Yes, writing shell scripts calling awk and sed was awful, just an aesthetic nightmare to work with. Properly quoting strings was always problematic, and while Usenet was available there wasn't a plethora of information like nowadays. This was a few years before Bash was released.
Through my use of Usenet I learned that a better reader program was available called 'rn', which I downloaded and built. It had an amazing handwritten install script (autoconf was years off) which could automatically configure and build rn on any *NIX system. All developed by a fellow named Larry Wall.
rn was truly a joy to use and made reading Usenet swift and efficient. It would get updated with the fixes that came across Usenet that I'd apply using the clever 'patch' program, also written by Larry Wall.
Based on my experience with his other software, when Larry Wall released Perl on Usenet I immediately downloaded, built, and started using it. As promised, for scripting things not requiring a C program, it was massive improvement. Version 2.0 came out and brought many great new capabilities.
I wasn't writing software while versions 3 and 4 came out; I started using it again after version 5 and the appearance of CPAN. Over the years I've used Perl extensively for task automation and data wrangling.
Python now dominates Perl's niche because it's easier to learn and interfaces better with C. It's also less flexible, which compared to Perl is a virtue. One of Perl's mottos is TMTOWTDI—there's more than one way to do it. But many of them are bad. Much of Perl's poor reputation ("line noise") stems from this.
But when Perl was released it was a revelation, like a drab day when the clouds suddenly part letting warm sunlight pour down on the land.
Board members Henry Kissinger and William Perry unwittingly admitted they were dupes ten months prior to the first Carreyrou article in a Dec. 2014 article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker: [1]
Kissinger, who is ninety-one, told me that Holmes “has a sort of ethereal quality—that is to say, she looks like nineteen. And you say to yourself, ‘How is she ever going to run this?’ ” She does so, he said, “by intellectual dominance; she knows the subject.”
Board members are clearly charmed by Holmes. She is a careful listener, and she is unnervingly serene; employees say that they can’t remember an instance when she raised her voice. “She has sometimes been called another Steve Jobs, but I think that’s an inadequate comparison,” Perry, who knew Jobs, said. “She has a social consciousness that Steve never had. He was a genius; she’s one with a big heart.”
Sure, it was cool to see, but it was inevitable that someone would do it. Once Dean Kamen demonstrated self-balancing wheelchairs and Segways, anyone paying attention could foresee subsequent applications such as self-landing boosters.
There are a lot of smart people in the world who, with the same backing that Musk received, could lead a company to achieve those goals. Without spreading themselves so thin that they make mistakes affecting thousands of people. Our tendency to elevate and idolize people who are aggressive and self-promoting leaves little room for those blessed by the absence of those traits.
It's ridiculous that on a day when thousands face unemployment that there are excited stories about flamethrowers being shipped.
I'm sorry, I think your analysis of the cause of the power disparity is wrong. It's not due to numbers.
It's because power disparity is inherent in hierarchical organizations. The CEO is just one person, but their position at the apex of the hierarchy gives them power over everyone else in the organization. Power disparity is baked into the hierarchy—it's not a hierarchy without it.
Unions are a way to balance the power of the employee group against the management hierarchy. Unfortunately unions are also subject to the corruption that accompanies power.
Some…yeah, where some is the 1.7 million cubic yards of rubble now clogging up the Thermalito Diversion Pool. [1]
When you look at photos or drone videos of the erosion near the main spillway, it's clear that an immense amount of rock has been eroded away (the color changes from brown to gray). [2]
Juan Browne discusses the type and strength of the rock in one of his excellent videos about the Oroville crisis. [3] (Note that he demonstrates the weakness of the rock where he is standing, which is across the river from the spillway and might not be the same rock.)
> Surely there are successful terrorist plots that have succeeded that we are unaware of.
No. Terrorists even take credit for things they had nothing to do with. The goal of a terrorist is to strike fear into the population by committing crimes in the most public way possible. Secrecy of the result doesn't serve this goal. The other reason to publicize is for recruiting purposes.
We certainly know the number of successful plots. Failed plots and fizzles, perhaps not.
Some members recently have put together a distributed soup search project to catalog objects that appear naturally. While the c/10 spaceship wasn't found in the search, a number of interesting things have been discovered. For more information about the catalog effort (named "catagolue" for Game of Life), the object database, and the distributed client, see http://catagolue.appspot.com/home
> With all due respect to Tim Cook and Apple, I work with a team of the best hackers on the planet. These hackers attend Defcon in Las Vegas, and they are legends in their local hacking groups, such as HackMiami. They are all prodigies, with talents that defy normal human comprehension. About 75% are social engineers. The remainder are hardcore coders. I would eat my shoe on the Neil Cavuto show if we could not break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone. This is a pure and simple fact.
[Emphasis added.]
His team will bluff its way into the phone.
(Quoted from McAfee's original op-ed referenced by the original linked article: www.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-ill-decrypt-san-bernardino-phone-for-free-2016-2)
There have been some comments, but I'm not sure I've seen this excellent take on the issue.
From the linked document:
> So what’s the value of getting the vibration mode shapes of this little section of the Hyperloop? Simple: it makes pretty pictures you can put in your proposal.
and
> Nothing in this section of the proposal has “demonstrated the capability of the Hyperloop,” nor was it intended to. This is not simply an error. This is eyewash for the rubes, the surest sign you’re dealing with a snake oil salesman.
And now the winning design from MIT drops the air hockey suspension for conventional magnetic levitation.
> Let me repeat that: the first serious proposal is no faster than a train and can't actually be used for transporting anything. Making it, as a suggestion for high speed transport, completely useless.
Yes, although this can be handwaved away by saying it's not a full-scale model and the test track is too short for higher speeds.
What I find more interesting is that the winning design isn't even true Hyperloop, as the air hockey suspension is replaced by maglev. There's no air intake on the front because magnets are used.
The winning design doesn't validate the Hyperloop concept since it replaces a critical element and becomes just a maglev in a tube with a rail. It wouldn't surprise me if the tube disappeared in the next iteration.