I remember using the CP/M card mostly for WordStar, but also for Turbo Pascal (after wasting a lot of time on Apple Pascal).

This is funny -- my class project in Semantics of Programming Languages in '88 at Univeristy of Illinois was essentially "Forth in Lisp".

I was just thinking of a project.

I don't know Forth or Lisp very well, so instead of bootstrapping one or the other, I could make a Forth that could compile the Lisp and a Lisp that could compile the Forth

I'm curious why you would divide by .75 there (?)

9 months a year of employment, which is a gross oversimplification of how many weeks/yr a teacher is working.

It was a proxy for the fact most teachers have summers off, so are only working 3/4ths the year...

Public sector salary pre-tax income is usually only 66-75 percent of total comp after adjusting for health insurance and pensions.

I think there's a distinction between accruing and applying generic skills in a particular discipline and using intellectual property from one employer to benefit another. If you have agreed to protect the trade secrets of your (former) employer, you need to exercise your professional judgement to draw the line between contributions that stem from your experience in the field and those that are informed by work that you or others did for hire at your former employer.

Within that framework, plenty of things are clearly out of bounds, like copied source code. I would argue that re-implementing chunks of code that you know to be economically valuable and unique to your former employer from memory is just as problematic.

Now, by out of bounds, I mean breach of a civil contract. I don't see the criminal aspect.

Basically, there's no need to erase your memory, you just need to distinguish exchanging your time for money from exchanging your former employer's IP for money.

I've been working for a number of years on a product of similar nature.

If I switched companies to make a new system from scratch, it would take me a non-trivial amount of time to replicate a full system, and I probably wouldn't do it the same way. Even if I did it the same way, it would be hard work. During years of work one encounters many little problems, glitches, and even random ideas that don't come to mind so easily.

Obviously the previous experience helps a lot but having your old code basically bootstraps you. And the reason that coders in this sector are paid well, is that obviously the expertise is worth more than the code itself looking into the future. But still, if you do something really stupid like giving them an excuse to lock you up when you're going to a competitor, then you're screwed. I'm pretty sure Aleynikov would agree with me that he fucked up massively by taking his code home. If not, then he'd be out of touch with reality. The very thought of trying to do what he did makes me anxious. Big corporations are powerful and can fuck your life up.

When I first saw the Siri Query, I was anticipating it would try to disambiguate A) remind me (to inflate my tires tomorrow) (at 9:00) vs. B) remind me (to inflate...) (tomorrow at 9:00). I guess I was overthinking it.

> The demand (and hence average salary) in SF for programmers would go way down

I think you mean the supply would go way up, and thus the market-clearing salary for new hires would go way down.

Also (all other things being equal) the number of programmers employed would go up as the equilibrium shifts to a lower-wage, higher-number-employed point on the demand curve.

yes you are right. Thanks for the correction. fixed in the original.

Isn't this just the wireless carriers getting their way?

I'm of two minds re: jwz's comments on the modifier key handling: (1) Yes! Absolutely! iSSH would be so much better if I could control my emacs with it (2) Why? that's not what it's for.