* Posts by Oliver Kiddle

2 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2007

Python joins movement to dump 'offensive' master, slave terms

Oliver Kiddle

Re: I second master / minion

On technical things, where the term "minion" is used, I'd expect there to be many minions and one master. With master/slave, it tends to imply one or few slaves. A "minion" also, sounds like a smaller component. If technical things get renamed you don't want to make them harder to understand. Now that I think about it "slave" is generally a poor analogy for the technical usage: slaves didn't sit around waiting while the master did all the work only stepping in when needed.

New euro coin stuffs Turkey

Oliver Kiddle

Cyprus, not Turkey has been stuffed

The only reason to extend the map eastwards would be to include Cyprus which is now an EU member. If you look at the old design, just EU member states were included. (Including non-Euro states such as the UK was perhaps necessary to make it actually look like a map of Europe, though the resulting appearance of Scandinavia minus Norway is somewhat unfortunate.) I can see that if you add all the new member states in the old manner, it'd be hard because there's too many. To include all EU members with the new style map, you'd have to shrink the actual EU states a lot and include large swathes of Russia, Turkey and non-EU states. The compromise they have seems resonable: Cyprus, North-East Finland, Eastern Bulgaria, and far off places like french Guiana get left off. The inclusion of what I assume is Ceuta and Mililla seems a bit silly and Malta seems to be over enlarged given that the Isle of Wight is bigger.

If Turkey does join (as I hope it one day will), I'm sure they would extend the map eastwards.