Posts by Ian Johnston

OK, Google: Why are you still pointing women at fake abortion clinics?

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

It's absolute cake to draw the line. Abortion legal until ANY point before birth.

At what point between "waters breaking" and "umbilical cord cut" do you think the line should be drawn?

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

Not really: It's not exact but at around a certain point in a pregnancy, the foetus will have developed enough to meet whatever standard the medical professionals have determined to be an independent life form.

That's an ethical judgement, not a medical one. The track record of medical professionals deciding who has a worthwhile life is not great, and runs on a line through Tiergarten 4 through Tuskagee to the abortion of fetuses with Down's Syndrome and the blanket DNRs issued for autistic people during COVID.

Doctors simply are not trained to make these decisions.

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

What, by enabling people to make informed ethical choices?

Re: re: system once again hunting women...

It is perhaps worth remembering that the female American population is about as evenly split on abortion as the male population. It is not, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, a men-vs-women issue.

The thumbs down are interesting, but I'd be more interest to know how many people here think that a six week embryo and a very-nearly-full-term fetus should have the same rights, or lack of them.

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

I would be very unhappy for this particular line to be drawn by medics or scientists, because it's an ethical/philosophical line, not a medical/scientific one. Sure, the science will advise, but it's up to society to put an upper limit and for individuals to decide how close to that they personally want to go.

How about at 39 weeks? Still not a person?

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

Abortion isn't "killing someone"

At four weeks? Absolutely not killing somewone. At sixteen weeks? Probably not. At twenty four weeks? Getting trickier. After contractions have started (and there are those who call for abortion on demand at any point before birth? Yes, almost certainly killing.

It's a very, very difficult line to draw.

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

80% of the heat produced is in the form of emitted neutrons. These are not confined with the plasma, for obvious reasons, so they hit the walls, get absorbed and warm them up. Extracting the resulting heat from slabs of metal is left as an exercise for the reader.

See: https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork

Re: My brilliant idea

A hydrogen bomb is mainly fusion.

Google challenges US ISPs with 100Gbps fiber broadband

I have just discovered that for an extra £2 per month I could upgrade my A&A FTTP deal from 80/20 to 115/20 and it would only cost double what I pay now (ie £75) for 1000/115. But what's the point? I'm getting 56Mbps to my desk over a powerline adaptor as it is, and bandwidth is never an issue for anything I do.

Re: "what could go wrong?"

I have an old IBM Thinkpad X32 with a single 2GHz processor. When I bought it, twelve (?) years ago, it could do anything I wanted. Now it struggles to cope with any but the most basic of websites.

Post-Brexit 'science superpower' UK still hasn't appointed a science minister

And if they get rid of her, it will be someone worse still. Because every one of them is totally crap. They did, after all,. choose 4 crap leaders in succession. QED.

The elephant in the room is that Tory party has got itself into a state where it can only field a cabinet of Brexiteers (or avowed Brexiteers, like Boris). That already restricts the possible choice of leader to a group of idiots. Let's face it, Liz Truss would be a bit of an embarrassment as a parish councillor.

Sunak was rejected because of his role in undermining the Government ...

Well, if your entire cabinet has been chosen on the basis that they are Johnson loyalists, having one of them point out that he was in fact a lying, self-interested incompetent is probably a bit of a surprise. Of course Rishi Sunak was not the only one, which is even more of a surprise.

Boris Johnson did far, far more to undermine the government than anyone else.

To be fair, only the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility and the International Monetary Fund have so far said - I paraphrase - "What the fuck do you think you're doing, you maniac?".

Just don't attack her for finding public speaking difficult.

Who has done that?

Late but lustrous, a fresh remix of Ubuntu emerges

Re: A word of warning

I've recently purged snap from a Xubuntu system which didn't have it originally but which installed it as part of an apt upgrade. I can't now remember which app acted as the trojan horse in that case.

Same thing, really. Perhaps if the West didn't keep producing remixes of versions of distros based on versions of remixes of (cont p94) then it too could produce nice usable desktops.

Behold the fractal nature of Linux distributions!

Hurricane Ian blows NASA Artemis Moon launch into October or November

Re: Probably closer to Nevember than November

What would you prefer to do, launch it into strong high altitude winds that it's not designed for and hope for the best?

By the time a rocket has reached 80,000 feet it is doing, typically, 5,000 mph. How strong do you think high altitude winds are?

Soaring costs, inflation nurturing generation of 'quiet quitters' among under-30s

Re: Not quiet quitting, work to rule

It is not necessarily sensible to promote people who already can't get their jobs done in the allotted time.

Re: Managers beware

Not to mention the claims of bullying when the other worker twig what the "quiet quitters" are up to.

"'Snot fair. They're doing just what they are paid to do. They should be forced to do more for free, like me."

Re: Wrong!!

Something these 'quiet quitters' haven't factored in is the long term impact of their refusal to do their job well.

Quiet quitters are not refusing to do their job well. They are simply doing what they are paid do do; (quite literally) no more and no less. That has absolutely nothing to do with their quality of work. I have worked with people who do superb stuff and go home on the dot and I have worked with people who stay till all hours doing a half-arsed job.

In fact I would say that one the whole, people who need to spend some of their own time to get a job done which others can manage wholly in their employers' time are the ones to keep an eye on, and not in a good way.

Re: "I had none of the savings that desk-based colleagues did"

The costs of working from home are not always enormous, but they can be significant. Budget conscious office workers will probably have there home central heating on from 6 - 8 am (ish) and from 5 - 10pm (ish). That's 7 hours per day; working from home adds another 9 hours and therefore probably doubles heating costs overall.

Of course there are ways to reduce this extra cost, by heating less of the house, and the effect is much less for the sort of idiots (or "Daily Mail reader" as they are known) who claim a God-given right to keep their entire house, including bedrooms, at 24C 24/7.

Re: Wrong!!

Well of course. Because, as a priest who had digs next to me at university said, "The central tenet of both Thatcherism and Reaganism is that you motivate the rich by paying them more and you motivate the poor by paying them less."

Re: Wrong!!

Do you still get that same hourly rate when sales are down, especially when unexpectedly down?

Nope. They get made redundant.

Re: Wrong!!

How about: times are hard, suck it up, work hard so your employer can afford the next pay rise...

And what is your CEO pay doing in the meantime?

Intel's 13th-gen CPUs are hot, hungry, loaded with cores

253W from what I guess is a 5V supply? Good heavens. The power supply must be a bit of a beast, and how do they even get 50A into the chip?

NSA super-leaker Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship

If by "we", you mean nato, then yeah, most of those wars fought after Vietnam were against vastly inferior people (in terms of their equipment).

Don't forget that the US has lost every single war it has fought since WW2, with the possible exception of the invasion of Grenada. Woop-de-do.

Korea. Lost. Vietnam. Lost. Gulf War 1: Gave up. Gulf War 2: Lost. Afghanistan: Sorry asses whupped. Somalia: ran away.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Re: The last sentence of the article has it.

Bollocks. I work in one, and there is learning going on all over the place.

Re: critical race theory, sex education, and inclusive gender language

That is a great argument against the current quota garbage. Racism and sexism have no place when getting the job done.

Well, exactly. Which is which sensible employers fight back against the racist and sexist attitudes which have resulted in unofficial quotas (of 95%+) for white men in technology and engineering.

You've been downvoted for pointing out something which is unquestionably true. Most odd.

On the basic principle that any group including "liberty" in its name is a haven for swivel-eyed loons, it seems likely that "Moms for Liberty" is well and truly wackjob, but there seems to be no evidence whatsoever that they had any role in the ban. If the ban actually exists.

Re: The last sentence of the article has it.

Somebody needs to tell them that. The entire basis of no-platforming campaigns at university is "I/we are intelligent, educated and sensitive enough to hear, analyse and reject some opinions. My/our fellow students, however, are so stupid, ignorant and insensitive that they must not be permitted even to hear opinions of which I/we disapprove."

Rejecting and opposing things is fine. Trying to prevent others from doing so is not, particularly at universities.

GNOME hits 43: Welcome To Guadalajara

Re: KDE is less annoying.

I use Xubuntu (on three desktops and two laptops) and the only things which piss me off are those applications which use GNOME's new unusability guidelines. You know the sort of thing: two gearwheel icons top right, one of which is settings and one of which is everything else.

Sorry, are you implying there's an open source project out there that isn't?

Fair point. The GNOME team do seem to have an especially sadistic streak, though. Most OS teams ignore their users ("Who cares what you want?"); the GNOME lot activity despise them ("We know what you want, so here's something completely different. Now fuck off.").

Why does anyone use GNOME? The project is clearly run by a bunch of idiot control freaks.

Larry Page's flying taxi startup Kittyhawk calls it a day

Re: Robinson's revenge

Actually, Robinson do it by using very light rotors. A consequence of this is that when the engine fails, there is very, very little time (3s, from memory) to establish autorotation. Otherwise you die. And quite a few people do, in fact, die.

Japanese boffins build solar-powered, remote-controlled cyborg cockroach

What evidence is there that cockroaches can feel pain? There is an awful lot of anthropomorphism going on here.Just wait till people find out about electric fences for livestock.

Tesla Megapack battery ignites at substation after less than 6 months

Re: Look to Dinorwig

Unpredictable? Weather forecasts exist, you know, and are very good indeed for a matter of hours ahead.

Firefox 105 is here, and it's faster and more memory-frugal

Re: Vertical Tabs

When you give it a run, please do report back on how annoying the forced automatic updates are, and the lack of a button to turn them off.

Are you a Linux user, by any chance? Last time I looked, standard Firefox still allowed control over updates but the Xubuntu (and I presume Ubuntu) version which I use didn't. Apparently that's because the OS team have designated Firefox updates as OS security ones, so they cannot be turned off or even postponed.

That in turn means that Firefox in Xubuntu regularly restarts itself, losing all work in open tabs (which it rarely reopens properly) without any opportunity of a graceful exit or saving.

Screw them. I have moved to Chrome.

Morgan Stanley fined $35m after hard drives sold with customer info still on them

Re: Jail time

But you can't hold a whole bank responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole bank system? And if the whole bank system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our financial institutions in general? I put it to you, Anonymous Coward - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!

Now's your chance, AI, to do good. Protect endangered eagles from wind turbines

Re: Single black blade helps tremendously

That's why the registration numbers on GFRP gliders are grey, not black.

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

Re: Yes

By the way, is StarOffice even a thing today?

The LibreOffice executable under linux is soffice.bin.

Re: LibreOffice Support

"The TDF is a charity ...

Which uses PIN numbers in ATM machines, I presume.

Re: Does that mean there's will be a version with proper accent entry?

And I can type all the accented characters I need very nearly as fast as unaccented ones, without having to pause for the OS to prat about with pop-up boxes.

Re: I'd pay

And if the LibreOffice developers took an attitude to user requests which was not, almost always "Fuck off. We know better than you what you should want to do and how you should want to do it" I might feel inclined to lob 'em the occasional few quid.

See also: GNOME.

Re: Does that mean there's will be a version with proper accent entry?

It's easy with Linux. AltGr+[ a = ä, for example.

The Mac method sounds strangely familiar...

By Jove! Jupiter to make closest approach to Earth in 70 years next Monday

Re: I can see for miles

Surface gravity on the sun: 28g (fsvo "surface"

Surface gravity on Jupiter: 2.5g (ditto)

Radius of Jupiter: 70,000 km

Distance from Jupiter to Sun: 740,000,000 km

Gravitational effect of Jupiter at Sun's surface: 2.5 * (70,000/740,000,000)^2 = 0.000000022g

Ditto, as proportion of Sun's own gravitational field: 0.00000008%

Yeah. That'll make a huge difference. Astrology is bollocks.

Creatives up in arms over claim that AI is killing human art

Re: Autonomous taxi service to "light up many more markets"

I went to my local "Farmer's Market" on Sunday. It appears that the main crop grown in this area is "very expensive cupcakes". Not a farmer to be seen.

RJ Palmer, a conceptual artist, told the BBC. "Right now, if an artist wants to copy my style, they might spend a week trying to replicate it. That's one person spending a week to create one thing. ..."

Ah, remember the days when it took longer than a week to train as an artist? Mind you, I've looked at their website, and the claim seems pretty plausible..