Baltimore is south of the Mason-Dixon line. Mason and Dixon surveyed the border between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.

In the mid-19th century, Maryland was a slave state but did not secede and join the Confederacy. Enslaved Marylanders were, thus, not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, since that only targeted seceding states under Union Army occupation. Slavery in Maryland ended in 1864 with the adoption of a new state constitution.

Okay, let’s skip the formal logic talk then and go straight to linguistics.

The question “Good to merge?” does not contain a grammatical error. It is perfectly well-formed by the grammar that native English speakers actually follow in everyday communication. A grammar that fails to parse “Good to merge?” in context cannot parse native English speakers’ actual output.

Schoolbook English is not native English, because it’s not how native English speakers actually speak. Schoolbook English contains rules that directly contradict native English speakers’ everyday usage.

(Standard examples include the rule against split infinitives and the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. These are not grammatical rules of English as it is spoken by native speakers. To boldly assert them is silliness up with which I will not put.)

The guideline (as applied) contains a contradiction, so the principle of explosion applies.

Specifically, there is a contradiction between “native-sounding English” and “no grammatical errors”, when the latter phrase is interpreted in the manner seen here. Native speakers quite often use sentence fragments and in other ways do not follow schoolbook “proper grammar”. In fact, second-language learners often use schoolbook grammar where a native speaker would use a more relaxed register.

Since the guideline contains a contradiction, it is either impossible to follow (i.e. forbids all communication whatsoever) or impossible to violate (i.e. forbids no communication).

But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

I recommend picking up Graham Hutton’s short text Programming in Haskell, Second Edition. Even if you don’t end up using Haskell in “real work” (and you might!) it will teach you a remarkable number of things about how functional programming works.

The term “open source software” was coined specifically to refer to software licensing that recognizes a particular set of freedoms. It is not a generic term for source-available software, and never was.

One of the freedoms of open source is “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.”

Calling the Hippocratic license family “open source” is inaccurate, since its entire goal is to discriminate against certain fields of endeavor.

It’s better described as a sort of source-available license.

Remember when a “pop-up blocker” was a browser plug-in because the browsers didn’t yet consider it a competitive feature?

(Well, okay, Opera and iCab did.)

Number of ads my OS shows me: 0

Split Colemak on an Iris keyboard.

Mother mother duck

Oh, shove it up your heck!

Have big events in other cities.

Billionaires have always turned on Trump, slightly more than underage girls.

As an individual? Don’t worry about it; show up at your local protest on the 19th.

If I recall correctly, Burke expected the French Revolution to eat itself and turn tyrannical … which, y’know, it did. He was right about that.

Reagan wasn’t good on HIV-AIDS.
George H. W. Bush wasn’t either.
But George W. Bush was.

PEPFAR was Baby Bush’s baby.

I don’t think the passage you quoted was intended to say that Reagan was good on HIV-AIDS, but rather that America ended up being good on HIV-AIDS.

This looks like a blog post. Do you have a news source for it?

To be clear, I mean people who praise Hitler, get swastika tattoos, blame everything on a Jewish Conspiracy, etc.

You know, Nazis.

Musks and Verses?