With RAM access being the one big bottleneck of a modern PC, can anyone in the know tell me about those SoCs? How much RAM did they have, and was it faster than external DIMMs?

And the reasoning? As always Terrorists, pedophile, criminals, etc. Guess what: If those guys have not learned yet to make a big detour around official chat apps, they deserve getting caught. My bet is, those people already have their own secured means of communication. Maybe they have their own encrypted app, or they have a forum somewhere in the Darknet, whatever. But the chance that this new law will catch anything worthwhile is practically nil.

You don’t have them yet?

GNU Image Manipulation Program (or Project)

Yes, we had such a guy. The owner wanted to turn that guy into the CEO of the company. We rebelled. Suddenly, he was “no longer available for the job for health reasons”.

A bank tried to sell me a pension fund contract. Luckily, I know my math and found out that it was so bad that I’d call it a scam.

It is the surprising exception to the rule. I never questioned this, but are there any real reasons for mandatory voting in Australia?

I don’t think mandatory voting is a good solution. This is mostly practices in autocratic/dictatorial states, and would have a bad taste to it.

What should be done is to either make voting day a public holiday (with mandatory “half day off” rule for anyone who would still have to work in retail or services), or just move it to a Sunday, like many other countries have done ages ago.

The Mitochondrial Eve.

For the level of “quality” they delivered, they have always been too expensive.

I don’t know much about Taylor Swift, but I assume she is simply too smart to be conservative.

I was just using it. But the behavior/reaction to button presses showed me that a button was obviously connected to the wrong function.

I don’t know how to see a memory bug in an out of order elevator, but I once saw and reported a wiring error of a working elevator. It was an interesting talk at the reception desk, but as I could precisely describe what was wrong and the verifyable consequences, they took me seriously. And sent me a “Thank You” email later ;-)

One key point here is: While you actually can replace a bunch of junior developers with AI in some places, any replaced junior developer will never become a senior developer that cannot be replaced by the AI because he/she is basically experince on two legs.

So, corporations, don’t complain about the lack of experienced, senior personnal because YOU have been the main reason they don’t exist.

Let’s come back to all of this when all those “quantum breakthroughs” manage to compute anything worthwhile that is not a quantum computer benchmark, but solves a real world problem.

Counter-Argument: Each camera in a bedroom can be free entertainment for millions!

Good luck holding a company sitting in China “responsible” for about anything.

I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.

Well, at least there are people who still use Perl.

I remember being forced to learn this in university.

I started CS from the POV of someone with several commercial projects under the belt and at the time being fluent already in five or six different programming languages. But the university where I started had had an issue - they had been way to theoretical (imagine people writing their CS thesis on a mechanical typewriter, and professors telling us that one does not need computer access for mastering CS!). So they had been more or less forced to include at least a bit of real world stuff into their blackboard and paper world. Which resulted in a no-excuse-mandatory beginners course in Turbo Pascal in the first year and Turbo Prolog in the second.

And I was not alone. It was painful. They showed a programming task to be done on the overhead projector, and about 90% of us could have just typed down the answer without thinking and be done with the weekly assignment in five minutes. Nope. Instead, we had to follow (and join) a lengthy, boring, and worthless discussion about the very basics of programming, before we were allowed to work on it. And woe to us if we did not follow the precise path that we had been “taught” in that lesson, even if it was done in a way that no normal programmer would ever implement it.

If they had given us all the assignments for the semester in one go, we would probably had finished them in one afternoon, including documentation and time to spare.

At least with Turbo Prolog we learned something new. First and foremost that there are strong reasons that nobody uses Prolog for serious programming.