Such folk (medical degrees; phd's) are notoriously hard to pin down and finish a product. Been part of more than one; after years of unfocussed effort they failed to deliver.
They seemed agile and capable. But not a lot of interaction with humans. Not sure they perceived their environment beyond simple gymnastics. So what use?
Agreed. While marvelous to watch, there's a big difference between "look at what I can do" and "let's move through the world together". I think it's just a matter of trust. I have no problem watching these perform in a public park or whatever, and admiring the awesome feat of engineering before me... I just don't want the damn things in my house, around my kids.
Maybe it's more complicated than that? With allocate/delete discipline, C can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C). But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for. By that point of view, we reverse the conclusion.
>can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C)
We are currently in a thread, where a major application has a heap corruption error in its CSS parser, and it's not even rare for such errors to occur. This doesn't seem true.
>But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for.
Last year there was a backdoor inserted into xz that was only caught because someone thought their CPU usage a little too high. I don't think the whole "C is safer because people don't use dependencies" is actually sound.
Yet so many language features that 'help' with this issue, end up not helping. Null pointers are endemic in Java, as well as leaks. Heap fragmentation becomes difficult to address when the language hides it under layers of helpful abstraction.
In the end, discipline of some kind is needed. C is no different.
In Iowa, most farmland is owned by folks 55+. A third in their eighties. Half women (widows by and large).
The land, if it's farmed at all, is by a younger tenant farmer who pays cash rent.
A huge intergenerational transfer is imminent. What the grandkids will do with eighty acres in Iowa is anybody's guess.
Sell for cheap to big corporate farming conglomerates. At least until the market is so saturated that even the conglomerates have no use for more.
Meanwhile, a few here and there will be snatched up by people from coastal cities who have made enough to FIRE and have romanticized farming. They won’t grow significant crops but will raise a few chickens and goats and a garden full of cabbages and peppers.
If you had the right background and resources, you could probably make a killing buying up 80 acres for a pittance, carving it up into 5- or 10-acre plots with modern amenities (upgraded plumbing; solar; excellent internet) and pre-built facilities for small numbers of farm animals, and selling them off to that market with the value-add of instant community.
Carving up farmland into home plots is easier said than done. Most fields have zero infrastructure, so you need to drill wells, run power lines, streets and/or ROW for driveways. Internet access is pretty easy as you get get a fiber line run. You'll need to work with the local town and county for permits and be sure that they can handle the additional services such as road maintenance, plowing, trash pickup, etc.
It could be done, but it is not just re-drawing some parcel lines and calling a realtor. Even once you get it done, you now need to build somewhat expensive homes to recover your costs, and the FIRE folks will then probably buy that century farmhouse down the street and re-parcel the connected field to keep a few acres for themselves and sell the rest to the neighbor, as they can almost get a house in the country for free if they do so.
Also you often cant build without owning a minimum of land, like 40 acres. A rule to stop the urbanization of farms. That could change, but for now you'd have to get the zoning board to make an exemption.
Where I live, it's not the conglomerates buying up farmland but developers. This put a huge strain on infrastructure and also exploded the price of land, so much so the county finally outright banned it.
Not sure the dynamics of Iowa of course, so it could be different...but I do not live in a particular big or interesting area, either.
80 acres sounds big to people who don't live in the country, but is fairly small potatoes when it come to agricultural land. Such parcels will get consolidated into nearby large operations/corporations. Sometimes that is a corporate farmer, sometimes a local family or two just hoovers up land as it becomes available. But there is no guessing needed - land ownership will consolidate.
Yeah, even 30 years ago I had farmers around me closing down because their about 400 acres wasn't enough to make any useful amount of money on. Under 100 isnt enough for any sort of row crops to even pay for tractor and impliment maintence.
You would need super specialize production of lower volume products. Flowers, maybe rarer berries, otherwise you just have a large garden that lets you sell some corn and pumpkins on a road stand to offset some fertilizer costs.
Twenty grandchildren are splitting whatever the grandparents had left. But that didn't occur to lots of people, who are unfamiliar with such events as land-inheritance.
Around me, cranberries are another crop where large farms will own thousands of acres. And there are some large dairies that grow the food for their herds as well as give them grazing space. There are no lack of commodity farmers in my state, but you are right that I appreciate those who grow food more.
Everyone in my mom's family agreed the farms should be inherited by one cousin so that he could make a go of keeping family farming going. Mom and hardly any of the cousins even lived in state anymore. They didn't get an inheritance but their parents wanted to keep the family farms in the family and this was what they came up with.
My male ancestors died of cancer in their 70's and 80's but my great grandmothers lived to 93, 103, 99, and died in childbirth. I actually remember meeting my great great grandmother when I was 8 or 9 and she was 102.
So true. Folks used pots for tens of thousands of years, and used them mostly like disposable dinnerware. They broke, daily, and got tossed out the window. A settlement of a dozen roundhouses might have a million sherds, depending on how long it persisted.
I just lost my Mom, at 97. We would go to lunch on Tuesday and then grocery shopping. She'd talk of the family and where they all were and what they were doing - it was MY day to catch up.
The last Tuesday we got back and she said "That was too hard. I think that was the last one." I agreed, and thought I'd call her next tuesday just the same and see if she'd changed her mind. But there was no 'next tuesday'.
Anyway, life is a gift and I miss her and Tuesday doesn't come but I feel the gap.
After my mother passed, I found an old essay talking about when her father (my grandfather) passed. She wrote that the last time we saw him, he seemed to know something was up, and then died that night.
My other grandfather figured it out after a blood test determined that he only had a few days left. His kids (including my dad) weren't going to tell him. He was 102 and otherwise healthy. Then, he wheeled himself across the nursing home into the meeting with the social worker, and announced the funeral home, church, and cemetery that his arrangements were with. He had such a big smile too. He "won" and couldn't ask for anything more.
Beautiful really. I feel you, there is something about hearing stories from those close to you that hit 100x harder. I have cousins who keep these memories alive by digging into our far past family trees and document it for the rest of us.
The penalty for legal concealed carry is not death.
Victim blaming may be practical, but it's a measure of the depths the government agents have come to, that we are in fear of our lives from them and stepping out of line might be a death sentence.
I showed up at Convergent just out of school, and the AWS was the newest release. We went on to develop the NGEN, the GWS, the Megaframe before I moved on to other pastures.
Those were pretty incredible machines. You were early for Sun’s slogan “the network is the computer”. I’ve seen the B-21 (or was it the 25?) at Unisys well after it was discontinued. It sold relatively well with financial institutions.
We need more articles on how they worked and reports on how they were used.
It’s a shame business-oriented machines tended to be scrapped and recycled more responsibly than home computers. I’d love to have one of these to play with.
I actually had a cabinet full of them. Sent them off to the guy in the OP, and he was glad to see them! Somebody got some fun out of them anyway. And I got some of the files off of the old defunct disk drive. He's a nice guy that way.
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