palordrolap

How about, I don’t know, not yanking the cord (or setting things up so the cord is yanked automatically) and pursuing the payment later?

But then that could mean that someone might - even temporarily - get something for nothing, and they can’t be seen to promote anything even remotely similar to that.

Perhaps this tiny company are so close to the knife edge that they can’t afford to allow it to happen. Must have constant revenue stream or else close up sho… wait, Micro-who?

I just imagined a horrible alternative universe where it’s illegal for brand names to become corrupted regardless of whatever else happens to data. Eventually humanity would start communicating only in brand names to ensure messages get through. *shudder*

Why do you think you wanted to run ELIZA on a Timex/Sinclair 2068?

If there was ever a time to replace this Drake format with the Geordi LaForge alternative, this was it.

That’s a thorny question: Do comments need to be in the base standard, or can that be offloaded to those building on it? It doesn’t look like it would be hard to have (comment "foo bar baz") in an expression and have a re-parser throw that out.

Is the complaint that no two groups of people will use the same comment standard if left to their own devices? It’s not like the other data from different sources will always match up. What’s one extra, and fairly easy to handle SNAFU?

That said, yes, I think I’d be more comfortable knowing there was an accepted comment format. The aesthetic seems to be Lisp-like, and I notice that the Lisp comment marker, the semicolon, is currently a reserved character, that is, it’s illegal to use it unquoted. Maybe they’re thinking of adding that at some point.

The video’s suggestion of /dev/null makes that super easy.

What does “lift” mean in this context? A web search turns up a Doris Day musical from 1951 which is kind of funny to think about but I’m guessing is not what you mean.

As for the general case of modifying the Sun - or any star - in some way, it’s all but certain to need a huge number of resources (or amount of energy, or both), and considering the Sun is on the order of a million times larger than Earth, far more than can be obtained from Earth alone.

I mean, I’d like to be proven wrong and there’s some exotic-physics way of causing the helium in the Sun to spontaneously turn back into hydrogen, but if that was easy, you’d expect that we’d see stars do that by themselves occasionally. We don’t, which implies there would still need to be some kind of energy input required to get it started.

Without exotic physics, we’d pretty much need on the order of the energy that the star had output from birth up to that point, and if we had that, we’d be better off using that energy in other ways.

We could get all Earth life off Earth and into a self-sustaining, space-faring habitat with a minuscule fraction of the resources. We might be better off aiming for something like that.

The gravitational collapse of a cloud of mostly hydrogen in the vacuum of space.

And anything falling together under gravity was given that kinetic energy from somewhere* and ultimately it can all be traced back to the Big Bang.

As for where that energy came from, it’s possible we’ll never know. Most organised religions (and no doubt a few disorganised ones) have their theories, of course. You may subscribe to one of these.

* This is the principle most commonly simplified as “what goes up, must come down”

Off the top of my head - handwashing before surgery/delivering a baby reducing patient deaths (though you mention germ theory), plate tectonics, the evolution of species, heliocentricism.

My money’s on Microsoft Frontpage