Ayn Rand supercharged the anti-Communist witch-hunt in Hollywood, in which the FBI classified "It's a Wonderful Life" as secret Communist propaganda

I’d gladly settle for 2018 being far less interresting.

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And therein lies the delicious irony.

Indeed.

Right?

I hope and pray for a BORING year…

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And to think, I, an European, philosophy buff, never heard about Ayn Rand before being in my thirties…

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Well, in fairness, the great PowerPC vs x86 war was a little after their time :-).

</nerd humor>

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Well, if you take things literally, every x86 running MS-DOS was a RISC system.

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And the connection between Ayn Rand and philosophy (=love of wisdom) is what precisely?

You know, using A E Neumann (aka Melvin Cowsnofsky) for your nick is extremely bad form, because his motto is “What? Me worry?” and your post suggests that you have a strong desire to put down anyone who denigrates your idols. Also, Mad Magazine is funny.

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Ah…no. IIRC the 8086 through to the 80286 were not RISC. They have a number of complex instructions implemented in the standard 8086 microcode. If you want to argue that they have a simple load/store architecture with no memory-memory operations I’ll grant you that but I don’t think they are really RISC.

(This is surely much more interesting than trying to read anything by Ayn Rand, and we can argue that it is sourcist as well as objectivist.)

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Some say that the P6 had a RISCy core. But the 386?

Public service announcement: please never mention Ann Coulter if you don’t like her. Not ever. Thank you.

All publicity is good publicity for creatures like that. If you amplify their message too much, you might end up helping them get elected to something. Play it safe! Ignore!

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I don’t know, because I went from assembler on a 286 to Unix on a 32032 (Nat Semi cpu) and missed x86 right through to the 486 era.

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Correct, but that wasn’t meant to be the joke…
What’s the matter, had a stressy christmas?

Not at all, I’m afraid you have been exposed to what in these islands passes for an aspect of a sense of humour (i.e. refusing to acknowledge a joke and taking it on face value perfectly seriously. The reverse is the other English habit of making outrageous remarks with an absolutely straight face, something I was warned most earnestly not to do before my first business trip to the US, about 50 years ago.)
It occurs in Monty Python, though I hesitate a bit to bring that up because that’s now visibly so crass, sexist, and redolent of class privilege that I find it unwatchable.

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I’m glad we could clear this up so quickly.

Aren’t you admitting that you do like her right there? Not that there is anything wrong with that…

I took that one for the team!

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Somehow I can feel a self-help group forming soon…

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from 1999-- a long time ago, so linkrot might have set in.


This article predates quite a lot of things, among them
NetBurst
Itanium (and the promise and disappointment of VLIW)
ARM
multicore.

Not to mention: a man who was a banker by another name.

ETA:(Hat-tip to @Pradaldi for getting there first.)

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He’s certainly not someone that I’d endorse without a lot of caveats and nuance.

OTOH, given the time and place and the nature of what he was fighting against…he wasn’t the greater evil. Che was flawed, but Batista was scum.

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If you want to know how absurd Ayn Rand can be look up Rothbard’s play “Mozart is a Red” which is based on the very real belief by Ayn Rand that Mozart was some evil/vile collectivist. It took 20 years of her closest friends to explain to her how silly that idea was. She just was…stubborn when it came to her misunderstanding of everything. It’s kinda embarrassing for me since I use to be a fan of hers and yes I did read Atlas Shrugged… TWICE. X_X

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