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Eulogy to _why
Unfortunately I’m short on time at the moment (trying to launch a project this week) but I have to say, at least, a few words about the hacker and artist _why .
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Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file
I got my FBI file today. ( Request yours! ) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful. It has only minor redactions for reasons of personal privacy (basically, they deleted agents’ names and so on). It all started when the—actually, I’ll let the file tell the story:
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Greybeard Stories: The Jamming Gyro
This is a story about how it's essential that you think of all the possible failure modes when you install a fix. Just because you've fixed the problem, that doesn't mean you haven't introduced a new one.
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Noam Chomsky: Education is Ignorance (1995)
The Noam Chomsky Website.
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Bill Gates sums up Microsoft's abusive history
The latest news about Opera web browsers, tech trends, internet tips.
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Yegge, Clojure, and Arc
This post was discussed thoroughly on Hacker News . Even Mr. Graham was kind enough to comment – though not in the affirmative. There was moderate discussion on Reddit as well.
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Imminent Death of the Net Predicted due to RCF3484
Warning: the following is excessively technical, and is intended more for the sake of the next poor sod who types "vista dns round robin resolution" into Google than it is for my actual friends list. (Except for a few of you. And you know who you are.) Also, since I want this to be searchable on…
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Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier
In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.
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The Capacitor Plague
I woke up from a nap to a loud pop and a smell of burning plastic. The source turned out to be one of the most precious and important to me digital devices: a ReadyNAS NV+, a small silver box with over a terabyte of hard drives that store my backups, music, and photos. Network attached storage (NAS) is an engineering…
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Greybeard Stories: The Black Team
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
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Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VI: Every World War II Movie was Wrong
This is Part VI of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. ——̵…
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Dmitry Medvedev declares official holiday in Russia: Programmer's Day
Russia's President Medvedev has decreed a new holiday for the country: Президент России Дмитрий Медведев своим указом установил профессиона...
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The story of Mel (1983)
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing
When I started writing The Geek Atlas there was one name that was getting in the book no matter what: Alan Turing . Alan Turing matters on ...
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How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball
Will…You…Play…Black Knight Again?? There is a reason I live in Winnetka and not in Evanston. And it’s not because, as Sandeep would put it, I like to get up 30 minutes earl…
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The C Programming Language: 4.10 (HP Lovecraft version)
C functions may be used recursively; that is, a function may call itself either directly or indirectly. Uninquiring souls may take this as just another peculiarity of those C folk, of whose ways their neighbours speak little to outsiders but much among themselves.
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