Posts by Graham Dawson 2748 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
They don't want you to know that aluminium foil, when folded or crumpled, forms a highly efficient antenna that if placed on the head, can be used as a simple neuralink analogue. The most obvious effects are docility and lack of scepticism, but also slavish interest in bizarre television programming and unswerving obedience to certain "masters". Once a person has donned a foil "cap" in this way, they're lost to everyone.
They're blairites. Blair did an absolute number on our political system and none of his successors has even hinted at overturning anything he did, except in the most superficial or peripheral sense. His government instituted numerous quangos that answered directly to the cabinet, bypassing parliament entirely, and drawing so much power into number 10 that he became a dictator in all but name. He totally inverted the relationship between the state and the people and utterly destroyed our institutions. Centralised digital ID cards were his baby, to the point that he's lobbied every government in power to implement them and even released a video just this week extolling the supposed virtues of the system.
Cameron followed in his footsteps (famously declaring himself the heir to Blair) and every PM since then, with the notable exception of Truss, had been fundamentally more of the same.
That's a fair point. I've had the OSA on my mind a lot recently, so I guess I defaulted to arguing against it. However, you can be certain they've received a OSA notification to imgur as well within the last couple of months. That letter, combined with the recent threat of a fine for the issues you've outlined, is likely what prompted them to throw up their hands and reach for a geoblock.
Besides, GDPR is a more difficult to comply with that you seem to think. One might say just record the absolute minimum PII necessary to operate, but they're specifically being dinged for not implementing special considerations for juvenile accounts, which requires obtaining some quantity of PII beyond an e-mail and IP address. Ultimately, whatever magic techniques people might believe exist, there is no way to fully determine if someone is a child without asking for some form of ID (and even then they might lie). Asking for ID means at least temporarily obtaining sensitive PII, which in the case of a subsequent subject access request then opens you up to liability for potential failure to prove you've removed it. Proving you don't have something is not an easy task.
Anyone who actually has to deal with GDPR knows it's difficult and costly to comply with at the best of times, even when you're making the best effort and operating well in the black. When you're starting from the back foot and already operating at a near-loss, it's going to be a expensive nightmare. Much easier to just cut off the problem at source, as so many other non-european services have done.
They may believe it, but without a financial presence in the UK, there's not much the ICO can actually do to extract a fine. The only next step available is for OFCOM to require ISPs to block the site. Imgur has simply made that decision for them.
As for following the law; as written, that is essentially impossible. The burden it places on websites is not only expensive, but technically insurmountable for any site that allows inter-personal communication. The only way to fully comply, without leaving yourself open to inevitable loopholes and oversights, is to block all traffic from the UK. Even that can be technically considered a material breach of the law, as it prevents the ICO from assessing compliance while still allowing UK visitors via VPN.
When a law cannot be obeyed, it is objectively bad law.
En-dash is the norm in British English style guides. Where American styles use word—word, British styles use word – word, and it is used to connect number ranges (e.g. 145–545).
Incidentally, this makes it pretty obvious that llms are trained to use the Chicago manual of style in their output. Everyone seems to think it's the only style guide in existence. It might well soon be the case that non-llm output is recognised by its deviation from Chicago.
The JCPOA wasn't a treaty. The participants (security council plus Germany) had an individual right under the agreement to unilaterally refuse continuation if Iran was not complying with the terms of the agreement, which was in fact the case. Iran had promised to only enrich to the level required to maintain a domestic nuclear power industry, in return for the lifting of sanctions and a fat stack of cash. They immediately began enrichment to high levels, as reported by the IAEA multiple times, in breach of their conditions.
Neither of these things create purpose. Rather, purpose, which is generated from the conflict between the inner self and external forces. Philosophy describes purpose; politics proscribes your ability to pursue purpose. People often say that something, some political cause, religious experience, or philosophical encounter, has "given" them purpose, but the reality is that they have taken purpose from those things. More accurately, they have created their own purpose from their experience of, or interaction with, those things. Politics and philosophy can no more give you purpose than they can give you sight.
I would have thought, given the context, that it was self evident. The core development team behind wayland also gatekeep commits to the xorg repo. They have blocked anything more than the most bare-bones security patches and have forced development to stall out entirely, a state of affairs that they then use as justification to abandon xorg and replace it with wayland.
There's several reasons for the ire.
First, Wayland is being pushed by the same people who actively prevent improvement to X11. They've decided that their way is the only way and no competition shall be tolerated. They grudgingly accept security patches, but anything that tries to fix or improve features is rejected. The very obvious conflict of interest frustrates people.
Second, their approach to development of the Wayland protocol (and it's gnome implementation) is high-handed and highly opinionated. They have, as the article notes, broken accessibility at a fundamental level and refuse to even address any argument or criticism of their decision to do so. They routinely reject anything that doesn't cleave to their very particular beliefs on how things should be and have spent most of the last decade bikeshedding. The consequence is that it took 15 years for the project to not even reach parity with X, and it's only after KDE and Steam became involved a couple of years ago that the project began moving forward appreciably again, but even they face continuous resistance when implementing what should be uncontroversial features.
The "extension" system is inherently fragmentary and opens the whole stack up to quasi-proprietary lock-in, which given who has been driving the project, should a great concern. This is probably the biggest issue a lot of people have with Wayland.
It takes a more pragmatic approach than devuan, by liberal use of shims rather than forking packages to remove systemd dependencies, and has the option to install systemd as an init, if you're that way inclined. I find it better than debian while easier to maintain, for my purposes at least, than devuan. Other experiences may differ.
The problem is, that paraphrase is deliberately intended to create the belief that fascism is a merger of the state and private business interests, when it's nothing of the sort. This idea directly contradicts Mussolini's own writings and actions, especially his dictum of everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
The "corporatism" referred to here is nothing to do with commercial corporations (as the link goes on to explain) but is instead more akin to syndicalism, with an interest in reducing people down to corporate groups defined by common interests. Think tribes and clans, or old-style guilds (which, again, the link uses as an example), where people of a certain profession are grouped together into a body (i.e. the "corp" in corporate, from the latin corpus), and it is that syndicated body which participates in government as a collective. So you'd have a steel-workers guild, a farmers guild, a baker's guild and so on, each wielding corporate power and influence, and each participating as a sub-unit of the state.
Mussolini started out as a socialist and only moderated insofar as he abandoned the idea of the direct seizure of the means of production, which he replaced with the belief that commerce should be subservient to corporate groups, which were in turn subservient to the state. He's only called "far right" now because of a certain Austrian painter's bad fanfiction of his and Giovani Gentile's political manifestos. Had the small disagreement of 1939 to 1945 not happened, or had Italy joined the Allies rather than the Axis (which almost happened), Mussolini would probably have been characterised a radical syndicalist instead.
Marcan barged into an issue that had already largely been resolved, or soon would have been, made unreasonable demands while grinding his axe about the lkml not adapting to his workflow, threatened to launch a social shaming campaign against everyone who didn't immediately kowtow to his position, and then flounced off when called out for his awful behaviour.
This is the sort of unstable, irrational person you absolutely do not want working on the kernel. His first reaction isn't discussion or compromise, but blackmail.
The # sign was originally the abbreviation of libre pondo, lb, (which for some reason had the p upside down) and was often written as the ligature ℔, often with an extra flourish across the top. It was later simplified into the # we now know and pound repeatedly while trying to get through automated phone helpline menus.
This idea that it was for the farmers is a myth, possibly spread as a post-hoc justification. Farmers generally start their work so early and end it so late that moving midday an hour one way or the other is neutral at best, and at worst causes then significant disruption. The cows still want milking at the same time of day; they can't read a clock.
The real reason for it was the erroneous belief that it would save electricity.
If you want the code, you abide by the terms of the license. If you don't want to abide by the terms of the license, you can't have the code. This is not a complicated proposition, it's only portrayed as complicated by people who want to ensure that the benefits of copyright protection only ever move in one direction.
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