* Posts by boblongii

136 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2020

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God bless this mess: Study says UK's Christian beliefs had 'important' role in Brexit

boblongii

Re: Great quote

The problem (or a problem) at the heart of the EU is the culture clash between Catholic France and Protestant Germany. Generally speaking, France comes of the worst of the two.

boblongii

AKA: People

Remainers continue to try to find some explanation of Brexit that doesn't involve people just wanting to leave - they must be religious, they must be racists, they must be gullible, they must be extreme right-wing, they must be extreme left-wing, they must be rich, they must be working-class, they must be old.

There was a vote; most people voted to leave. Just deal with it FFS.

'There was no one driving that vehicle': Texas cops suspect Autopilot involved after two men killed in Tesla crash

boblongii

Re: It's more like an actual autopilot actually.

"If Tesla didn't call it autopilot some other manufacturer would have tried to own it."

And that manufacturer should be told that you can't trademark a generic word and you can't call the very limited automatic system in "self driving" cars an autopilot because non-pilots will take that to mean more than it is.

Debian devs decide best response to Richard Stallman controversy is … nothing

boblongii

Re: Not very accurate

"He defended Minsky by saying Minsky would have done nothing wrong if he had had sex with Giuffre."

No. He said that what ACTUALLY happened was not sexual assault. He then said that Minsky probably had no reason to think that trafficking was going on as the woman would have been told not to tell people.

Then we have a discussion about whether "sex offender" or "paedophile" are good labels for Epstien. RMS says that "serial rapist" is a better description of what he was for various reasons.

"An opinion that based on their age difference at the time would be questionable"

I look forward to reading your definition of decency which clears up when people can and can not hook up without needing your special permission.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-56525456

I assume that Gee Atkin (26) and her husband Alan (69) will be asked to give some sort of explanation of their marriage to your Council on Morality at some point in the near future.

"That attention resulted in a number of women coming forward to make accusations against Stallman of inappropriate behaviour over most of his career."

At least one of these was that he had asked her out and when she said "no" he dropped the issue. One of the lynch mob posted to the gcc mailing list that this was "utterly unacceptable" behaviour.

I've yet to see any substantial accusation from a woman about Stallman that doesn't amount to "he had the temerity to ask me out even though he has a beard", despite a great deal of effort going into whipping this storm up as far as humanly possible.

boblongii

Not very accurate

"Stallman resigned from the Foundation in 2019 after he questioned whether the term “sexual assault” was applicable in the case of a woman who, aged 17, was coerced to have sex with AI pioneer Marvin Minksy."

The actual quote is:

"You will see in this article that Giuffre was directed by Jeffrey Epstein to have sex with Minsky. Is this equivalent to Minsky assaulting Giuffre? Think about this yourselves. If A tells B to have sex with C, C assaulted B? "

Bear in mind that the woman in question says that Minsky did not in fact have sex with her. So Minsky is being accused of sexual assault because someone was asked to offer him some sort of sexual encounter which he turned down. This mutates somehow into Stallman questioning whether non-consensual sex is sexual assault.

At this point the attackers generally fall back on the "yes, but he's a weirdo" angle.

The fact that it later transpired that the woman was older than 17 just indicates how little basis in real life this whole affair has.

Likewise, Stallmans complaint that "[the] plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein was not only extremely lenient, it was so lenient that it was illegal" doesn't get a lot of airtime.

The Debian devs decision not to support RMS against this is a very weak one but not surprising given how much grief one can get for putting ones head above the parapet on this.

Docking £500k commission from top SAS salesman was perfectly legal, rules judge

boblongii

Hands up

Anyone that believes that SAS have a 0.135% profit margin. Does anyone anywhere really think that the $27m contract netted the company a grand total of $36,500 profit? I smell KPMG accounting processes at work here.

What's this about a muon experiment potentially upending Standard Model of physics? We speak to one of the scientists involved

boblongii

Re: Not a scientist

Stiltonium is an unstable trans-edible member of the group.

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

boblongii

Re: No TV

I have to say it would be a very quiet news day if they get around to covering your vacuum cleaner problems.

Jeff Bezos supports US tax rise after not paying it for two years – and paying tiny amount in 2019

boblongii

Re: Ah, tax laws

Just tax turnover. No deductions; tax becomes a cost like rent or salaries. I know it would put people at KPMG (those who aren't working on money laundering anyway) out of work, but I could live with that.

PHP repository moved to GitHub after malicious code inserted under creator Rasmus Lerdorf's name

boblongii

"it would be good to know the results of said investigation, and if the perpetrator received proper legal repercussions."

Is that for the breach or for writing PHP?

Feeling brave? GNOME 40 is here and you can have a poke around in the Fedora 34 beta

boblongii

No titlebar, no use

The Gnome UI is so ugly it actually makes me feel ill when I look at it. I can't believe that people get paid to do this shit.

As to the numbering, well that just shows how far up their own arses the Gnome team are, doesn't it?

Now that half of Nominet's board has been ejected, what happens next? Let us walk you through the possibilities

boblongii

Re: resulting in a narrow three per cent margin of victory

Having a vote and then acting on the majority decision is not "pushing something through", it's how things are supposed to work. If the board had refused to enact the decision because "the winning margin was only 3%" you would be up in arms.

boblongii

Re: And further down the line - #DissolveTheUnion

Not all Catholics would vote to join the Republic and not all Protestants would vote to remain in the UK, so it's not that simple.

Additionally, a vote would make no difference to the existence of Loyalist guns, just as the GFA made no difference to the existence of Republican ones.

License to thrill: Ahead of v13.0, the FreeBSD team talks about Linux and the completed toolchain project that changes everything

boblongii

Re: Says it all

I have no doubts about the quality of the work, but I'm never going to contribute to anything with the BSD license because I see Apple using it every day to rip off programmers, customers, and society at large.

Also: systemd is not required for Linux and my main machine at home does not use it.

boblongii

Re: Says it all

"Perhaps they just want to write cool software and also ensure that smaller startups can benefit from their work too?"

They can do that with GPL; there's no need to give Apple a free ride.

"BSD evens the playing field for the little guys too."

No it doesn't.

boblongii

Re: Says it all

Mine isn't. Maybe you should change distro.

boblongii

Re: Says it all

I've never understood why the BSD people are so proud of working for rich people for free. No one loves a martyr quite as much as they love themselves, I guess.

SpaceX small print on Starlink insists no Earth government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities

boblongii

Re: What a surprise

"thrash something out ahead of time"

Well, it has been. In 1967, apparently.

Of course, your average billionaire thinks laws, international or otherwise, are for little people and assume they can do what they like. They're generally right.

Nominet sets the date for extraordinary meeting where members could fire CEO

boblongii

Re: Would post a video....

You have very high hopes for "any other government".

Happy birthday, Python, you're 30 years old this week: Easy to learn, and the right tool at the right time

boblongii

Re: Why do some people not like python's indentation=code block container

"The cost of failure is sufficiently high that programmers quickly adopt a discipline to make it really unlikely"

Whereas Python programmers adopt draconian editor settings to shackle them to someone else's idea of "clear code".

Programming languages have cultures. Guido started off making a stupid mistake about whitespace and then defending it against all rational argument. Naturally enough Python today is dominated by people who stand by their mistakes against all rational argument and the language is a pig as a result. Backward compatibility is not a consideration so even the version numbering is broken. But any discussion just meets the same old Python response: "You don't like it because it's different; you are stupid and we are geniuses".

Python is pollution.

boblongii

Re: Why do some people not like python's indentation=code block container

"I have never created or even seen a bug caused by python using the quantity of white space to indicate the start and end of a block of code. Seriously never in decades."

That doesn't change the fact that it's a mind-numbingly stupid idea. Also, I don't believe you.

Fancy a £130k director of technology role with the UK's Ministry of Justice? All you need to do is 'fix the basics'

boblongii

Re: "Court digitisation has gone poorly in the UK"

Part of the problem is scale. A fiend in the MoD once asked me why I was sure the NHS project (whichever one it was at the time) would fail and I said, "Because it would be the biggest successful IT project ever completed anywhere in the world by anyone in the whole history of IT if it did work. Does that sound likely?"

Don't kid yourself that the private sector has a long list of successful IT projects on this scale because it ain't so; quite the opposite.

Courts and NHS both have enormously wide parameters about what sort of documents they have to be able to handle and the skills of the people handling them - which includes bods off the street in both cases.

It's a bloody hard task, not helped by the fact that the Govt puts no effort into finding a decent partner but always turns to crooks like KPMG and the other shitbags of multinational consultancy. But even so, there just are not many (if any) companies capable of implementing this stuff.

Has Amazon finally gone cuckoo? Bezos' behemoth turns to crowdfunding for Alexa-powered timepiece

boblongii
Flame

You are having a laugh

The richest man in the world wants me to fund his latest idea?

If Jeff agrees to fun my mortgage I might consider it.

Nominet claims effort to replace its board with 'safe hands' is invalid, refuses to put it to member vote

boblongii

Easy fix

Enact #1, and then immediately call a second EGM for after lunch and enact #2 then.

Forgot Valentine's Day? Never mind, today marks 75 years of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer

boblongii

British Technology Leads the World

Just as with the supersonic aircraft, British scientists and engineers tempted over the pond to "share" information, Turing and others found that the US had basically nothing and the transfer was all one way. Meanwhile, the British government sat on everything that had a military angle, largely suffocating it.

Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite 'calamitous design choices' in git

boblongii

I guess you copied these off a trolling blog post somewhere. If you'd used git you would know that most of them are simply not true and others are meaningless - master is not the master; origin is not the origin etc.

Perl-clutching hijackers appear to have seized control of 33-year-old programming language's .com domain

boblongii

Re: I loved Perl so much...

I much prefer Perl to Python.

University of Nottingham looks for new HR and finance software just 18 months after massive Unit4 system upgrade

boblongii

We use Business World here

And it is atrocious. Really not fit for any purpose. Total garbage. Basic functionality is missing. The UI was clearly designed by a 4-year-old.

BW is easily the worst application I've ever used in 40 years.

Sticking with it is a complete waste of money, so the lesser of two evils is certainly to junk it and get something else.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

boblongii

What a giveaway!

"If business model includes non-revenue"

Talk about dinosaur outlooks. Of course non-revenue contributes to the business model. Being perceived as trustworthly, reliable, or just plain Not-IBM, is important to anyone's business model. To say nothing of social factors of the "high tide floats every boat" type.

Not that it matters at this point; RedHat was doomed the moment IBM touched it; it's just a question of how long the life support will be left on now.

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

boblongii

Re: Censorship by Private Companies

The First Amendment is about the government trying to stop you saying something. Amazon is not the government just yet so it's completely irrelevant whatever category of speech it was.

boblongii

Re: Seems like Parler don't know how private companies work

The cloud is just someone else's computer and they can turn that computer off at any time, contract or not.

The contract allows you to ask a court to force them to turn it back on but by then time has passed and lawyers have compiled bills. And good luck if the owner of the computer is in a different jurisdiction from you.

As UK breaks away from Europe, Facebook tells Brits: You'll all be Californians soon

boblongii

Re: It's a fait accompli situation.

Then vote for someone else. Take some bloody responsibility.

boblongii

So what?

Has the concept of not using Facebook escaped everyone?

Oh no! We've been taken hostage and forced to post innane crap on a webpage hosted in the US instead of Ireland! Whatever shall we do? Without the EU to protect us from being idiots we could all die horribly in some terrible privacy-related accident of our own causing!

What difference does it make *FaceBook* is the company that you shouldn't be sharing your data with.

Billionaire's Pagani Pa-gone-i after teen son takes hypercar out for a drive, trashes it

boblongii

Re: Ask any actuary

"Sex discrimination is illegal here."

This wouldn't be sex discrimination. Young male drivers are simply worse drivers. Legislating to say that they're not doesn't change that. All it achieves is to demonstrate that something has gone wrong with your law-making process.

It's nice to have a proper example of political correctness for a change. PC is when we have to say that something that is not true is true because real life is not socially or politically acceptable. It's not actually for when the world has moved on and left your personal values behind or for when someone you don't like says something that's popular.

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

boblongii

Re: Proudly ignorant

Neither of your phrases is "objectively" better than the established, and clear, terminology.

You need context to understand that what the "block" is and that the list is not a list of blocks. "Allow list" is pretty unclear all around.

"Blacklist" on the other hand is less ambiguous as there is really only one meaning.

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

boblongii

Re: Master copy

"As someone else said, what's the harm in making the world a little better?"

This is making the world a little worse. It is spreading and pandering to a type of paranoia that says we must avoid offending ANYONE no matter how irrational their offence is. This is regressive and by its nature divisive. It also cheapens our language by stripping out all context and saying that *only* the most offensive possible interpretation for any word should be read into it no matter what the specific usage would indicate is the correct interpretation.

"And if changing a word makes you feel angry, frustrated, and powerless, imagine those facing injustices on a near daily, weekly or monthly basis."

"Those" injustices? What are "those" injustices here? That a word is being used to describe a relationship between two git branches? Which git branch is being oppressed? What are you talking about? This is moronic and again cheapens the reality of oppression among real people - you know, oppressed people who don't have time to prance around boosting their egos by making virtue points on Twitter.

The we come to the whole question of what is actually being achieved here: a white-washing of history where we can not ever talk about or reference things which we disapprove of today. The removal of everyday reminders of where our modern and very lucky lifestyles came from.

Slavery happened - and it didn't happen to you or me or the idiots pushing for these meaningless changes. The same idiots that want to "shine a light" on a very well-known part of history (who wasn't taught about this at school?), while doing absolutely nothing about modern slavery which is actually a problem - unlike things that happened 200 years ago to people dead before your granddad was born.

It's *good* to have streets named after plantations in Jamaca - if you don't know why they're called that then no harm is done and if you do dig in and find out then you'll learn something important about the horrors of the past that we are always trying to move away from. That certainly won't be the reasons the streets were named that way originally, but it's a useful purpose today nonetheless. Never forget the past, never stop learning from it.

This infantile movement is not about improving things - it's about instituting new taboos when we should be more open, it's about controlling what people can say when we should be making it easier to have free discussion, it's about making people ashamed of *things they didn't do* when we should all be trying to be more accepting of others and of our own failings, it's about hiding slavery when we should be exposing it.

It is absolutely NOT "making the world a little better".

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