They would have had a working compiler by now if only they had taken my advice and gotten an ALGOL 60 compiler to work first, rather than skipping a generation!
Hi @cm0002! Out of curiosity, it has been stated by @lengau that you posted this here because Ubuntu's switch to uutils has motivated you to pay more attention to other projects that the FSF is working on. Is this true, or was this just a projection?
(Just to be clear, I don't mind if this is your motivation, since you supply so much of the content here so I am not going to complain, and it is fun to hear about projects I was unaware of anyway! I just don't like seeing people project their own biases onto others.)
It would not be giving D.C. too much power because ultimately Congress governs D.C., not the local government which exists entirely at Congress's pleasure, so this would at least give D.C. some influence over its own government rather than none, which is what it currently has.
Using plainer language, it is really just a fancy way of saying that there is an ultimate cause-like thing in the sense that clearly forms exist, rather than nothing existing, so we may as well name it "the source" because that is more descriptive than more flowery names like Brahman or Tao. (Also, the term God is misleading because usually people associate it with a particular form, but the source cannot have a form because then there would be need to be a cause for that form!)
This might seem like abstract philosophy, but believe it or not it is actually directly relevant to you personally! You already know all of this intuitively because you are aware of the fact that you are aware, which means that you are directly aware of the existence of the source—in fact, in a way, you are already in union with the source of reality, because the whole point of the source is to make things exist rather than not existing, and at the core of your experience you are something that exists.
The reason why you might not appreciate this is because you (like me, and most other people) probably spend most of your time focused outward on the objects in your awareness, rather than on your awareness itself. However, it turns out that there is a lot of happiness and wisdom that can be gained by spending time practicing being consciously aware of the feeling of being aware; at the very least, I think it is really exciting to play with trying to connect more with the ultimate reality at the core of my being to gain intuition about the nature of reality! 😀 As a caveat, though: it's actually surprisingly tricky because it is hard to consciously change your focus to the feeling of being aware of being aware, so if you want to play with this then you need to be relaxed and watchful to create the conditions under which this can happen spontaneously.
My interpretation of the comic is that he had not done these things until after she had yelled at him, making him realize that the situation was really bad and he needed to take it over from her. Arguably he should have come to this realization sooner, but we all occasionally fail to see what is in front of us time to time, so I am willing to cut him slack given that he immediately jumped in without being asked once it became clear he was needed.
Your animosity is perplexing given that the article agrees with you; it even ends with:
Anyway, these are good moves, and I’m glad most prominent Linux distributions are not married to decisions made in the ’70s, especially not when they can be undone without users really noticing anything.
In civilized languages tail recursion takes care of this for you. 😁