* Posts by Blake St. Claire

384 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2008

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Parler games: Social network for internet rejects sues Amazon Web Services for pulling plug on hosting

Blake St. Claire

Re: Thank god

So you're trying to equate one objection (without a senator signing on) to one state where there was documented voter suppression to the original planned six objections tied to baseless claims of a rigged election?

After 50+ secretaries of state affirmed the votes? And 60+ court cases were thrown out because the plaintiff had zero evidence?

And you think those are both "stunts" of the same magnitude?

Because Congress is, if nothing else, one big three ring circus of political stunts. But you're going to try to claim that one stunt is just as big and bad as the other?

Pretty sad.

Blake St. Claire

Re: Thank god

First they came for Trump supporters, ...

Are you trying to equate Trump supporters with socialists, unionists, and Jews?

Because I don't remember a time when socialists, unionists, or Jews ever rejected the outcome of a fair and free election*, and rioted and broke into the Capital with the intention of murdering the people within.

Of the flip side, nor do I remember any Trump supporters being woken up in the middle of the night, dragged from their homes, and hauled away to some unknown destination to be interrogated, tortured, or worse.

And if you're going to fixate on "socialists" as bad people (because Trump said so?) then that's a whole other history lesson fail for you. Go learn what socialism really is.

Trump supporters cast their die when they rioted at the Capitol. Now they're being rounded up and charged for the crimes they committed. Nowhere even close to what happened to the socialists, unionists, and Jews. Nowhere even close.

*Free and fair according to 50+ Secretaries of State (many of them Republicans themselves) and according to 60+ judges (many of them Republicans too, some even appointed by Trump) who threw out or rejected baseless claims of fraud with no supporting evidence whatsoever.

Blake St. Claire

Re: @AC and @ Author Thank god

Parler is a platform. They have the right to censor or in this case not to censor anyone on their platform as they see fit.

AWS is a platform too. They have the right to censor ... anyone on their platform as they see fit.

Remember the bakery that refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple?

Pretty much the same principles in all three cases. If you're not the government, the Constitution doesn't apply to you. And I'd be willing to bet there was a clause in the AWS service agreement that would negate the 30 day notice requirement if Parler was doing something "bad" like violating the law.

Irony and Karma.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Blake St. Claire

Re: The RedHat corporate spinners won't fix this

Linux is Linux ; switching between CentOS and pretty much every other Linux usually only directly affects the deploy / management mechanisms.

Said no developer, ever.

Packaging on Debian/Ubuntu is a nightmare too.

Marine archaeologists catch a break on the bottom of the Baltic Sea: A 75-year-old Enigma Machine

Blake St. Claire

WTF? WWF

Last I checked, WWF is World Wildlife Fund, aka. wwf.org which redirects to worldwildlife.org.

And not World Wide Fund for Nature as the fine article claims.

Heck yeah, we should have access to our own cars' repair data: Voters in US state approve a landmark right-to-repair ballot measure

Blake St. Claire

Re: Cars collect some interesting data...

More important, it has to decide to arm the airbag or not.

You don't want the airbag to fire it in a minor accident if there's nobody sitting there. And you want to make sure you do fire it if there is someone.

Linux 5.10 to make Year 2038 problem the Year 2486 problem

Blake St. Claire
Joke

Re: Sigh... the K notation again.

I think they really meant Y2.038K

Struggling company pleads with landlords to slash rents as COVID-19 batters UK high street. The firm's name? Apple

Blake St. Claire

Re: Its the way of it

You thought the LLC was just for the financial part?

It also absolves the shareholders of having to have a heart, social responsibility, or noblesse oblige.

And it's off! NASA launches nuke-powered, laser-shooting, tank Perseverance to Mars to search for signs of life

Blake St. Claire

Re: Well, I am glad that they were able to launch the mission during the current launch window

Decimal minutes? Next you'll be proposing ten months: five with 36 days and five with 37 days. Or maybe all with 36 days and five days of holiday at the end of the year.

Madness.

Blake St. Claire

in living technicolor

To paraphrase Henry Ford: You can have it in any color as long as it's red.

Blake St. Claire

Re: RIMFAX

Is a plugged nickel something like a ha'penny?

More like a farthing.

51 years after humans first set foot on the Moon, a deepfaked Nixon mourns how Armstrong and Aldrin never made it home

Blake St. Claire

C'mon MIT, if that's the state of the art, I want my money back

Nixon's face looks like a cheap photoshop wobbling around like a bobblehead doll. Meh.

But I definitely fear for what the future has in store.

Asterix co-creator Albert Uderzo dies aged 92

Blake St. Claire

Re: O tempora, o mores!

"I shudder to think what the new American-translations of the back-catalogue will be like."

They'll be fine. We'll send all the extra 'u's back for a refund. I'm sure you lot can put them to good use somewhere.

I got my first A&O fix when my family spent two years in South Africa in early 70s. I made sure we had them when my children were young. In a few years the grandkids will be ready for them.

Oracle staff say Larry Ellison's fundraiser for Trump is against 'company ethics' – Oracle, ethics... what dimension have we fallen into?

Blake St. Claire

Re: Did they change the meaning of an acronym again?

""...LGBTQ and trans communities...". Double dipping?

You have to cut the Department of Redundancies Department some slack.

Come to Five Guys, where the software is as fresh as the burgers... or maybe not

Blake St. Claire

Re: upstart?

If you're in paris, ...

As it is, I don't eat at McDonalds here. Don't worry, when I'm in Paris, or London, I don't eat at McDonalds either.

Still waiting to get kidney again in my Steak and Kidney pie.

Blake St. Claire

upstart?

upstart burger chain (in the UK at least) Five Guys

I know I've seen a Five Guys or two in the vicinity of Trafalgar Square or a bit further down The Strand, and that would've been two or three or more years ago when last I was in the Big Smoke.

Unless you mean compared to McDonalds and Burger King.

Alan Turing’s OBE medal, PhD cert, other missing items found in super-fan’s Colorado home by agents, says US govt

Blake St. Claire

Why yes, it would be ironic. Hilarious even.

<cough>Elgin Marbles</cough>

I wouldn't be surprised if Twitler weren't in already in negotiations with the government of Greece.

Blake St. Claire

Re: @AC - She sounds like a f*****g nutcase.

Yes please.

By definition she'd be better than the f*****g nutcase we have now.

We’ve had enough of your beach-blocking shenanigans, California tells stubborn Sun co-founder: Kiss our lawsuit

Blake St. Claire

Short answer: yes

Do the US not have the same rules then as the UK regarding public footpaths ...

Most of our state laws are based on English Common Law.

And then perhaps even codified in statutory laws.

And that's one of them. At least as far a I can remember from my Bus. Law classes 30+ years ago.

Dell slathers on factor XPS 13 to reveal new shiny with... ooh... a 0.1 inch bigger screen

Blake St. Claire

Can I get that in London double decker buses?

...size of the panel from 13.3 inches to 13.4 inches. And while that sounds like a fairly modest increase, every extra centimetre of screen...

Or football (American or FIFA) fields? (Yes, I know there's not a standard FIFA field size.)

And then there were two: HMS Prince of Wales joins Royal Navy

Blake St. Claire

What about the double decker buses?

It just doesn't seem right that the RN didn't park 470 buses on PoW like they did for the HMS QE.

Or paint it with 1.5 million m² of paint covering 370 acres.

HP to Xerox: Nope, your $33.5bn bid falls short of our valuation

Blake St. Claire

IBM paid $34B for Red Hat

I'm pretty sure HP is thinking to itself that it's got to be worth more than Red Hat – way more.

Does anyone think IBM paid too much?

50 years ago, someone decided it would be OK to fire Apollo 12 through a rain cloud. Awks, or just 'SCE to Aux'?

Blake St. Claire

costly jaunts?

as the US taxpayer tired of the agency's costly jaunts

Really? We seem to never tire of paying for the military's costly jaunts, even back then. And that was orders of magnitude more. (And still is.)

i wasn't paying taxes back then, but now I'm more than fed up with the size of the military budget and not at all worried about NASA's budget.

I kinda remember that launches and moon walks had become commonplace and maybe a little boring. It was also apparent that we had beat the 'Ruskies' so the thrill of the race was gone.

Gas-guzzling Americans continue to shun electric vehicles as sales fail to bother US car market

Blake St. Claire

Re: Alternate headline

Oh, I'm sure EVs are just fine for folks commuting in from the suburbs of Kansas City, Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Dallas into their respective downtowns.

Never mind all the major metro areas of California, Oregon, and Washington.

You don't need to make up excuses for them (them == the limeys.)

In terms of percentages, I don't believe that there are large numbers of people making cross country trips in general, let alone in a Tesla or a Leaf. So AFAIC it's irrelevant that it's slightly harder to do in an EV.

Oh, and AFAIK the expression is "Knickers in a twist."

Shock! US border cops need 'reasonable suspicion' of a crime before searching your phone, laptop

Blake St. Claire

Re: No problem

LMGTFY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

Blake St. Claire

Re: No problem

That would be the Shengen ... zone...

Well, yes. But a non sequitur because we were talking about the US border.

And regardless of whether you need a passport to do it, you can definitely walk across and don't need to be a passenger.

Blake St. Claire

Re: A CITIZEN'S rights

The Fourth Amendment protects US Citizen's Rights...

I'm not a Constitutional Scholar, or even a lawyer, but I have read the Constitution. I don't see anything in it that it says it only applies to US citizens.

You must be thinking of some other Constitution. I'm guessing you also have a Republican Bible. That's the one that doesn't have "Thou shall not kill" in it.

Blake St. Claire

Re: No problem

[A] passenger? It might come as a surprise, but there are places where you can – gasp – walk across the border.

And it's the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave." But I hope we never get to the point where you have to be brave to want to come back home from visiting other places.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

Blake St. Claire

Re: lucky you...

Or 12am. Or 12pm. I'm never sure which is which.

How bad is Catalina? It's almost Apple Maps bad: MacOS 10.15 pushes Cupertino's low bar for code quality lower still

Blake St. Claire

Re: No problems here!

must have taken their Marketing departments many weeks of meetings and brainstorming to name that app

I'd guess about as long as it took Microsoft to come up with Windows and Word.

MacOS wakes to a bright Catalina sunrise – and broken Adobe apps

Blake St. Claire

> Mac OS X on X86 is actually quite old, in the context that NEXTStep and OPENBSD

> it was based on

May I borrow your Reality Distortion Field?

The NeXT* used an M68040 cpu and was first released in 1988. DeRaadt didn't fork OpenBSD* until 1995.

NeXTSTEP* was "based on Unix", and specifically used the Mach (monolithic) kernel. Much has been said about the NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X userland; one study of the OS X RCS ID strings compiled into everything showed that – at that point in time – it was a mix of all the BSDs, and I'd wager that's still true.

No reason to make stuff up. It's all there in Wikipedia – among other places – for anyone to see.

*Note the correct capitalization. Please hand in your geek card at reception desk on your way out of the building.

Blake St. Claire

Shared volumes from my Airport Extreme

Seem to mount instantly, and stay mounted. Finally.

Which would be great except for the fact that Apple is no longer in the WiFi Access Point business, and when this Airport inevitably dies I'll have to find something else to serve what's on those drives.

Blake St. Claire

Re: 'Trash' is gone

It still says "Move to Trash" for me.

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

Blake St. Claire

a kind of runny-nose green?

> Worse, they are all the same colour: a kind of runny-nose green.

Can't that be fixed with a can of spray paint?

Trump attacks and appeals 'fundamentally misconceived' Twitter block decision

Blake St. Claire

Re: You can't have it both ways...

The 1st Amendment expressly prohibits the suppression of free speech by the government.

Can you guess what the President of the United States is a part of? Go on! Take a wild guess!

There is no nuance here. It's as straightforward as it gets.

I can't tell if you're trying to be funny here or not. The way you've written it you seem to be suggesting that speech by someone in the government – e.g. the president – can't be suppressed. And you say there's no nuance there. lol.

What the 1st Amendment actually says is: "Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;..."

It really doesn't get any more straight forward than that, IMO. Twitter is not Congress; Twitter would be entirely within its rights to suppress Twitler.

Blake St. Claire

Re: Personal brand

I'm sure the only guy who ever managed to lose money running a casino will somehow manage to not monetize his @realDonaldTrump twitter account.

With any luck it be because he'll be in jail and not allowed to have a phone or computer to tweet from.

Xbox daddy bakes bread with 4,000-year-old Egyptian yeast

Blake St. Claire

What a fucking poser

UK readers will also be pleased to hear that his kitchen kit includes a 5,000W transformer allowing him to run 230 volts to his proper British kettle in order to make a proper cup of tea

My electric kettle makes 100℃ water perfectly, using 120v electricity.

Storied veteran Spitfire slapped with chrome paint job takes off on round-the-world jaunt

Blake St. Claire

Re: Arghh!

And when you own your own Spitfire you can paint it in an authentic finish.

A couple years ago I visited the Spitfire and Hurricane Museum in Manston. When I walked in one of the gentlemen there asked if I'd like to buy a Spitfire. (I trusted that he wasn't talking about a Triumph.)

I said "sure, will you take a credit card?"

Needless to say I'm not painting anything, in authentic colors or otherwise.

Guess who reserved their seat on the first Moon flight? My mum, that's who

Blake St. Claire

because driving your country into recession because of a vanity project is never a good way to get re-elected

Exactly like a project involving a wall?

FTFY

US border cops' secret racist Facebook group a total disgrace, says patrol chief. She should know, she was a member

Blake St. Claire

Re: Patrol?

> To me her measurements are nominal murrican.

I remember you now. You were that lard-assed brit in the seat next to me flying back from BLR on BA.

You were so big you couldn't eat your meal without constantly elbowing me in the ribs.

And you had the nerve to ask me if I could leave so you could eat.

When there are no fat people left in Britain, then you can talk about the fatties in America. Until then, STFU.

Blackburn ain't big enough for the both of us: Mr Creamy and Mr Whippy at the centre of new ice-cream war

Blake St. Claire
Joke

30 mph?

100 yards apart?

If I didn't know better I mighta thunk you were talking about America.

I thought you all were metrificated. Or metrified. Or something like that.

And nothing measured in units of London double decker buses either? What is the world coming to?

Pants-purveyor in plea for popularity: It's not just any pork push... it's an M&S 'love sausage'

Blake St. Claire

What kind of "bacon" is that?

It certainly doesn't look like anything I've ever seen on a plate with eggs, mushrooms, and baked beans in England. Marks and Sparks should be ashamed.

But it does look like bacon pretty much every where else in the world.

Blake St. Claire

Re: missed opportunity

> and Spanish,

Not 'round here it's not. Cojones is – AFAIK – the preferred euphemism on this side of the pond. (Mexico and USA anyway; I don't know about further south.) Don't ask me why.

Here huevos are just eggs, of the poultry kind.

Apple hardware priced so high that no one wants to buy it? It's 1983 all over again

Blake St. Claire

Expansion slots. Meh.

> ... expansion slots, something the innovative company has tended to shy away from in recent years.

This gets brought up over and over and over again, as if it somehow mattered then, or matters now.

PC XT and PC AT buyers laughed at Apple for not having expansion slots. The Lisa and all the Macs came with audio and mouse built in. What did 99.99% of PC buyers put in those slots? An AST Six Pack to max out memory. Quite a few probably put a SCSI card in. Few people cared about better audio until much later. Eventually maybe a mouse card (with mouse). All stuff, for the most part*, that the Mac had – gasp – built in. Who had the last laugh?

You know what I've put in the slots of the last two Wintel PCs I've bought, er, that my employer bought? A graphics card. That's it.

*TBH I don't know if the Lisa or the earliest Macs used SCS and/or had external SCSI ports; in any event it wasn't long before they did.

*taps on glass* Hellooo, IRS? Anyone in? Anyone guarding taxpayers' data from crooks? Hellooo?

Blake St. Claire

Re: There's a simple solution to this

That would be playing straight into Twitler's hand. Part of his base think the government is too big and they want to shrink it.

As it is, eight out ten jobs are unfilled at the State Department[1] and half the "top jobs" there are also unfilled[2]. And they're not even trying to fill them AFAACT.

People I know who who have been taking the State Dept. test tell me that a "passing score" – which is function of how many positions they are trying to fill – is very high these days, indicating that they're not hiring.A lot of jobs unfilled, but not hiring anyone to fill them? Hmmm. I'm not sure if that is the case elsewhere in government or not.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-state-department-vacancies/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/state-department-empty-ambassador-to-australi/574831/

Hubble 'scope camera breaks down amid US govt shutdown, forcing boffins to fix it for free

Blake St. Claire

Re: How many Shuttles could have been kept operative..

> so the wall would have paid for about 4 launches.

The $5.7B he wants in the budget is just the appropriation for this year.

Several more years are required to build the wall that he promised Mexico would pay for.

Um, I'm not that Gary, American man tells Ryanair after being sent other Gary's flight itinerary

Blake St. Claire

Re: It'll never happen...

> what with having my own domain and all.

Well, me too. But rather than run my own IMAP server and have to manage the storage for all that mail (especially the spam) I just forward through SpamAssassin to gmail, where I have a FirstInitialSurname@gmail address.

So I still get the random distant cousin ditz that arrives at their first year of college or where ever and has to cough up an email address, apparently for the first time in their life, and they naively assume that nobody will have taken FirstInitialSurname@gmail.

Or the distant cousin who signed up for several things, and gave my gmail address. One of the several confirmation emails had her street address, so I looked them and called. I got the mother and asked her to tell her daughter to figure out her real email address and stop giving out mine. $stupid_mom said "oh no, she'd never do that." I told her in return that she would, and she did. Apparently she figured it out as I haven't had any that I can attribute to her for a while.

The most recent was another distant cousin on the opposite coast who booked a hotel room on this coast. I sent a reply to the reservation confirmation asking to remove the incorrect address from their system. Instead they groveled through the mail headers or something and found my personal TLD email address and added that to the booking as well. After a couple emails were exchanged I was contemplating driving the three or so hours and checking in ahead of $idjit and having a hooker waiting in his room when he and his wife arrived. Luckily for him though the hotel seems to have gotten it sorted.

Ecuador says 'yes' to Assange 'freedom' deal, but Julian says 'nyet'

Blake St. Claire

Re: Double down?

> "double down" makes sense. You lose a bet, then place the same bet again... that's

> doubling down (probably soon to be "doubly" down).

AFAIK gamblers who double down (or double up), e.g. at the roulette wheel, usually don't last long; either they run out of money or they are "invited" to leave the casino and not come back.

There's a bet in Blackjack called double down, or doubling down. When dealt two cards totaling ten or eleven you may double your bet and you get one more "down card", i.e. a card dealt to you face down that nobody else can see. (For the card counters.) Often the odds are good to be dealt a ten or a face card and thus a good chance of either winning or tying with the dealer.

Quit that job and earn $185k... cleaning up San Francisco's notoriously crappy sidewalks

Blake St. Claire

Re: $185K vs. $71K

Where do you live that taxes the value of your health care benefit?

I'm not taxed on it where I live now, on the east coast, nor was I taxed on it when I lived on the west coast.

My employer pays about 66-75% of my health care benefit, and I pay the balance, which is withheld from my pay – that's not tax.

And I don't pay any tax to the feds or state for the part that my employer paid. (And don't give them any ideas.)

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