palordrolap

The earliest message I have accessible in Thunderbird is from the 25th of May, 2001. It’s part of a conversation with old work colleagues who I had remained drinking buddies with when I started a new job nearby. (There are actually two messages with earlier dates, but one is an imported message from March of 2001 that wasn’t actually sent or originally received by me, and another that’s an old Usenet post, probably also imported, that doesn’t have a datestamp at all, registering as 1/1/1970.)

If I go digging around in my university backup, I have messages from 1998 in there. I would have earlier e-mails, but quota was limited on the University systems, so I expect I deleted everything at the start of every year.

Whenever it cost £35 for a 256MB stick. The Internet suggests 2003 or 2004 which tracks.

Let’s say Usenet.

When I gained access at university, search engines hadn’t really taken off yet so if you wanted to access something, you had to know the http address, and if you didn’t know any web addresses, you were stuck. (Maybe the actual, actual first thing I visited was the university website, because that was at least fairly easy to figure out the address of, even if visiting it was somewhat redundant.)

However, the university also provided Usenet access.

Usenet at least had a small, finite number of newsgroups and any decent Usenet server could list all the groups it had available. A hundred or more web.server.like things right there. And thousands of people who already knew several actual web addresses elsewhere in the world who also had access to those newsgroups.

Has to be at least 15 years. Probably 20 or more.

I still have a few floppies somewhere around here, but haven’t had a drive that can read them since I donated an ancient laptop to a friend of a relative.

I don’t feel like splashing out £12 for a USB floppy drive right now.

Other people mention 5¼" floppies for old 8-bit computers, and I suppose I do have my old computer and drive packed away somewhere, but I haven’t touched any of that in over 20 too. I’d be surprised if any of that still works and I’m kind of afraid to find out for sure.

Curmudgeon, perhaps. Or at least curmudgeonly.

Or choose from something here: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/curmudgeon

Among those, “crank” stands out. This is usually someone who holds a (often provably) wrong, unconventional or unpopular opinion and insists that their way is the right way and that everyone else is wrong.

Cranks can be right, which a crank will hold onto dearly and use in their arguments, even if the considerable majority of cranks turn out to have been wrong.

On the other hand, cranks tend to beat their metaphorical drum a lot more than someone who simply refuses to pick a side and keeps their trap shut.

The article doesn’t imply there was anything sexual about it. This was a bigger kid beating up a younger, weaker kid, and perhaps because of the genders involved you could argue there might be a misogynistic element at play, but that’s not clear from the information given.

If you combine it with the mechanism from one of those novelty dancing flowers, you’ll have a heck of a talking point when you put the music on.

Or maybe a really good time if you’re on your own.

(For legal reasons, I accept no responsibility for injury or death from enacting any part of this comment, kthx.)

Void the transaction. There’s no way I’d be able to pay it back and I do not need any of that and everything that goes with it.

Heck, I might not even be able to afford the interest that accrued on it in the short time I had it and I’d be looking for pro bono legal representation ASAP if the lender tried to stick me with it.

There’s no way I would have knowingly signed for it, so it ought to be an open and shut case.

No thank you. No way. Nuh-uh.

Now if this million was to be no strings attached and no repayment required, half’s getting invested properly after a chat with a financial advisor and the other half is going in the highest interest bank account(s) I can get for it. Then I’ll live off 60-80% of the interest, leaving the rest to stave off inflation.

I’d still have to live a frugal lifestyle, but I’d be more comfortable than I am on government handouts and I wouldn’t have to worry about a government stripping the help I currently get.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BKInDainD5M

If you ask some police forces, driving with the radio on is also dangerous as it can also affect concentration.

Not as much as a screen, sure, but nonetheless.

Source: Know at least one driver who was given a warning using the above argument by a bored police officer looking for drunks. They were barking up the wrong tree, but the argument does have some merit.

Ciphers are easy to invent, and if you can’t read the cipher-maker’s mind, it’s going to be an order of magnitude harder to break simply because you don’t know the rule(s).

I don’t think we got one that tracked back to lunchtime specifically, and those tend to be slightly less well aligned or frequent anyway, but the one that was being caused by a freight elevator’s motor was a devil to track down before we knew what it was.

And we may not have found it if the engineer had used the stairs to come back from the basement where the router was. Lazy engineer plus angry motor = DSL died when engineer still present. “It died again! What did you do?” “What did I what now?”

Reminds me of when I did DSL customer service. Once every few months we’d get a customer (never the same one twice) calling up saying that their connection was terrible, and when we checked the logs, their connection would dropping at incredibly regular intervals aligned well with human units of time. On the hour (or a few minutes past) every hour, for example, or every 10 minutes.

We figured, and told them, that it had to be something on a timer causing an EMP or other interference at their end because there ought to be nothing outside their premises acting with such specific regularity.

The caller usually went away and we’d see the connection stabilise not long after, leaving us none the wiser, but hey, fixed!

“… as foodstock for the Hhftss Diregulum”

Their word for us translates roughly as “crunchy”.

I think most people are able. Knowing how to act on it and being willing to do so are the two real problems here.

It probably does. To my knowledge they’ve never deleted old accounts, though you might have an issue if you’ve forgotten your password and the e-mail address you used to sign up is no longer accessible to you.

the Russian alternative

You say that like it’s not simply swapping which one you have in your mouth.

Your company needs to charge Waymo a toll for usage of your premises.

Alternatively, get a button-operated rising-arm barrier. All a driver needs to do is push the button to get in or out. Unless they’re an AI that can’t get out of the car, anyway.

Edit: Sometimes I a word.

This was the in the UK over a decade ago, back in the bad old days of migration codes and everything being underpinned by BT Openreach who basically had their arm twisted to allow other ISPs to exist and use that infrastructure. And even then they guarded everything jealously (and sometimes incompetently, but that’s another story).

We didn’t sell telephone lines, so every DSL we sold was on an existing POTS line that each customer already had. Most of our customers wouldn’t have known about getting a separate POTSless line even if that was possible at the time. And the customer in question certainly didn’t.

They had it installed on their company’s one and only telecommunications line. Of all the hundreds of customers I dealt with over the years, it only ever happened the once… although we did have to warn at least one other customer off the idea when it happened to come up in conversation.

Once upon a time I worked for a company that provided DSL internet.

One day we got a call from a customer complaining that they had no connection.

We investigated and discovered that their line had been completely cancelled from under us and ask the customer what happened to their telephone line.

They said they had set up VoIP on their internet connection, and thus no longer had need of their telephone line and so they cancelled it.

The telephone line on which we had provisioned their DSL internet…

“No more hand-written code” sounds to me an awful lot like “we don’t need that telephone line any more”.

The real shame here is that the fall-out won’t be as sudden and the people who ought to be getting the brunt of it will manage to squirm out of any responsibility.