peace4all

But how do you press "shift+home" or "shift+pg up" to select a line or page? I tried this on Asus laptop 10 years ago, and IIRC it didn't work.

Another combo I use sometimes is "ctrl+shift+home/end" to select the text from cursor position to the very beginning/end.

I like it being low-profile. That's why I didn't buy ErgoDox.

So all the best wishes to the author.

But there are some tradeoffs why I probably not buy it.

1) I'd suggest a column of home/page up/page down/end (top to bottom in this order) on the right side, like some laptop makers do. They're very convenient. That's absolutely necessary for text editing or navigating in various windows. (Sure one can use combos, but then you must stick to the keyboard all the time.) Del/backspace probably also should be different keys.

2) Missing menu key also requires you to take mouse sometimes. Laptops can get away with touchpad. But with the minimal keyboard, that requires user to hold it more and use combos, you must leave the keyboard and take a mouse to open a context menu.

A general philosophical question (not a negative comment to this particular keyboard): do we really still need key rows to be shifted 1/4 of width, because keys needed arms underneath in the late 19th century?

It probably meant that the railway was for kids as passengers.

But also, in Russian language, "child" doesn't imply someone younger than teenager, it does include adolescents too. There is a distinct term for "adolescent", but no distinct term for English "kid" or "toddler" except for some regional variants.

Hence, "childrens' railway" is the most broad term for it. Also, naming it "adolescents' railway" sounded more complex in Russian, a bit awkward, and would make visitors wonder: "do they allow little kids to ride?"

Regarding running the railway, there are very strict limitations what adolescents can do and what they can't do. IIRC, they can't control the fuelling of the vehicle, and some other arbitrary operations. Probably, they can't drive the engine, but just sit next to an adult driver.

Respect for the link to John T. Gatto, he was a great thinker, I even translated one of his essays from a link posted here a decade ago.

It does. It's bought by the Russian Mail.ru group.

In 2016, I went to an interview in their office, and the interviewer made me an excursion around it. At one place I saw big ICQ logo with sign reading "ICQ Project Department".

- Wow, it still hasn't died?!

- Shhhhh! Don't say this so loud, the guys get very offended! - said the interviewer.

The office itself was spacious, with free snacks and drinks, including free fresh juice -- I remember a perfect set of 4 people sitting together, some holding those free juices -- a guy and a girl sitting on small either couchettes or stools, and two more sitting next to them a bit higher on the window, and together looking like sat down to make promotion pictures for some sort of bar. I joked that this was staged just for me.

Then, there was a nice sightseeing place: an imposing rotating armchair next to panoramic glass, to make photos with Moscow in the backdrop. When you enter or exit the office, you walk along a tennis-field-size playground, with people playing, surrounded by a net to catch stray balls. The interviewer joked that of course all this play was also staged just for the interview.

Regarding ICQ, I guess, the project is kept by the corporation for nostalgic reasons -- it was the default messenger in exUSSR in the 90s and 00s.

Maybe he was just sarcastic?

It’s a no brainer that a person cannot be equally oriented both in linguistics and in geology. ... So it would be quite possible to declare an amnesty to the Professor at this place: they say, an offense undoubtedly took place, but it does not pose a particular public danger.

no, just my mistake, corrected, ty

True for complex systems, but West Roman empire didn't "collapse" instantaneously, nor within a year/decade.

If I remember correctly what I read on it, the actual date is arbitrarily taken for didactic clarity, and it's the date the capital moved to another city. But the kingdom still called itself Roman, so contemporaries didn't quite notice the difference. BTW, this is how modern Romania got its name -- smaller kingdoms in the former empire called themselves the glorious Rome.

The curious detail is that Barbarian leaders actually wanted to become king of Rome and to be acknowledged as equally civilized, rather than merely sack and loot it. Some of them were actually legioneers, if I remember it correctly. So it's not clear if a legioneer sacked Rome and set himself as king, was the new state still Roman or already not.

He probably means what the osm2pgsql import tool creates.

I wonder how come gas stove, an artifact of the 20th century, became a "traditional" thing?

The way people cook on gas stove is just one of many ways it can be, and I'm sure in year 1900, cooking on coal was rather different, and gas must have been an improvement, but also met with skepticism, and probably laments about the lack of charcoal smell or taste.

Gas isn't a tradition written in stone. It has serious issues like hot surfaces and higher chances of burning your skin, scurf on the pans, benzopyrene in the air, and risk of suffocation, heating of the indoor air, etc. Personally, I switched to induction for all these reasons.

It looks like the only downside to induction is that some users need walls hot (I don't) and need cooking to continue if they raise the pan up. I think this is doable with different forms of the oven, and with thicker iron pans: iron absorbs EM waves, it conducts heat well, and it will add thermal inertia. These pans will be heavier, but IMO that's a small price for all the benefits of induction.

Back in 2007-2008 I, an economics graduate, was snubbed by developers, even though I showed a working prototype and examples of works since 1998!

DB developers also snubbed, even though I asked to show a working database app made at analyst position.

I showed a hand-made website with Javascript and PHP backend, and they snubbed that I didn't use frameworks.

Finally, in 2009 I got a web dev position with humiliating remarks. Only at the next company, a small web studio, the chief dev said "great, because if you did it by hand, it means you know the internal gears better than the framework guys", hired me and taught me some frameworks, which I learned quickly.

I understand that people are afraid they'd have to babysit the new developer, but I showed them lots of things, and it still didn't matter. Maybe they were afraid I'd leave their shitty job, IDK.

So, some standard framework used in the industry is a must. Plus, if a company is bigger than 20 people, snobs start running the hiring process.

Nowadays, well, if you want to slightly change the field of work, you're given a huge task to build a whole app, and then are nitpicked at insufficient comments, not clear code, not making useless classes, not using useless async, and so on. Nobody looks at your github project where you have those features. I guess, a single child-less guy could do this in 3 nights on RedBull, but I don't think I could. I'm quite discouraged.

Did I talk about forced labor in this comment above? I said: in later times, such clashes with bureacracy made people lose their entire career.

They weren't necessary sent to work camps. Some were just fired and couldn't get hired. Later, in 1950's & 60's, you would be effectively banned from career. Sometimes librarians would paint black their name if they were in references section. Since 1960's victims of these political battles could go to other institutions, probably at less important position.

This practice continued all the way till the collapse of the USSR, I heard of such stories in Moscow universities, and in the Academy of Science.