in America

And you can almost cross out “with monopolies” too because there’s a lot of tacit price-fixing in industries where there is competition.

Lib Dems to the left of Labour? I would have thought with the Overton window shifting, they’d still be occupying a position between Labour and the Conservatives like they always have… but I guess it’s possible with some of Labour’s suspiciously Conservative decisions lately.

Well, there was a period in the 90s through to the early 2000s where we had a centre-left party (New Labour) running the show and mostly improving things, but then 9/11 and the Iraq war happened and the country went scurrying back to the Conservatives again.

The conspiracy nut that lives in my brain is convinced Putin’s taking control of Russia in 2000 has everything to do with every single bit of the above after “but then”.

We currently have New Labour (now just “Labour”) in charge again, but politically they smell an awful lot like the pre-Thatcherite Conservatives.

They’ll find a way to launch it. They’ll go back into the old Soviet mindset of throwing blini at a wall until something sticks sending cosmonaut after cosmonaut until they have a success and then pretend the others didn’t exist.

And they’ll fill the minds of young would-be cosmonauts full of propaganda and tell them that there was definitely no-one before them who died up there, especially not in pain or terror. Those were unmanned test missions. Strap yourself in, you’re going to space!

Interesting to compare and contrast with Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe who deliberately wore a toothbrush moustache and referred to himself as “The Hitler of our time”.

Also interesting that now Mugabe is dead, there seem to be quite a few potential candidates for that title.

But, as best as I can tell, Uunona isn’t in the running there.

Will the war end if he dies?

Well, no, it wouldn’t. The bods that make these decisions still live like its 1950 and dream of an authoritarian future of masters and slaves.

What good is The Google or The AI when you’re sipping champagne up an ivory tower or out on the ocean being waited on hand and foot on a gleaming yacht?

So, there was this TV experiment where they served soup to a well-known scientist*, but, with his agreement, they stirred it first with an unused - and I stress unused - toilet brush.

He couldn’t bring himself to eat it.

Metaphorically speaking, our world is full of amazing things but they’re all stirred by clean toilet brushes. Sometimes, it’s worse than that and they’re used.

Do not want.

* Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he was later cancelled for being old and out of touch on women’s issues among other things, which is kind of an example of this same trope when you think about it. His opinions and reactions on soup and food disgust aren’t linked to any of that but you might be tempted to ignore the result because of it.

But then, that puts him in the same category as Louis CK and that’s what I’m responding to. Food for thought.

Fun fact: “Aluminium” is the international / official spelling. But where Brits have to take the L, or rather the F, is with “Sulphur”, because the international / official spelling of that is “Sulfur”. The others aren’t wrong, but they’re not the standard.

Anyway, I wonder if the international spelling has anything to do with it. Or maybe it just follows better from Chromium.

There are places waste is, by law, supposed to end up and places it isn’t.

You might argue that the law and good environmental sense don’t always agree on where waste should go and how it should be treated, but they’re in clear agreement on this particular dump.

And that means someone is in deep … waste.

Looks like DDR6 is due in 2027, so DDR5 prices will start to fall in 2-3 years when all the AI bros move over to DDR6 instead.

It might be sooner, but that would mean the AI bubble popped.

Meanwhile, here I am on a PC that’s less than two years old with DDR4 in it. Works fine for my needs.

When “You look Chinese, why aren’t you Chinese?” turns into an international incident rather than just plain racism.

We’ll have to get rid of the politicians in the back pocket of those corporations first.

There’s a reason the new legislation doesn’t say anything about them.

Yeah. I think I have a preference for a three tier system that’s Y.R.P (e.g. 25.0.2; “Year”, Release within year, Patch number), so yes, I could imagine the third level being incremented the following year in an emergency.

And if two-tier is paramount, tricks like (R+1)*100+P will work provided there aren’t going to be 100 patches per release. (e.g. 25.102)

I wouldn’t want to keep the 11 in there. The entire reason for (hypothetically) making this change is to get away from the old version number and any potential confusion it might cause.

I also prefer smaller version numbers, so “subtract 2000 from year” works better for me (and there’s no better time to take advantage of the fact this produces sensible numbers), but I can see why the full year might be preferable for someone else.

Odd question: What would be the fallout from changing the version numbering to be more like the change recently made by LibreOffice? That is, making it be related to the year number rather than the current system.

The reason I ask is that Linux has been and will be getting refugees from Windows 10 and 11, and the timing of the current version numbers is somewhat unfortunate and potentially confusing in that regard.

I’m aware I may be imagining a problem that won’t actually exist in any meaningful amount.

There’s also the potential problem of Microsoft following suit with whatever follows Windows 11 being “Windows 2029” or something, but it wouldn’t be too hard to deliberately throw in another jump if that were to happen at the loss of some synchronicity.

Wine 49 certainly has a ring to it!

IIRC Thatcher claimed to sleep for four hours, and she only did that because she thought it was necessary to be able to do the job properly. The job of, you know, running a country.

Sleeping for two, and then expecting a regular salaryman / career woman to get on the same level and then do that for a lifetime is an entirely new level of ludicrous.

Don’t complain people have stopped loving you when you’re the one who built a wall around your heart.

Fun fact: The closest English equivalent might be “Roderick”.

But names have a funny habit of doing that. Nothing for decades, then it becomes a fashion and everyone and their pets have the same name, and then back to obscurity again. Rinse and repeat.

Facial expressions say everything.

“This is my powerful friend who I am just like and we both rule large landmasses and he will help me with my special military exercises.”

“There’s a good chance I’ll get my hands on Taiwan if I keep pretending to be friends with this clown.”