Post #2728700
2026-05-10 10:20 UTC
Replies (2)
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@Spoon@aus.social 2026-05-10 10:30
@MsDropbear42@blahaj.zone @kauer@aus.social I was in first year Uni, bored with my courses and looking around for something to do. We booked time on the vacuum tube computer and wrote a program in Fortran that was supposed to list prime numbers, pull them apart and look for relationships with other primes. I made a mistake in memory allocation - it had 32 Kb of memory (yes that's right Kb). We left the program running and came back in the morning. It had printed about a thousand pages with the one message on each line. 'Logical bucket number out of reach' I've forgotten what the term 'bucket number' means. So it goes.
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@Spoon@aus.social 2026-05-10 23:37
@MsDropbear42@blahaj.zone @kauer@aus.social @maudenificent@aus.social I heard that sigh. I'm also interested how the discussion has been hijacked to focus on values rather than, dare I say the word, ethics or even morals. We all know where it would lead if we were to look at what Australian values really are. The white Australia policy was not invented by Arthur Caldwell, it was a reflection of the values of his constituency and I use 'values' advisedly because many, including Artie himself, would not have known an ethic if they had fallen over one. This country was established on the basis of denying the existence of an entire population and then proceeding to kill them, enslave them or both. None of this has been a positive contributor to social cohesion and we live, every day, with the legacy of this ongoing shame. Events in Alice Springs are not happening in isolation and are directly attributable to the social, cultural and human degradation of an entire population - not just the despicable actions of one person who has spent most of his life in jail. This point is never made in public. I sigh, in chorus, with you.