Posts by holmegm 327 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Aug 2018
Except of course that there really are British people, and even if you were born there, that doesn't magically make you one, if you aren't.
I'm not sure why people have such a problem with that, but only in certain countries. If I move to the Amazon river basin, nobody is going to call my children Indians, even though they were born there.
"Somebody obviously works there who thinks in these terms. Perhaps still does."
Lots of people who work there - and everywhere else - think in those terms, including in HR.
There is plenty of obsession with race.
They just don't use those specific words, that's all. But they are still obsessed though with your race, how many they hire of each, how to hire more of some and less of others, etc.
And there are ways to fire a customer gracefully.
You can just be so, so sad that you are unable to help them. It grieves you so much that you just can't even try anymore.
You care about them so much that you are sure they can get better help elsewhere. You are so sorry to have failed them. No no, you really can't risk failing them any longer.
"I abandoned Google because I was receiving emails not intended for me. My alias was punctuation between my first and last name. Apparently, they are really bad at hashing."
Mine is precisely that, and I get the emails not intended for me too. But that's because people don't know their customer's/friend's/lover's - or heaven help us, their own - email address, not due to a technical error.
It's not just the walled garden - do you really want the very existence of your email service (or any other service) to depend on the good will of Google?
To play devil's advocate - I've been on the consumer internet since the beginning. I've changed email providers every time I changed ISPs, until I said to heck with it and went with Gmail. Frankly, Gmail has been more stable and had more longevity than just about anything else out there.
“Among the coffee species threatened with extinction are those that have potential to be used to breed and develop the coffees of the future, including those resistant to disease and capable of withstanding worsening climatic conditions,” noted Aaron Davis, lead author of the paper published in Science Advances and head of coffee research at Kew.
So, climate change is wiping out coffee species whose super power is resisting climate change? I'm confused.
"We can see they are good at science and engineering, and they don't appear to have copied from the West to achieve it."
Not disputing they can be good at it, but not sure that follows from this ...
Landing on the moon? (US, 1969, manned)
Discovering that plants don't like cryogenic temperatures? (Pretty sure the West knew that some time ago ...)
Someone must have forgot to tell them your clever little joke, because still they, and their southern neighbors, come ... and come ... and come ... year after year, decade after decade.
I indeed wonder why they don't protect themselves from such evil folk as we are, and choose to stay in their vibrant paradises where they are safe from us. Mysterious.
It's almost as though snarky anglo techies might get things wrong sometimes ...
Depends.
If a given election got the results that you wanted, then in your eyes it wasn't hacked.
If a given election *didn't* get the results that you wanted, then in your eyes it *was* hacked.
Under no circumstances could your side just lose legitimately.
“Nazis” really?
You disagrees with someone so you compare them to a genocidal dictatorship who attempted to exterminate and entire ethnic group? That makes you at least as bad as the people you are trying to deride with your exaggeration of their intentions.
As an American I find that very amusing right about now for some reason. I won't go on about it though. Carry on :)
"That's a big assumption that you know what anyone else should consider to be in their interests."
That's really what they think though.
They think they are just so clearly and obviously right, that the only way someone could disagree with them is by being duped by propaganda, being an idiot, being a racist, etc.
Often that works for them - groupthink and peer pressure are things, after all.
But with Trump, Brexit, etc. it didn't work ... and that scares them, mightily.
"Wait, didn't some government just persuade you to vote against your own interest and vote for theirs instead?"
No, they didn't.
Again, if you believe that propaganda was required to get anyone to disagree with you ... well, that speaks for itself.
Believe it or not, people can and do disagree with you without being dupes of propaganda.
Seriously. Even in Orwell's dystopian nightmare the hate sessions were only two minutes, for pete's sake.
Ah yes, the inevitable downvotes for pointing inconvenient stuff out.
I just find it amusing.
El Reg on Engelbart: "We debunk you! You didn't do *anything* of note, you weren't showing the first of anything, fie upon you, XY carrier!"
El Reg on Berezin: "Awesome, first word processor evah! Er, for some values of "word processor" ..."
Drum:
"This…does not compute. The Data Secretary was functionally identical to the IBM MT/ST, introduced in 1964. Like the Data Secretary, it was not a modern word processor that allows you to type an entire document and then print it out. You typed one line at a time on an IBM Selectric typewriter—fixing typos along the way—and then saved each line on a device that used quarter-inch magnetic tape. When you were done, you put a blank piece of paper in the typewriter and told it to spit out all the lines you had typed. "
{...}
"Evelyn Berezin’s Data Secretary was the first computerized word processor only if you use the word “computerized” very narrowly: the MT/ST was originally electromechanical and only later used circuit boards in its main processing unit. The Data Secretary used ICs from the beginning.
I understand that the Times obit section is trying to be more conscious these days of women who didn’t get credit for their accomplishments back in the day. In this case, however, they’ve overreached."
Yeah, puzzling.
The specific shenanigans listed, yes, they are certainly bad. Burn the ISPs at the stake for them, fine with me,
The article headline that is here though? Well, yes, generally if you are poor, your stuff is less shiny. That's an injustice in itself? No.
Slower broadband does not exactly make me think of the poverty of Jean Valjean or Cosette.
As it happens, "de-platforming" has also involved domain name registrars, network providers, and payment processors (yes, it all has to be paid for, so that's part of the plumbing).
So when people said "well, let them go set up their own websites then!", ah, no, apparently not ...
"“We’re building the technology to reverse this trend, and to create inexpensive and accurate reproductions that can be enjoyed by all.”"
A truly spot on reproduction should drive down the price of the original too, shouldn't it?
Oh, I suppose not ... it's kind of like "Well, *this* ascorbic acid comes from rose hips!"
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
