Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | monocasa's commentslogin

I don't think chiplets require or even are even generally seen with silicon backplanes yet, otherwise you'd be leaving out stuff like AMD's CPUs.

And from there, stuff like the Vac 9000's packaging were very advanced for the time designs that I'd hesitate to call PCBs unless we're calling all organic packaging PCBs now.


Humphrey Davy, the British chemist who performed early work to isolate the element, and who initially named it, called it 'aluminum'. Americans mostly followed him, but the British changed later at the complaints of the French, Swedish, and Germans that it used essentially English roots rather than Latin ones. Which, considering that we now have elements named such things as Tennessine, seems to be a bit of an argument that doesn't quite apply anymore.

The suffix "-io-", which becomes "-ium" in accusative/nominative neuter Latin nouns, is extremely ancient. It is inherited from the common Indo-European language.

This suffix is used to derive nouns or adjectives from other nouns, where the derived nouns are understood to have some kind of relationship with the base nouns.

A great number of the names of chemical elements use the Latin variant of this suffix, i.e. "-ium", to derive the name of the element either from the name of the substance from which it has been extracted, or from the name of some characteristic property of the element or from some mythological name or from some person or place that is intended to be honored by this choice.

The name of aluminium comes from the name of the aluminium sulfate in Latin, which was "alumin-".

So "aluminium" means "something that is not aluminium sulfate, but it is related to aluminium sulfate".

On the other hand, "aluminum", which lacks the derivation suffix, just means "aluminium sulfate" (which has become "alum" in English), but the noun has been converted from the 3rd Latin declension to the 2nd Latin declension. Such conversion between declensions were not unusual even for native Latin speakers.

So this is definitely a grammar mistake, which is annoying for those who understand the meaning of words, because it creates an exception that must be remembered, instead of applying the general rule.

In general the British and American scientists have always been much more lax in observing grammar rules than the continental Europeans. So there are also other chemical elements where the English names differ from the correct names. For instance the name of the chemical element "silicium" is derived from Latin "silic-" (flint), from which it is extracted, but in English it has been changed to "silicon", for the silly reason to make it rhyme with "carbon", despite the fact that most chemical properties of silicon resemble more those of boron or of phosphorus or of germanium, than those of carbon (because valence is only 1 of the 3 main properties that determine chemical behavior, electronegativity and ionic/atomic size are equally important). (Carbon is one of the few elements that were known in pure form already in the Ancient World, so its name is not derived from another noun.) ("Boron" has also been changed in English to make it rhyme with "carbon", which is equally baseless.)


Except Davy said he named it after platinum, except with an alum- prefix instead of the silver plat- prefix, as it was to be considered a new precious metal out of what had previously just been considered impurities like platinum relatively contemporaneously had.

To be fair, those sensitive secrets included secret, unconstitutional, dragnet surveillance programs targeting american citizens, and the fact that the director of national intelligence had perjured himself during congressional hearings on those programs.

Less than 1% of what Snowden took and leaked pertained to domestic surveillance programs, The rest was intelligence capabilities and sources and methods.

But that's besides the point. There is a real argument that the U.S. government, in trying to catch Snowden, was protecting national security. There is no such argument with Trump.


> was protecting national security

No, it was retribution. The info was already out there when they were going after him. Even if he stayed in the US and was captured, it still wouldn't have "stopped" anything.


> The info was already out there when they were going after him.

This was of course not known at the time. The only thing that was known is that a single individual was responsible for the greatest breach of classified secrets in the nation's history, and that individual was still at large.

> was protecting national security

So yes, it was.


The federal government was found violating the constitution, and yet he's the bad guy.

Nonsense.


> The federal government was found violating the constitution

This was of course not known at the time.


Sure, but it took multi court cases and years to prove that "legally".

If Snowden hasn't moved quickly, he wouldn't have been able to leak any of it.

What he did, grab it all, then give it to reputable journalists, was the correct option to be able to inform the public of massive intelligence dragnets targeting civilians that the government was lying about.


Dave Airlie is saying that the subsystem maintainers are themselves choosing to move to Rust.

But what about this statement that Linus wrote:

> That's been made clear pretty much from the very beginning, that nobody is forced to suddenly have to learn a new language, and that people who want to work purely on the C side can very much continue to do so.

If any C developer developed drivers in C previously for the DRM subsystem, they might in the future be forced to learn Rust.


You're confusing the audience here. That's directed at subsystem maintainers, not just 'anyone who wants to submit a patch'. If a subsystem doesn't want to deal with Rust code, they won't be forced to. But there's no restriction on the inverse.

I don't believe that I am. Especially given the other arguments and claims in the email.

I'm not seeing any claims in the email which counter my interpretation.

Nothing is happening “suddenly”, and it remains true that “people who want to work purely on the C side can very much continue to do so”.

But, is this true or false?

> If any C developer developed drivers in C previously for the DRM subsystem, they might in the future be forced to learn Rust.


Whether that's true or false depends on what your hypothetical developer wants to do in the future. When an all-new driver is written in Rust, then working on that driver will require knowing Rust. But nobody's talking about trying to re-write all the existing drivers in Rust, so there will still be plenty of C code to work on even in the DRM subsystem.

> When an all-new driver is written in Rust, then working on that driver will require knowing Rust.

But that is not what the claim is about, it is about any new driver, not a specific one.


I think this is true. But that'd be nonetheless up to the subsystem maintainers.

That means that, even if a C developer used or added C bindings to DRM when wanting to write a new driver, they would be forced to write their new driver in Rust regardless. That seems to run counter to the promises made by Linus.

Also, in a lot of states you don't get IDed for alcohol after about age 35.

It's a sad reminder that I look as old as I am.

> Evidently the payment backends can tell credit and debit apart.

Yeah those are parallel systems for reasons that amount to technical debt.


You don't even need that. The IRS will give you a TIN to pay taxes with if you don't have an SSN.

And yet ICE can't be bothered to reach even that low bar.

To be completely fair, neither of us is even a magistrate.

> many of the peoples who once inhabited those lands have long since been replaced

That is overstated. "Arab" in a lot of cases is more a cultural moniker than a genetic one. For instance the Palestinians are some of the genetically closest modern populations to the ancient Canaanite remains we've studied.


True, I didn't phrase that perfectly. It is my opinion that climate change poses an even greater threat to the Middle East. It's reaching a point where states and groups can no longer sustain the massive resources required to fuel large-scale warfare like they used to. Therefore, what I am really getting at is that the sheer intensity of competition in East Asia—particularly those existential social upheavals—is the true catalyst for what we call a 'cooperative' culture.

This is unsurprising. Wholesale genetic replacement basically doesn't exist unless there's a huge plague that kills 90% of the population or something (this happened in the Americas when the Europeans arrived, there are other cases of it in history but it's plenty rare). From an ancestry perspective, populations tend to be derived from the people that were there thousands of years prior; cultures and even elites can spread and migrate and cause huge material changes, but the bulk of the people just stay put.

You should be able to write a meta circular VM in JavaScript that targets bare metal without any C or asm.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: