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Harry Chapin’s “What Made America Famous?” got an unsuccessful musical, but never a film. In a modern update, the song’s “hippies” are instead gutter punks squatting an abandoned building, and the fat plumber is the one non-MAGA in the town’s volunteer fire department.

Some people who voted for Trump have repented and joined the movement for democracy in America.

But also, there are serious doubts about the integrity of the 2024 elections and a nontrivial possibility that Trump didn’t win the election.

It has been obvious for many years that the Trump movement aims at the downfall of America, through the promotion and exaggeration of America’s flaws and the increasingly violent suppression of its virtues.

But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

I recommend picking up Graham Hutton’s short text Programming in Haskell, Second Edition. Even if you don’t end up using Haskell in “real work” (and you might!) it will teach you a remarkable number of things about how functional programming works.

The term “open source software” was coined specifically to refer to software licensing that recognizes a particular set of freedoms. It is not a generic term for source-available software, and never was.

One of the freedoms of open source is “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.”

Calling the Hippocratic license family “open source” is inaccurate, since its entire goal is to discriminate against certain fields of endeavor.

It’s better described as a sort of source-available license.

The ruble is worth more than the penny, but it’s way down from 2008 when it was almost a nickel.

Billionaires have always turned on Trump, slightly more than underage girls.

If I recall correctly, Burke expected the French Revolution to eat itself and turn tyrannical … which, y’know, it did. He was right about that.

Reagan wasn’t good on HIV-AIDS.
George H. W. Bush wasn’t either.
But George W. Bush was.

PEPFAR was Baby Bush’s baby.

I don’t think the passage you quoted was intended to say that Reagan was good on HIV-AIDS, but rather that America ended up being good on HIV-AIDS.

This looks like a blog post. Do you have a news source for it?

The conspiracy theory was that child-molesters ran the government. To fix it, they elected child-molesters to run the government.

The Social Security Agency is abbreviated “SSA”, not “SS”.

While we’re at it, the Secret Service is abbreviated “USSS”; also not “SS”.

There are no federal elections. There are state elections for Congress and for presidential electors.

In other words, the new technologies (like insect farming or mycoprotein harvesting) have not caught up with the old ones (like composting or feeding food scraps to a pig or goat).

As long as the US military remains capable of projecting force abroad in defense of America’s traditional allies, the US military will be the enemy of the Trump administration.

Hurting LGBT people is fun for the Trumpies, but their overall goal is to wind down America as a world power; and specifically to hand the children of Europe over to Putin’s rape gangs.

To be clear, Putin won’t get far unless France falls to fascism first, because France has nukes and will remember how to use them for things other than offending Kiwis.

Well someone’s a scrub there …