Dear friend,

My profuse appologies for falling out of communication recently, strange and dreadful events have been occuring that have kept me from such pleasures.

You see, I fell prey to a terrible darkness, a strange and compelling fugue state overtook me and lead me to partaking in the strange and unwholesome rituals involving, as I was lead to believe, a more than mearly symbolic ‘clensing’ before changing my garb entirely. I then felt some dread force overtake me completely and, though my mind rebeled, I fell unconcious, overwhealmed entirely by that force that seemed to drag me down to some unquiet realm of darkness where I could not move and only dimly understood the strange and disjoint visions shown to me.

It was only moments ago that I struggled back to conciousness, the darkness seemingly miraculously past, although I still feel it’s aweful tentacles slithering through the margins of my mind. The memories of what I saw and heard in that most grim swoon seem to be fading like the mists that burn off in the sun. I know not what entity it was that inflicted such trials upon me, nor to what end they did so, but it is my desperate hope that it will not hapoen again.

I once again beg your forgiveness for not answering your previous communication, and look forward most earnestly to seeing you at your earliest convenience as I am certain your company and an elixier of those fine beans you have bern so prudent in collecting and treating would drive the last vestiges of the darkness from my mind.

Yours etc…

(I was tired and didn’t sleep well, fancy grabbing a coffee this morning)

In the play store, don’t forget to flag it as innapropriate.

So their standard hourly rate is $100, but for $75 more they’ll teach you how to do it? That might not be a bad deal, depending on the task, and how frequently you’ll need to do it in future. Even if you had to go to the super delux “do it while I watch” option to really get to grips with it, it might be worth it.

It just occured to me that if you want to use Ubuntu without snap, you could uninstall the snap package itself (I’m not on Ubuntu, so you might need to find it), then put a ‘hold’ on the package to prevent it being reinstalled. That should, in turn, prevent any package versions that use snap from being installed.

Initially uninstalling snap might require removing any packages that use it, but that’ll tell you what you need non-snap versions of.

I suspect that what’s happened is you installed the apt version, then at some point upgraded it and there was a version in the main repo that had a higher version number and installed the snap version. If two repositories both have a package with the same name, and no other rules in place, the higher version number wins.

If that is the case, you need to pin the firefox package to the mozilla repository. You can find more details here: https://wiki.debian.org/AptConfiguration

Hey, at least bats isn’t running them over with his tank-monstercar thing

…bats isn’t running them over with his tank-monstercar thing yet.

Wire you being so negative? The current joke got me amped up.

Show up in person and explain exactly what you want to see from them, and why it would benefit them. Then let them talk to the next person, who does the same. Make sure your representatives hear the same message again, and again, until it’s easier for them to do what you’re asking than not.

That’s not helping…

For media to endure, whether we’re talking years or millenia, you need to answer three questions:

• What to record it on.
• Where to store it.
• How to encode it.

The first is, perhaps, the easiest to answer, we have cave paintings from the stone age, velum and parchment that have lasted thousands of years, clay tablets that have similarly endured and various other historical artifacts that could be considered ‘media’. Alternatively, there are more modern techniques, such as etching into plates of non-coroding metal or other substances, or encoding in stable chemical structures such as DNA. Each approach has different benefits, but largely depends on the second question, where to store it?

Storing the media is the next question, and the answer is going to depend on both what media you’ve chosen and how long you want it to last. Somewhere dry, solid and geologically stable probably makes the most sense, but it also needs to be accessible to those you hope will find the information later. The Voyager disks are a good example of long term storage that will probably outlast the human race, but they’re not exactly handy to retrieve. The same goes for the various efforts to send archives to the moon; they’re more for posterity than use. Finding, or digging, a tunnel in a bedrock type mountain, far above current, or expected, sea levels is probably a good bet. Don’t forget to record how to find the repository, and find a way to keep that knowledge available. That could be a record in another repository, or maybe engineered into the landscape such that signs point to it.

The last question is how to encode the information. If you’re aiming to store the information for an extreme duration, you have to assume the entity finding it will have little or no cultural, technological or language connection with you. Pictures may work, we’ve learnt a lot from stone-age cave paintings and Egyptian tomb paintings, but they can only convey so much. For textual information you’re probably going to need multiple layers, the first being illustrated and readable without special equipment or techniques, and showing how to access the latter layers. The next layer should include information about how to read the rest of the layers (do you need magnification? If so, how do you do that? Have you included a lens that could be used? Do you need special illumination, or other techniques? How should the reader do that?), information about the language(s) used (perhaps a Rosetta Stone type artifact to help translate if they know any of the languages) and information about things like the units used (how long actually is a metre? What is a second?). The next layer would explain any envoding used for the rest of the information. If it’s binary stored as pits engraved in stone, or DNA base pairs, or holographically stored in metal plates, how do you extract the data, and how do you convert the naughts and ones to text for example. You must assume the entity processing this has no common base with you to work from, so everythis must be explained in detail. Finally you can store the information you actually wanted to store in the final layer.

These concerns hold whether you’re trying to store information for millenia or just a few decades. For instance, if I handed you an 8" floppy disk containing a Wordstar file, could you read it without more information? Even once you’ve found an appropriate drive (very rare now-a-days) and a machine that can use it (likewise) you need to hope the disk has been stored appropriately.

If you’re trying to store information to be accessible to humans over a timespan of no more than a few lifetimes you’ll probably be better served by arranging for it to be reencoded and tranferred to new, modern, media every few years.

Like a sea turtle trying to get up on a raft.

What a mental image. Brain bleach, stat, please.

They already have the money for the original paper, do they charge for retractions? I don’t know, but I’d assumed not.

I’m sure he could and would. All he’d need to do is dictate that X is the only payment provider all government departments may use to improve ‘efficiency’.

Would the journals be under any obligation to accept these bad-faith revisions or retractions?

I’m guessing that was their last post.

Consider the presidential election. A simple binary choice was presented to the electorate; the Democrat candidate versus the Republican candidate. There were no other possible results. It was extremely clear to anyone who wasn’t already MAGA levels of devoted to the Republicans, that the Republican candidate would do far worse things than the Democrat candidate, thus there were functionally only two actions you could take: vote for the democrat candidate or vote against the democrat candidate. Abstaining, voting third party, or otherwise not voting democrat had exactly the same result as directly voting for the republican candidate, namely increasing their odds of winning.

Neither candidate should have been standing, both parties should have had free, fair and open primaries, and the whole situation stank, but that was the situation when the polls opened, and voters needed to act accordingly. As I said, the republican propaganda team was in overdrive and successfully fooled a large enough portion of the electorate into thinking of the election as a referendum on the democrats, rather than a choice between democrat and republican, and got them to think along the lines you’ve outlined above. That was enough to shift the election in favour of the republicans, and leave us in the situation we’re in now.

The same dynamic played out all the way down the ticket, giving what is likely to be a catastrophic result for a vast number of people. The argument that it’s not the voters’ fault is disingenuous; no-one was holding gun to their heads when they voted. Yes, the amount of disinformation and propaganda they experienced was extreme, but that does not absolve anyone of their personal responsibility. The fact that neither party treated the electorate with any respect, likewise, does not absolve anyone of their responsibility, nor did it change the nature of the election. The trick was played on voters by the republicans, getting them to think, and say, that the democrats weren’t good enough without considering what the alternative was.

As you say, they want people fighting amongst themselves, and it would certainly be best to acknowledge that the election has passed, and the situation is as it stands. The republicans have a clean sweep of every branch of federal government and many state ones too, and are wasting no time in implementing their worst and more damaging policies as quickly and ruthlessly as they can. Now we have to work out how to protect the vulnerable, slow the oncoming tide of fascism and find a way to start bringing people back together again. The next major round of elections should be in two years, and present an opportunity to turn, or at least, slow the tide that threatens to wash away the USA. Between now and then a lot has to change, but it’s doable, even if the parties themselves do not, but it will take people looking past the obvious tricks and understanding that they usually, unfortunately, only have two options in an election, and now-a-days one is much, much worse than the other.

Nope. The question was which of the two candidates, Democrat or Republucan, would be the best (or least bad, if you will) in each of the elections, from President down.

Because the Republican propaganda machine managed to convince enough people this was a referendum on the Democrats, the Republicans won at every level.

Threads like that explain a lot about the state of the world.

I heard you like to irradiate things, so I put a nuke in your nuke, so you can irradiate while you irradiate.

A project Pluto powered missile really would be the ultimate ‘screw you’, it could fly around enemy territory for days or more, spewing radioactive exhaust, launching warheads as it went, before finally hitting a target. Shoot it down and you have a nuclear mess, don’t and you have a wider nuclear mess.

it’s just the B-52 but the bomb bay doors may fall off during flight.

Cunning. Extra munitions built into the airframe and deployable with minimal manual intervention. We’ll take 50.