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Labour MPs begin quitting X over ‘hate and disinformation’
  • I think a cross-party Mastodon instance or something like it could actually be a good idea. The hard part would be deciding who's allowed to create accounts and when (or whether) to deactivate an account after a person stops fitting whatever qualification got them an account in the first place.

    Being an MP, sure, that's a given. What about people running to be MP? What about people setting up fake parties / independently standing in order to get a place on there? Consider Count Binface. Clearly he should have an account on such a platform, but how the heck would he qualify without letting someone less sane on under the same criteria?

    And then there's the fact it would need to be run by incorruptible third parties.

    And the fact that fascist-leaning politicians would need to be allowed on there so they can't cry foul, despite the fact they'll all only ever post on X anyway.

    But then, only a handful of MPs would use it even if it was the only platform available, so it being a potentially good idea is probably all it'll ever be.

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    I hate it
  • Yes it does bother me a little that the letters in the latter half of my username can't be written backwards. (Well, some can, and the p can become a q, but then it's not a p any more.)

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    SanDisk introduces the first 8TB SD and 4TB microSD cards - Liliputing
  • “I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that." -- an actual Bill Gates quote referring to the 640k quote that won't die.

    But yes, it was probably satirically ascribed to him because of MS-DOS not having the capability to deal with any more than that amount of RAM for a lot longer than it probably should have.

    The "temporary" solution of requiring an extra driver to be able to do so (EMM386.SYS or similar) remained in place right up until DOS-based Windows was allowed to die.

    (The underlying reason was almost certainly ancient IBM PC memory-mapped IO standards, so maybe we could ascribe the original quote an engineer working there some time around 1980.)

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    How would your codebase (personal projects, work projects etc.) look as a burger?
  • The last thing I messed around with choked on some wide characters that weren't in the current locale, so I guess picture the top half of the burger bun, about two thirds of the top part of the patty, a small pile of raw ingredients off to the side and some inexplicable six-inch nails through the raw meat, maybe.

    Most of the rest of the stuff I do could be compared to those nouvelle cuisine jokes that have been running since the 1980s. Large plate, inexplicably small serving of something allegedly gourmet but is probably a cube of the cheapest pâté from the closest supermarket that was flash frozen and then stylishly drizzled in jus de menthe or something.

    Bon appetit

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    Civil servants cannot wear ‘fetish gear’ to work, minister confirms
  • Being trans does not give extra dress-code rights, and nor should it. None of the other women are allowed to dress that way, so why should she?

    Now, if she wants to challenge the dress code for more esoteric modes to be allowed, that should be taken under consideration by whoever is in charge of that, but in the meantime, she should at least try to conform. Then if the decision was to go against her, she'd have the requisite conforming clothing already.

    (Tangentially, there's an argument that gender non-conforming people might want to define other professional dress codes that don't strictly fit with male and female norms, but that's doesn't seem to be what's happening here.)

    I understand that it's difficult for trans folk who deal with transphobics everywhere they turn and thus every discrimination could be transphobia, but this one seems pretty easy to test.

    And I have to wonder how she'd react if she won the dress code change and other people, cis people, started dressing more like her.

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    Trump spews lies, disparages Harris’s intelligence, insults Jews, and rambles about “insane asylums” in unhinged press conference
  • There's the idea that he believes he's entitled to a second term. And there's so much he wants to do and it must be done as soon as possible. If any of that is even vaguely true, he won't drop out.

    (The fact he's not getting any younger might be in there somewhere, but he probably doesn't think about that at all if he can help it.)

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    Classical version.
  • Has he actually gone to the great Chinese restaurant in the sky this time?

    Pretty sure there was a hoax that he'd died a while back, and though there is a Wikipedia article for "Democracy Manifest", the way it's written and put together doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

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    31% of Republicans say vaccines are more dangerous than diseases they prevent
  • The genie grants your wish. Everyone on Earth at the moment of the wish emerges from cryosleep 50 years from now with no memory of how they got into the cryosleep pod, nor how they got to it, and worse, as well rested as they were right before the event happened. Important parts of infrastructure have crumbled in our absence. Nature has taken back over.

    Mankind finds itself with different problems, but are they any better?

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    Elon Musk shares fake news about England rioters being sent to Falklands
  • It directed followers to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

    Three more piles of manure, two from the same stable. There's no accounting for taste.

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    Why Are You Staying On Windows 11?
  • (FWIW the downvote wasn't me)

    That sounds like you're suggesting that Microsoft wouldn't care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

    I think it's all but certain that they'd want user's computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

    I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren't guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn't theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

    And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they're not going to cripple that as well.

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    US abortion numbers have risen slightly since Roe was overturned, study finds
  • There are people of all genders who enjoy being kicked repeatedly in the crotch.

    Would you like to volunteer to see if you are one of those people? How about we do it a few times to see if you get addicted?

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    How do you switch whats controlled by media keys?
  • Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I'm on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it's definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

    For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

    The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.

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    Why Are You Staying On Windows 11?
  • The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

    Even if that didn't already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn't have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

    A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they'd roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

    And even if somehow that didn't get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a "switch" that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can't boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you're booting into Linux.

    Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.

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    Sci-fi writer and WordStar lover re-releases the cult DOS app for free
  • Apparently, The joe editor has a jstar mode, so says this old Stackexchange thread. I can't verify because I've never used Wordstar, but joe's available in my distro's repository.

    No idea if it can read old WordStar files, but maybe you don't need that.

    For the GUI version - and some old file capability, the same page and other searches turn up WordTsar which is in progress. The dev says they'll be picking up development again next month.

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    Timeshift just saved my Mint Install
  • Deleting snapshots shouldn't destroy the system as far as I know. It might confuse Timeshift later down the line if that deletion was done outside of Timeshift's interface, but they're supposed to be entirely separate.

    Timeshift creates a directory called "timeshift" in the root of whatever partition it's configured to use. It should create at least one copy of every file, but it does then create hard links to save space between snapshots where files would otherwise be identical. Those links shouldn't be to (or from) live system files though.

    Now, if someone was to bypass Timeshift and manually move files of the timeshift directory back into a live system or manually link live system locations into a snapshot, that might lead to the problem you experienced. Not sure if that's what's happened.

    It's worth noting that I have Timeshift set to create its directory in a separate partition on a different physical drive, so if it was broken in some way, it would struggle to mess up. Hard links across partition boundaries are a lot harder to achieve if not impossible, so it would stop someone (or something) trying to bypass Timeshift, or at the very least give them pause for thought. And it would provide some protection against Timeshift doing something silly as well.

    Another way I suspect this could happen is if Timeshift's own copy as well as all hard links to it in all snapshots were manually deleted before a restore was attempted. Can't restore from what doesn't exist, and so the system would remain broken.

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    Downing Street condemns Elon Musk for claim ‘civil war is inevitable’
  • He must be scared of his parents - or scared of losing an inheritance - because he hasn't changed his own name to have an X in it yet.

    Ex-lax Mux certainly has a ring to it, don't you think?

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