Notices by Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE (timwardcam@c.im), page 2

@gwagner Saudi Arabia ... remind me ... isn't that the place that makes all its money getting carbon out of the ground for people to burn?

@AlexGallagher So? It worked for the Tories and #brexshit. We're still finding out what the costs are going to be.

@strypey Um ... my email address is controlled by me. Sure, I pay someone to actually run it for me, but if I don't like what they're doing I'll move it to another supplier ... as I've already done once.

@silverwizard @jerry If, as engineers might wish to, you tell the auditors "I don't meet any of the regulatory requirements, but look, I've done this other stuff which in my personal opinion is better targeted at the bad guys" then guess whether (a) you get certified and (b) you can then sell your uncertified product into a highly regulated marketplace.

@MaJ1 @HistoPol @mina @energiepirat @2ndStar @evelynefoerster @SilviaMarton @VeroniqueB99 @si_irini @forthy42 @SarahEx @GreenFire His publisher told him that each equation would halve the readership, so he left them all out apart from e = mc².

@GreenFire @MaJ1 @HistoPol @mina @energiepirat @2ndStar @evelynefoerster @SilviaMarton @VeroniqueB99 @si_irini @forthy42 @SarahEx OK, so I'm married to a publisher, so I have picked up some of how they operate.

A particular, specific, book is aimed at a particular, specific, market. The same author may well write other stuff in other ways for other markets.

And then the punter has a choice of what to buy and read.

@MaJ1 @HistoPol @mina @energiepirat @2ndStar @evelynefoerster @SilviaMarton @VeroniqueB99 @si_irini @forthy42 @SarahEx @GreenFire Eh? There's only one equation in the original!

@ChrisMayLA6 As a pensioner what I see from the Tories is

* triple lock suspended whenever they feel like it

* tax cuts spun as going to "everyone in work" actually go to everyone in work except pensioners

* fiscal drag and thus increased income tax.

OK, so they're promising to maybe not do the last one again, but they're not going to get elected so they can promise what the fuck they like in the full knowledge that they're not going to have to deliver.

@FlashMobOfOne Plus, I think you can even set your screen resolution to match your monitor these days without having to edit config files as root like you used to!

@FlashMobOfOne Installing Linux has got *lots* easier over the decades - it mostly no longer starts by asking you lots of questions in which you don't even know what most of the words mean.

On a bad day, though, it'll still scroll reams of frightening-looking error messages past you on the screen too fast to read, depending on which of the 487,201 different flavours of installer you're using, of which you probably have to really worry about exactly none.

@ShadowJonathan My favourite is the second-order compiler bug.

The compiler has a bug in how it compiles feature A. But the compiler itself uses feature A to compile feature B. So if you take a compiler with the bug in feature A, and compile it with itself, it now also has a bug in how it compiles feature B.

Which is real fun to debug if the bug in feature A arose in the first place from a read error from a magnetic medium which the parity and/or error detection didn't detect. So you can look at the source code as much as you like, and not only does it not have a bug in how it handles feature B, but it also doesn't have a bug in how it handles feature A.

(The lesson? A naïve eight bit checksum per block isn't enough. The witchcraft? It was a long time ago, but I *think* it only took about three of us less than two days to get to the bottom of this.)

@clacke @kagan I don't think the police or prisons have any such problem - "how do we spend this excess budget?" - in the UK.

@kagan The police I've dealt with (quite a few, I was a councillor for a number of years) were mostly pretty pragmatic. No point in doing something that costs money and doesn't actually work.

@kagan One version of that is the observation by the police that some young men can be a right bloody nuisance from the ages of about 16 to 26 after which they settle down and become at least tolerably well behaved citizens.

"So, at the first sign of trouble, how's about we lock them up and release them at age 26 when their brains have matured?"

No, that won't work, say the police. Because what turns these lads into decent citizens is that they get involved with a woman who says "sort yourself out or I'm off", and there's no opportunity to meet such a woman in prison.

@aral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc

@carnage4life Car manufacturers can stop supporting cars without going bust. There's bits for my VW which have been unobtainable for many years now and the car is only 20 years old.

@thehill They don't. Anyone who claims to be both right wing and Christian is lying, as the two are fundamentally incompatible. They're probably lying about being Christian, and they're probably lying to themselves as much as to the rest of us, but one way or another they're lying.

@clacke Went to a restaurant. Went again, for a second time, some decades later. Same proprietor:

"Hello, haven't seen you for a while."

@darnell "She" reads like a troll. Russian bot?

@Free_Press We keep hearing that all sorts of people "will provide" this that and the other for month after month after month.

Does any of it ever get delivered? Or is that kept quiet about when it happens because the Russians don't need to know until it hits them?