spauldo

Nuns were the original empowered women, you know. That was one thing the church offered for hundreds of years: if you don't want to be what society tells you have to be, you could always join the church and be a priest/monk/nun instead.

But yeah, I get what you're saying. I don't have any explanation for you, other than he/she was what I was taught in the 80s in Oklahoma public schools.

It's not a waste of time if you enjoy debating about it!

I think he/she will become outdated soon, if it's not already. I don't think anyone really anticipated there'd be a global debate about gender identity. Regardless of how anyone feels about that particular topic, it's not going to go away. Either everyone naturally shifts to the more inclusive "they" or people will continue to clamor for it.

Matt Levine's not alone in his use of "she/her" - it's actually fairly popular in modern technical writing, I've found.

Ack, don't give him ideas!

Except that the Public Health Service doesn't have torpedoes :)

I dunno, I just can't see it that way. Starfleet has been involved in way too much combat to not be a military. But then again, I don't really remember seeing a Federation equivalent of marines, which a real navy would have...

You'd think that, but for the last decade there's been a huge push to move all the SCADA software into the cloud. "Run your plant from your phone!"

And that's not even counting the various integrators that just don't implement any kind of security at all.

I fight against this sort of thing all the time. Sometimes I get my way.

I think you're taking the "FTP" part a bit too literally here. No one's suggesting we'd jump in a terminal and type in FTP commands manually or even use the FTP protocol itself - we've got better options today, and we'd have even better options if the Internet had had global node-to-node connectivity all along.

It'd likely just be built into your operating system's tooling. Your file manager would be able to access other machines it can authenticate to, or you'd automount remote directories on login, etc.

The reason people use cloud storage systems for moving files around is because they have to. A 3rd party server is required because we don't have node-to-node connectivity.

Hell, we'd likely have had cloud storage options sooner because people wanting extra remote storage would totally have been a thing.

Yep. That's something we would have had to deal with. I would love to see what solution we would have come up with.

Sadly, we'll never know.

> Never heard of an acre-inch before

I only know of it because it's a unit used by the US Army Corps of Engineers, who maintain the local reservoir. A buddy of mine's dad worked for them when I was a kid so that lake was my stomping ground.

> 2.54 cm

Oops! You're right! My bad.

Possibly. Or maybe you and I did a dramatically different amount of work on our networks. My setup is very much not what should be default for SOHO, for instance.

My point wasn't ever about home users anyway.

Maybe! Although I doubt it. Honestly, if you're really curious about it it's best to ask a local language expert if you have access to a university. I'm just an old computer geek with a higher-than-average interest in the written word.

This might make a good subject for a RobWords video, actually.

Unless someone vibecodes a new OS and convinces everyone to use it, we're stuck with what we got. Reaching feature parity with Linux and then debugging it to the point where it'd be usable is a gargantuan undertaking.

What, you've never seen a moose with a beowulf cluster?

I thought IPv5 was a protocol designed for telecoms to route voice data over packet networks, though? It wasn't supposed to be a replacement for IPv4.

There's still quite a few pockets of the industry where IPv6 just isn't available. Industrial control systems, for instance - there's lots of PLCs and SCADA software that are still IPv4-only. It's changing slowly, but industrial computing runs on thirty year time scales and there's still a lot of stuff out there that won't even run on modern operating systems. We use 32-bit Windows XP VMs or sometimes even FreeDOS for some of the software we use.

Now imagine if you didn't need that icon and Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager you use) could just connect to wherever your file is. Maybe through a "Favorite."