Posts by grizzly 17 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Oct 2016
Mastodon diverged from Twitter's core competency: micro-blogging. Mastodon's 500 chars is more like blogging vs Twitter's 280. People get to the point faster on Twitter. Grammar and vocab are flabbier on Mastodon because people needn't care about wasting words, using tautologies, etc. Micro-blogging is the name of the game. I want to quit Twitter, and I would if a critical mass went elsewhere, but Mastodon hasn't helped itself.
Twitter is dead for people like me now. I can't cope with ads & non-chrony timeline.
I've tried Mastodon instead, don't like its near-double Twitter's word limit. The name of the game is micro-blogging, not small-blogging. Many of the eight billion want to spout on the internet and life's too short to read them in non-micro form. I know there's a nuance-deficit in micro-blogging, but if you really can't fit in micro, can thread. It's clear that given mastodon's 500-char sprawl, people get lazy with their grammer & phrasing. There's more tautology. They don't think about every word they spend. Mastodon thew the baby out with the bathwater.
My biggest complaint with Windows 11 is that it is no longer possible to tell the time accurately. Some genius UX committee decided it would be "cleaner" if we no longer saw seconds after clicking the clock. Not optionally removed, removed end-of. Cannot be reinstated.
There are many circumstances where knowing the time more accurately than to-the-last-minute is essential. In Win10 I often clicked the clock to be more puctual when attending ubiquitous remote meetings, or doing quick estimates of execution times when writing code.
"Ditching Orifice looks more and more attractive every day." - I could ditch Office were it not for Outlook. All the other apps have decent FOSS Linux equivalents. But there isn't an email/PIM app nearly as good as Outlook. Eg email-handling rules, recurring appointment options, tabbed\coloured calendar view, etc.
Does anyone know different? I'd prefer not to give my data to Google by using GMail.
For people like you and me, engaging with conspiracy theorists is usually pointless. Conspiracy theories have two traits:
1. Scale-bias. Big events "must" have big causes. Thus the JFK assassination has them, yet the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981 does not because it wasn't as news-worthy.
2. Self-sealing. The "you're in on it" factor. Refuting becomes reinforcing.
It's worth pointing out too that real conspiracies point to why coronavirus-is-a-hoax, or the moon landings were faked simply cannot be true. Take Snowden. The truth became known because the sheer number of people who needed to keep shtum simply wasn't sustainable. One study of real-conspiracies calculated the average quantity of conspirators and time before whistleblowers reveal it to the world. It demonstrated that if the 411,000 people who worked on the moon-landings collaborated to fake it, the story would typically have broken after 3.68 years.
John Oliver last weekend had a good thesis on how to respond. Find someone who the wacky-theorist respects and get them to nudge, not hector. Compliment the theorist's curiosity and intelligence, suggest they think critically and explore whether any credible experts agree with it. Then compliment how smart and inquisitive they are again.
"Best deal would be to stay in the Single Market and Customs Union." The best deal yes, but what exactly would be the point? It's non-voting Remain. Remain minus.
The only perceivable benefit is: "it will make some ignorant people happy". Is that the level of desperation we've reached? Really?
Best outcome is a second ref. Three years have passed. Unlike 1975, 2016 was won marginally and was unfair. The Leave side broke electoral and data protection law, and told proven misinformation throughout the campaign. It's entirely legitimate to have another.
I think you'll find, the way things are going, the only way this leaflet was "misleading and biased" is in how it toned-down the consequences of Brexit.
The remain campaign have not been convicted of breaking the law. Not for breaking electoral law, nor for breaking direct market rules. Anyone can dispute this by contacting the Electoral Commission and the ICO. Nobody has because the remain camp weren't devoid of ethics and veracity during the referendum campaign.
I've no objection to a national broadcaster, but it should be funded progressively from general taxation, not a separate regressive fixed-price tax (licence fee).
If you don't have a TV, a radio or a computer, you still benefit from having a society that is informed, entertained and educated.
I agree the beeb tends to be biased in favour of whoever is in govt, eg when half the Tory party lied that leaving EU would give £350m to the NHS, it should have been couched exactly as that: a lie. Not "Remain supporters dispute the claim..." But it is the responsibility of the regulator Ofcom, to ensure balance. Scrapping the national broadcaster is not the solution.
"It allows me to run a GUI that's hosted on one machine, and displayed on a different one" - can still do that in ubuntu 17.10, but only because it falls back to X11 for remote sessions. Either they need to fix remote sessions via Wayland, or otherwise keep X11 (dual gnome-shells) in 18.04.
This is all a massive distraction.
Steve Bannon has it right. In rich world elections, talk of economic inequality will beat talk of race. The more people focus on gender\race\sexuality instead of what really matters: addressing the real problems of globalisation and technological-advance, the more they play into the hands of snake-oil pedlars like Trump.
Versus the $32 trillion secretly hoarded offshore, the left going on about cultural appropriation by white TV chefs selling Indian sauce, or campaigning for transexual toilets is so pathetic it's almost despicable.
"fell short of the high standards we set for ourselves"
Hardly high though are they Mr Bartholomew? Take upload speeds, Virgin's package that is priced the same as the cheapest Ultrafast Fibre (BT OpenReach's top fibre) package is 7 (seven), that's SEVEN times slower. I know because, as a long-time Virgin customer whose contract was ending, I shopped around recently before realising quite how uncompetitive Virgin are on speed (where it matters) and dumping them. To get the same upload speed (up to 20mb), you must get Virgin's 200 or 300mb packages that are vastly more expensive. Virgin are still pretending we're in a pre-cloud world where people don't upload most of their data. 100 or 300Mbps isn't a hill of beans to most people, 3mb to 20mb upload speed however is a transformative experience.
Sure there can be room for discretion. But it's pointless if the cop is allowed the excuse: "I woz too busy\fraught to switch the cam on m'lud".
Record everything for the past 10 minutes, then choose whether to retain. Sensitive things like the widow being informed of husband's death, etc don't need to be kept, but the bent copper loses the excuse if he fails to record something the IPCC would have been interested to see.
"will be turned on at the officers' discretion"
Why bother then? They'll just plead: "I didn't have time to switch my camera on before I shot the deceased 42 times in self-defence your honour". Should automatically record everything at least for the past x number of days - data storage is cheaper than ever.
Or if that would upset the Police Federation too much, as a compromise could only retain say the last 10 minutes, then cops can choose whether to retain the past 10 mins's footage. Won't have the excuse of "was an emergency and didn't have time guv". As it stands, it's a tool that will cause, not prevent police injustice. Will push the weight of evidence away from the IPC and public, and towards the police.
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