to which the bartender replies "ok"

Smalltalk, Haskell, and Lisp

...walk into a bar.

Smalltalk: “Bartender, please send an instance of Martini to me - selector withOlive: set to true.”

Haskell: “I’ll take beer >>= chill, but only if it’s defined for all inputs and returns IO ().”

Lisp: “(drink ’(ale (temperature cold))) .”

The bartender mutters, “Great ... an object, a functor, and a list.”

Then a janitor walks by sweeping the closures that they left.

I lived on the other side of the planet the 1960s when Radio Caroline began transmission so I was deprived of the somewhat 'illicit' fun of listening to it.

Instead I'd come home from school turn on my shortwave radio and witness Radio Moscow and Radio Peking battling it out for the position of which could produce the most outrageous and over-the-top propaganda. It was hilarious, even this naïve school kid wasn't taken in by any of it.

That was at the height of the Cold War (Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.) and especially Radio Moscow could be heard splattered all over the dial—it seemed that no matter where one tuned, it came in at strength 5/9+, its signal was enormous.

I'd love to hear some recording of those broadcasts again and I reckon I'd still be amused (I've not searched but I'd bet there are recording of them in archives somewhere).

Yeah in a couple of years it'll just be Radio Caroline and various small-time pirates on AM. Even the venerable longwave transmitter for Radio 4 is getting shut down in a couple of months sadly.

Can't help feeling this is all a bit short-sighted, it's not like you can do anything else with those bands and if things go sideways it's a reliable way to reach a lot of people without power. Personally if we can't keep our medium and long wave transmitters on economic grounds I think those bands should be opened to unlicensed hobbyists, it'd be an excellent technical and artistic opportunity that would allow for actual broadcasting rather than just two-way communication. I doubt there'd be a huge issue with interference as few people have the room to put up a 150' quarter wave, and if copyrights were a material issue rights holders would have gone after public SDRs capturing the broadcast bands years ago.

Moreover, in wartime or during some other major catastrophe when technical infrastructure is likely to be impacted or destroyed then establishing and maintaining communications services on these frequencies is easy for reasons that the technology is low-tech and easy to understand—and there's an enormous amount of engineering experience to fall back upon (about 100 years' worth).

That we even have to raise this discussion is a quintessential example of intergenerational information loss.

Given their strategic importance, governments should put priority on educating the smartphone/streaming generation that these other modes of electronic communication actually exist and that they may even have to depend upon them.

I only need to refer to the current debate over retaining AM-band reception in car radios to illustrate the paucity of understanding. That EV manufacturers are pushing for the removal of the AM band in their car radios is proof-positive of how little the current breed of electronics engineers knows about these frequencies let alone their strategic importance.

Jesus fuck this video has me on edge. I don't know what moved me to click that link, haha.

These people have balls of tungsten, that's for sure.

    ensure
      Count = old Count +1 
      : 'MyObject: Count logic error';

Another good reason is testing and verification. Your application becomes decoupled from the OS resources and you can verify what it does to them by comparing the database. Because the OS state is managed by database, it is formally described and you can verify what your application does to it. In some sense, it's an implementation of functional core/imperative shell idea.

Also, because DBs are transactional, transactions will become a first-class concept in your operating system. Which is something that's long overdue for applications (although there are systems such as CICS that have been doing this for some time now).