Envisioning an update to https://xkcd.com/221/

SoftICE was like magic back in the day.

Still thinking about those three black olive slices?

I work with hospital IT people at customer sites. Can confirm that the positions seem to require neither extensive knowledge nor effort.

> set up by someone who at least half knows what they're doing.

Finding someone like that is hard for many churches.

Moby-Dick really is a great book. If you want a dolphin-sized taste of Melville, try Billy Budd.

For a salmon-sized taste, Bartleby the Scrivener. Great annotated version here: https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/10/herma...

Both Billy Bud and Bartleby are very focused on the human drama. If you are more interested in the sea rather, I'd suggest Typee and its follow up Omoo.

Wait? That was the moby dick guy?! Loved that Bartley story.

This is one heck of a hook:

> I was one social notch above children who were so pitiable it would be rude to mock them.

He's just like me, for real

Coleman won the 'Slants' case at SCOTUS, so he's the real thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matal_v._Tam

https://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/legal-publications-ron...

Arguing a case in front of SCOTUS still means something today?

It still is but current SCOTUS of US has lost a lot of credibility in essentially making Presidents 4 to 8 year kings who can't be sued or charged with a crime. There are other things like the newer judges lying while under oath that they weren't joining up to end decisions on civil rights and ending abortion as a basic right.

As a layman, I thought that was a bit of a prestige deal. Is it not?

Some would say it has lately become a bit of a kangaroo court.

Put enough money into the right-wing hands and anything is possible

From the page: The EPSON MX-80 printer was a commercially successful product in the early 1980s.

That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.

Something that I forgot to add was that with early TRS-80's and PC's the computer was "frozen" while it sent the job to the printer.

Most entry-level printers didn't have enough internal memory for more than a few pages.

Which was fine for everybody that only printed a page or two, but for those who needed printouts of dozens of pages this would take a long time because the printer had such little memory.

So eventually the external print buffers appeared which connected between the PC and the printer so you could go back to DOS without waiting while the printer sat there chewing through fanfold paper.

> That's quite the understatement - they were everywhere.

"I doubt we'll ever bomb Japan as long as they make Epson printers" —Woz, 1983 <https://books.google.com/books?id=4S8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA19>

The quality of the docs doesn't matter if the customer won't read them: "We'll set up a Teams meeting and you can tell us what to do"