Posts by Greybearded old scrote 903 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2020
"there has to be some grassroots avenue for self-re-empowerment"
There is. Open source OS and applications, federated social stuff. Yes that means giving up some things , but are they still worth having?
Admittedly, the hardest thing there is keeping your online friends.
Or even worse, several minutes of being accused of video piracy. On a box set that I'd paid full price for. Haven't seen it on anything recent, but the otherwise excellent Jeeves and Wooster is hard to tolerate because of it. I even have to mute it, it's so incredibly loud.
So how does this square with Google's recent plans to make developer registration compulsory?
I'm not kind enough to sack him. Demote him to constable and put him on the beat. "Pour encourager les autres."
Apparently the Home Secretary doesn't have the power to sack a chief c*ntstable, for quite sensible reasons. There must be somebody "watching the watchmen" though.
It's a much smaller job than that Airbus comparison suggests, because there is all that highly capable FLOSS to pick up. Working on integration and fit and finish will go a long way.
The bad news is liberating all the data that the incumbents are holding hostage is tricksy. Especially since we all banned reverse engineering, under threat of US sanctions if we didn't. But hey, they broke their side of that deal didn't they?
I remember one journalist predicting that the new Pentium processor would cause a return to writing efficient code, because programs that fitted into the 32kb cpu cache (a new feature on desktops then) would be blazingly fast compared to those that didn't.
Before that Windows 3.0 was going to save masses of disc space. After all, applications would no longer have to ship with their own set of print drivers.
D. Richard Hipp manages to run a viable business by getting sponsored to work on public domain SQLite. Just as well, since you'll be hard put to find a computer that does anything useful without it these days. Most won't even boot up.
I wonder how he can where others can't?
Don't even need a finger, when you leave your password on every damn thing you touch.
If you've configured noscript to temporarily allow scripts from the same domain. Then very likely examined the list for whatever cdn(s) they are using. By the 2nd or third attempt I decide that their dribblings aren't that important to me after all.
It's still less hassle than letting everything run, but I can't recommend it to my non-techie friends.
Oh, do be serious. Do you think somebody whose expertise is in drama should have a tinkerer's OS inflicted on them?
OTOH, I'd be all up for guiding them through a switch to one of the "beginner's" distributions. Done it before, with a decent outcome. Mint is my preferred one. But "other easy systems are available" as they say.
"Anonymised" is the problem there. If there is enough detail to be useful there is too much to be genuinely anonymous. Those who keep saying, "It's ok, it's all anonymised" either don't know statistics (even less than me) or don't know ethics.
BTW, that Pluralistic article linked to includes the best solution to the problem that I've heard of.
I think keeping medical records for life is sensible, since it can be of direct benefit to the person concerned.
OTOH, exporting the lot to a foreign spy-tech company as the UK is doing is a whole other thing. Especially when they've named themselves after the tool of a fictional Big Bad. (When somebody tells you so explicitly who they are you should believe them.)
When asked we told the relevent authorities to fornicate elsewhere (twice), so the third time they decided that they didn't need to ask.
True, we had "Protect and Survive." With the most ridiculous fallout shelter imaginable.
I can only imagine it was intended to give us doomed plebs a comforting illusion of control.
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