Posts by Sanguma 521 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2017
is good. It should mean that there are no gotchas in the firmware, no hidden traps to catch you unawares, no IOT-Call-Home to catch you out, no unexplained behaviour from what is alleged to be single-purpose hardware, etc.
I look forward to seeing what can be done with it. I commend Microsoft for doing this. It's a good move.
For what it's worth, the cut-off of water triggers an aspect of the Genocide Convention; article 2, (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide
I may not like Hamas as a political organization, but it is entitled to self-defense, and retaliation if self-defense has been by-passed. BTW, have you noticed one thing about the West's leaders on Israel and Palestine? They always claim to support Israel's right to self-defense, and if pressed, tehy would argue it's a common human right. Then they go silent on the question of if it is a common human right, why are the Palestinians not permitted it? Why are Palestinians exercising it, libelled as "terrorist"?
And then, to make matters even more murky, there's the little detail that the Palestinians have been in Palestine for over two thousand years - as evidenced by the existence of the Samaritan community in the same area they'd been living in during the 1st century CE. Romans didn't exile any more than they needed to, so most of the villages would have stayed there after the Great Revolt 70CE, as long as they didn't actively get involved. So back in the 1st century CE they were Jewish, circumcized their sons, celebrated Passover, etc. So if the West's leaders - and the Israelis - deny their humanity by denying them the right of self-defense, it gets remarkably reentrant and recursive - the people who today's Jews claim descent from, today's Zionists claim are less than human ... so where does that leave today's Jewish communities? Zionists appear positively antisemitic. Little wonder I don't have much patience for Zionists.
Reminds me of a certain group in NZ who used to make noises about New Zealand needing nuclear power, and whatnot. Then there was a massive power outage in Auckland, and they piped up and said their bit about how all this would not have happened if New Zealand had Nuclear Power.
Then people discovered the outage had been caused by a faulty insulator which hadn't been replaced, and we've never heard from them since.
Consider the mental health of all those whose ability to snigger mercilessly at the sight and sound of lobbyists putting both feet in their mouths at once, has been curtailed by lobbyists deciding to shut up!!! It's a mental health crisis, I tell you.
I'm in full agreement. I think most people's views would be exactly the same. Though we need not get our own hands dirty in offering them physical violence - I'd suggest they'd enjoy an environmentally friendly session of feeding the piranha in the Amazon basin. The full immersion feeding session.
Personal story here: during my first year as a BA (Classics(Latin)) at the Uni of Canterbury (NZ), I was knocked off my bicycle and came to, more or less, almost a full week later with a Traumatic Brain Injury, an Extradural Haematoma they cleaned out an hour or so before I shuffled off the mortal coil. As the information the hospital gave me was decidedly inadequate, I picked up Dr Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, discovered that there was a whole heap of material about people in my situation, and promptly ordered some of the books he mentions in it. I later worked out that I'd given myself the equivalent of Third and Fourth Year papers in Neuropsychology, and a paper in the medical science of Neurology (Surgery). The books included Guyton's Basic Neuroscience: Anatomy and Physiology, AR Luria's The Working Brain, Dr Muriel Lezak's Neuropsychological Assessment, and Springer and Deutsch's Left Brain Right Brain. Most neuropsychologists, starting with the neuropsychologist who managed my recovery, have treated me rather as an ungraduated colleague - and you know, the rule is it's when the professionals treat you as one of them, that you're actually one of them. But it means nothing, because although it helped me mightily in conquering the subsequent 5 years of clinical depression - easier to deal with the "personal demons" when you know they are not real - the work I did, didn't involve pieces of paper bearing the title of BA or BSc in Psychology.
During those five years I did some largely voluntary work computer-cataloguing school libraries. Finding I couldn't get any work in spite of proving I had the attitude to get up and enter the details, I thought I'd learned enough to get and make my own work as a programmer of library systems. To do that, I needed to know a lot more about databases, and the like. So again, I bought simple nightime reading, books like Andrew Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, Comer's Operating Systems Design: The Xinu Approach, CJ Date's Database Systems: An Introduction, and Elmasri and Navathe's The Fundamentals of Database Systems. I read but didn't buy, Tanenbaum's Computer Networks. I thought after reading all that, that since the daily rag and the computer press were moaning about computer network skills shortages, that I should do this short course on networks. My bank wouldn't loan unless I had work at the end of it; none of the HR companies would suggest any company who might offer me a part-time job as an assistant network administrator. Etc.
So that's my life story. It doesn't seem to matter if you actually know the material - and as an ungraduated neuropsychologist, I might have some professional opinions on the meaningfulness of the postgrad Organizational Psychology Diploma ... Clueless seems to be too tame to describe HR policies.
Human Resources is a subset of the scientific discipline of Psychology. You'll see it in University calendars marked as Organizational Psychology. And, to the best of my knowledge, it is the only subset of said Psychology discipline that does not generate a large number of research papers, so I take it that most Psychology professors regard it as a waste of time and money. (Disclaimer, I am not myself a Psychology professor nor have I asked any who I might know, about their opinions on Organizational psychology, but the general theme in the sciences, is that research is what everything's about: Organizational Psychology in that mindset's of the same order as a Mills&Boon to Nobel Prize Literature winner.)
but where is everybody? Reminds me of the time I jumped on usenet using knode, c. 2004, subscribed to a number of newsgroups, popped in to see what was doing on one, and woe and behold, the only action was a posting by someone cursing someone else in frankly not very interesting terms of unendearment ...
There's a lot more newsgroups in existence than there are people on them. It's almost zenlike in its absences. The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of usenet ghosts reminiscing about their past histories ...
I made good use of the antiX 19 386 when we were in lockdown in 2020. I was at Mum's, to help her in case anything needed to be done, away from my PC, and with only an aged Pentium laptop, where the original MS Win XP installation had bitrotted off the HD. With antiX 19 I was able to keep in touch with my email and keep up with the news.
That's what antiX is aimed at, and it's probably the best distro for the job. It's not something you'll find many other distros capable of doing.
You can shoot them up; you can never shoot them down. It's the atmosphere in its thinness that'll do that, eventually.
Lack of understanding of orbital dynamics should be a disqualifier for any role in any such "Space Force"; except this is a Donald Trump establishment, and like Donald Trump's casinos in Atlanta, I'm not expecting it to either last, or do anything of any use.
Even disabling some random opponent's military satellite's fraught with risk - if you haven't "shot it up" because it can't come down like an aircraft, and won't go down like a ship, and instead you've just rendered it "harmless", in the same way Kosmos 2251 was "harmless", you've left it around to take out some future Iridium 33. You've put a certain number of communications and remote sensing satellites at risk, which means you might find them missing when you need them.
Earth Orbit's more in need of some Hague Convention of the Neutrality sort, recognizing it as covered by the same sort of neutrality the Antarctic's covered by, than any muscle-pumping, fist-thumping Rambo All-American Can't Do!!!
an evening with Russ Meyer ... not quite. (Thank $DEITY) The US Constitution gives an admirably succinct reason for protecting creative output, and I quote:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Or in other words, to provide an incentive for authors and inventors to keep working by ensuring that they get paid for keeping on writing and inventing. I would dearly love to see the cheques paid to Walter Elias Disney for his posthumous output; who wouldn't? By extending the copyright to life plus 90 years, the Disney Corp has solemnly informed us that they are continuing to employ Walter Elias Disney; is it possible that they have not in fact been paying him? If so, the founder of Disney Corp et al., is posthumously enslaved. Is it possible that Walter Elias Disney is having his work continuously rejected? In which case, since no discernable NDA or non-compete agreement was ever signed, why has not the Disney Corp permitted him to seek work elsewhere?
And if Disney Corp has neither been paying Walter Elias Disney nor employing him, then they have been defrauding him of the posthumous payments he is due for the use of his creative works. And if Disney Corp has in fact employed Walter Elias Disney posthumously without paying him, it has violated any number of anti-slavery laws by continuing to employ him posthumously without payment.
"limited times" is just the tip of the iceberg.
I remember SLS, patchlevel ?? rather well. I had a 486 with 4 meg of memory, which was excessive for MS DOS 5, endured MS Windows 3.0 and 3.1 and could barely handle IBM OS/2 2.0. And I had some bare intro to Unix (SCO before Caldera took the name) before, and a copy of Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and Comer's Operating Systems: The Xinu Approach, which gave me a bare hint of what I was to expect. I survived the installation, but had no Internet connection and not much idea of what to do with it, so I kept fooling around with installing DOS, Windows, and OS/2.
A short time after, I got a CD-ROM drive for that 486 and a pile of Linux and 4.4BSDLite CD-ROMs. Feeling like a pig in clover I installed a number of the small Linux-in-FAT distros on those CD-ROMs until I knew what I was doing, then with a FreeBSD/NetBSD CD-ROM I'd also picked up, I installed the FreeBSD bootloader and the Slackware distro I'd likewise picked up. Pig in clover days alright. I'd intended to compare and contrast FreeBSD and Linux, but never got around to it. With the help of some Unix books, including Frisch's System Admin book, I got my head around Linux, and among other things, wound up using emacs to write a novel. And emacs' meta-x dissociated-press feature to make some nasty comments about some politicos who'd got up my nose.
But then I got myself an updated PC, a copy of Mandrake Linux 9.0 or thenabouts, and felt like a pig in clover again.
Linux has over its lifetime been faced with the claim that it has too many distros. And no standardization. While Red Hat ltd has claimed that it was the standard, since it was the Enterprise distro.
It now looks as though that will change. The free/community projects like CentOS and Scientific Linux etc, were part of that. Now they're not.
Red Hat/IBM have just removed a part of what made Red Hat the standard Enterprise distro, and now they are going to find themselves competing. IBM showed during the 90s it wasn't competitive, didn't know how to compete, and gave up a lot of territory it had formerly thought it owned.
But feeding trolls their own toes is part and parcel of the sheer joy of living!!! I mean, finding an accredited "international human rights lawyer" on Twitter who fails to understand the significance of "Habeas corpus" has got to be one of the great shocks of life - feeding him his own toes (with suitable condiments) made up for the grim horror of discovering his existence ... By the time he'd got around to deleting all his offending posts, I figured he'd put both feet in his mouth, right up to the hip, and really, you can't deny such individuals the joy of tasting their own toes up to their pelvic cage ...
I like Slackware. As I like FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Minimal assumptions made, plenty of room to experiment and learn. But for the past few years I've been using the Mandrake branch - PCLinuxOS is its coolest branch IMHO - and then switching to a dual setup of Kubuntu and Fedora, because most of the people I met using Linux professionally seemed to be gravitating to those two distros.
Wouldn't mind running Slackware again.
That's what this reminds me of, way back in the 80s. IBM cut corners to get their PC out, and that included using common parts; they also published the specifications so that people could build add-ons that IBM wasn't going to waste time building themselves. And they also published the BIOS source, which a few people promptly clean-room cloned.
After suddenly realizing they'd created a marketplace out of a hobbyist niche, they tried to close things up. They soon discovered that they couldn't sue the likes of Phoenix, maker of a clone BIOS out of existence, because the law didn't agree with IBM's views. So they developed a brand new PC architecture, the MCA (microchannel architecture) and tried to establish that as the new motherboard bus. Which led to a lot of kerfuffle and the EISA (extended industry standard architecture), yadayadayada. All long since deceased, gone to the great big bit-bucket in the sky.
What we've had has been similar - a new software "architecture" has taken over, moving rapidly from mere hobbyist to serious business underpinning, and IBM has tried to corral it. And they're finding it's not what they think it is. It enables IBM to maintain its massive investment in mainframes, since it works just as well on mainframes as on PCs and smartphones. But it's not their product; it's owned by others who are willing to share, but not to let it be corralled off in any way.
Which is in large part, why I have every now and then, mentioned IBM and Microsoft letting go of the OS/2 code base (and prior such as the VAX VMS and later, such as the early MS Win 3x-9X and WinNT 3-5), so they can also let go of some of those assumptions. Because at the rate they're going, they're spending more time spinning in circles than actually getting anywhere.
I just found a term which seems to fit the current Red Hat trajectory - Cory Doctorow's enshittification, to wit:
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
It would apply to companies as well as platforms. MS Windows began to run into this during the 2000s; Linux's hedge against enshittification would be that it is free and open source; however, Red Hat as a company, doesn't have that hedge.
As Senator Diirksen apparently didn't say:
"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money"
https://www.dirksencenter.org/research-collections/everett-m-dirksen/dirksen-record/billion-here-billion-there
But he did take the credit for it, which comes to pretty much the same thing.
As far as I can make out, the only use the Pentagon and associated types have ever got out of the Budgetary Defense Initiative has been Theatre Missile Defense. Ie, not strategic ballistic missiles, but tactical ballistic missiles. Stuff I read during those days, pointed out that decoys could waste a lot of the orbital BMD resources. Someone pointed out that a pair of secateurs in the right place could take out ground control - but I knew that from seeing Silo 15 at high school in Canberra about 78 or 79.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_15
Though the Israelis have been touting their Iron Dome's success in shooting down the rudimentary rockets from the Gaza Strip. Much as the Pentagon has touted the success of the Patriot theatre defense system.
I'm opposed to anything that would be world-wide. Orbiting weapons "rods of god", X-ray lasers, particularly if they require a nuclear explosive to trigger them, as was reported by the popular literature about "Star Wars" during the 80s - live-testing one in orbit over the Atlantic Ocean might cause fatal EMP on civil airliners not hardened to military standards. While the Kessler Syndrome acts as a fence against widespread deployment of orbital ASATs, it won't do much to stop the paranoid narcissists who tend to gravitate to dictatorships, men like the Duke of Dorkshit himself, Donald J. Trump ...
While something that could shoot down missile launches on sight, but had an insecure command/communications structure, might be persuaded by others that Cape Canaveral is a USSR ICBM site, and bye-bye Miss American Pie ...
Not that useful if your opponent discovers you've got an insecure connection somewhere along the line - IDK, someone with gambling debts and insecure accounts on his HomePC, or suchlike - the Russians did something like that with the Austro-Hungarians before WW I. And uses it to alter targeting to "more useful" targets, such as your nice big Brand New Base in the middle of somewhere-or-other ...
Blue-on-Blue aka Friendly Fire's not something to aim for, but if you insist on universal connection and insecure ie human connectors, and stationing orbiting weapons, it may well be what you get. While Artificial Intelligence might be even more frightening than Natural Stupidity ...
Isn't this a retread of The Third Ronnie, appropriately surnamed Raygun, and his Evil Empire rants of the early 80s? With its very own Budgetary Defense Initiative, nicknamed "Star Wars"?
Overall, I'd say that the US situation in Earth Orbit is very well set up, with more satellites in orbit than any other power, and alliances to "borrow" satellites from in need. And most likely the ability to "borrow" information more quickly and easily than most other space powers, from commercial operations.
This reads more like a proverbial scam spam in my inbox, telling me that I can add an extra foot to my proverbial if I take this-or-that, or gain extra tonnage in my bank balance if I spend this-or-that, or the like.
I think this particular Think Tank has sprung a leak, and to compensate, they've thrown in a few dead horses from The Third Ronnie's era.
One of the examples of hate speech that I can think that I was actually the target of, happened in December 2003 (summer in Southern Hemisphere) when I was house-sitting for my youngest sister in New Zealand while she was off on her honeymoon with her husband. I was riding along one street on a bicycle, when a couple of young girls came out and one said to the other, "I think New Zealand should be for whites only." It took me some time to realize I had been the target of that, but yes, I'd burnt well and truly brown, and the halfwits concerned had decided I was too black to reside in New Zealand ... interesting what a mix of ancestry does for one, but my ancestors include plenty of nut-brown maids ...
No reference to anything other than my colour, which was well and truly brown then. Thankfully it was only a couple of halfwitted girls, but if you meet it in a pub from a drunk doofus or in a shop from a bored and dull shopkeeper, it's a bit more serious.
The one problem I see with "hate speech" laws is that they'll wind up being used and abused by the wrong sort - the halfwits who claim "free speech" for their own ravings, but claim it's "hate speech" whenever I make fun of them for their obvious deficiencies in ... humour, for starters ... it's been seen in action: His Serene Grace the Duke of Dorkshit Donald J. Trump claiming "Free Speech" for his ravings, while claiming anyone who criticizes him is a "hater" ....
"Trump Has Vowed To Fill Guantanamo With 'Some Bad Dudes' — But Who?"
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/11/14/502007304/trump-has-vowed-to-fill-guantanamo-with-some-bad-dudes-but-who
"Trump Wisely Keeping ‘Really Bad Dudes’ in Guantanamo Bay"
https://www.heritage.org/terrorism/commentary/trump-wisely-keeping-really-bad-dudes-guantanamo-bay
"This morning, I watched President Obama talking about Gitmo, right, Guantanamo Bay, which by the way, which by the way, we are keeping open. Which we are keeping open ... and we're gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me, we're gonna load it up."
If it were up to Trump, those suspects might actually come from the United States. Asked last summer by the Miami Herald if Americans accused of terrorism should be tried by military commissions in Guantanamo, Trump endorsed such a policy.
As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for - you just might get it. Under a Trump administration, Trump would be eligible for trial and "re-settlement" in Guantanamo Bay, where all he would need to do would be to answer some questions - repeatedly ...
"Q&A: Guantanamo Bay, US Detentions, and the Trump Administration"
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/06/27/qa-guantanamo-bay-us-detentions-and-trump-administration
Then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld labeled Guantanamo’s first detainees “unlawful combatants” who “do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.”
As it happens, Donald J. Trump, as an insurrectionist and "mastermind" (very loosely defined) of an act of domestic terrorism against the US equivalent of the UK Parliament, the US Congress, does not have any rights under the Geneva Conventions, and indeed, under most state jurisdictions, they would have no rights either.
that it missed the boat in 2018 and did not show both World-Class Numpties and award them with the Blue Ribbons they both deserved, when they were both in London (or at least that's the Press Release that crossed by desk this morning.)
It is not proposed to award Boris Johnson his Numpty Breeders Association Blue Ribbon posthumously; nor is it proposed to award Donald J Trump his Blue Ribbon posthumously. Is there anyone in Florida who would be able to present Donald J. Trump with his Numpty Breeders Association Blue Ribbon, and take the time to display his fetlocks, show his teeth, etc, everything that a Show Judge would be expected to do? (I regret to inform you that Numpty Breeders Association Show rules do not include expecting Numpties on show to round up sheep: there have been too many cases of Numpties worrying sheep. as testified to in the song "Dirty Deeds - Done with Sheep". That is the role of the Numpty Breeders Numpty Trials, and with any luck, both Boris Johnson and Donald J. Trump will be considered eligible for the Numpty Breeders Numpty Trials.)
Which is why I keep saying, we should demand, every single one of us, to see the works that Walter Elias Disney was undoubtedly posthumously inspired to create by having the copyright on Mickey Mouse extended to 90 years post mortem. I mean, the US Constitution, which is the overriding Law of the Land in the case of the Mickey Duck Corp(se), does inform us that the purpose of copyright in to provide incentive to creative types to keep producing stuff, and Mickey Duck Corp(se) has clearly indicated it thinks the posthumous productivity of Walter Elias Disney is worth "incentivizing". We have the right to see the resulting products, have we not?
Part of the problem I suspect is that software iterates. Or to use another analogy, it gets retreads and refurbishments every now and then.
Copyright as it stands at the current day, is based on items that don't iterate/get retreads, refurbishments, new roofs put on, new engines, new range hoods installed in teh NEW, UP2DATE Kitchen_Of_Your_Dreams ... copyright was originally for books, and how many times does a new edition of say Dombey and Sons or Tommyknockers or Of Human Bondage come out that completely changes the settings, etc, the way Microsoft for example, completely changed the desktop metaphor between Windows 3 and Windows 95? So that the lead character in Tommyknockers one edition, is driving a Ford Prefect and in the next edition he's driving a Toyota Prius? And the lead character in Nicholas Nickleby in the latest up2date edition drives a retro Model T, complete with Toyota Prius drivechain, and has the latest Galaxy phone.
Software does that all the time. So, my own personal preference would be for software to become Open to Constant Users after the second iteration away from the state it is fixed for particular users, such as the CNC machines, photocopiers, whatnot, that people mention. And after End Of Life, the source code/source trees get released into the public under an MIT/BSD style license. That way, software that has played an important role in computer history, will be open to examination and fooling around with, by computer scientists and security experts and hobbyists and others besides the ever-present malware kiddies.
There's a story in the Mediterranean/Middle East/Central Asia area,about someone variously called the Mullah Nasrudin or Goha/Juha/Hoja/Giuffa, who had a donkey, and a distressing lack of finances. So he cut back on his donkey's feed day by day, until it fell over and died of starvation. "Now that's a pity," he was heard to remark. "I could've got it living on nothing at all!"
Meanwhile i expect Elon Musk'll keep pushing at his gaskrankinstation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4topF9qZSjs&ab_channel=FlyingNunRecords
but I think it's mostly dead by now.
Microsoft should leap at the opportunity to expand on its side of the story. And officially "pardon" so to speak, the release of the WinXP and Win2K source tree a few years back, and treat it and this as part of the "playing with tech" community bundles they got started releasing about a couple of decades ago.
Chris Rea singing This Is The Road To Hell ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGRPXtIToOs
Stanislaw Lem wrote about this in a little fictious article titled "The Upside-down Evolution" published in a little book titled "One Human Minute" in the 80s, iirc. Applying "artificial instinct" to the miniaturized weaponry - Buckminster Fuller's "ephemeralization" principle at work - soon they had no one at war ... but war never stopped. (When everything tastes like chicken, what does chicken itself taste like?)
But a satellite ? It may be sailing in the dark and hard to spot with the naked eye, but a radioastronomer can likely discover it and follow it without trouble.
There's a band of brothers fascinated enough with tracking satellites, to do it as amateurs, which should tell you, they're very, very good. And they report some satellites apparently disappear from sight.
There's just one problem with that I can see - if a satellite can disappear from sight for the purposes of eluding tracking while it is operational, what'll happen if it fails prematurely, and the operators can't deorbit it? And no one can find it?
We've already had one non-operational military satellite crash into an operational communications satellite. We can't allow Doofuses Anonymous too much fun, can we? Particularly after the non-showing of the Numpty Breeders Association in 2018, when two of the finest examples of numpty breeding from both sides of the Atlantic were in the UK and could have been shown, and received Blue Ribbons ...
"To be fair, Russia isn't the only country adept at information operations. China, Iran and even the US and UK are quite good at it, too. "
The actual past masters of information warfare are the House of Windsor; that they aren't absolute bollocks/monarchs is a tribute to other players occasionally outsmarting them. That they have endured to this day in spite of displaying an inordinate pleasure in the taste of their own toes, indicates that they have been playing it very, very well over the past two centuries. You'd never recognize Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance as a propaganda masterpiece, would you? I doubt they'd consider it that either - but I'm sure that was the effect of that tribute to Queen Victoria at the end.
There was a lot of flashy displaying of high-power lasers a decade or more ago, blowing up objects like a missile, etc. Including ideas of putting such high-powered lasers into fighter jets for that ultimate space cadet feeling, bullseyeing womp rats from ... how many metres, again?
I'd say a much easier way to move a space junk pile is to send a asteroid nudger, with one of those high-powered lasers and enough propellant that it can match velocity and orbit, stay in orbit and change orbit for as long as necessary. Then from a distance of a few thousand kilometres, blast the space junk pile with ablative blasts in the direction of orbit. A steady set of such laser blasts won't tear the asteroid to pieces, but it will shift the material, and the ablative blasts will change the orbit somewhat.
The great advantage of doing it bit by bit, piece by piece, is that you don't have to get it right the first time. You can do it over a few months, and apply corrections if you find you've hit a snag of sorts.
My 0.02c worth, and don't spend it all at once.
What I like about Britain beginning the whole "free speech" thing, is how haphazard it all was - we had the Magna Carta, which was strictly between the barons and the king at the time, though it did have nice things to say about the freemen. Then there was that German who came over and took the throne, and since he couldn't at the time speak English, the parliamentarians took a long holiday from passing law in favour of wenching and partying and getting blotto. Amongst the laws that didn't get passed or renewed was one of censorship. And when the parliamentarians finally got back to business, they noticed the law of censorship hadn't been renewed and the wheels hadn't fallen off the world, so in keeping with the primal law of the less effort the better, they dropped it.
Such laziness should be encouraged.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
