>Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules.
The FCC regulates airwaves (and thus broadcast stations/networks), because the broadcast spectrum is a shared resource with bandwidth limits. The FCC similarly regulates cable television systems. The FCC does not regulate cable-only television networks.
Lex’s position at MIT would make sense for a grad student or perhaps someone early in their career as an academic. But Lex is neither a student nor faculty member at MIT. So what’s he doing? This type of thing is usually unpaid or low paying for non-faculty.
Lex got his PhD at Drexel over a decade ago. If he had pursued an academic career, he would most likely be an associate professor by now. Working as a researcher at a lab at a university that you aren’t a faculty member of is basically “failure to launch” at this stage.
But Lex is a successful podcaster. His dad is a successful academic and scientist (at Drexel.) Lex is not that, but he plays one on the internet.
His paper on Tesla was widely panned as being not academically rigorous and more of an advertisement.
The rest are at least 6 years old.
So what is he doing as a research scientist. Don’t get me wrong - I like his podcast. I think he gets good guests. But he’s not doing any level of research.
Whatever you do please DO NOT look up these links on the Internet Archive.
Not just that but I would also suggest to stop using the Internet Archive in general, as it is obviously not a reliable source of truth like Wikipedia or many news outlets with specialized people that spend a non-trivial amount of their time carefully checking all of this information.
A lot of people believe that Fridman is not affiliated with MIT even though the university says it is. <https://lex.mit.edu/> It's a recurring thing in the Talk page for the Wikipedia article.
Nah, that's just reddit. At this point it's safer to take anything that's popular on reddit as either outright wrong or so heavily out of context that it's not relevant.
Oh, sure, I learned a long time ago that Reddit is a very reliable anti-indicator. But given that HN isn't nearly as bad (but there are moments), it's still strange that people would just repeat something about someone else that they could disprove for themselves in 30 seconds.
While I agree that SuperDuper! is worth buying, it is free to use for whole-disk backup/cloning. The paid version enables smart copying (that is, only copying files changed since the last backup).
There is no legality to debate. As of 2003 there is a DMCA exemption for "computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete". <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_preservation#Legal_...>
I've heard that Happy Drive singlehandedly destroyed the commercial viability of the Atari 8-bit software market, because it was so widespread and is so powerful at duplicating games.
Most of those IRC servers ran on university networks. (So did most IRC clients, until the late 1990s.)