No more copy and paste...
...only copy and pissed.
Posts by Brave Coward
319 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Apr 2024
Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste
US troops can still be tracked by purchased location data, and Congress wants to know why
Sunday 13th September 2026 21:11 GMT 
Re: Everything digital can be tracked.
>> Around year 1450 "legal requirement mentioning publisher"
Yes. In Western Europe, in the XVth century, the incoming printing technique was related to some legal obligations. My point here was that these obligations cannot be seen as advertising. Nothing more. Full stop.
>> And before printing books were multiplied too, though usually by monks and not machines.
Oh no, really? And how many of these incunabula incorporated any kind of advertising? Exactly none. So how does your (rather obscure) rant (I quote: 'You know when bookPRINTING came?') relates to advertising? It doesn't.
>>If by 'it' you mean the western printing technique (Gutenberg's machine), it took at least another century to become cheap enough to produce ad leaflets glued on the walls. So, for this part of the world, one had to wait the *XVIth* century for any noticeable advertising industry to emerge - other than signs on shops, and the verbal advertising carried out by traders in marketplaces (and, funnily enough, it was already seen, or rather heard, as an absolute nuisance - see here).
On the other hand, 'its predecessor machines' - mainly xylography and bronze plaques - were far more older in eastern Asia (China, Korea, Japan), up to the seventh century. Still, these clever techniques were mostly used to produce religious texts, poetry and some literature - not ads, probably due to its costs. The main exception being the Song dynasty in China, well known for the *most* ancient printed add press known to date. That STILL puts us in the *XIth* century, humanity being at least 100 000 years old.
=> So to subsume it: printing as an add support is at most one thousand years old, printing as a *massive* add support being much, much younger. Ergo the printing technique cannot be considered as a proof of advertising having *always* existed, as you initially claimed.
And still leaves pending another question: how many people were able to read under the Song Dynasty, or the European Renaissance? Notwithstanding the most obvious fact: printing was radically unknown in all the rest of the world, that is, Africa, Oceania, and the whole America (with perhaps the sole exception of Mayan codex which, once again, were religious and practical treaties, not adds). One may safely bet that most places of the world didn't hear of advertisement until modern ages.
> You seem to be confusing a possible signature by the artist with advertising
>> I don't.
Well, glad to know it.
> advertising - proper advertising
>>Your thinking and definition is way too narrow, and you twist it afterwards only to contradict.
No it isn't and I didn't, but yes I do contradict.
To quote the French version of Wikipedia : 'However, it was not until around 1830 that the term ‘publicity’ [= advertising], which means ‘the act of making something public’ or ‘the state of being public’, came to have its modern meaning of ‘the range of methods used to make a product, or an industrial or commercial enterprise, known to the public’.
And that's the whole point. Nobody argues about the fact that some forms of commercial trades are probably as old as humanity itself (stones cut during the Paleolithic Age in the actual Parisian region having been found as far as the Black See, for example), and with it some ways of promoting - probably mainly by vocal means or demonstration. But its relations to the current advertising industry is rather meager: as if one would claim that air bombing has always existed because Persians and Romans used catapults.
The turning point came via scoundrels in the likes of Edwards Bernays : the precise moment where all the resources of *psychologist propaganda*, combined with the development of mass media, have been considered as perfectly acceptable and fit means to sell goods (including tobacco, for example). It's one thing to try to convince would-be consumers that your stuff is of good quality and worth the price; it's an entirely different one to deploy an all-time systematic assault on all cognitive resources of *everybody*, kids included, to shape people's mind to buy goods they don't need in the first place - which is what the modern 'economy' boils down to for quite a good part.
>>You must be joking and not really up to the task to do even the smallest bit of research. [...] You don't deserve them [visual clues], and you'd ignore them anyway. [...] Open your mind, dude, discover the possibilities.
These are not arguments, but ad hominem attacks. I have be polite in exposing my views on the topic, and I am perfectly fine that you would disagree with me - as long as you have proper arguments to present, in a polite manner. And by the way, I am not your 'dude', and you can keep your advice on mental health and sound epistemology to yourself, thank you very much, Sir.
Tuesday 8th September 2026 19:47 GMT
Re: Everything digital can be tracked.
Thank you for your answer. Even, alas, if it's not - in my eyes - a very convincing one.
a) Book printing doesn't equate to advertising. Mention of the publisher is a legal requirement, not an add. And until very recently, no book on earth would have a plain full page in the middle of it's text, saying: 'buy the XXX toothpaste'!
b) What kind of 'commercial paintings in Pompéi' are you referring to? Or on ancient Greek vases? Or in Egypt, of China? Visual clues would be most welcome.
c) You seem to be confusing a possible signature by the artist with advertising, and that's a bold move (by the way, most ancient vases were NOT signed at all). An talented individual claiming 'I, named X, have done that' - which is most of what I can refer to when you're talking about 'old Egypt (or Chinese) advertising' - is NOT advertising. Or would you consider a Picasso signature an add?
d) 'Butchers sell meat, fishermen sell fish, tailors sell cloth [...]' : yes they do, and did. Of course they do, and did. Having a sign on top of your shop signaling that you're selling meat, or fish, or cloth, is NOT the same as advertising : it's a somehow useful information for would-be customers, NOT a message extolling the unrivaled quality of your stuff. Antic oil or wine amphorae bearing the producer's name were most probably a way to keep track of purchases, NOT some fancy message claiming 'You should absolutely drink this wine if you want to have sex with the gorgeous blond hereby depicted!'. And in many parts of the world - especially in open-air markets - the stalls have no sign at all. People just look on stuff. In most places of the world, goods where produced in rather small quantities, so there was no point in using an add system to convince people to buy what they needed. Scarcity was the rule, not abundance, and scarcity advertises by itself.
On a broader note, advertising - proper advertising - requires both mass media (which shop signs, grave paintings, signatures on elitist handicrafts are NOT) and massively educated people (people at least able to read, as there was no audio or video diffusion two centuries ago): both are very recent phenomenons.
So no, advertising - the modern, massive, unbearable barrage of stupid messages which invades every aspect of life, against everybody's will - has not existed for thousand of years, and most importantly, is not some kind of malediction attached to the very human condition.
Disembodied fruit fly brain joins the crypto speculation swarm
Retired man turns spare room into Soviet-era supercomputer
CERN moves thousands of accelerator control computers to Debian
Saturday 5th September 2026 20:38 GMT
Re: Of course they do!
@bazza, @FirstTangoInParis
Thank you for your interesting contributions to the debate.
Anyhow, my remark was supposed to be a joke (CERN throwing high-velocity atomic kernels at each other and needing precise guidance to do so, that sort of stuff...)
Sorry for it being so bad.
Orbify.eu pitches warped Inception-style 3D maps for navigation
Tuesday 1st September 2026 19:35 GMT
Use it or lose it
Friend of mine, in her sixties, came visiting me the other summer, in my very small village. One morning, she wanted to go to tiny park in there, to relax in trees shadow. Instructions to go there were: 'out of my house turn right, then first left, then first left again, and there you are'. The whole trajectory being less than 300 yards.
She got *lost* while trying to come back, and had to *hitch* a local driver to find my home again. She used to live for many years in quite remote areas (think central Africa, south American forests and so on). She has been heavily relying on navigation devices these last years.
Word 97's ghost in the machine: The crash that vanished the moment anyone looked at it
Cyborg cockroaches may soon deliver life-saving drugs to disaster victims
Hugging Face offers $399 robot duck to help you quack the AI code
Omarchy distro gains serious backing
Friday 28th August 2026 00:10 GMT
Careful
Everybody to their own, of course, but it might be sort of interesting to have an in-depth read of this post (referenced by the article linked by Liam), prior to any installation:
https://マリウス.com/a-word-on-omarchy/
Looks like that distro is an absolute security nightmare.
On a side note, has anybody any information on the reason why Distrowatch is down since two days?
Chipmakers laughing all the way to the vault as memory prices go stratospheric
AI companies are burning books, advocates complain to FTC
Deeply buried 16-year-old SQLite bug caused last year's Tailscale outages
Anthropic says text watermarking scheme relies on inconsequential words
French tax authority admits data heist after crook touts 2M records
Ryanair adds Google Cloud to its dual-cloud flight plan
India’s central bank wants AI to approve loans that humans would reject
The Future is for Billionaires – the rest of us will get open weight AI models, maybe
Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm
New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut
Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine
Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info
Uncle Sam tells overseas cybercrooks their visas are canceled
Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it
Chinese memory ban would cut off RAMpocalypse relief
EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope
An unnamed US county – perhaps in Ohio – paid $1M extortion demand to cybercriminals
Connect, disconnect, or just have a lovely beer
Flatpak-NG sounds like bad news for systemd refuseniks
Monday 15th June 2026 22:00 GMT
About Flatpak
Updated my version of Gimp recently on Ubuntu. Came out as a Flatpak bundle (previous ones were traditional packets).
Now I'm blessed with the immense privilege of having to execute *** 2 *** sort actions before any attempt to save a file:
a) sort by name - to have existing files in the directory sorted by alphabetical order, which they aren't by default
b) sort by type - to have sub-directories first, before files, which isn't by default.
... and no way to save this as the default settings.
We're progressing every day.
Brit workers waste nearly six hours a week 'botsitting'
Microsoft Build: Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, Coreutils for Windows, air-gapped GitHub and more
AI hiring algorithms reject Black, Asian job seekers at higher rates
AIs don't like religion – particularly Jehovah's Witnesses, study claims
Gemini accused of 30,000-line code purge and fake recovery report
Even Claude agrees: hole in its sandbox was real and dangerous
Google Cloud suspended major customer Railway.com without cause, causing outage
MPs want social media treated more like unsafe toys than harmless apps
Bedrock and a hard place: Claude adventure leaves AWS user staring down $30K invoice
Microsoft makes Copilot easier to summon, harder to ignore in Office
Shadow IT has given way to shadow AI. Enter AI-BOMs
Microsoft fixes VS Code after app gives Copilot credit for human's work
Microsoft boss tells investors the company is working to 'win back fans'
Vintage chatbot lives in the past like an elderly relative
Wednesday 29th April 2026 21:15 GMT
Not to bad for a start
Out of curiosity, and among other topics, I asked it the following question:
'do you consider plausible that a failed businessman would become president of the united states?'
Answer was:
'I do not think it at all plausible that a failed businessman should become president of the united states. The chief magistrate of so great a country ought to be a person of established character, and of proved abilities; he should be a man familiar with affairs, and versed in politics; one who has acted a conspicuous part in the world, and has given pledges to society, that he possesses firmness, prudence, and honesty. Now, a failed trader has done none of these things; he has given no hostages to fortune; he has offered no securities to the public; and, therefore, I think, he cannot be deemed a fit choice for the presidency of the union.'
Something obviously changed between the 30' and nowadays.