> DOS was barely an operating system, in the true sense.

I mean you may be OK saying "compared to modern operating systems", but it was a perfectly adequate OS for the time. Windows wasn't an actual OS until Windows 98...

Just to clarify: not only did MS make the OS handle a bunch of the stuff, but hardware manufacturers also settled on a (semi) standard method of communication

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It doesn't become legal, legally speaking, but it is found to have always been legal.

When you charge a battery you "force" a chemical reaction. You store chemical energy. This chemical state is forced but can not be reversed until you allow current to flow in the oposite direction as in charging.

So your new games could be programmed to speak to the windows audio subsystem, which would speak to the sound card using drivers made by the sound card manufacturer, and these systems would keep track of the IRQs and DMAs and everything. Before that, the DOS games had to know how to speak directly to every sound card they wanted to support. There were a few standards, and not that many sound cards overall, but PnP eventually enabled a very wide range of devices that all mostly just worked.

DOS was barely an operating system, in the true sense.

If you look at the windows kernel and the core system libraries and tools, they provide key features such as device drivers, process separation, memory management, storage and file systems. The device drivers allow different devices from different manufacturers to be controlled in a common way at the application layer. So to some extent it doesn't matter which sound card you have. Obviously, some have more features, but the base level of functionality is the same: make stereo sound.

DOS didn't do much of that, except the filing system, keyboard and character console. Each application had to have its own drivers for sound, hi-res graphics and even a mouse! Some hardware became a standard due to popularity, and were supported by many applications.

Common sense is often quite narrow and short-sighted though. It doesn't seem particularly hard for governments to give amnesties when they decriminalise things, so why isn't this the norm?

It's not hard to think of potential problems.

What if it looks like a law is going to be changed and people start breaking it anticipating that change? Even worse, what if it then isn't changed?

Does it undermine people's respect for laws and fear of punishment?

Does the law punish people based on the impact of their actions or their character? Eg. we might now believe there's little harm in selling weed, but if the consensus when someone sold some weed was it was dangerous, shouldn't they have paid attention to that? (This seems similar to how we don't apply new crimes retrospectively.)

What if the law changes because the situation changes? For example, the benefits and harms of drug prohibition differ in different circumstances.

With examples like this there are usually a bunch of reasons why things are done the way they are that aren't obvious or have been forgotten. They may or may not be persuasive reasons, but you don't know until you know what they are.

"lex prospicit non respicit" (the law works foward, not backwards) has been a fundamental part in any legal systems, going all the way back to the holy roman empire

so yes, people cannot be charged for something, that was not illegal when they did it. when someone is charged for something, only the laws that were in effect at the time of the "crime" are considered

Ferrari V8s fire their cylinder like this:

O-O-O-O

Most American V8s fire their cylinders like this:

OO-O--O

Longer explanation:

There are two different types of V8, one with a cross-plane crankshaft and one with a flat-plane crankshaft. This refers to how the crankshaft of the engine would look when viewed head on: + vs. |.

Flat-plane V8s are basically two inline-4 engines glued together, and that's why they sound a bit like a 4-cylinder. That's the type you'd find in most Ferraris or McLarens for example. They're lighter, can rev higher, but they vibrate more.

What determines the sound of the engine are the gaps between firing events of the cylinders of one bank (one side). In a flat-plane V8, if you only look at say the driver side bank of the engine, one cylinder fires every 180°.

With a cross-plane crankshaft, these gaps are uneven, specifically 90-180-270-180. Sometimes two cylinders fire in quick succession, sometimes there's a longer pause, so you get the characteristic rumble.

​

It's interesting to see how lactose intolerance is caused by more than just the inability to break down lactose. Our gut bacteria can play a key role in the digestion of lactose, and the by-products of their metabolism can cause distress. This is why lactose-free products are so popular, as they have been predigested for us. It's fascinating to see how our bodies work together to help us digest food!

It stopped being a problem when Microsoft introduced plug and play in windows 95. This was a hardware standard and software stack that would identify each hardware device automatically, then load the necessary drivers and assign the IRQ and DMA numbers automatically.

In the beginning few devices supported the standard and so the auto detection was kind of hard and also very flakey. We all have vivid memories of how this would fail with blue screen of death and systems hanging. It even got the nick name "plug and pray". But as time went on hardware support improved, and so did the software, and now we take it for granted that hardware detection "just works".

L is a non-SI unit. SI unit for volume is not litre but cubic metre - m^(3)

Litre is however accepted for use with SI because it's more convenient to say than milli-cubic metre.

Nothing, unless an amnesty or general pardon is given then they stay in prison. People are serving the sentences that were handed down by the courts at the time, that isn't going to change for anyone except for those whose trials are yet to start.

https://www.mlb.com/news/ted-williams-faced-defensive-shifts-in-1940s-c191605204

>This wasn't actually the first recorded instance of the shift. In the 1920s, some managers moved their defenses around to the right side against another dead pull left-handed batter, the Phillies' Cy Williams, according to a Society For American Baseball Research (SABR) profile. This Williams, who batted .320 from 1920-26, reportedly admitted, "I couldn't hit a ball to left if my life depended on it."

It wasn't used anywhere near as frequently back then, but the shift actually has been around for just about a hundred years.

That’s kinda like how the old bar in town can sell you a 6 pack over the counter to take home versus the bar that opened a few years ago can’t legally do that?

Additionally, all bacteria and microbes, that come out of your butt have already been inside your body, so you cannot get any "new" infections this way. Nevertheless, getting as many of them out without re-entering helps a lot

I don't think there's a significant effect. Just because there's fermentation happening doesn't mean a lot of alcohol is being produced. It's probably similar bacteria to the first population active in sauerkraut, which produce a lot of bubbling and a negligible amount of alcohol.

Also there isn't very much lactose in milk. Even if you ferment it with a yeast that turns it into alcohol fairly efficiently, milk won't pass 2.5% ABV, which is half the strength of beer.

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abstract: Finding it difficult to reconcile a fact contrary to long held beliefs.

Cognition: Cognition is your way of processing and thinking about information. The way you think comes with inherent biases they have been trained into you through various socio-politico-cultural media.

A simple example is your culture training you into believing Santa Claus.

Bias: Over time, with enough information training, peer-review and reaffirmation, your biases get entrenched into you. Understand that the word bias here is being used technically, not negatively. It's a bias, for example, to want to know more about a story you read somewhere because you've trained yourself to not accept a story for it's headline. Or it's a bias for you to start indicating a turn when driving way earlier than most people because you once witnessed an accident that you thought could've been avoided with a timely turn signal.

Mental model: The important point here is that the mental map of the world you're forming is not based on what you see but how you've come to interpret it. The same news story can be interpreted differently across the political spectrum, despite all having lived the same experience. This mental model is fairly robust and can interpret or rationalize most information thrown at it.

Dissonance: Just because you have a mental model of how you think the world works doesn't mean the world works that way. Every once in a while, an event, a discovery or a new learning is irreconcilable with your long held beliefs. This is extremely inconvenient for you because this new information is not resonant with your mental model; it is dissonant.

"Santa isn't real. Dad takes the gifts out at night from the car trunk and puts it under the tree"

A fact is irrefutable. Therefore your entire mental model must be retrained to now fit this new data.

This is called cognitive dissonance.

Long held beliefs in religion, politics, personal romance and alliances, society, and causality in general all popularly get challenged. A cheap shot is providi g irrefutable evidence to a flatearther that the planet is an oblong spheroid.

Side story: In statistics, when designing stochastic or bayesian models that are sensitive to disruptive data, we often try to filter "noise" away. But if the signal is prominent a d recurrent enough, you're going to have to recalibrate your model to incorporate this new signal/observation as well.

Free money for former pot dealers. What could go wrong?

Punishment was for breaking an existing law at that time. Not for breaking it NOW.

That very thing was legal back in Ancient Rome. Odd to think people accepted such a scary concept

See, that's the funny thing, innit? The laws were written by lawmakers, the lawmakers were voted in by the commoners, i.e. they're common sense, and if they weren't common sense, well we'd just vote in some smarter lawmakers! But we don't.

You or I in particular might be smart, but collectively we are startlingly stupid.

(aside: happy cake day!)

More like a doughnut (or a mug)