It can get a bit tricky sometimes with "nation", "tribe", and "band" all used.

I think semi-sarcastic comments about tribes in the Middle East are more to the point: tribes under this notion are the people you rely on when either there is no stronger government, or the government is authoritarian and predatory. They're an armed and multigenerational version of the unions' "power in numbers."

I suspect it's similar in Africa and parts of India? With both we're talking large areas that were the home of fairly large and advanced empires. What we're seeing in Africa, especially West Africa and Congo, are the social results of horrors created by colonial empire-building, slaving, and now resource extraction.

In regards to the latter, it seems that the eastern Congo is quietly becoming a global sacrifice, because cobalt is needed for lithium batteries and that's where it is. Similarly, Western Sahara has a rich load of phosphorus, so Morocco's depredations in the region are kept quiet. If you live as the prey of the powerful, banding together in a "tribe" may be a way to survive.

To bring this back to the dead horse of a hydrogen economy and alt-history...

In some ways I wonder if the choice to convert to lithium batteries as energy storage rather than hydrogen and fuel cells was because the cobalt, tantalum, lithium, and rare earths offer greater opportunity for conflict than does even using natural gas for hydrogen. Fuel cells mostly require platinum and graphite, which are not fuels for civil war and land co-option like the mining of "blood minerals" is. Or oil is. Was part of the politics of choosing lithium batteries about throwing a bone to the global Military Industrial Complex in return for its political support?

And is the choice to rocket mass quantities of disposable satellites into LEO about appeasing the missile makers, in a way that swarms of high stratosphere balloon satellites cannot? It's hard to start an atmospheric Kessler cascade with balloons, even if their lift gas is hydrogen, and it's cheaper to launch balloons. But instead we launch rockets and make Musk rich. Why is that?

I know, I know, hydrogen burns are scary. O the humanity, we're conditioned to cry. But the weird thing is, we don't scream "Oh the humanity" when gasoline or lithium fires incinerate even more people than died in all the airship crashes in history. Why is that, I wonder? Why are some kinds of human incinerations okay, but others prevent industries from growing?

Why are we going for lithium and not hydrogen? Maybe that's something worth interrogating in an alt-history...?

If you live as the prey of the powerful, banding together in a "tribe" may be a way to survive.

I think this might explain some problems of immigrants in places. I've read some books about Sweden's immigrant crime problems; there have been shootings and bombings in recent years, mostly by immigrants and children of immigrants.

You'd think Sweden is a social democratic Nordic country. And, to my understanding, it mostly is. But it does also seem quite racist in its own way, and for a child of immigrants from the 'wrong places' the future might not be as easy and bright as for the regular Svenssons. So if the state does not seem to provide safety and a future, people might turn into, well, 'tribes' to get by and have some feeling of belonging. This looks pretty much like 'organized crime' or 'gangs' to the state they're in, and you get even more racist language very fast.

Also, I feel like Finland is very similar, but we have less immigrants than Sweden and not enough time for the problems to fester. Not sure what to do about it, especially with the current right-wing cabinet it seems we have a multitude of issues of which getting the cabinet to resign is quite high on the list.

»In some ways I wonder if the choice to convert to lithium batteries as energy storage rather than hydrogen and fuel cells was because the cobalt, tantalum, lithium, and rare earths«

I can guarantee you that it is not.

Hydrogen is the nightmare-fuel.

Just four percent concentration in the atmosphere is a very dangerous fire- and explosion hazard.

The Fukushima reactor-building explosions were hydrogen-explosions, I've seen official estimates that the concentration was as low as 5% and the time of detonation.

Do you know you hydrogen is filtered ? You press it through a Palladium plate, and it's not even particularly hard, because all metals are essentially soups where the broth is hydrogen, that's literally why they conduct electricity.

The only reason anybody mentions hydrogen for road transport, is that the oil-companies are very, very keen on not having to do green-field remediation of all the tank-stations, and the unfathomable amount of hydrocarbons (and ethyl-lead!) spilled under them through the last century.

There /may/ be a case for hydrogen in air-traffic, but everybody crosses their fingers that it wont get to that, because compared to today's jet-fuel everything would become slower, less and more dangerous.

And pretty much everywhere it has been tried, people have given up on it after a few years, concluding that hydrogen is for rocket-scientists - and nobody else.

»Every city was a microclimate.«

It does not have to be a city to have micro climate, any variation in landscape which affects the low winds create a micro climate. A coastal cliff 8-10m tall will create a very distinct micro climatic zone for the first ~100m of land.

The reason we talk so much about cities micro climates, is that they make heatwaves worse with a positive feedback loop: Warmer - more air-condtion - even warmer.

I think it was CUNY who published an article about the temperature/electricity-use correlation for New York through some notable heat-waves and documented a second order effect from air-con becoming less efficient as people do silly thing with portable units and the exterior units heat each other up.

The "district-cooling" I mentioned some days ago is supposed to be much less subject to that, because the heat is dumped some distance away into a body of water, so the rise in recipient temperature will be much less, with a side-effect of increased evaporation, which may or may not be beneficial, depending on the local micro climate.

»Another shakeout of something like this would be in image processing and graphics; photoshop would remain a bit of a novelty[…]«

Sorry, you lost me there ?

If the premise is that we rewind to 1995, and all tech-promises magically come true, Moore's Law is also in full operation.

Ignoring micro-architectural breakthroughs, and just using clock-frequency as proxy for CPU performance, as everybody did in 1995, that gives us:

2GHz CPUs at Y2K

100GHz CPUs in 2009

100THz CPUs today.

I cannot imagine that not being used for photos ?

hydrogen is for rocket-scientists

And the rocket engineers have mostly decided it's too much faff and are settling on methane for the next generation of rockets. SpaceX, ULA and Blue Origin are all heading that way although ULA and BO are staying with hydrogen for upper stages for now. A Chinese rocket was the first to reach orbit with methane power recently.

In a dotcom 1.0 future, I think the communications tech for the masses has to be descended from Amstrad's email phones. Meaning that the standard VM known to be present on every comms device isn't a Java VM, it's a souped-up Spectrum emulator.

And no-one's ever heard of Linux, because HURD and Plan9 are where it's at.

it's a safe bet that the majority of CPUs are active inside city limits...

I have heard WAGs of nine CPUs (and associated motherboards and routers and other junk) per resident for Manhattan, excluding smart appliances and mobile phones...

so in the alt-timeline if they are utilizing faster CPUs or more CPUs or less efficient CPUs then it would be plausible to guess significantly more waste heat

which given the architecture would lead to ever earlier summers and ever faster heat stroke for anyone walking the sidewalks or riding the subway...

...leading to more hospitalizations

And is the choice to rocket mass quantities of disposable satellites into LEO about appeasing the missile makers, in a way that swarms of high stratosphere balloon satellites cannot?

I am not here to stan for Elon goddamn Musk, but SpaceX has totally disrupted that: SpaceX has now landed more boosters than most other rockets ever launch -- 300 successful consecutive landings. In the course of which Falcon 9 is now in third place for all-time record number of launches by an orbit-capable rocket. And they just raised the target number of flights per booster from the current 20 (yes, one of their boosters has landed successfully after 20 flights) to 40, which is more than any space shuttle ever made (assuming they get there).

We're finally getting the reusable space truck we were promised in the 1980s, with an even better (i.e. 100% reusable rather than 90% reusable) one in development.

My guess is that we're currently mistaking the current roll-out phase of global orbital broadband comms for the final stage, and that's a mistake.

It's glaringly obvious that throwing away a Starlink satellite after 3-5 years on orbit is wasteful, but right now the laser-networked ion-rocket-reboosted low-latency comsats are still in the early stages of their evolution -- those 5 year old satellites are as obsolescent as a 5 year old wifi repeater node.

Throwing 5 year old wifi hotspots away is wasteful, too, and as soon as performance stops improving rapidly we'll stop throwing them away: I'm reminded that my first Apple Airport cost £350 and delivered a stunning 11mbps of wifi bandwidth in total: I currently have a mesh network with four nodes that cost less than that Airport and delivers up to 600mbps (yes, I tested it), so that's a two orders of magnitude improvement over the past 20 years.

Right now there's no way to return a Starlink node intact from orbit because Falcon 9's upper stage was expendable. But Starship is not intended to be expendable, and it's intended to land on a planetary surface carrying cargo.

So, looking ten years ahead, assuming SpaceX get Starship taking off and landing as planned (just as they did with Falcon 9, which you will recall was not initially even semi-reusable -- it took a few years to get it working), I expect they will switch from destructively de-orbiting old satellites to steering them into a parking orbit where they can rendezvous with a Starship which, having delivered a stack of fresh satellites, can pick up the old ones.

At which point I expect a third (or later) generation of Starlink satellite will feature modular, upgradable telecommunications kit and refuelable ion thrusters, and be modified to return to the flat-pak launch configuration and dock with the pez dispenser on board Starship for return to factory for refueling, upgrades, and general refurbishment. Thereby saving SpaceX a good chunk of the cost of the satellites, because fuel is always the cheapest element of a rocket or satellite.

There /may/ be a case for hydrogen in air-traffic, but everybody crosses their fingers that it wont get to that, because compared to today's jet-fuel everything would become slower, less and more dangerous.

Hydrogen is simply too damn bulky for civil aviation. Or even most military aviation.

I still believe that the future of aviation is hydrocarbons. However, if you can electrolyse hydrogen in bulk you can then react it with CO2 (at a cost of some energy loss -- nothing in thermodynamics is free) to produce long-chain alkanes, including jet fuel.

And we already have infrastructure optimized for handling jet fuel -- including the jets that run on it.

If you're using solar and other renewable energy to produce your hydrogen, and taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, then all that burning that synthetic fuel does is return the CO2 from whence it came, rebalancing the equation. It's fossil carbon neutral and makes no net contribution to global climate change. (Caveat: water vapour in jet contrails may affect heat retention in the upper atmosphere, but that's a different issue.)

So my guess is that we'll just swap out the source of the hydrocarbons going into our aircraft from a bad one (that releases fossil carbon into our atmosphere) to a neutral one (powered by renewables, recycles non-fossil carbon).

Methane has the huge advantage that as a cryogen its temperature range very nearly overlaps with LOX -- CH4 melts at -182℃ and boils at -161℃, LOX melts at -218℃ and boils at -182℃ (all at 1 bar, obviously rocket propellant tankage is pressurized). LH2 boils at -252℃, at which temperature oxygen is still a solid.

So if you run your rockets on methalox it's relatively easy to ensure that both fuel and oxidizer are liquid and stay liquid at the same time, which makes life easier for turbopump designers.

(Also it takes exponentially more energy to refrigerate a fluid as it approaches absolute zero: the cost of refrigerating a rocket-load of H2 to less than 14 kelvins is far higher than keeping a similar load of methane at 111 kelvins.)

I think the same of Africa, but the West has meddled less there, except in certain areas, because oil/no oil, and "non-white people".

This is fractally wrong.

"So my guess is that we'll just swap out the source of the hydrocarbons going into our aircraft from a bad one (that releases fossil carbon into our atmosphere) to a neutral one (powered by renewables, recycles non-fossil carbon)."

Agreed; it's almost inevitable now, given the current investment. I have a relative working in process engineering of biofuels. He says that there is a lot of work on non-fossil aviation-fuel, but most of it is still at the pilot-plant stage. When those pilots are accepted as workable, then we should see production plants rather rapidly. There's no indication that the pilot planets will show the process unworkable, although I gather it's a fair bit harder than distilling fossil oil.

Gangs are what happens when law and order breaks down for at least a subsection of society (say if law enforcement isn't trusted); sociological studies of teenagers in Chicago are really useful on this.

But as we're all working in the 640kB "thats enough for anybody" the images are pretty small...

What I really want is the alternate-1980s in which Windows 3 flopped but DESQView/386 took over, then DESQView/X -- think in terms of DOS running in multiple 640Kb memory spaces with true pre-emptive multitasking and then an X11 server so that X11 apps (either running locally under DOS, or remotely on a sever) could display locally. That was functionally equivalent to OS/2 2.0, but a whole bundle cheaper and nimbler and without IBM.

At least until Linux matured enough to be worthwhile (optimistically: no earlier than 1996, using Linux for productivity before 1996 was an exercise in masochism do not ask me how I know this).

At least until Linux matured enough to be worthwhile

Though if the DESQView/X is cheap enough that poor Helsinki University students can buy it and maybe even see the source code, maybe nobody is going to build a terminal emulator as a hobby project and the we wouldn't have Linux.

Luckily it wasn't that cheap -- it needed a Motif license so DESQView jacked the price compared to the basic DOS multitasker.

(The DOS multitasker was rock-solid and fast compared to Windows 3.0; it got me through a uni degree using a PC with only 2Mb of RAM at the time.)

water vapour in jet contrails

I cannot find links to back up my memory... in the aftermath of 9/11, which was the first time in history an entire continent had all of its aircraft grounded en masse for a sustained interval, it was noted that temperatures rose slightly as well sunlight was noticeably brighter

suggestive of temporary, localized cooling due to those contrails

as to synthetic jet fuel... by brewing it up from feedstock rather than distilling it from crude oil it ought be possible to avoid some of the toxic crud and thus reduce (but not eliminate) pollution

question being... can the synthesis be performed in a small enough footprint to make it feasible (and cost effective) to place the chemical factory close to airports?

thus offering a close to hand sourcing of fuel to its consumers and (maybe) sidestepping Big Oil's control of distribution

Quibbling the grammar used in the press coverage, SpaceX have successfully landed boosters 300 times. 42 first stages have flown more than once, the current active fleet is 18 with 4 more (2 Heavy cores and 2 Heavy boosters) yet to fly for the first time.

We used DESQView/386 for multi-tasking our DOS-based printing program (use case - driving multiple printers to print labels for such as Waitrose). We really, really wanted DESQView/X, but it took so long to arrive that we bit the bullet and went for Windows 3.1 instead. Well, it was 3.11 by the time we released the first version back in 1993

And, since the US & friends have been hauling massively more stuff openly to Ukraine via Rzeszow during the same time, I still am struggling a bit to think of what the putative CIA flights are adding to the effort. David's suggestion that it's just a case of using capabilities that would otherwise go unemployed makes as much sense as anything, IMO.

One explanation is that the US and various other countries were moving stuff to the edge of Ukraine so that if/when the US Congress approved the aid it was ready to cross the border. Moving things around inside of NATO countries is basically a thing the President of the US can have done as Commander in Chief.

in the aftermath of 9/11, which was the first time in history an entire continent had all of its aircraft grounded en masse for a sustained interval, it was noted that temperatures rose slightly as well sunlight was noticeably brighter

Atmospheric scientists who got their act together basically had a week to look at the air over the US with almost 0 contrails. And a bit longer with way less than normal. I don't know what all they found but it was also not all that much of a controlled experiment given it was one week out of 52 and there was basically no "getting ready" before hand.

tribe

Since I started this.

I don't like the word tribe. But again, our European mindset with English and other languages likely don't have good mappings. (See a talk by Steven Briar long ago about translators in US courts for non common languages in the US giving everyone fits as simple questions, in English, turn into essays that only 2 people in the room likely understand.)

But things like Rwanda 30 years ago were not just the result of colonialism. Not that colonialism didn't impact it, with European style governments installed and political boundaries drawn that didn't reflect reality, but those divisions were there a long time ago.

My point is like Europe getting involved in East Asia a few centuries back, African societies just don't operate the way we expect them to operate. And to be honest much of the world is this way.

And our languages and the built in assumptions with words makes it worse.

although ULA and BO are staying with hydrogen for upper stages for now.

ULA was told by Congress to use Shuttle engines for SLS which used hydrogen. If you MUST maintain a high level of expertise with screwdrivers it costs money to also maintain a skill set for using hammers.

_ Several investigators have suggested that the airline shutdown following the 9/11 terrorist attacks led to a reduction of jet contrails and an increase in the diurnal temperature range (DTR) across the US. Here, we use an air-mass approach to control for weather conditions across the country following 9/11 in order to more accurately assess the observed patterns in the temperature range. We indeed find a higher-than-average DTR shortly after the attacks, but we find that the unusually clear weather across the US more than accounts for the observed DTR._

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250221829_Impact_of_unusually_clear_weather_on_United_States_daily_temperature_range_following_9112001

Sorry, you lost me there ?

Oh, I didn't explain it well enough.

There would certainly be the technical capacity for image processing and rendering and all that and the products and capabilities would still exist, but without internet video, social media and a lot of the "Web 2.0" sharing sites, the consumer demand for high-end image editing and graphics wouldn't have exploded like it did. So that sort of thing would remain comparatively niche, mostly restricted to the realm of professionals.

I remember those early versions of Photoshop; they were neat but had a lot of features that were either impenetrable or useless to someone who didn't have a background in professional photography or publishing. Adobe didn't release an affordable version for punters until the tail end of the 90's, and even then it didn't get IMHO particularly "consumer friendly" until about 2003.

300 successful consecutive landings. In the course of which Falcon 9 is now in third place for all-time record number of launches by an orbit-capable rocket. And they just raised the target number of flights per booster from the current 20 (yes, one of their boosters has landed successfully after 20 flights) to 40, which is more than any space shuttle ever made (assuming they get there).

And in what feels like a cartoon clip from Rocky and Bullwinkle, Russia has announced a reusable rocket that will fly 100 times. With first flights in 5 years. Currently no one is sure if this rockets exists in more than some PowerPoint presentations and some engineering sketches somewhere.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/russian-space-chief-says-new-rocket-will-put-falcon-9-reuse-to-shame/

SLS is not ULA, the ULA launcher is Vulcan with methane powered first stage (using BO engines) and a hydrogen powered Centaur variant as second stage. Senate Launch System is hydrogen burning Boeing core with Orbital ATK SRBs.

I did think of adding "Rocket politicians still like hydrogen as it keeps the pork flowing" to my comment...

nothing to worry about folks, go about your day...

hmmm... knock out GPS, radio & teevee relays, weather observation, all manner of civilian LEO / GEO... and trigger a stock market crash...

...and oh by the way in net effect announce World War 3 with a bang

"Russia vetoes US-backed UN resolution to ban nuclear weapons in space"

https://lite.cnn.com/2024/04/25/world/russia-veto-un-space-nuclear-weapons-intl-hnk/index.html

I did think of adding "Rocket politicians still like hydrogen as it keeps the pork flowing" to my comment...

Agreed. And yes I did get mixed up with which big pork related rocket company has merged with which other ones.

But things like Rwanda 30 years ago were not just the result of colonialism. Not that colonialism didn't impact it, with European style governments installed and political boundaries drawn that didn't reflect reality, but those divisions were there a long time ago.

Politely, bullshit.

It was European colonialism that drew boundaries over pre-existing nations) -- and followed a standard procedure of mixing a large majority to be farmed, a minority population (who could be armed and sent out as tax collectors), and a small colonial ruling elite with machine guns to keep the rabble in line and send the taxes home.

Rwanda was an odd semi-exception because the Kingdom of Rwanda was formed by conquest in the 15th century as the Tutsis went on a small-scale empire-building spree: but then Germany and Belgium moved in and colonized it and set the Tutsis up as the tax collectors and the majority Hutu and other population up as the victims.

Ummm, please realize that the US Space Force is totally dependent on SpaceX for launches, because SpaceX is the only one who can launch the mass quantities of satellites that the USSF doctrine of space dominance through wastage of mass quantities of space equipment requires.

I’m questioning the US strategy and why it came to be in the first place. Given the way the military is belatedly going in on UFO research, it may well be that the US military basically abandoned the upper atmosphere and opted to go big on space in a way that they have to to know will induce a Kessler Cascade.

And China, possibly others, moved into the upper atmosphere instead, leading to years of UFO reports that the US military is only now following up on. In other words, the upper atmosphere is a viable place for military and espionage activities, and the US is mostly abandoning it. Apparently.

That is the blind spot I’m pointing to: why did the US abandon one battlefield in favor of an hugely wasteful strategy in another that primarily enriches billionaires?

Saying that rockets are cool now misses the point. Who are the tastemakers who made them cool? Why did they do it?

That's pretty basic stuff as far as neuro & bio components go.

Anti-vaccers don't care about facts. Emotions are all that matters. Especially "fact" (fake or real) that agree with their desires.

The scientific method to these people is the elites using BS to suppress the working class.

I'm related to a non trivial number of these folks. Most stopped talking with me in the last few years as I didn't agree that COVID was a hoax. Being used by the deep state and world wide liberal cabals to control the masses.

To some degree you're agreeing with me. My point is that Europe running Africa as if it was populated by darker skinned Europeans was a disaster. With slavery and extraction tossed in.

We jammed a social and political structure on top of one that already existed. And the end result is a mess. How much of that mess existed before the 1600s/1500s? Hard to tell as we wiped out much of the details when "we" showed up. But society was already split into Muslim and non Muslim factions when "we" showed up.

I don’t think hydrogen will ever be more than a niche fuel. But I think the safety concerns are overstated. Until the 1970s the UK, and many other countries used coal gas for heating, cooking and, in many cases lighting. Coal gas is about half and half hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Hydrogen is being used safely (and expensively)for cars. I haven’t seen any reports of fires. It’s failing as a car fuel and fuelling stations are being closed but that’s not due to safety concerns.

"If I look back I am lost"

Yes.

The point about hydrogen, again, is that in the early 1990s, climate change was a bipartisan issue that would be fixed by technological progress, and the future economy as portrayed in science fiction generally ran on hydrogen, not lithium.

Then in the mid to late nineties, with the rise of the Neocons and a lot of lobbying by Koch and others, climate change became a partisan political issue and the US not only doubled down on petroleum, we mainstreamed SUVs and went to war for oil in Iraq.

Now we’re in an era where EV owners like myself are warned not to charge our cars in closed garages in hot weather, lest they catch fire—and battery fires are big and hard to put out. We shrug and say that’s as normal as huge oil tanker fires that wreck freeway overpasses for weeks.

But hydrogen is scary! Really?

In college I actually had two teachers, one in chemistry and one in physiology, who made trash bags full of hydrogen and lit them off. When they were college students. One broke a window and got yelled at, the other burned his arm hairs off and eventually got tenure. Imagine doing that with a bag of gasoline or lithium batteries. That’s scary. And probably felonious.

But hydrogen is scary, gasoline and lithium are not. How much of this is science, how much is propaganda?

So if you’re talking about the road not taken in the 90s because of industrial politics, what happened to the hydrogen economy people assumed would beat climate change?

Re: HS 'biochemistry and molecular genetics.'

When were these included in the curriculum?

Re: Other sciences in SF ... Asimov, etc.

Okay, there are/were a few but I bet that if you asked 100 people for a specific example of an SF trope, they'd reference tech/engineering before any other science.

And although neuroscience has been around for over 100 years (Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal were awarded the Nobel in 1906), I doubt that most people link it to regular developmental/behavioral psych. I think that Asimov's psychohistory is treated/comes across like a science because of its stress on math/equations. It also seems to lean more to economics and soc than to psych inputs and economics has a longish history of having some built-in math/equations so sciencing it up wouldn't be such a big leap. (No idea whether any level/type of sociology is associated with equations/formulas.)

Back to Charlie's topic plus your educator background ...

At what point did elem-HS kids have computers in classrooms and how did this change the curriculum - which subjects were more affected by this? (COVID certainly made computers mandatory but that's a whole generation past the era Charlie's interested in.)

Heteromeles @ 158:

Beat me to it. The one thing I’d add is that last Friday, the Pentagon told reporters that they had fast ways of getting aid to Ukraine, and that they were prepping them as the log jam broke in Congress. I’d hazard a guess that those Pallas flights are part of what they were talking about.

The only reason for the CIA to get involved is if the DoD wants to sheep-dip some Air Force logistics crews as “non-military” government employees, for the sake of meeting legal obligations while maintaining continuity of operations to keep things moving fast. I kind of doubt this is happening, because there are lots of veterans out there who don’t need CIA cover and can do the job just fine.

Add to that the majority of military supplies are too bulky to be cost effectively shipped by air. Tanks, artillery, combat vehicles all ship by rail and or truck.

It's all (or almost all) time critical repair parts or operating supplies ... e.g. Poland signed an agreement to purchase 96 AH-64E Apache Helicopters in August 2023 ... "and related equipment". That "related equipment" includes tool sets & repair parts, which can be cost effectively moved by air ... and on the U.S. model, that air movement is going to be using private contractors.

Plus, Ramstein in Germany is a central NATO nexus for "conduct of air operations" for all of NATO, so arms & equipment from other NATO countries bound for the new front-line NATO members are likely to flow through there.

... and there's nothing clandestine about that either.

The contractor is an American owned company, using aircraft manufactured in the U.S., but the supplies they're transporting come from all over NATO.

PS: Won't surprise me a bit if Pallas has orders in for the A400M if there's ever a "civilian" version released.

DavidL @ 215

Please read all of the below - very, very carefully, before you explode, OK?

There's another, more unpleasant "secret" in open sight, just not spoken of, as well ..... Before the "Europeans" coasted, landed at the ports of, or invaded Africa, there were the muslim states of the North ( i.e. Mediterranean) coastline, who had been raiding & trading in slaves, for many centuries.
And, all the local kingdoms of Africa, S of the Sahara enthusiastically partook in that trade. Funny thing though: It's ONLY the "Europeans" who are being attacked for reparations over something that ceased between 1807 & 1833 ... no-one seems to be chasing the current governments of Morocco, or Tunisia, or Algeria, or anywhere from Senegal - to - Angola { Or for that matter Mozambique-to-Sudan } for "reparations".
Nor the current governments of Brazil - via - Venezuela - to Mexico, & finally the USA, for monies & fake "apologies" about something about which neither "we" [ i.e. all of Europe ] nor our parents, nor their parents, nor back for about, for 30 years-to-a-generation, 6-7 generations - AT A MINIMUM - I cry rampant lying hypocrisy, mingled with christian blackmail { Ex: 20.5-6 & 34.7 } - & even that stops at about generation 4.

Comparison: Why should ANY German, alive today, apologise for the horrors of the Nazis?
Their job, like ours, is to make sure that "it" never happens again.

PLEASE NOTE: I am emphatically NOT saying that slavery was not really horrible & we should have got rid of it sooner, "Just" that all this blaming of the Europeans is a deliberate diversion.

PLEASE NOTE 2:
To Charlie - if this really is too explosive, then delete it?

SpaceX is the only one who can launch the mass quantities of satellites that the USSF doctrine of space dominance through wastage of mass quantities of space equipment requires.

Currently true. Blue Origin and/or ULA have a very ambitious plan to overtak SpaceX's lead, although that isn't going to happen in 2024 (as it is they'll be lucky if Vulcan flies again this year, let alone the first launch of New Glenn).

That is the blind spot I’m pointing to: why did the US abandon one battlefield in favor of an hugely wasteful strategy in another that primarily enriches billionaires?

Drones, for starters. And for seconds, the USA can't afford a Kessler cascade and neither can China. There'll be a tacit agreement not to do that shit, just like there's been a tacit agreement not to use nukes on the battlefield.

So if you’re talking about the road not taken in the 90s because of industrial politics, what happened to the hydrogen economy people assumed would beat climate change?

To me the biggest issue with H is it is hard to store. Compared to other fuels. Gasoline is easy at temps we live at. Electricity is mostly about wires and insulation. Which the modern world is fairly good at.

Battery chemistry causing fires, well we went a long time with a lousy record of gasoline fires. We're in the early days of batteries. Relatively.

If someone had a canister (that you bought at the corner store) of H in their garage I'd be a bit fearful of entering the garage or their house.

Re: HS 'biochemistry and molecular genetics.'

When were these included in the curriculum?

Eh?

They were most certainly part of my A-level biology syllabus when I was US high school age! In fact you couldn't pass A level biology (a prerequisite for medicine, pharmacy, and pretty much all the biological sciences at university level) without a metric fuckton of high school biochemistry.

On the other hand I left school in 1983 and the school got its first computer lab with a whopping 4 machines (3 Apple IIs and a Systime 505 CP/M machine) in late 1981, a year too late for me to take any examination board CS courses.

Drones, for starters. And for seconds, the USA can't afford a Kessler cascade and neither can China. There'll be a tacit agreement not to do that shit, just like there's been a tacit agreement not to use nukes on the battlefield.

It's worth looking at the USSF warfighting doctrine. When I looked at it awhile ago, it seemed to be saying that in the event of a war, a Kessler Cascade was inevitable. Therefore the USSF was going into rapid production and rapid launch of cheap satellites, on the theory that, so long as they can replace sats faster than they're lost, they win the space war. They've publicly said they're not happy that SpaceX is the only service that will allow them to do this, but their announcements about faster satellite builds and launches seems to follow this doctrine.

China may have responded by simply increasing spending on aerial and other drones, including high altitude balloons. They're still in the space game, obviously.

Since we're talking about an alt-history separating in the early 90s, it really is worth asking if any of this was inevitable. For example, much of USSF doctrine was about giving the oligarchs their cut, perhaps by framing constraining the doctrine creators so that they had to choose something that looped a billionaire in as an essential contractor?

Kardashev @ 159:

The other point is that of the five airfields, three are located in countries (Romania, Slovakia, Poland) that have a border with Ukraine, but two (Latvia, Lithuania) do not. They have eastern borders with Belarus and Russia.

It appears to me the bulk of military aid to Ukraine flows through Poland on the highway & rail links between Rzeszów and Lviv. The Polish airfield is a bit out of the way for being a part of that.

Romania, Slovakia & Poland were once dominated by the Russian Empire (aka the Soviet Union) and the primary reason they joined NATO is because they don't want to be subsumed by Russia again. Same for the Baltic States.

That's why I believe these flights are NATO resupply rather than aid to Ukraine. And because the flights did continue while the U.S. Congress had their heads stuck up their collective fourth points of contact over aid to Ukraine.

Comparison: Why should ANY German, alive today, apologise for the horrors of the Nazis?

Watched an interview with the US editor for Der Spiegel yesterday. He touched on this as a part of how Germany's relationship with the US is convoluted to say the least. This was a part of a broad discussion on coverage of the current Trump trial.

And to quote someone (German) around 45 at the time when I was around their Christmas table in 2018. I take pride in my country. But I doubt I'd like to live in a world where Germany won WWII.

As to the Africa history. Yes. I know. I have a strong memory of a PBS/BBC 6 part series "Wonders of the African World" from 1999 done by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. which covered this topic. He is the Harvard professor arrested on his front porch, had a beer with Obama, and is the host of the PBS show "Finder Your Roots". And much more. He is good at irritating people of all colors and politics with his views. You might know him from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_Jr.#Cambridge_arrest

Ohferpetessake Greg.

Of course all the slave trading states, governments and companies - at least those with some connection to that period - should be accountable for reparations.

However, I am not Moroccan, Algerian, Egyptian, Sudanese or otherwise. I am, however, Canadian with plenty of Scots, Irish and British heritage (among others). My current country and its history most definitely benefitted from historical wrongs - including slavery - and part of our current prosperity is based upon those historical wrongs.

Just as part of the current poverty of the locales where slaves were stolen is rooted in those historical wrongs. So I see no issue in the relatively very wealthy nations whose histories are stained with blood and slavery having some responsibility to support the poor nations whose histories were harmed by those crimes.

I won't get into the current issue about reparations and reconciliation with much wrongs indigenous persons here in Canada because previous discussions have determined that you are both ignorant of local history and adamant that anything the British Empire did before last week is wholly in the past and therefore utterly blameless.

One easy additional reason: when the attack on Ukraine began, it was expected to be over, with Russia walking over Ukraine (with a former comedian as President?)

Then Ukraine said no. So this could have started in case Russia kept going.

Nope. For one, there was this post to usenet in 1991 from that Finnish college student asked for help, and got a ton of it.

For another... mobile phones? Those are bulky and expensive. Palm Pilot gains wireless....

3-5 year obsolescence is ludicrous. Here's a thought: geosync orbital reflectors, and the upgrades and all processing and software on the ground. Then what's on your mobile has already been upgraded to understand the signal.

Nor the current governments of Brazil - via - Venezuela - to Mexico, & finally the USA, for monies & fake "apologies" about something about which neither "we" [ i.e. all of Europe ] nor our parents, nor their parents, nor back for about, for 30 years-to-a-generation, 6-7 generations - AT A MINIMUM - I cry rampant lying hypocrisy, mingled with christian blackmail { Ex: 20.5-6 & 34.7 } - & even that stops at about generation 4.

Do yourself a favor: look up "California reparations." For years there was a commission trying to figure out how to pay reparations to black Californians due to slavery and discrimination. I don't think it got anywhere, in part because proving which damage needed reparations was hard, in part because it would have bankrupted the state, and taking away services for reparations might cause more harm than good. But we're trying. You?

Why did they do it? Um, because it sounds like a tv/movie plot, and TFG shoved the creation through. Now do you understand it?

Come on, look at their uniforms... camo. For space.

They were most certainly part of my A-level biology syllabus when I was US high school age!

You've often talked about how big the US is. And I grew up in outside of a town of 32K in a clump of 52K. And a 4 hour drive at 50-60MPH to get to where there were more people. We had 5 high schools. 1 city, 3 county and 1 catholic. The catholic was paid tuition and where parents send kids to make sure they got a high school diploma. I suspect you could likely get a real education also, but even then the local Catholics ran in different and separate circles.

I graduated high school with 235 in my class. 11 of us took Physics. 16 Chemistry II. Most of us didn't take biology II as it was mostly about slicing up frogs and maybe a small mammal or two. And the Chem / Physics teacher was a breath of fresh air as the fossil he replaced retired the previous break. (Thank goodness!!!)

The kind of biology you're talking about might have existing in NYC, Chicago, LA, Louisville, etc... but not where I and likely half of the students were in the US. Then take 5% of that half who might take the courses I did and you get a very small number who come out of high school understanding much about such things.

This was 1972. I'm sure things are better now. But still most people in the US get out of basic schooling getting as much medical information from Goop and such than real science.

How many kids in the UK percentage wise take those A level courses you mention?

Wasn't the anti-vac guru from England? The one who got most of the current movement started?

Anyway I have two brothers. One went to work at IBM Federal Systems division in 1980 and worked on sonar analysis and initial integration of early cruise missiles. Has spend the last 10-20 years in robotics. My other brother is proud to be anti-vac, MAGA, and all the rest.

Big sigh.

I sit and type corrected. The "West" came in and screwed Africa politically in the 19th century, while they didn't get to the Middle East until after WWI.

I don't think it got anywhere

I was impressed when the SoCal city turned over that ocean side land/park. At least it was a step.

To simplify. The most powerful civilization (interpret these two words as you wish) typically shows up and screws up the "new" place. It may have been screwed up before. But just differently.

The history of the world has very little history of everyone holding hands and singing cumbia.

If you look at this list, the thing I find interesting is how it doesn't have much for sub Saharan Africa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

I suspect this is more to a lack of historical record / evidence than no big wars for the last 3000 years.

Forgot about that. Thanks!

The statewide effort was the equivalent of 40 acres and a mule to the descendants of slaves, but with cash payouts. I agree that we can't afford that, because we're dealing with a budget deficit. But as you pointed out, illegal land grabs can be fixed, and occasionally are being fixed.

When technology is moving fast you cannot help but end up with rapid obsolescence. Could you really imagine wifi access points of twenty years ago being upgradeable to be seriously useful now? Let alone orbital units. The only items I can think of right now that would be reusable might be some of the screws and bolts. (And I'll add that having orbital equipment that could gather up dead items and extract those parts would be extremely useful when building space habitats from junk. Which must inevitably happen)

in a way that swarms of high stratosphere balloon satellites cannot?

Two points.

Passive reflectors you mean? If you think astronomers are upset about the current satellite constellations, just wait until they have millions of square kilometres of reflector whizzing round. Transmitters on the ground are going to need to be much larger, it will require a large dish (forget portable equipment that doesn't need a truck to move it) to give a reasonable data rate, and the co-channel interference is going to seriously limit the number of units than can be handled at any one time.

Could you really imagine wifi access points of twenty years ago being upgradeable to be seriously useful now? Let alone orbital units.

Totally. I'm emptying my basement of my old electronics. I'm keeping a few things to try and resurrect some 30+ year old computers as a way to pass time but other than that, ugh.

$300 SCSI ribbon cables. $1000s in SCSI terminators. They were vital when new. No real value in 5 years.

About 5, maybe 10, years ago at our local electronics recycle center someone had dropped off a pile of HP (I think) servers. A stack of them each about 1/4 the size of a fridge. I'm guessing well over $200K new. They were sitting in the rain.

Kardashev @ 169:

"Couldn't possibly be related to this"

Can't exclude it, but they've been flying 4-5 flights weekly since the war started.

And, since the US & friends have been hauling massively more stuff openly to Ukraine via Rzeszow during the same time, I still am struggling a bit to think of what the putative CIA flights are adding to the effort. David's suggestion that it's just a case of using capabilities that would otherwise go unemployed makes as much sense as anything, IMO.

First consideration - It's NOT the CIA. The planes flying the secret shit around turn OFF those transponders.

It's just standard NATO logistics - spare parts, supplies & tools. The front-line NATO states have been getting beefed up in response to Russia's aggression in Ukraine and standing up new systems takes A LOT of spare parts, supplies & etc.

It serves several purposes - gets ALL of the NATO states playing from the same sheet of music; reassures the newer NATO members that the rest of us have got their back if Russia gets froggy and pointedly reminds Russia that if they fuck with one NATO state they've got to fight ALL of the NATO states.

Again the contractor may be an American company, but they're transporting NATO supplies to the front-line NATO countries.

Here's a thought: geosync orbital reflectors

IBM did that 40 years ago. WIth geosync sats. And sold a long distance service using it. I signed up. The latency drove people talking on it nuts. Me included.

awk

Yeah, for a quick commandline thing I'll do awk, and sed and the lot. But for stuff like take the output of this command, smash it around a bit and stuff it into Nagios, or Telegraf nowadays, perl is still really nice.

Leatherman, check. Still have mine but I've gone off the batbelt. Got a little keychain one now, which is slightly less conspicuous. ;-)

Incidentally, Charlie? Posting a comment takes a while, and I get a "The page isn’t redirecting properly" when it's done posting. Dunno if that's just me (Firefox) or is anyone else having this too?

"In college I actually had two teachers, one in chemistry and one in physiology, who made trash bags full of hydrogen and lit them off."

Full of hydrogen and what?

With only incidental air in there and the bag basically inflated by the hydrogen input, being not all that spectacular for the size of the thing is more or less what I'd expect. Most of the energy won't be released until the first bit of bang has mixed some air in with it.

(OTOH if the trash bag is turgid with acetylene plus oxygen in a stoichiometric mixture, setting that off out in the yard on the end of a 10m extension lead can make the whole roof of an industrial unit boioioing up and down for some seconds and create a blast wave that can be felt behind three closed doors.)

The thing about hydrogen is that it can be easily touched off even at very low concentrations in air, so you can be a long way away from a leak and still be able to inadvertently ignite it. By which time there will of course be a rather large volume of hydrogen/air, all nicely mixed, between you and the leak; and the flame speed is ferociously fast, so you then get a lot of energy released in a very big and destructive spike. Even though it's less energetic than most other explodable gases, the peak power of the release is still huge. This is why we used to get coal gas explosions in houses that would demolish half the street.

Unless you count acetylene as an "ordinary" fuel, no other ordinary fuel comes close to hydrogen for ignitability and flame speed. Methane domestic gas supplies do explode sometimes but it doesn't happen so much and it doesn't do so much damage. I blew up a car battery once by accidentally igniting the hydrogen it was outgassing from some distance away; had it been methane in the same sort of quantity and distribution, (a) it wouldn't have gone off at all and (b) even if it had it would only have gone "whoomph". Indeed making any alkane go "bang" rather than "whoomph" tends to require attention to conditions and/or enormous quantities. Hydrogen, though, not only goes "bang" by preference, but is also much, much easier to ignite.

Posting a comment takes a while, and I get a "The page isn’t redirecting properly" when it's done posting. Dunno if that's just me (Firefox) or is anyone else having this too?

Here on the eastern side of the US in North Carolina it takes 2 to 10 seconds for the page to reload after posting a comment. But no errors. Macbook Air M2 with 1gig Google Fiber. Charlie has mentioned that this blog is way past getting "creeky".

Robert Prior @ 176:

"Nikon Coolscan IV ED"

I've got one of those. Bought it to digitize my slides, as well as my father's slides I inherited. Was going to sell it after I was done, but as I haven't finished yet I still have it.

My first digital camera was a Canon Powershot of some type, bought for a trip to China in 2005. My first DSLR was a Nikon D80, which at 12 MP seemed so much higher resolution than the Canon's 4 MP.

I bought the Coolscan because I'm a Pentax shooter. Pentax came late to the DSLR market. Scanning my film (& slides) allowed me to join the digital future while still using a camera that my lenses would fit on. I had a K-1000, a LX and a Pz-1p.

My first digital camera was also a Canon Powershot (2Mp A60) bought by the Army for me to use during our deployment to Iraq.

I took the Pz-1p (and the film scanner) to Iraq, but fortunately just a week or so before I shipped out a Pentax *ist-D became available. I would have been "up the creek without a paddle" trying to shoot film in Iraq - no way to process it.

The *ist-D could use all my Pz-1p lenses (and all my manual focus lenses as well).

Grant @ 195:

But as we're all working in the 640kB "thats enough for anybody" the images are pretty small...

With a really good "memory manager" you might be able to get that up to a whopping 720k ... looks good on a VGA monitor.

"Wasn't the anti-vac guru from England? The one who got most of the current movement started?"

He was a flipping doctor, of all things.

RE: shooting down things that violate airspace: It appears, from Wikipedia, that there are no US or international standards for where airspace rules top out. While there are legal "freedoms of the air" for commercial air travel" (via treaty), they don't apply to balloons. Or, for that matter, satellites. Do LEO satellites violate airspace? We'll find out when we get our wars on, I guess.

I agree that orbits are predictable. This has been a problem for spysats for decades (cf MISTY). Since navies have fleets of buoys and increasingly autonomous drones monitoring stuff, drift is less of a problem than discovery for intelligence gathering.

The other key point is cost. Anyone can launch a weather balloon with a mini-sat's worth of stuff for a few thousand dollars. Space tech is routinely tested this way in early development. Lofting a satellite is considerably more expensive.

Oh yeah, the other point is that during the Cold War, the US was so into spy balloons that the Soviets developed a balloon interceptor, although I'm not sure it ever flew. Not to mention Roswell and lesser known examples. Somehow, between the 90s and now, we apparently went from that culture of spy balloons to a "balloons, WTF?" military culture. I have looked, and while weather balloons and army aerostats are flown, surveillance balloons are missing from the org charts. So either our intelligence community is flying them surreptitiously, or they were abandoned. Oddly, the latter seems more supported by evidence.

I have looked, and while weather balloons and army aerostats are flown

Weather balloons are designed to be recoverable. There are instructions on how to mail it. I assume for free. A report a few years ago had them getting back 10%.

Rocketpjs @ 228:

I won't get into the current issue about reparations and reconciliation with much wrongs indigenous persons here in Canada because previous discussions have determined that you are both ignorant of local history and adamant that anything the British Empire did before last week is wholly in the past and therefore utterly blameless.

The problem with "reparations" is no one can agree on who should pay, how much they should pay ... who should receive & how much ...

And no one wants to admit they're descended from the exploiters. It's always someone else's ancestors who were at fault.

I'm pretty sure some of my ancestors must have been slave holders, because I know African-Americans who share my family name and I don't know how they would have acquired it otherwise.

I think "reparations" are a good idea, but I'm not smart enough to figure out how to do it right, who should pay, who should get and/or what form they should take.

In the meantime, until someone smarter than me figures it out, all I can do is try not to be a racist asshole.

Pigeon @ 251:

"Wasn't the anti-vac guru from England? The one who got most of the current movement started?"

He was a flipping doctor, of all things.

Also a con man seeking to get NHS to stop using the MMR (IIRC) vaccine in favor of an an alternative measles only vaccine that he had a proprietary interest in.

Falsified a study of the children he "treated".

De-frocked, dis-barred or whatever you call it - lost his license to practice medicine in the U.K. and moved to Texas in the U.S.A. where he set up shop.

He was a flipping doctor, of all things.

Observation, reading and a small amount of experience has persuaded me that the medical biz is best avoided without concrete reason to engage it.

The model of having a competent, sane, trusted doctor and having regular check-ups is much to be desired, but it's not clear the real world supports it.

You're wrong about video. Without Jobs to back Phil Schiller paywalling QuickTime and cancelling the QuickTime/HyperCard merger to protect Macromedia, we have a truly flexible audio video subsystem, combined with HyperCard for authoring and interactivity, that runs on Solaris, Linux, Mac, Windows NT, SGi, and set-top boxes. It supports code extensions compiled to multiple CPU formats, and has a fallback mode of 68030 bytecode instead fo the Java VM. It also runs MacOS 9 apps across all those platforms, because NeXT engineers didn't rip out the mutexes and call it Carbon. Cocoa is still a visual programming language for it, like Roblox. Most of this is here https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-308-quicktime-futures - this was working code in 1997.

»that there are no US or international standards for where airspace rules top out.«

It's defined in one of the "peaceful use of space" treaties.

A more personal counterfactual would have involved my UK startup MultiMedia Corporation not being shut down by the bankers for tax reasons so we could continue with the next generation of 3D Atlas that switched from pre-rendered CD-ROM images to dynamically warped satellite imagery cached locally but paged in over the web (think Earth from Snow Crash, but working 3D code in PowerPC assembler, also in 1997).

On a sort of similar basis, Network Rail's computing would be using Debian.

Re: 'Most of us didn't take biology II as it was mostly about slicing up frogs and maybe a small mammal or two.'

I went to high school in a new suburb - the school barely had enough desks let alone labs or even a cafeteria. We were also 'streamed': I was uni bound therefore had to take physics, chem, a bunch of math, Latin plus a modern language. Bio was for the college-bound stream.

I did take bio in undergrad but don't recall that there was much biochem involved - just very general discussion of some basics (ATP, DNA/RNA, Krebs cycle, etc.).

Actually, in the oughts, SUSE was popular in Europe.

geosync orbital reflectors, and the upgrades and all processing and software on the ground.

Nope; it's been tried (in the 1960s) and it's shit.

For one thing, in geosync the signal path up and down is 70,000km -- to send a TCP packet requires three signals, so that's a 210,000km path, so the latency is a minimum of 700ms. (Starlink latency is intended to be low enough to support real-time activities like gaming or controlling a guided missile -- 30ms or lower.)

For another thing, Starlink supports satellite-to-satellite directional comms with dynamic route adaptation, so you can talk ground-to-satellite-A, then sat-A-to-sat-C-relayed-via-sat-B, thereby load balancing across a network of satellites.

Finally: with a system like Starlink, your phone only has to be able to send a signal that a receiver can pick up 200km above your head. An actual real world cellphone can just barely manage that. To talk to something in geosync, you're going to need a 1 metre diameter dish antenna and a honking great amplifier. But to get a reflected signal back from geosync your signal is attenuated to the fourth power (it's inverse square law to the reflector, then inverse square law back down). So think in terms of a full scale ground station!

Charlie @ 222
just like there's been a tacit agreement not to use nukes on the battlefield. - CAN we trust Vladimir to hold to this?
He's been nuke sabre-rattling almost from the day that he ordered his "Short Victorious War" against Ukraine, but ...

David L @ 227
I LIKE H L GATes Jnr, straight off!

Rocketjps @ 228 ...
AND anyone else on the same The central point of my argument @ 221 was - I repeat:

Why should ANY German, alive today, apologise for the horrors of the Nazis?
Their job, like ours, is to make sure that "it" never happens again.
- Have we got that yet?
It was more than 6 generations ago - let it go - provided, of course, that it is not still happening - which is why I have still got it in for christianity - they are still doing "it".
Your comment about "The British Empire" is equally loopy, since it ceased to exist 1948-58, or maybe approx '68 - SO: We are still responsible for things done in that period & back to about 1940, maybe.
Before that - our job is to take warning & NOT repeat mistakes, OK?

H @ 232
Us ( "You" in your parlance )
- Erm IIRC: 1807 - abolition of the slave trade ...
1832-3 - abolition of slavery in British-controlled territories everywhere.
Took the US another 28 years, plus your second civil war to sort it out & the legacy ( "Jim Crow" etc ) is still with us, yes?

whitroth @ 235
Does Egypt count as the Middle East, or Africa, in this context?
HINT: Suez Canal shares?

OFF-Topic
Are we going to get a Scottish General Election, if the Groan's Motion of No Confidence passes?

"I think "reparations" are a good idea, but I'm not smart enough to figure out how to do it right, who should pay, who should get and/or what form they should take.

In the meantime, until someone smarter than me figures it out, all I can do is try not to be a racist asshole."

Well, governments are our generally approved method of resolving 'who should pay' questions. Particularly governments that were in place when the various crimes were happening. I personally would have no issue with a portion of my income and/or capital taxes were to go to help resolve multigenerational issues.

Where the governmental structures that were in place are long gone I have no idea. There is a ruined castle in Croatia that was controlled by one of my ancestors - same name even - and he was almost certainly an oppressor of some kind. The castle was abandoned in the 17th century, the governmental structures are long since gone, and certainly any lingering prosperity my family may have had vanished with my great-great grandfather during the Red Army invasion of Budapest.

I suspect the threads of guilt and reparations are too frayed and diverse for any such process. But where the government and/or monarchy that committed the crimes is still extant and prosperous? Then we need to talk and figure something out, in my opinion.

It is a very current and very pressing issue here in Canada. The indigenous people have every right to object to past exploitation, abuse and expropriation. Much of it is ongoing. Something must be sorted out.

I also seek to not be a racist asshole.

Re: 'In fact you couldn't pass A level biology (a prerequisite for medicine, pharmacy, ...'

In both Canada* and the US you need an undergrad before applying into medicine therefore plenty of time to get a handle on the biochem. No idea about the pharmacy programs - only know that they vary considerably in prerequisites and difficulty depending on the exact diploma/degree.

*Except Quebec which has CEGEP (pre-uni) and from which students can apply directly to med school. No idea how well that works but almost all the med schools (I think) also required MCATs or equivalent.

So Charlie and all the other compsci folks:

-Is the computer/tech industry (and local supporting educational institutions) as messy as the applied sciences re: training, adoption, usage, etc., i.e., no international (universal) standards?

-If the tech is up in the air - no outright leader - how does a university figure out what to teach? I think this might be the only 'science' field where industry determines academic content. That's pretty risky for the undergrad paying an arm & a leg for a degree. And with the accelerated pace of advancements the uni content could be obsolete by graduation.

Wasn't the anti-vac guru from England? The one who got most of the current movement started?

Andrew Wakefield. Note that the strap line on his wikipedia page is Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born September 3, 1956) is a British fraudster, discredited academic, anti-vaccine activist, and former physician.

Wakefield engaged in research fraud to promote his "vaccines cause autism" scam at the same time he was peddling alternative medicines for autism (hint: not a disease condition and in no way treatable by his quack remedies). He did immense damage, both to the autistic community (who he fanned prejudice against) and against vaccination programs against childhood diseases, with the clear intention of benefiting financially from it and in my opinion he should have done prison time. People almost certainly died as a direct result of his crimes.

All I can really respond is that if a current power structure - government, monarchy, former empire, company - whatever - gained its power and wealth from past crimes, I don't think we should just wipe the slate clean and pretend it isn't ill gotten gains.

I can't come and steal your car, murder a few of your family, and burn down your house, then expect to be allowed to drive your car around town the next day saying 'let's move on and make sure to prevent that from happening again'.

I believe the victims and their descendents have every reason to expect some reparations. Hell, the 'end of slavery' in the British Empire you are so proud of came with massive cash payments to the former slave owners, much of which formed the basis of the wealth of your current incompetent chumocracy. To my knowledge there was zero recompense to the actual victims of slavery, then or now.

Tell you what Greg, you pay your share and then we'll start going after Muhammad Ture's descendents, alright?

In passing I note Greg's list of centres of the post-Roman slave trade has some gaps: the Varangians, the Kingdom of the Isles, Venice, Novgorod, Crimea, Malta (which sold primarily Muslims captured by the Knights Of Malta), Byzantium...
You may notice some commonalities; I couldn't possibly comment.

Are we going to get a Scottish General Election, if the Groan's Motion of No Confidence passes?

It's a motion of no confidence in Humza, which he's completely free to ignore.

If it was a motion of no confidence in the government and it succeeded, that would force an election.

But a motion of no confidence in a minister? Is just posturing and hot air.

(As I keep having to repeat: you cannot trust The Guardian to accurately report on Scotland. The Guardian is pro-union -- that is, the UK -- and anti-independence. It's also a Labour house newspaper. The SNP in Scotland are an existential threat to Scottish Labour. So the Guardian will always trash-talk the SNP, Scottish Independence in general, anything that suggests Scotland might be viable outside the UK, and so on. This article is just more of the same.)

It's worth looking at the USSF warfighting doctrine. When I looked at it awhile ago, it seemed to be saying that in the event of a war, a Kessler Cascade was inevitable. Therefore the USSF was going into rapid production and rapid launch of cheap satellites, on the theory that, so long as they can replace sats faster than they're lost, they win the space war

That's what this latest nukes-in-space kerfuffle is about, isn't it? People have noticed the C&C edge US space infrastructure gives and aren't willing to promise not to attack it in the event of a war, on the quite sensible basis that no-one who wants to win a war (even one they don't want to fight) starts by promising to leave the other side's advantages alone.

I think the problem is with how using "tribe" positions the discussion, and just making a change in language, while it doesn't fix that entirely, at least makes it less hard to come at the underlying concepts.

There are plenty of examples of the pattern that Charlie described for Rwanda in Europe. Transylvania is a great one. The Habsburgs relied on a Hungarian-speaking Magyar ruling class in a region where the serfs were mostly Romanian-speaking slavs. Periodic bloody uprisings with brutal crackdowns, both sides responsible for massacres. And the thing that made it historically exceptional is that unlike neighbouring areas it had never come under Ottoman rule.

So the point isn't that Africa was somehow radically different to Europe, the evidence really is that they are both similarly human, with group loyalties attached to language, families and social classes. The point is that European powers treated it as homogeneously exploitable at best, and at worst used the existing groups against each other. The problem with using language in certain ways is that it carries with it certain baggage around the relative sophistication and nuance between European examples and African examples of the same patterns, to the latter's detriment, and historically has been used as deflection.

It's also worth at least trying to explain that the point also isn't about blame, although accountability is certainly part of it. The point, mainly, is to understand it better so we don't keep doing it. Because while it's great to talk about reparations for the past, actually stopping doing the things is also important and that hasn't really been achieved, at least not universally.

This is illustrates some of your comments.

https://youtu.be/qOTgeeTB_kA?si=ES1haMAZ5R3QQhFE

If Transylvania is still too exotic to bring home, consider Silesia. Similar pattern, the German speaking Austrian imperial layer over a Czech ruling class and German speaking peasantry. But also coal, and one of the main flashpoints of industrialisation, so suddenly it's not just peasants but a whole industrial working class. No surprise when Frederick the Great takes it for Prussia, Prussia keeps it. Well for a while anyway.

That's what this latest nukes-in-space kerfuffle is about, isn't it?

That’s been my guess all along. Note that both Tianhong and the ISS have been damaged by debris strikes.

It kind of pisses me off that we’ve gone from space being for all humans to it being the next battlefield, one which will keep humans earthbound for centuries at best. Oh well. We’ve done it for nukes too. Guess it’s all instant sunshine and shooting galleries, with consequences for the little people, while big people hide in luxurious caverns in the delusional belief that they’re safe therein.

FUNFACT:

the motherboards (and almost any circuitboard) are worth serious bucks

about 300 grams of gold per ton (10^6 grams) ... gold @ USD$74/gram

which leads to the eyepopping realization that's USD$22,000/ton

yeah... it's filthy waste products and toxic fumes arising from melting it down and attempt half-arsed amateur in your backyard would turn your property into a toxic waste zone... but if you've retrieved 20 tons of motherboards... temptation

as to whatever else is embedded, traces of this or that... tin, copper, lead, zinc, etc... secondary valuables

most folks are shocked to learn 70/30 lead-tin solder is worth USD$9,700/ton... because pure tin is going for 32,425/ton... how much solder in motherboards? elsewhere in a chunk of technology?

of course, extracting those motherboards is labor intensive and fraught with exposure to ungodly toxic crud

any copper, lead, zinc recovered being afterthoughts

...cameras in general and lenses in specific being another example of 'fiscal inertia' in resisting change

after investing kilo-bucks and a zillion hours of sweat 'n fumbling in mastering complexities, not many will casually shrug off tossing it all out for 'the next bit thing'

BTW: this new laptop I got? sux... I loathe Win 11... and finding out unhappy things about Dell's design philosophy is verging on sado-cyber-cruelty

QUOTE: "Sally Hemings had at least six children fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Four survived to adulthood... Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings's children..."

...and now you know why there's been so much resistance to legalizing DNA-testing as part of parental neglect cases and challenging post-death estate distribution

lately? the phrase "to be equally divided amongst my children" has been quietly dropped from standard boilerplate as well as lots of judges taken aside by various 'concerned parties' to convince them that it would be a sad thing to re-open estate distributions from 1840s onwards...

if ever that was done to fullest extent? my gut-check is about USD$30B would be subdivided amongst rather more offspring than previously...

right there... a techno thriller by way of genealogy websites and exhuming graves and cheek swaps and salivating hordes of lawyers

...then there's Haiti

a horror compounded by multiple acts of amoral greed by way of "might makes right"

11.5 million people who never deserved what was done to them over the prior hundred-plus years

and sadly my nation (and therefore all citizens alive today) have the obligation to un-do the harm done... but America has other priorities than tidying up its 'amoral' toxic waste dumps

I'll leave the issues of French abuses to anyone currently living in Paris

Weather balloons are designed to be recoverable.

They're also usable by civilians. One of my students used one to get to the edge of space (by some reckonings) a while ago.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/lego-man-sent-to-space-by-toronto-teens-1.1195556

It is apparently legal (or was back then), probably because so few balloons are launched they haven't been seen as a problem. If everyone started doing it they would soon be regulated.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/lego-man-s-flight-raises-air-safety-concerns-1.1174403

I used to be a Pentax shooter. Then someone broke into my house and stole it, the the insurance replacement (only model available in the small city I was in) had horrible ergonomics and I couldn't afford a new camera and so basically stopped taking pictures for nearly two decades.

Tip for the slide scanner: your negative/slide stress more information than you realize. Scan the same frame with multiple exposure levels and run HDR processing on them. You can cover detail in what look like blocked shadows or blown highlights. David Morgan Mar scanned some of his old negatives (admittedly using a very expensive scanner at the Canon research lab he worked at) and was amazed at what he found. (Like totally black shadow reveals a woman sitting on a bench kinda thing.)

He was a flipping doctor, of all things.

He also had a financial stake in having people avoid MMR vaccines.

the first of the patent applications—which was titled “Pharmaceutical composition for treatment of IBD [inflammatory bowel disease] and RBD [regressive behavioural disorder or autism]”—was filed at the London Patent Office on 5 June 1997. The full characterisation of the patent was published 12 months later, naming “Andrew Jeremy Wakefield” as one of the inventors. This said that the “composition may be used as a measles virus vaccine and for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease and regressive behavioural disorder”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC534464/

And he was being paid by a personal injury lawyer to find results.

In 2004, six years after Wakefield’s article, a London Times reporter, Brian Deer, made some devastating allegations about Wakefield’s research to the editors of Lancet. Wakefield had been given $100,000 by personal injury lawyer Richard Barr. Five of the eight autistic children in Wakefield’s study were clients of Barr.

At that time the British government had a unique program known as the Legal Services Commission, which provided money to law firms for the investigation of claims. Law firms actually supervised the scientific research. The commission controlled over $1 billion. Reporter Deer found that the commission had provided $30 million to the Barr law firm-$20 million of which went to the law firm and only $10 million to doctors and research scientists. Later investigations revealed that Wakefield received not $100,000 but $800,000 from Barr to support his research. A number of other researchers, both in the U.K. and the U.S. who had supported Wakefield’s findings also received large stipends from Barr’s law firm.

Further independent studies by reputable scientists were unable to verify Wakefield’s findings. These revelations forced an embarrassed Commission to conclude: “The courts are not the place to prove medical truths.” Offit wryly comments: “A science directed by personal injury lawyers is not likely to be the best kind of science.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6181752/

ATP, DNA/RNA, Krebs cycle, etc

That currently forms part of the grade 12 biology course in Ontario.

Incidentally, if you want a fun way to brush up on that kind of thing try the game Cytosis published by Genius Games.

https://www.geniusgames.org/products/cytosis-a-cell-biology-game

I've got it and I think it's fun.

I can't come and steal your car, murder a few of your family, and burn down your house, then expect to be allowed to drive your car around town the next day saying 'let's move on and make sure to prevent that from happening again'.

Of course not. But by the let-bygones-be-bygones logic, if you passed the car on to your son he should be allowed to keep it, along with the money you made renting a home to the folks who had their house burned down. And of course your statue should remain up and we shouldn't revise history to make you a bad chap…

I think the problem is with how using "tribe" positions the discussion, and just making a change in language, while it doesn't fix that entirely, at least makes it less hard to come at the underlying concepts.

I agree that using nation rather than tribe can be better, although places like Syria use both.

It gets messier. Both the Romans and the Brits (and probably the US, although I can't think of an example) had the bad habit of designating whoever was willing to talk or work with them as the chief of the tribe, the tribe being whoever didn't run away from the dude and the Brits/Romans. They supported this chief as a client ruler as a way of getting control of a group of people and their territory. The Chinese did similar things, as did the Americans around the Great Lakes, where groups of refugees became tribes.

The problem is that there are four processes (at least) At play: there's how people organize for long term survival. There's how conquerors and authoritarians force organization onto their new subjects or clients. There's how bureaucracies and diplomats use terms to fulfill their functions, and there's how scientists try to understand how human group dynamics work by appropriating terms for their studies. For each one, a word like tribe or nation has meanings with subtle but crucial differences and implications. In casual conversation, as here, the subtleties can get lost.

The 70s/80s OOP Future continues to never actually happen.

In 1990-ish I was writing OO code in an object oriented database! There was a whole lot of weird going on inside that, not least the idea of transient vs persistent objects, and having every method separately versioned so you could transactionally update the distributed code while it was running. Not to mention the joy of having to describe which versions of various objects the methods could interact with. But it was very cool and I'm still slightly sad that Java basically ate that thing for lunch.

Then later (post 2000) I got to give a talk to 50-odd programmers using a different distributed language about the important difference betweemn passing large objects by value vs by reference. This would still be important today, but at the time we had a whopping 100mbit ethernet setup with on a couple of ridiculously expensive switches so the effective bandwidth was lower than you'd expect today (and the "software architect" in that place was one reason I had to give that talk).

OTOH I am grateful that we no longer have "bleeding edge" Symbol mobile barcode scanners ranning embedded Windows 3.11 over a proprietry wireless network.

From down under the radiant tech future looks a lot like the internet was just getting started and ISPs are offering "high speed" dial up while fighting with each other over who is least shit. We have a whole megabit link to the outside world!

It's also important to note that during this time the Bastard Operator From Hell was in charge of Aotearoa's internet connection to the world. Be good. Or else.

The link below takes us to a Wired article that starts with this quote: "For Maurice Williamson, cutting code in C++ ranks just below sex in terms of pure pleasure."

https://web.archive.org/web/20070501015030/http://www.wlug.org.nz/NewZealandInternetHistory

(note that Maurice Williamson's wikipedia page mentions "flamboyant" which is ancient times code for gay as fuck. Aotearoa decriminalised homosexuality in 1987 but...)

Don't forget that when Howard came in he gifted AARNet 1 to Telstra, as a way to ensure Telstra shares were overvalued when they went on the market. And Malcolm Turnbull invented the internet... by investing in an already-existing ISP - which is why he later got the job of making sure the NBN would be shit.

Neal Stephenson's startup is a success, and everyone gets transputer accelerators so they meet each other in virtual reality, order pizza online, and so on. Sometimes, at tech conferences, he talks about how he could have been a science fiction author, but his work was too successful.

Meanwhile, back in the future past: The Radiant future of 1995 is about to close - Science Museum Domestic Appliances gallery (!)
Um.

anonemouse
I DO NOT have a horse in this race ....
Some of my ancestors came here in 1665, in the clothes they stood up in, fleeing religious persecution & have never been rich. At the other end of the spectrum, others came from the highest appointed posts in the land, but were almost-notorious for their "rectitude" - one even won the 1937 Nobel Peace prize, though that was well-after the generational split ( approx 1839-50 ).

Charlie
We can be certain that: A) Yousaf is an incompetent tosser - fit to stand alongside Richi & Dowdy.
B) It appears that his remaining depends on someone who rejects the Cass report, how nice.
C) ALL the newspapers are saying this.
D) Talking of posturing, the Scottish Groans have an impossible piece of hot air in their manifesto: - withdrawing from NATO ..... { Though I think they are too stupid to have taken money from Putin, nice though it would be to suggest it! }

Howard NYC @ 277
Which is why I INSISTED on my new laptop having Win10 installed & not 11 & both it & this machine are "HP" ...
- & @ 279
BUT - that is "Still Happening" - it's current ( Never mind "In living memory" ) & therefore is worthy of action.

Every city was a microclimate.

Or in the case of San Francisco, multiple semi-compatible microclimates that only occasionally talk to each other. Much writing has been done about this. The city is famously seven miles by seven miles (or in UK terms, half the distance from Trafalgar Square to Heathrow), yet questions about the weather often can't be answered at scales larger than a neighborhood.

The extreme of this was the old Candlestick Park baseball stadium, which was notoriously cold and windy for reasons that became clear only after it was built. Indeed, it was worked out much too late that things could have been better had the building been constructed just a hundred meters northeast. For geographic reasons winds blow in off the Pacific Ocean, pass over flat ground, and then hit Bayview Hill, which sheds wind vortexes to the east; this turns out to be a problem if humans have built a giant bowl in exactly the right place to catch them.

(I've been reading up on San Francisco lately; I'm primed to dump this stuff on others.)

okay, a happier timeline...

here's my personal grievance, outlawed by US President Al Gore (2000-2008) who squeaked into office after near-riotous recount in Florida

"Cyber Privacy and Anti-Stalking Act OF 2003" (CPAST) which outlawed selling personal data without explicit consent of consumers and effectively eliminated third-party cookies controlled by advertisers (and ad placement brokers) from all browsers

folks described it happily as "Google on a lease"

...so that part of the city will be better at enduring mega-heat waves which melt the asphalt elsewhere...?

therefore: in a cli-fi disaster novel, after the power grid literally goes up in flames, refugees go there to chill out... and chunks of the cheaper seats end up DIY'd into refugee housing

It looks like Russia is gradually losing the ability to do space on any significant scale. Soyuz is nearing end of life, other rockets have QA problems and are expensive, posited replacements are powerpoint studies and "we'll be flying in five years" (repeated every five years since 1991 so you know how likely it is).

Torching off a Kessler cascade to deny space to their enemies therefore becomes an increasingly viable tactic for a declining Russian Empire.

Icing on the cake: GPS is used these days not only for location, but as a universal clock with microsecond-level precision. If GPS goes dark globally, then a lot of the world's financial infrastructure collapses. And while navsats orbit well above the altitudes at which a Kessler cascade would be an issue, they're vulnerable to deliberate EMP attack using high altitude nukes.

(Russia uses Glonass, a similar system, but if their infrastructure is already decaying, who cares?)

hmmm... the business of war

https://cnn.com/2024/04/24/style/nikita-teryoshin-global-arms-fairs-photo-book/index.html

Weapons companies also appeared to brand themselves as heroes... Kalashnikov Group, whose AK–47 rifles are among the cheapest on the market and are thought to have killed more people globally than any other firearm, used the slogan “70 years defending peace” ...

Hi Greg, I read it carefully, and yes, there are shitty people everywhere. I think the reason people blame the U.S. and U.K. is not so much the actions as the fact that the skin-color difference allowed a racist ideology in support of slavery. Also note that the racist ideology allowed the U.S. to industrialize slavery in ways the Middle East and Africa did not - the owners of a plantation had a very careful understanding of exactly what level of brutality - there really is no other word - would get the most industrially-successful use out of a particular person. Add to that how the racist ideology resulted in the use of rape as an industrial technique meant to breed more-useful slaves and you've got a particularly toxic brew. Slavery in Africa was not great, of course, but it was generally more humane than that practiced by the Brits or the Americans.

In short, the Europeans were the Microsoft of colonialism and slavery. They embraced, extended, and spread so much FUD that it still poisons our politics 150-plus years later.

If memory serves, one of the goals of the displaced Americans in Eric Flint's "Ring Of Fire" series was to discourage European participation in the slave trade. I've only read a few of those, don't know if any of them had a thing to say about that particular forked timeline.

Charlie, have you ever heard of "Cassette Futurism"? It seems to be very similar to what you described here.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CassetteFuturism

the racist ideology allowed the U.S. to industrialize slavery in ways the Middle East and Africa did not - the owners of a plantation had a very careful understanding of exactly what level of brutality - there really is no other word - would get the most industrially-successful use out of a particular person

From what I read, Romans had a similarly scientific approach to mines: all slaves assigned to the mines were doomed to a very short life even if well fed, and Romans had figured out the optimal food-to-output ratio.

I like to have a little cash in my pocket for walking around money... And I pulled out $100 "just in case" money for my two trips out west in the last year.

This is wise.

Last night I spent about fifteen minutes trying to help a Canadian traveler check into a hotel in the United States. His phone was set up with some kind of Apple e-money thing I've never paid attention to and the hotel's system wasn't recognizing whatever his phone was doing. Reasonably, his phone app didn't want to display the actual credit card number where just anyone could see it, but that meant that the number couldn't be entered manually. Frustratingly, his phone didn't work in a foreign country (and the hotel's phone wouldn't call Canada) so he couldn't call tech support. And his phone wouldn't talk to the hotel's wifi. And he didn't have the physical card with him. And he didn't have any cash. I was afraid it might end badly, but he had a multi-day prepaid reservation and was arriving a night early; it was possible to reschedule the other reservation, putting off the problem until he had time to sort out things, after a good night's sleep.

(Please do not travel around your home city, much less a foreign country, without some contingency plan for surviving when your phone battery runs out.)

Yup. I saw a report that I can’t find again (agitprop?) that someone in the Russia manned space program was caught going to a big box retailer for adhesives to use on a rocket, without checking to see if the materials were space certified.

Putting together the bits, I’ve known for decades without thinking about it that the US MIC’s space program has been several times larger than NASA for decades. So has the commercial space industry. So an induced Kessler Cascade has probably been on their radar for the entire century, if not longer. Me focusing on NASA keeps missing the point that most of what we’ve done to colonize space is of a piece with what we’ve done to colonize everywhere else.

A thing to think about is that it’s likely that the real purpose of heavy lifters like the SpaceX Starship is to “insure US dominance” during such a war, and that the Mars mission is just a cover story. Musk has form for such tricks. He’s admitted that he proposed the hyperloop as a way to divide and conquer on California high speed rail, so that he could sell more Teslas. And earnest nerds still beaver away at trying to figure out how to make it work. The same will happen with his Mars mission, of course.

Please do not travel around your home city, much less a foreign country, without some contingency plan for surviving when your phone battery runs out.

As a legacy of travelling in Europe in the 80s, I have multiple credit card/debit card/cash stashes with me when I travel. Short of stripping me naked and stealing all my luggage I'll have access to at least some money.

Greg, as you say, the responsibility (penance?) for future generations of Germans is to make sure it doesn't happen again. So it's written prominently in history books, the country literally has laws to stop anyone trying to even suggest this was a good thing, and they take those laws seriously when it comes to enforcement.

Compare and contrast to Britain though, where streets or even areas of cities are named after prominent slave-traders, and there are statues of slave-traders scattered around fairly widely. School history books are very light on exactly how Britain got to be such a rich country, or what the British seafaring tradition was based on (which simply was piracy first and slave-trading second). It's starting to be much more of a thing these days, with a large enough immigrant or immigrant-descended minority who are established enough to kick against it, and a couple of generations for the white majority to treat them as regular people. And that's a good thing. But it's still taking a while for places to get serious about at least returning some of their looted artefacts (or in some cases, literal bodies).

Basically, if Britain had historically done a better job at owning the stuff the country got up to in the past, maybe people would be less pissed off about it now.

lots of characters ere actively hostile, with chatter about hunting the slaver ships to sink after freeing their cargo some were coldly rational in their efforts to gnaw away at underpinnings of the slave trade such as the horrific price Europeans were ignoring for importing Caribbean-sourced sugar ("one sweet ton, one dead slave" might not be the precise wording from a story)

so by introducing sugar beets which could grow in European climate and designing the necessary processing (mix of chemistry and mechanical separation) the goal was to outproduce the slave-based sugar cane plantations in higher volumes at lower costs (and zero deaths) which would lower price to consumers and effectively bankrupt that particular niche

...with chatter about how to smack at other niches

though there have been economic basis -- excuses -- for slavery which can be attacked indirectly, there being those arsewipes whose personality traits include joy from tormenting others and owning human chattel... only way to resolve that niche ==> "only good slaveowner is a dead slaveowner"

Just last September spouse and I were on a short trip to Mexico to celebrate the 20th anniversary.* The day after arrival I discovered that my credit card had been copied (back in Canada). On contacting the company they immediately cancelled the card and mailed me a new one - all well except it didn't help much where we were.

After that it transpired that our debit card was not willing to talk to the atms or direct debit machines that were extant in that part of Mexico - despite the clear indications that it should.

Ultimately I was able to find a privately operated ATM that charged an eyewatering fee, but allowed us to at least carry some cash around to pay taxis and incidentals.

Lesson re-learned, bring multiple credit cards and cash options.

*Not what I wanted to do but marriage involves compromise.

bring multiple credit cards

When I was in Iceland I had no problems using my credit card. Until it was my turn to pay for gas and my card was declined. Gas station didn't accept cash (which I had). Card didn't work for anything after that (I tried). Chap I was travelling with paid while I got on the phone with Visa to discover, eventually, that for some reason they flagged translations for fuel in Iceland as 'probably fraudulent', and this would happen again if I tried to buy gas. Why gas only and not treats from the convenience store at the gas station I don't know.

The lesson being have cards from different companies when travelling — and don't count on cash to work either. (I could probably have got someone to buy gas for me in exchange for cash, but I wouldn't like to count on it.)

Yup. I saw a report that I can’t find again (agitprop?) that someone in the Russia manned space program was caught going to a big box retailer for adhesives to use on a rocket, without checking to see if the materials were space certified.

I remember a comment about how the Soviet space program - run by good Communists - was characterised by competing projects whose materials were supplied by the normal manufacturers (you needed a bolt, you went and bought a bolt), in comparison to NASA's monolithic government agency with iron control of their entire supply chain.

Also note that the racist ideology allowed the U.S. to industrialize slavery in ways the Middle East and Africa did not

The US and UK record on skin color sucks a big one. Totally.

But the US and UK were the top economies with a shared heritage so we get most of the blame. So be it.

But look at the record of the slave trade into South America. Especially Brazil. They made the US look second rate back in days of dragging people from Africa to the "new world". Which may be why their economies didn't flourish during the industrial revolution. Or not. I'm sure 20 or 1000 other factors.

Short of stripping me naked and stealing all my luggage I'll have access to at least some money.

I know some here will laugh at me but so be it.

I have a few password memorized. And have encrypted backups in a cloud of credit cards.

And YES travel with a debit card (that isn't unlimited and tied to a bank account with a not massive balance) AND a credit card or two. Plus a bit of cash.

Apple Pay is great. I use it all the time. It is based on one time authorizations and tokens. But I also have ways to deal when it doesn't.

One problem with the US and Canadian border is that is almost as easy as crossing borders inside the EU. And people not in the know don't realize things that make look the same may not be all that similar. I know people who work for a Canadian bank who have operations in the US just to deal with their customers who head south and want to lessen the friction in their travels.

Howard NYC @ 277:

...cameras in general and lenses in specific being another example of 'fiscal inertia' in resisting change

after investing kilo-bucks and a zillion hours of sweat 'n fumbling in mastering complexities, not many will casually shrug off tossing it all out for 'the next bit thing'

Phone cameras have gotten a lot better since they were first introduced. There are many people doing masterful work with them. Photography in general has gotten better with the advent of digital.

I was already deeply invested in my camera system before digital photography came along. My budget will only stretch so far, so I needed to build on what I already had.

Younger people starting out without the baggage I had accumulated don't need to maintain backwards compatibility, so it's a generational change.

of course, extracting those motherboards is labor intensive and fraught with exposure to ungodly toxic crud

Actually less so than the original extraction from planet earth. Look at exactly what has to happen in most places on earth to mine gold and other rare metals. You grind up tons of granite or similar into incredibly fine dust and get a few ounces out after some acid baths and other noxious processes. The gold from those old volcanic pipes in South Africa is a bit different but no less obnoxious.

Modern recyclers pay low wages to folks to separate out circuit boards, power supplies, cases, etc... The circuit boards have the removable CPUs plucked out and offered to NASA and similar who need things not made for 10 years or more. Then the boards are ground into dust and run through multiple chemical / acid baths to separate out the metals. Which are at much higher densities than in the granite for raw ore.

Piling on because you made serveral posts in a row.

this new laptop I got? sux

Welcome to the Windows race to the bottom. I buy HP Z Workstations for a client to use with CAD and rendering. They cost double what the regular stuff costs but the warranties are great and they are solid. The desktop minis are built like tanks and now have 16gig video ram in the graphics cards as an option. But they do get warm.

Personally I prefer to pay a bit more for a Mac but that's another debate. :)

and now you know why there's been so much resistance to legalizing DNA-testing as part of parental neglect cases and challenging post-death estate distribution

A HUGE reason is that not all moms and dads who gave a newborn up for adoption want to ever meet the child or now adult. At all.

Speaking of space, folks here might enjoy this book by Paul Drye: False Steps: The Space Race as It Might Have Been.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/568622

Charlie @ 294: Torching off a Kessler cascade to deny space to their enemies therefore becomes an increasingly viable tactic for a declining Russian Empire.

While I see your logic, I don't think that would actually work, thanks to SpaceX.

AIUI the outcome of a Kessler cascade would be that any satellite in LEO would have a half-life measured in months rather than decades. But SpaceX's Falcon rocket has reduced the cost of putting a kilo in orbit by an order of magnitude, and Starship looks set to do the same again.

So in the event of a Kessler cascade you can now afford to:

• Armour a satellite against penetrating damage by small debris. Solar cells will still be exposed, but you can wire them up to be resilient to local failures.

• Add more manoeuvring fuel to dodge bigger debris.

• Just plan to replace your satellite next year.

• Boost to a higher orbit with less debris (at a proportionate cost in resolution).

None of these are a total solution, but together they mean that spysat capability would be reduced but nothing like a denial of the high ground.

Armor against the KE of something moving at up to 17K Mph?

And for each one hit the situation gets worse.

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield

Which incidentally is useless against projectiles moving less than 1 km/sec, and completely useless in the atmosphere. But for its place and purpose, Whipple Shield is great. And does not even add much mass.

Thank you, that sounds like what I'd expect from the co-author of "Crown of Slaves".

Problem #1: Climate change Problem #2: Junk in LEO

The atmosphere expands because it heats up, and slows the junk in LEO until it burns up.

See, that was easy!

(and for extra credit, all the dust in the upper atmosphere cools things off :) )

And for seconds, the USA can't afford a Kessler cascade and neither can China.

I suspect Kessler Cascade is about as real is Nuclear Winter. That is, technically possible, but way over-hyped.

But hey, only one way to find out! (About either of them, yes :-) )

Robert Prior @ 306:

bring multiple credit cards

When I was in Iceland I had no problems using my credit card. Until it was my turn to pay for gas and my card was declined. Gas station didn't accept cash (which I had). Card didn't work for anything after that (I tried). Chap I was travelling with paid while I got on the phone with Visa to discover, eventually, that for some reason they flagged translations for fuel in Iceland as 'probably fraudulent', and this would happen again if I tried to buy gas. Why gas only and not treats from the convenience store at the gas station I don't know.

The lesson being have cards from different companies when travelling — and don't count on cash to work either. (I could probably have got someone to buy gas for me in exchange for cash, but I wouldn't like to count on it.)

Did you rent the car y'all were using? I can see a stand-alone gas purchase without any car rental charge raising red flags?

I ran into something similar back in the early 80s where my ATM/Debit card (didn't have any credit cards at the time) suddenly stopped working when I tried to buy gas up in Washington, DC. Turned out the purchase was flagged because it fell outside of my usual routine & DC was considered a high fraud area. Fortunately my bank had an 800 number so I wasn't stranded.

One thing I learned from that is to contact the bank/credit card company BEFORE taking any "out of the ordinary" trips & have them put a note in my account with my planned itinerary.

... "Note: Cardholder will be in Iceland for two weeks starting [DATE], using card for shared travel expenses"

I take it you haven't seen footage of people dressed in brightly coloured rags squatting on their heels in the dirt, holding motherboards over smoky little fires made out of whatever rubbish and (possibly actual) shit they can scrape together to melt the solder so the connectors with the gold plating on them fall off?

As for the primary extraction, the extractors own the regulators plus half the country so they basically do what the fuck they want. OTOH one of the things about gold is that all the things it's actually useful for only require very tiny amounts of it, so something over 90% of what is extracted is used for bullshit purposes, ie. putting it back in the ground again in boxes of armoured concrete, or draping it over people's bodies.

It's a prime example of something where the damage it causes could be cut to negligible levels simply by not insisting on doing bloody stupid things as if our lives depended on them. Can the reburying and draping and you gain 90%, then you can easily get the next 9% by not deliberately manufacturing things with it to become useless in a couple of years. As any truly intelligent species would surely be doing as a matter of course, and not even considering our approach.

A thing to think about is that it’s likely that the real purpose of heavy lifters like the SpaceX Starship is to “insure US dominance” during such a war, and that the Mars mission is just a cover story. Musk has form for such tricks.

It's interesting that the cover story for the Hughes Glomar Challenger and HMB-1 barge during Operation Azorian was "mining manganese nodules on the deep ocean sea floor".

It was convincing enough that several other companies tried it and went bust before the Challenger was redeployed as an oil exploration drilling vessel ... and even today, mining manganese nodules is A Thing (can't remember the last startup I saw pitching for it, but apparently ROVs have improved enough that it's actually credible with a billion dollar black CIA program as cover).

So it's possible that the whole Mars thing and Lunar HLS mission is cover for a military capability, but it's also possible that a mature Starship will be capable to serving all those missions. In other words, why not do both (and use the military money to pay for the Mars base)?

David L @ 311:

Personally I prefer to pay a bit more for a Mac but that's another debate. :)

Just try to find a perpetual license, shrink wrapped copy of PhotoshopCS 6 Extended Edition (64-bit) for Mac. 😕

I found one copy on Big River's "marketplace", but it was in Canada and they wouldn't sell it to anyone in the U.S. (probably exchange rates, taxes & import/export duties and I don't know what all).

Of course not. But by the let-bygones-be-bygones logic, if you passed the car on to your son he should be allowed to keep it, along with the money you made renting a home to the folks who had their house burned down. And of course your statue should remain up and we shouldn't revise history to make you a bad chap…

The core problem with the current reparations paradigm is that there's no statute of limitations. Liability for the crimes of one's ancestors continues until the descendants of their victims decide to forgive it. In addition, the chain of causality for a given people's current condition can always be traced back further and further in time.

Does Egypt owe Israel reparations for the Hebrews' enslavement prior to the Exodus? Does Israel owe Lebanon reparations for the Hebrews' post-Exodus conquest of the Canaanites? Do mestizo Mexicans owe the Nahua reparations for the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs? Do the Nahua owe reparations to the descendants of the tribes the Aztecs conquered? Do the descendants of the West African tribes that sold the ancestors of African-Americans into slavery in the first place owe reparations, too?

In practice, the reasoning behind reparations, at least in the U.S., is too broad and ill-defined for them to be implemented as policy. So, reparations function instead as a rhetorical flourish to motivate Democratic voters and to drive greater support for welfare programs and affirmative action.

Charlie Stross @ 321:

"A thing to think about is that it’s likely that the real purpose of heavy lifters like the SpaceX Starship is to “insure US dominance” during such a war, and that the Mars mission is just a cover story. Musk has form for such tricks."

It's interesting that the cover story for the Hughes Glomar Challenger and HMB-1 barge during Operation Azorian was "mining manganese nodules on the deep ocean sea floor".

It was convincing enough that several other companies tried it and went bust before the Challenger was redeployed as an oil exploration drilling vessel ... and even today, mining manganese nodules is A Thing (can't remember the last startup I saw pitching for it, but apparently ROVs have improved enough that it's actually credible with a billion dollar black CIA program as cover).

So it's possible that the whole Mars thing and Lunar HLS mission is cover for a military capability, but it's also possible that a mature Starship will be capable to serving all those missions. In other words, why not do both (and use the military money to pay for the Mars base)?

While I'm sure Musk would be willing to take the money and run, I'm less convinced he gives a shit about ensuring anyone's dominance other than his own.

I treat my phone as a credit/debit card. And I never travel with just one payment method.

Within walking/bus/home town range, I carry the phone and a pre-paid card (good for unlimited public transport locally -- in six months I get a free old age bus pass). Within day trip range, it's the phone, two cards (pre-paid for buses, debit or credit card in case the phone fails), and a booster battery or plug-in charger and cable for the phone.

Within 24-96 hour range, it's all of the above plus an iPad (which can also do Apple Pay) and both booster battery and plug-in charger. I also scope out local retailers that can replace cables/chargers/battery in emergency.

Somewhere between the 96 hour and 168 hour (week) duration I flip over into "I am now officially traveling" mode which includes a panic get-me-home credit card to leave in a hotel safe, and maybe the laptop (in case I get mugged by more work than I can do comfortably on an iPad while on the road).

This is in addition to essential medication (pill case with compartments for up to 5 nights away; bag with boxed prescriptions and re-order form for longer trips -- they're quite bulky) and Apple Watch (which I treat as a peripheral). And all of this has to go in hand luggage/backpack and stay either in a locked room or on my person.

Just try to find a perpetual license, shrink wrapped copy of PhotoshopCS 6 Extended Edition (64-bit) for Mac.

You know me and how to contact me. Why didn't you ask? I tossed a dozen or more in the trash a while back. I may have a few left. (To the consternation of my wife.)

FUBAR007 @ 323:

"Of course not. But by the let-bygones-be-bygones logic, if you passed the car on to your son he should be allowed to keep it, along with the money you made renting a home to the folks who had their house burned down. And of course your statue should remain up and we shouldn't revise history to make you a bad chap…"

The core problem with the current reparations paradigm is that there's no statute of limitations. Liability for the crimes of one's ancestors continues until the descendants of their victims decide to forgive it. In addition, the chain of causality for a given people's current condition can always be traced back further and further in time.

Does Egypt owe Israel reparations for the Hebrews' enslavement prior to the Exodus? Does Israel owe Lebanon reparations for the Hebrews' post-Exodus conquest of the Canaanites? Do mestizo Mexicans owe the Nahua reparations for the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs? Do the Nahua owe reparations to the descendants of the tribes the Aztecs conquered? Do the descendants of the West African tribes that sold the ancestors of African-Americans into slavery in the first place owe reparations, too?

In practice, the reasoning behind reparations, at least in the U.S., is too broad and ill-defined for them to be implemented as policy. So, reparations function instead as a rhetorical flourish to motivate Democratic voters and to drive greater support for welfare programs and affirmative action.

Don't agree with that last bit.

From the Democratic side "reparations" is about leveling the playing field; making our society less unjust - for everyone regardless of "race".

But almost everything I hear about "reparations" appears to be using it as a "wedge issue" to divide the have-nots so they won't be able to question other economic injustices in our society.

"Welfare programs" and "Affirmative action" are racist dog whistles.

"Welfare programs" and "Affirmative action" are racist dog whistles.

As the Republicans use them, yes.

But, that's what the Democrats call them, too. (Note: I generally support both policies.)

I take it you haven't seen footage of people dressed in brightly coloured rags squatting on their heels in the dirt, holding motherboards over smoky little fires made out of whatever rubbish and (possibly actual) shit they can scrape together to melt the solder so the connectors with the gold plating on them fall off?

Of course. And they are all 10 years or more old. It is a declining business model as circuit boards shrink due to chip die shrinkage and consolidation of multiple chips into one die. The amount of gold and solder in modern electronics goes down each year. Thank goodness. But, yes, there is still a big supply tail of such in the world just now.

But those pictures are a cudgel to use against one group while we ignore the starting point of it all. Is the child based mining in the Congo worse? Again, look at the rape and pillage gold and other rare earth mining does where it occurs.

We FIRST WORLD folks like our toys. Especially when we can ignore where the source bits come from and where the end product goes. But a picture of a kid smelting solder over a campfire tugs hearts better than a football stadium size pile (or multiples of such) of acid soaked rock polluting the poor folks drinking water 20 to 40 miles downstream.

As I roll my trash down to the curb each week I notice that except when we're purging, we have maybe 1 plastic trash bag of actual trash each week. And 2 or 3 times that in recycling. With a goal of less and less faux plastic recycling over time. Most of our recycling now is metal cans and paper based products.

Did you rent the car y'all were using? I can see a stand-alone gas purchase without any car rental charge raising red flags?

No, my friend did. But he paid for it with a different card than he used to buy gas, successfully.

What was really annoying is that I could talk to Visa and have them reactivate my card, so I could do things like paying for food and hotel rooms and campsites and expensive tours and other holiday stuff, but they apparently had no way to override the automatic "freeze card when used to buy gas, even though it was just used to buy a chocolate bar at the same gas station".

A badly designed system. In the old days you contacted Visa before travelling and they put a note in your file about where you were going and a human checked any flagged transactions; now it's apparently all handled by computer algorithms that run automatically, and human oversight is limited to undoing the algorithm's decision (and they can't re-emptively prevent repeated incorrect decisions).

And another book recommendation. I've finally started Shihini Ghose's book Her Space, Her Time and it's every bit as good as I expected. Heartily recommend.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048316/her-space-her-time/

(And if you ever have a chance to attend one of Dr. Ghose's lectures, grab it. She's as engaging a speaker as she is a writer.)

Shohini, not "Shihini" Still fumble-fingered from six hours travelling yesterday.

A badly designed system. In the old days you contacted Visa before travelling and they put a note in your file about where you were going and a human checked any flagged transactions

Actually in the US and I suspect Canada you're contacting your bank. Chase says don't bother, we're good at figuring it out. Citi says DO CALL or you may get blocked. I've also called before leaving to let my bank with my debit card what I'm doing.

And with all of them I tend to get a text after most transactions asking me to say "Did you do this? Please respond with Yes or No."

Actually in the US and I suspect Canada you're contacting your bank.

I called the number for enquiries on my Visa statement, and talked to whoever answered the phone before I travelled. They told me that it was all handled automatically and I no longer had to inform them in advance of travelling. Then when it happened I called the number printed on my credit card and went through the verification questions.

Credit card is through my bank; no idea who owns which call centre.

Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade -- Adam Minter

lots 'n lots of details, including the horrid bits of amateur recycling done by people too desperate to care about slow poisoning themselves ("I have to earn my food today to be alive in ten years to die of cancer")

Credit card is through my bank

My point is that Visa and MasterCard don't deal with authorizations, blocks, and such. They are just the back end processor. Well mostly.

Each transaction has to get to your bank and it issues a computerized go/no go to the Visa/MC system. All within a second or so.

including the horrid bits of amateur recycling done by people too desperate to care about slow poisoning themselves

I re-word my point a bit. WE (first world) see the trash end and can relate. WE (first world citizens) do not see the front end. All we see are shiny boxes in stores or second hand items at flea markets or thrift stores or such.

Again, it is easier to get people to feel sad about things they can directly relate to (trash) than things they can't (vast mining operations).

Charlie @ 294
BUT if Putin's Russia is stupid & desperate enough to do that ... EVERYBODY will want a chunk of their hides, including the Chinese & the Indians.
The problem is, that, as of 24th February 2022, they showed that they are stupid enough to do "that"...

Graham
I know - I always have a good belly-laugh when some, inevitably British, total fuckwit does ein Hitler-Schuss & then quickly gets arrested - & if lucky, fined 500 Euros!
Erm: * what the British seafaring tradition was based on (which simply was piracy first and slave-trading second).* - WRONG - Piracy at first, then huge amounts of actual trading for goods.
Slave-transportation was large in the mid 1700's - but was banned in 1807, remember?
And, at a period where Britain basically controlled the Atlantic Ocean, so - if money was the object, transportation would not have been banned, but it was.
Let's not get into the ( Hopefully no longer-extant ) knife-fights on London (etc) building sites, where (say) Nigerians & W Indians were both working. I'm sure you can work out why that was?

FUBAR007
Precisely ... We want reparations for the Roman occupation! And the Viking raids! ( COUGH "Tingey" is a Viking name ... ) etc.