Notices by Bill Zaumen (bzdev@fosstodon.org)

@evan You might want to delete "tear up ... rail lines" because Elon Musk it seems doesn't like our train systems (at a minimum, one of them) anyway. Why spend the effort if these bozos may do it for you?

https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article264451076.html

@dgar Unfortunately, preferential voting will occasionally elect the wrong candidate. For an explanation of why, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem (don't feel bad if this is not obvious - the work resulted in Kenneth Arrow receiving a Nobel prize).

@hellomiakoda @georgetakei The problem with Canada taking over the west coast of the U.S. is that California's population alone is comparable to Canada's, so we'd dominate parliament.

Meanwhile Trump has a pronoun problem: instead of "they/them" he thinks his are "we/us" (as in the royal "we").

@murdoc @hellomiakoda @georgetakei Except that all the citizens of these new territories could simply move to proviinces before an election and then take over parliament, then making the new territories provinces. After the election they could move back.

So, you'd pretty much have the same problem, and given that we can't seem to govern ourselves these days ....

@Nentuaby @48kRAM You missed the point, which was basically, given all the ridiculous allegations going around these days - like meteorologists controlling hurricanes - when I see something where the "editors" are "anonymous", why would I bother reading it? How would they be threatened? It's not like Trump being able to ban someone from his country club (assuming anyone even cared).

It is not about Richard Stallman. It is about a simple filter to avoid wasting my time.

@48kRAM I blocked "The Stallman Report" because (a) it was attributed to "anonymous editors", (b) allegations in some of the replies sounded like things that should have been reported to the police, so if they weren't contacted or did not find it credible, the obvious question is "why", and (c) the whole matter seemed to pop up out of nowhere.

Allegations should not be anonymous unless there is a credible reason to believe that there could be some non-trivial retaliation.

@thomasfuchs the "rhetoric" Trump was referring to probably centers around the idea that he is a threat to democracy. There is not a precondition that a statement be untrue for it to qualify as rhetoric.

@thomasfuchs Just read that the Trump is asking Democrats to cool down their rhetoric, but he could (as far as I can tell) care less that his rhetoric has lead to death threats, etc., against ordinary Americans who, of course, do not get Secret Service protection. Of course, he won't tone down his rhetoric.

@libreoffice A useful enhancement to the GPG encryption would be an option to always encrypt to 1 or more recipients besides one self. This is useful for organizations with legal requirements for record keeping and as a backup in case a person encrypting the file is no longer available.

@thomasfuchs About those students protesting in tents: when I was in college & graduate school (1960s to early 1970s) in anti-war student protests that "got out of hand", the students would occupy university buildings. If they had merely camped out on the lawn, an administration would have breathed a sigh of relieve. Why is the reaction so different now?

@fsf As an historical note, given the adoption of LibreOffice by a German state, LibreOffice originated from OpenOffice, which in turn came from a proprietary program named StarOffice that was acquired by Sun Microsystems, which released it as open source. The original StarOffice had a terrible user interface that was replaced over time. Curiously, the original software was developed in Germany.