> that's from over 100 km up through an atmosphere

Could be from atmospheric fly-overs.

This definetly looks like some sort of scam. Like a volume key license being resold against EULA or some such.

> Like a volume key license being resold against EULA or some such.

At least in the EU, this is legal.

Through which means?

I can only provide articles that are in German:

An article about court decision by the EuGH from 2012:

https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/EuGH-Gebrauchte-Softwareliz...

Another court decision from the BGH (the highest German civil court) from 2014 that builds on this EuGH decision:

https://www.heise.de/news/BGH-begruendet-Rechtmaessigkeit-de...

Who's hit with the transaction fees though?

Bonus question is which PCs had IR ports.

Some laptops had them, and came with IR remotes. Some of the marketing was around using those laptops as "media centres", and you could control them from the sofa while it was plugged into a TV.

Yeah, it's really a masterpiece. It's utterly fantastic.

What's the use case? Clearly, you made it with some specific use in mind, at least initially. What was it?

To be more specific (see my general comment), I’ve used the language in two open-source projects: 1) a chromosome conformation reconstruction tool, and 2) a fast neural network generator (back end). Re Project 2: I’m also planning to embed the language into results webpages served from the NN generator website.

This is truly excellent. The grid is completely randomly generated?

Yup! A fairly simple deterministic RNG such that it can be generated both client and server side. This strategy greatly reduces the burden of transmitting all the letters as you scroll around, only needing the subset of found words

Add https://tiledwords.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750789

Amazing! Thanks for reminding me of this one!

Stunnel basically allows you to easily secure existing network protocols.

POP3 over stunnel -> SPOP3.

A practical solution, both for legacy components and for the cases when you don't want to deal with implementing TLS natively.

Ultimately, it's very Unix in spirit. Does one specific thing and is composable with others.

> But it takes a lot of discipline to keep the slop out of the code base.

It is largely a question of working ethics, rather than a matter of discipline per se.