Posts by unimaginative

Re: “an unknown worm component”

Its more likely that you used to have an airgapped anti-malware PC until a policy of running endpoint security with automatic online updates on all machines was imposed...

Re: "It was their behavior that got them there in the first place"

> BLM: What I hear: Black lives matter.

BLM came about because American cops were shooting lots of black people. It copied by people in the UK.

Police in the UK have shot a total of 10 people so far in the 2020s. https://www.inquest.org.uk/fatal-police-shootings That is considerably fewer than in the US in a single month. Even on a per capita basis it is not even remotely comparable.

No one in the UK (reasonably) worries they will be killed by the police, except people who are actually carrying out an armed crime.

So what I hear is "people think they are living in the US".

> I'm a lot less likely in the UK or the USA to get into a situation where my white skin colour puts my life into danger

In the UK people of any skin colour are not likely to find their skin colour puts their life in danger. The US has about twice as many (the exact numbers do not seem to be available) people killed by police than the UK has total murders. The murder rate and the homicide rate (murder plus legal killings such as in self-defence) is much lower.

I am not white and I have rarely had a serious worry about being subject to violence, never to serious violence, and never been threatened with racially motivated violence.

It makes no sense to lump very different countries together like this.History, culture, and present issues around race are entirely different.

For more on what I think about this, read my blog post about how racism is a different thing in different countries.

Re: Party in charge is irrelevant

> I'm a mid-to-senior civil servant, and I can assure you that we decide nothing, we do our utmost for any government to offer policy options to meet the objectives ministers say they want. We don't control agendas, we don't push them to conclusions we want. If they want some policy like Rwanda or pints of wine, it is not our job to argue against it, but to give them a view of how we think it could operate in practice, including whether it will work and possible consequences, offer options to implement, and then when a decision has been made we offer proposals to amend legislation that once approved by the minister go before Parliament.

That is exactly what Sir Humphrey says.

Yes Minister is not a lightweight comedy. It is well researched. If you get the book version the footnotes tell you about the real events it is based on.

Re: Opt Out Now!

The Uk is in Europe. More importantly the UK has GDPR like laws.

Various countries have GDPR like laws.

You cannot scrub specific data from an 'AI' without retraining it from scratch.

Re: Most Users Are Focused On Applications..........

Do you consider the desktop environment to be an application? Technically it is, I suppose, but to the average user its not really separate.

I find the desktop environment is important - apart from launching applications (and how you launch applications matters) it provides panels, integrated applications (matters for file managers and a few others), GUIs for settings (unless provided separately by another component of the OS).

The other big differentiator for me is installation and maintenance load. its not just easy vs difficult (i.e. say Gentoo vs Ubuntu) but the pattern (rolling or big updates) and the risk of problems.

Re: Situational awareness is rare

I see people working on laptops every time I get on a long distance train. Very hard to stop people in seats behind you seeing what you are doing. Some look like they are dealing with potentially confidential information - I often see things like NHS login screens.

I think this is spot on. Its CYA for the CTO. Outsourcing the blame.

Like all extremes, the woke and the far right feed off each other. Each outrages people into supporting the other.

"More broadly we've had a dance company drop ballet as "it's too white","

That is racist. Its saying non-white people are no sophisticated enough to enjoy ballet.

Everyone in my non white family except me likes ballet.

The problem is that race is so deeply entrenched in US culture that even people trying not to be racist (and of all races) cannot let go of the idea that it is an unalterable fundamental of what people are. You can see this in the fact that people are happy to accept gender self-identification struggle to accept people who want to similarly self-identify their race. Race is a lot less fundamental - its based on very superficial characteristics, that vary between cultures.

The deep racism makes me understand why people in the US want "affirmative action". I think its a huge mistake, but I can understand why. Doing the same thing in the UK makes things worse. I wrote a blog post, based partly on my own experience of multiple cultures, explaining that racism is a different thing in different places.. The US and India are similar, the UK is very different, and other places are different from any of them.

Re: hellish simulation

The group is not part of the church organisationally. A stupid but well intentioned tech project is hardly something terrible.

That is not enough. We need to revise laws and court practice around electronic evidence to stop something like this happening again.

The developer of software should not be the only expert witness to software being sufficiently reliable to be relied on in a criminal case. They cannot possibly be impartial.

Re: Photo ID in UK

Except that it is not people turning up to vote by pretending to be someone else that is the problem in the UK.

The main problem is fraudulent, coerced or bribed postal votes, which requiring ID for voting in person does nothing about.

The people who chose to solve the non-problem but ignore the actual problem must be presumed to benefit from it.

Re: Be Brave

Woke means:

Policing people's language (and their by discriminating against people from the wrong backgrounds, especially non-native English speakers and immigrants), banning books because you do not like the ideas in them, hounding people of of their jobs because they disagree with you, imposing American cultural norms on the rest of the world (words like "master" in version control, or "blacklist" are banned in international projects and companies purely because of their role in American history and culture).

Essentially work is an oppressive and cultural imperialist movement.

Re: This is almost bibilical

The usual state of politicians minds, surely?

The level of biblical knowledge suddenly cropping up in register comments is astonishing.