Posts by Bebu sa Ware

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber?

No.

From my limited contact with that tribe I cannot quite see how "dumber" is possible.

HP ditches 15-minute wait time policy due to 'feedback'

Re: Irate customers

It is difficult to think of a move more likely to antagonise their customers than forcing a 15 minute wait for 'help'.

The answer to that challenge is of course: letting their long suffering customers† know this.

_{† one would like to think ex-customers but there are a surprisingly large number of masochists.}

NASA's on-again, off-again job cuts – what's the plan?

Re: The plan...

"What is it with people that when they achieve great success they develop a god complex?"

Hubris which WikiP "describes a personality quality of extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. The term arrogance comes from the Latin adrogare, meaning "to feel that one has a right to demand certain attitudes and behaviors from other people". To arrogate means "to claim or seize without justification... To make undue claims to having", or "to claim or seize without right... to ascribe or attribute without reason". The term pretension is also associated with the term hubris, but is not synonymous with it."

A cap the fits the current culprits perfectly I think.

The ancient used the term to describe "transgressions against the gods" and "insolent encroachment upon the rights of others" all of which invariably incurred the wrath of those gods and the destruction of the transgressor. So we can but hope but it is also said the same gods first make mad those that they would destroy (collateral damage notwithstanding.)

Re: The plan...

"If you want blood transfusions from young people, I wonder whether you can freeze your own teenage blood, and get it back safely in middle age."

Sort of an auto-vampirism?

Really would you actually want the frenzied untempered cocktail of teen hormones and naked lust coursing through your mid life veins?

Think back to those times and think of the wenches you lusted after and with the benefit of hindsight would have avoided like the plague. Barbarella? Ok conceded. Your wife - not my fault that you didn't have an imagination that extended to exogamy.

Never quite occurred to me that all the obscenely wealthy and powerful from Randy Rupert to Muddled Musk all share an insane fear of their own death which given some of the things for which they will have been responsible, I imagine they wouldn't be too keen on expediting any potential interview with their maker.

Randy won't admit he is done and the Reaper had given up:

"HAVE YOUR OWN WAY BUT WHEN YOUR CARCASS IS FALLING OFF YOUR BONES IT WILL BE THE RAT HERE WHO PERFORCE WILL PAINFULLY DETACH YOUR SOUL PIECEMEAL ^{_{(squeak) PAINFULLY PIECEMEAL! (squeak)}}."

Reminds me of Homer Simpson's boss Mr Burns who I recall was afflicted with so many fatal conditions whose equisite balance like that of Calufrax's Queen Xanxia's time dams kept him not unalive.

These Midas clowns might ask for immortality but forgetting to also ask for eternal youth (like Eos for her lover Tithonus.) It probably never occurs to any seeker of immortality that even in the body of a youth a 1000 year old mind will still have decayed or at best become someone unrecognisable and likely abhorrent to the original. Most of what defines a person's identity is ephemeral and is eventually washed away by tides of time leaving the personality that they supported to struggle and drown in the waters of oblivion.

I can only guess that the madness at the core of the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the hope that if the flesh won't serve the needs of these seekers of immortality that they might transfer their personality into an artificial "brain" and continue inside a robotic shell until the technology exists to clone and grow a copy of their original carcass and transfer from their AGI abode into their new body.

Looks like in a few decades there will be a lively market for barrels of rotten fish.

A Gift to the PRC

All the Chinese need do is announce a program to deal with the potential hazard of a 2024 YR4 impact and get a PR coup with a "soft power" bonus for largely words.

Should the risk of an impact in 2032 crystallize into a certainty the PRC should have more than enough capability to avert any catastrophe assuming none of the lower 48 is the impact site.

Ironic that the Trump administration with all his anti Chinese bluster is actually through the moronic actions of Musk and co. moving the geopolitical centre of gravity away from Washington towards Peking.

Longtime friends and allies are seriously asking whether from here the US can be considered a trusted partner in anything and are considering alternative strategic arrangements for their region.

Re: NASA budget

"handed a sword by some lady lying around in a pond handing out cutlery."

Monty Python obviously hadn't considered the US political system where some fay Limnetic Lady dispensing ironmongery would be a far more rational and ultimately more effective method of governing the nation. Trump's penchant for pussy grabbing would likely mean he would have received Caliban from the Lady with force, point first.

"You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you! ... I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!"

Re: The plan...

"White men are ALWAYS the most qualified in the MAGA world!"

English being what she is, "qualified" can have the sense "subject to conditions" or "incomplete" eg "a qualified success" or "not an unqualified success."

This might not be the case with the creole spoken in the US which has increasingly scant resemblance to our King's English.

So perhaps we might translate the above as

"White men are always the most incomplete or lacking in the MAGA world!" - Which is almost axiomatic and no ones intelligence is strained in considering where these magaboys' manifold and manifest deficiencies lie.

Ghost ransomware crew continues to haunt IT depts with scarily bad infosec

Re: Path of least resistance

Not every IT and cyber security team are as diligent as one would hope,

A really large part of the problem in many (most?) organisations is that the "security" teams were assembled outside the existing corporate IT management and reporting structure.

Typically you have some newly minted but gormless ITsec "professional" dictating from in front of his vendors "single pane of glass" that some business critical system must be upgraded or patched without consulting the applications and systems support personnel assigned to the system.

When consulted they would have briefed him on the unfortunate facts that the crucial application won't run on an upgraded or patched system and furthermore there is no budget to have the application remediated.

Usually other risk minimisation measures have be instituted. Unfortunately in my experience most ITsec people are pretty clueless without their tools (eg Qualys, Mandiant fireeye, Oleum Serpentis Tutelae etc ) and not much better with them and normally don't understand those measures anyway.

Generally there is more security capability to be found amongst the experienceed or older systems and network administrators.

The bottom line is that security must be designed in and built in along with enterprise wide capability if you have any chance of having a resilient, robust and secure system.

Modern organisations are doing their level best to jeopardize any security they might have possessed though their insane world best practice policies of outsourcing, continuous attritional restructuring and blunderbuss employee retrenchments.

CISA, FBI & NSA?

Who is left to issue these warnings? The janitor or night watchman?

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

"Details simplified as the culprit was convinced of theft."

"the culprit was convinced of theft."

The plod resorted more robust interrogation techniques? (Wrecking bar and the "A to Z" come to mind.)

During the great DRAM shortage of '88 the prices for these components meant the temptation was pretty great. Whole university computer labs were raided and the computers relieved of their DRAM chips. PCs were hastily wrapped in steel chastity belts and wired in alarm loops.

I would have thought a less clueless techie might have exfiltrated the RAM by placing them in a floppy disc mailer and dropping it in the company's outward mail bag.

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

Clearly...

a totally ghastly site with no viewers would have the highest energy efficiency in the sense used here.

I was thinking Muskoid Twitter (X) could be an example but the current X users presumably want white on white which, while lacking in contrast, wouldn't matter much for the illiterate loons that haunt the place.

Re: For me it was never about power consumption

"A lot of the UK stores now use a programmable e-ink shelf ticket."

The local Woolworths (AU National food/grocery retailer) been using them for almost a year now. They looked exactly like the removable tickets they replaced and I only cottoned on to them when one of these tickets was stuck in a boot loop (not running Windows surely?)

Haven't determined whether the yellow tickets [specials] are the same as white ones [bicolour ePaper] or distinct devices. They do display a hex 48 bit MAC address which makes me wonder how secure they are from a clown with a custom app on his phone randomly reprogramming the prices etc.

I assume they are programmed or configured via WiFi, BT or NFC.

When I were a lad long before bar codes were a twinkle, grocers just wrote the prices on cardboard signs with one local no frills concrete floor, warehouse shelving grocery chain† dispensing with the product price stickers by giving each customer a felt tip marker pen to write the price on the item.

_{† Jack the Slasher "It was like Aldi but even more dusty and with less helpful staff."}

Re: Love the aesthetic, but don't use it...

"Then they over-generalise and use grey on grey,"

I found Accessibility/Colour inversion [reverse video] + High-contrast text [contrast colour silhouette] and Display/Dark-theme [dark mode] on my very cheap but small phone while rather surreal is more readable.

Re: Love the aesthetic, but don't use it...

The problem I have with my old eyes is that they are not as good at constricting the iris when hit with bright light, resulting in it being even more easy to get blinded by people's far too bright headlights when driving at night.

In these "sunlit lands"† cataracts are pretty much a function of aging from 40 yrs onwards. Not only reduces the amount of light passing through the lens but scatters light (like a dirty window) from bright sources such as oncoming car headlights.

Pretty much everyone heading into their 70s requires cataract surgery which at ~AUD8000 per eye should keep opthalmic surgeons in gravy for their whole career at least until they stop making 60 year Olds.

Even +20 years ago long before "dark mode" I had trouble with text on black background - one site with SGI information insisted on dark shit brown text on black background - completely unreadable until you overrode the shite CSS with a browser custom style sheet.‡

Whatever happened to accessibility mandates for web sites? So many official sites (government, banking, education, telco & utilities) are unusable for anyone with impaired vision. One reason for my insisting on manual and paper options now is, the probably vain hope that when my vision is so impaired in the nearish future these option would still be available.

_{† AU but phrase from The Silver Chair (Narnia cycle) where some dismal chaps keep repeating "Few return to the Sunlit Lands"}

_{‡ black text on white (Kobo) or sepia (tablet.) Caxton didn't use white ink on black paper and still no complaints centuries later.}

Talk of Broadcom and TSMC grabbing pieces of Intel lights fire under investors

"limbs said to be on the table"

Sounds more like a Saudi PE buyout.

DXC paid 50% more than original contract value for disastrous public sector Oracle project

Re: 50% more for doing less than 50% of the job

Recursively you should get 125% more for doing less than 25% of the job. ;)

And 284% for 10%, 1479% for 1%

These numbers are uncannily close to reality of typical public sector cost blowouts death spirals - rather scary really.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Chatbot from Hell

"everyone here uses a marketing contact at the aforementioned company, who exposed his email address to us unintentionally, as their first as only point of contact with them."

Perhaps the marketing chap is the only human (stretching a point perhaps) in the company the rest being transdimensional brain sucking aliens with whom any communication invariably results semiliquid brain leaking from ones ears, eyes and nostrils.

Unsurprisingly actually sounds like most large organisations today. When did the Vogons take over Earth? Presumably hired by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. Just wait for the poetry....

Want to play billionaire for a day? This app lets you rent your own armed goon squad

Re: I should add ...

"...and pick up a phone book."

Not seen a dead tree Yellow Pages† for ages (or any other business directory.) The A-M was really just the right thickness to put under your 41 kg 21" Sony Trinitron CRT monitor.

_{† for me a great source of amusement when young system people that juggle ldap or ad with aplomb flee in terror from yellow pages (nis) even after explaining it's just a collection ndbm(3) files exposed on the network via a rpc service. Dangerously simple. :)}

Microsoft shows off novel quantum chip that can scale to 'a million qubits'. So far: Eight

how many qubits will my PC need if I want to install and run Windows 15?

A variation on Erwin's famous cat - a superposition of BSOD and the usual dysfunctional state of Windows.

So when you try to do something the the superposition collapses into the blue screen or some multicoloured clutter of uselessness. Cannot quite see the value proposition over the current offering.

Curiously MS recently (2024) walked away from a seven year quantum computing collaboration with an Australian University, so I might be sceptical about the company's actual commitment to the technology. These days it's all smoke and mirrors driven by the share market, executive bonuses and "shareholder value."

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Just software

which arguably is just the realization of a collection of abstractions usually called algorithms.

Algorithms and abstraction all the way down until you reach the dungeon dimensions of quantum ;)

Re: Hang on a minute...

Oh dear!

I will never be able to refer the OSI network model without raising the spectre of some poor woman of negotiable affection being impaled by mnemonically possessed engineer.

Basic BSD 4.3 TCP/IP routing is pretty straightforward and once a student has a handle on that netmasks and routes are pretty obvious. The contemporary networking world is a lot more complicated than that but 99% of the networking is pretty much old school.

I suspect that today's students have the latest and greatest heaped on them before they have a handle on the fundamentals.

Grok 3 wades into the AI wars with 'beta' rollout

Re: Truth

The various fish wrappers the over the he years published under the banner "The Truth" or Veritas or Pravda etc are eloquent illustrations of the truth Musk and fellow travellers on the AI path to damnation actually have in mind.

The popular and populist success of these tabloid rags is testimony that the polloi have little interest in any other "truth."

Newsprint media is largely deceased and the few remaining rags, diseased with their shameful banners passed to the electronic media.

The concept truth in logic is subtle and not really all that transferrable to a world where every assertion no matter how true it might appear is contingent on no counterexample being produced. Scientific "truths" are no exception having at best provisional validity in so far as they deal comprehensively with and are not contradicted by the observational evidence. Presumably this dependence on observation means most theories evolve through refinement and generalisation rather than being completely abandoned.

Only Man can look Truth full in the face and revile her as the mother of lies.

Re: But....

"Can it tell the difference between a Roman salute and a sieg heil?"

"Tausend Jahre Dummheit"

Re: Ye gods

"not sure if you saw it, but a little while ago there was a story about heil muskler asking where the most misinformation comes from, and his ai identified elon musk as the biggest source of misinformation on the internet."

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the ...

The old stories just keep popping up.

Trump teases 25% semiconductor tariffs that will go ‘substantially higher’

Re: "It’s unclear if Trump’s remarks applied to pharmaceuticals, or semiconductors, or both."

It’s unclear if Trump’s remarks apply to reality.

Pretty clear that they don't.

Reality between 31°N and 49°N in the western hemisphere appears to have wandered off for a wee lie down and the prospect of her ever returning is doubtful at best.

HP Inc to build future products atop grave of flopped 'AI pin'

Crowd crush

HP customer especially those afflicted with HP printers are fleeing through the exits as fast as humanly possible but the prospect of those printers being infected by some sort of malevolent talkie toaster AI will turn mere flight into into lethal panic.

The Humane AI pin really was something out of the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

An enterprising chap might purchase a decent length of wall and auction off shoulder width sections with each successful bidder winning the right to nominate who, unless already so accommodated, gets to stand in his section "come the revolution."

City-slaying space rock 2024 YR4 still has 2.4% shot at smacking Earth

Re: Or ....

"North America was not among the possible impact locations."

They have clearly underestimated the positive power of prayer.

I am sure the chap upstairs groks lat.&long. (38° 53' 52.6452'' N and 77° 2' 11.6160'' W. would be favourite.)

Looks like paywalls are coming soon to a subreddit near you

Re: Can't we just bring back newsgroups?

They seem to be still going in some form. A mob called Eternal September appear to offer a free nntp service. Whether anyone uses these groups is another question.

One of my earliest BoFH PFY tasks was to build and get running CNEWS on a Pyramid minicomputer (OSX a BSD/System V UNIX chimera) using dial-up connection with a brain dead terminal server at the other end to negotiate a connection with a uucp type software peculiar to Oz (MHSnet or ACSnet.)

Once going the rapid rise in popularity of the service in a time when RS232 terminals (Visual VT102) still ruled was a warning I suppose.

Palo Alto firewalls under attack as miscreants chain flaws for root access

"Exposing management consoles to the internet is a known risk."

Or a massive hazard with a known risk, approaching certainty, of exploitation.

A bit last century I suppose but I blanch at the thought of placing these over complicated devices on the network border. To my mind that function would be more securely served by simpler devices that implemented relatively static but broad bedrock security policies with the more complicated devices placed in network enclaves between the routers/firewalls of the internal networks and the border device. Roughly the DMZ architecture of yore.

I still have a fondness for screening bridges the headless monks of network traffic filtering.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Re: Not Just a DIFFERENT Set of Problems

The more-magic the magic, the larger the explosion when it goes wrong.

Sounds like Pratchett's Discworld Unseen University Wizards views on the use of "magic" from which they mostly and wisely refrained. They might have quibbled about the "goes wrong" condition as when magic "goes right" the consequences are often even more devastating.

FreSSH bugs undiscovered for years threaten OpenSSH security

Time to start using SSH certificates?

Signing host keys would remove the need to consult known_ hosts or the user or DNS - known_hosts marginally the least dodgy of the three IMHO. :)

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Re: Why ?

"if you don't look at the history you make the same mistakes, look at Hitler/Stalin carving up Poland and now you have Trump/Putin about to do that to Ukraine. On a positive side, Putin found his Nazis, they are in the Whitehouse."

On that positive side I have a ridiculous picture the DOGe in chief stomping around the Shit... Whitehouse with his kepi and tunic emblazoned with a square enclosed Z aka a Zwaztika.†‡

If I were to force the analogy I would think ultimately the Russian Federation would collapse with loss of territory westward (and eastward) while the US will have descended into 21st century version of a repression channeling and exceeding that of the Stalinist state. In this unlikely state of affairs the necessary major player who would have saved the western tradition would likely come as a surprise to many.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) to whom the original quote is incorrectly attributed did write rather more perceptively:

"History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends."

_{† officially was intended as a task force identifier to reduce the risk from friendly fire. In the event unfriendly fire removed that risk.}

_{‡ for DOGe reuse might be rechristened a Twatzika.}

Re: Why ?

I thought it was pretty much settled that modern-day IT is one of the circles of hell

Which one?

If Dante's Inferno were any guide modern-day IT would be crowding out each and every of the nine circles save perhaps the first.

I can easily imagine any of our contemporary tech bros billionaires locuming for the big guy at the bottom.

A surprising bit of sanity from Redmond

The last version of Windows I ever personally ran seriously was 3.x on a box with a Hercules mono adaptor (HGA) so the idea that a 95 installer would be written to run in a cutdown Win3 environment makes sense even if it would discover and report the non VGA hardware and abort the installation.

Proprietary Unix installation and upgrades often booted a minimal Unix kernel from tape or existing system disk (with an in memory file system? mfs?) to perform the task. The proprietary Unix hardware vendors' firmware was also vastly more capable than the humble bios of the IBM PC. The boot floppy with installation CDROM install media for the x86 version of Solaris 2.6 recreates much the functionality of the Sparc OpenBoot environment.

Lloyds Bank reviews tech and engineering personnel in reorg

Re: "We are excited"...

They will be "loving" their customers next.

Definitely non-consensual but then we have come to expect corporate rapine of their customers as the norm. (Over a barrel is a common but nonetheless rather visual metaphor of that violation.)

Re: "Lloyds Technology Center in India"

"And then they're going to moan about how there are no good techs in the UK . . ."

Or in India ... (or anywhere else.)

The median quality of the talent seeking careers in almost any branch of IT or Computer Science has steadily and monotonically declined in the last ten to fifteen years which not coincidentally parallels the uptick in the corporate embrace of this nonsense. That embrace limited career progression, indeed futures, together with the consequent stagnation and reduction in renumeration has rendered these roles rather unattractive to the best and brightest and also to many of lesser lights.

The thinking that in less developed nations this not yet the case and a rich vein of talent remains to be exploited (or drunk from? :) is mostly short term and ultimately wishful thinking.

Many who entered the industry in the 80s or 90s would be now in their 50s or 60s with thirty to forty years of experience, possessing skills that haven't to any great extent been acquired by their juniors, now facing one more round of attritional restructuring will understandably opt to exit the industry either through retirement or retraining.

The ramifications of this impending avalanche of talent attrition might be more devastating and far-reaching than has been imagined.

The future of AI is ... analog? Upstart bags $100M to push GPU-like brains on less juice

Full circle

When I was† a wee lad and first learnt of computers from a library book that text spend quite a few chapters on analogue computers and the problems that they were used to solve and later chapters on digital computers with a conclusion that hybrid (analogue + digital) computers were the future - the author clearly not a frontrunner in the Nostradamus stakes.

But I guess if you prophesy too far into the future you and your prophecies will be long forgotten before their fruition.

My take on this "new" technology is that it's pretty much a late 1960s hybrid computer element miniaturized to nano scale with massive on chip replication.

I could see that an element that could solve a range of differential equations replicated millions of time could run the same model with a million different boundary and initial conditions in parallel might be very useful.

Even back then (1960s) early AI were building neuristors and basic neural networks from such basic electronics. The move from physical devices to modelling the same devices and networks in software probably happened during the 1970s and the rest is history and the lamentable state we find ourselves in today.

I cannot help but think if you were to make a large number of adjacent compound analogue-digital neuron like elements small enough then quantum mechanical interactions might provides some unexpected surprises.:)

_{† I instinctively feel that this should be "were" but cannot see any reason why.}

Avaya hangs up on users with fewer than 200 SaaSy contact center seats

Re: "orchestrate seamless customer journeys”

"There's nothing more seamless than being told that you have to pay more for the same service . . ."

So you reckon the poor customer is being "stitched up" then? Sewn into a body bag to be later jettisoned.

Seamless I guess in the sense that if the proposals aren't adjoining or attached then there is no seam just a gulf or gap.

Even Linus Torvalds can have trouble with autocycle … autocracy… AUTOCOMPLETE!

“to allow platform devices from stop being abused.”

Couldn't quite parse that other than permitting devices from a vendor called "stop being abused." Cannot help thinking autoconfuse had been assisting here too.

Fortunately clarified by Greg K-H in the next sentence.

Unsolicited autocomplete does have it comedic moments. Completing "demented also rans" as "demented also fans" in a context of the supporters of DOGe Space Karen's activities seemed rather insightful.:)

Loken: An easy interactive way to better looking websites

"Getting to the right level of extreme simplicity is really, really hard."

Really refreshing to read of someone in the industry who holds this view against the horde of "Fake it until you make it" also rans.

St Exupéry in Terre des Hommes expressed succinctly:

«Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher.»†

"But sometime, you realize, if you need the thing, you just have to build it yourself."

If it's "need" rather than "want" this is more often the rule rather than the exception, unfortunately.

_{† Lit. "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."}

Bank of England Oracle Cloud bill balloons – but when you print money, who's counting?

Could help being reminded of ...

Terry Pratchett's Making Money the "Men of the Sheds" in particular.

Never thought I would live in world where the fictional peculiar government and institutions of Ankh-Morpork would be the envy of most contemporary states. I imagine one the more notable of that city's guilds would be overwhelmed with contracts were it were present today in this world. The Thieves Guild was always present here and has enjoyed unprecedented success in recent times.

The glass computer in the Bank's basement was unnervingly prescient of Pratchett.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: Top Cover

"We now have a CEO who thinks meetings are a waste of time.

If I wasn't such a coward I'd tell you where I work, and that we're hiring programmers..."

Too old, I was never a code monkey but the NASDAQ stock symbol might be useful.

On second thoughts I am assuming that by this CEO's aversion to meetings he/she is an enlightened, rational executive but I also can imagine a raving insane autocrat might have a similar aversion and unfortunately those creatures don't appear to be in short supply.

Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed

Re: Government. . .

'When, to paraphrase Aleister Crowley, "Your and whose army? Shall be the whole of the law," '

I haven't heard that nutter's name for ages.† I read one of his books as a teenager and thought the author demented.

Crowley's phrase paraphrased was: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

If the world hadn't been blessed by his passing more than seventy years ago he could be the high priest of today's ruling cults.

_{† Good Omens probably has a nod in his direction.}

"trained in the art of the..."

Sorry, silly me... now I see "snow job" but then...

2 charged over alleged New IRA terrorism activity linked to cops' spilled data

Blunt tools. Again.

Anyone with even a few functional brain cells would have concealed the actual spreadsheets either through encryption or steganography.

But I supposed if you had clever terrorists they would be the government which given the governments we have our terrorists must be in unbelievably retarded which is at least a small comfort in these interesting times.

The image of the current Great Orange Eejit marching with the Derry apprentice boys completely cracked me up. The Paisley retort priceless.

One can laugh from the other side of the planet but this is serious history for which the last word has not been written by any means. As a child I remember one of our neighbours was a participant in the Easter Rising (on the wrong side) and probably just avoided an English firing party. A very sad, haunted old man far from his country.

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

It is just 30 days to the 15th of March

Does the Senate convene on Saturdays?

Re: Perhaps the time is right ?

"The president's brain is missing"

A Street Art Utopia image makes sense now.

The president's brain is missing in https://streetartutopia.com/2025/02/10/street-protest/

Re: Jesus is depicted as looking like ...

"There are two versions of the Bible. One is the Old Testament."

And arguably, at least by the gnostics, two versions of God.

Re: Jesus is depicted as looking like ...

Moses, for instance, was an Egyptian, who converted to the Jewish faith and threatened the Pharaoh. That's a real historical account.

I would imagine in those pre-anaesthetic times, that would have been painful.

In any case I thought it was cannon that "man creates god in his own image." Extant deities speak volumes of human failings and nothing of divinity.

Re: FTFY

Renaming the degenerate koiné or creole of English commonly used in the US as American is possibly an insult to the other nations in the Americas that routinely use English in its more recognisable forms.

For me the idea of renaming the US creole as Analingus would appear to work on so many levels.