great comment. actually reminds me of how intel screwed up with developing the first 64 bit processor, then amd came along with theirs and managed to force intel into compatibility. All these big companies think they're too big to fail until they do. at the end of the day the consumers hold the purchasing power. ignore them at your peril.

> An Tróid leis na 'Cráidmí' = The war with the Craidmi

The battle/fight with the Craidmi. troid is singular whereas war is plural.

neat. not something i´d hanker for. i saw a 16 core z80 laptop years ago and i often think about it because it can multitask. https://hackaday.com/2019/12/10/laptop-like-its-1979-with-a-...

I implemented "multitasking" (well, two-tasking) between a BASIC program and native code on a Z80, using a "supervisor" driven by hardware interrupts. There's just so much you can pack in a 4MHz CPU with a 4-bit ALU (yes, not 8-bit). It worked for soft-realtime tasks, but would be a rather weak desktop.

The follow on to CPM which ran on the Z80 is MPM which is a multitasking OS.

software is a bad example since all the coding is done in english. the translation tools are inexpensive nowadays. bilingual persons have lower rates of dementia so it's not even sure that standardising on one language would be a net benefit. also it's universally accepted that english is one of the more difficult languages to learn. If there was a revival of the movement for a single language then english wouldn't be picked by non native english speakers.

Esperanto for all! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

How much easier is it to learn Esperanto than some broken form of simplified English that gets the message across and then also enables you to speak the native language of 26% of the world GDP?

If my concern is % of GDP I'd rather learn Mandarin.

I tried to learn Mandarin and it's really hard! That's coming from someone who is able to say Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz without a problem.

I feel the perceived difficulty varies from person to person. Personally I found Mandarin much easier to pick up than German or Spanish, since you don't have to worry about conjugation.

many of the older analog low impedance multimeters drew so much current that they affected the circuits they were trying to test, requiring a high impedance digital multimeter instead. it's a similar problem, and i'm sure the physicist was aware of it, but didn't like to admit it.

could you cut russias undersea cables in a tit for tat?

there are physical laws that cannot be broken, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. therefore attempting to restrain a higher power only ends in self restraint. have you considered that the best approach is to go on strike, depriving the higher power of something of yours, whether that be labour, or progeny.

actually there was a chinese serial killer that used a technique like this. He had a septic tank and threw his victims in along with the dead bodies of his previous victims and would only let them out if they brought more victims from a train station. article is partially paywalled but is the case in question. https://archive.is/QxBDr https://medium.com/crimes-by-mr-o/this-teacher-was-thrown-in...

the school to prison pipeline is talked about a lot.

or that the leaders of our society have consistently elected to increase the birthrate in the hope that attrition will prop up the status quo rather than making a social contract with their populace to achieve what they mutually want from life.