* Posts by Pompous Git

3087 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2014

Quality journalism

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Unhappy

Re: Quality journalism

Gareth Corfield does then deletes comments to make it look as though he doesn't. El Reg ain't what it used to be.

France to lend Brexit Britain sore souvenir of Norman yoke – the Bayeux Tapestry

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Re: something's missing here

It was missing in an illustration made in 1730 "commissioned by a certain Bernard de Montfaucon". So were his legs. The tapestry has since been restored and the depiction of Adam with an erection was there in "the later drawings by Charles Stothard, published between 1818 and 1823, though Stothard’s version of the man’s legs are not as they appear now on the Tapestry."

Butt plugs, mock cocks, late pay and paranoia: The world of Waymo star Anthony Levandowski… by his kids' nanny

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"By the way, I'll have to remember to thank my wife for refusing to hire babysitters."
The babysitter we hired to look after my youngest (who's now 33) taught him how to program computers. That's what genuine nerds do I suppose...

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"That's what happens when you go searching for Christmas presents."
In Silicone Valley...

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Wong's sueball is set to be held on April 5

Wouldn't April 1 be more appropriate? I can hardly wait...

PC lab in remote leper colony had wrong cables, no licences, and not much hope

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Re: Delivery

"After using Amazon for e-books for several years, they decided that my postal address is invalid, and now I can't even order downloadable stuff from them."
Several decades ago, a friend changed his name by deed poll to Informal when he stood as a candidate for parliament. Until recently, The Book Depository in the UK had no problems delivering books to him here in Tasmania. Then they announced that AusPost refused to accept items for delivery to people with less than two names. Fixed by Informal becoming The Reverend Informal.

Perhaps a change to your address that won't affect delivery might work...

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Re: Ré causing, not curing chaos

"Remember the old AC/DC transformerless radios? Probably running off "
a 2-pin plug. check

Serial heaters, check

quite possibly a live chassis... check

But mostly I remember trying all sorts of different aerials to reduce the problem of fading while listening to Radio Luxembourg. "The good old days".

Butcher breaks out of own freezer using black pudding

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Re: Ee, bah, eck etc

"I think there's a market for gluten-free water."
But not as big as the market for gluten. In SE Asia there are many vegetarians who eat a meat substitute called seitan. Seitan is made from gluten extracted from wheat flour.

What Is Seitan? All About the Popular "Wheat Meat"

Amusingly, my vegan nephew and his Merkin wife won't eat seitan "because it's too much like real meat". I often wonder how many vegetarians are aware that the mock chicken/beef/pork they're eating is actually gluten.

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Re: "psychosomatic illness"

"I would hope that a GF black pudding contained only suitable oats."

It's a bit more complicated than that.

Coeliac disease and oats: a systematic review

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Re: Gluten sensitivity

"About the only thing it was good for was catching carp and eels."
I find it sticks to the roof of my mouth, a rather strange place to go fishing for carp and eels I would have thought ;-)

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Re: "milled somewhere that doesn't also handle wheat"

@ jake

Oh Homer may be overstating the case, but not by much from what I'm told. My best friend was from the US and when he returned his sister prepared the family a Thanksgiving feast "from scratch". Almost everything was processed, even the potatoes. He said he couldn't wait to return to Tasmania and have a real feast at my place. The chicken came from the hen-house, the vegetables from the garden...

When the American artist Alan Gussow visited us he remarked on the rarity of food such as we served up in the US. Vermont market gardener Eliot Coleman remarked that small-scale market gardens like his are extremely rare. I frequently browse the Internet looking for recipe ideas. A very high proportion of those posted by Merkins include proprietary processed foods, even such simple things as a vinaigrette.

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Re: Lips and aholes

"The only animal parts in black pudding is blood."
Wrong! You won't find much pig fat in blood. Or intestine (sausage casing).

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Re: Ee, bah, eck etc

@ Lars

I believe we were talking about black pudding, a specific blood sausage popular in Northern England, rather than blood sausage in general. I can recall a particularly fine dish I had at a restaurant in Hobart and the sausage was made with hare's blood, the dish French. My sister-in-law is Swedish, though born in Norway and yes, she incorporates ingredients in her blood sausage that would not be countenanced by black pudding aficionados.

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Gluten sensitivity

As jake pointed out early in this thread, coeliac disease is a nasty thing to have and is fortunately rare. Not rare is digestive upset following consumption of food containing gluten; typically bread. Gluten is a protein responsible for giving bread dough elasticity and trapping the bubbles of "carbon pollution" that give leavened breads their texture.

The period of allowing the yeast to do its work in the dough is called proving. Modern breads use accelerants to reduce proving to its shortest possible duration, two hours or less. Traditional bread makers like Mrs Git allow bread dough to prove for 24 hours. A friend in the USA who makes award-winning pizzas proves his dough for 48 hours. The longer proving improves the digestibility of the baked product.

I suspect that many who think they are sensitive to gluten are reacting to crappy modern bread.

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Re: "psychosomatic illness"

"Actually, both delicacies traditionally contain oatmeal, and oats contain gluten."
You'll need to provide a reference for that. Oatmeal is gluten-free. Oats contain avenin, a protein similar to gluten. Research shows that most people with coeliac disease can safely eat avenin.

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Re: Ee, bah, eck etc

"HM Sheridan can't be real butcher. They advertise gluten free black pudding and haggis. Catering to the post-modern psychosomatic illness crowd[0] is a sure way to let standards slip."
Black pudding is a blend of onions, pork fat, oatmeal, flavourings and blood, so by definition is gluten free. For there to be gluten in black pud, there must be wheat, barley, or rye.

Beer hall putz: Regulator slaps northern pub over Nazi-themed ad

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Re: The problem here is bigger than one pub...

"They are still finding huge bombs in German cities from WW2. People are killed regularly.

What is your point, that we are still at war?"

Indeed; that is what the evidence would seem to suggest. Perhaps we need a slogan: "Modern warfare, the gift that keeps on giving".

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Re: The problem here is bigger than one pub...

"So the Nazi party was still a thing and the Luftwaffe were flying over the UK dropping butterfly bombs in the 1960s*?"
They are your words, not mine. If you read the link you provide you will find that the most recent death from a WW2 butterfly bomb was in 1981. The most recent butterfly bomb find was "on 28 October 2009, by an 11-year-old boy in a secluded valley close to a heavily bombarded airfield." There's nothing quite so likely to focus attention on those who deployed such things as someone having their face and hands blown off.

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Re: The problem here is bigger than one pub...

"72 years after the war's end we in Britain (and particularly England) bang on about it as if it was last week."
The war didn't end with the armistice. In the 1960s the Nazis were still killing Brits with butterfly bombs.

It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer wrecks some AMD PCs

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Re: This is what happens

"But you shouldn't be running such antiquated hardware anyways. So it's totally your own fault."
IPCop runs on a 386 with 32 MB RAM. Heck, I published a book on that hardware and it's still doing useful stuff! Hint: if you get consigned to the scrapheap because you're "antiquated" you'll only have yourself to blame ;-)

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"So, unhalfbricking?"
They do it to give us something to do on our holidays...

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Re: windows forced-update blues

"I've had to do a clean install twice due to microsoft updates. And twice I've had to play in the bios because, for some reason, it's changed the boot partition from my SSD to my other HD (don't even know how it does that)"
I've had to disconnect all except my SSD to force Windows to install to the SSD. This week I forgot and Win7 installed over my Mint 18.3 partition on the HDD instead of the partition I'd selected!

If Australian animals don't poison you or eat you, they'll BURN DOWN YOUR HOUSE

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Re: Yes and no.

"We have for too long dismissed anecdotal information in favour of scientific hearsay & interpretation driven by people with undisclosed agendas."
May be true in some fields. When I was involved in agricultural research, a fellow told me that every research project he had been involved with started out as an anecdote from a farmer.

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Re: Australian wildlife

"The most dangerous animals in Australia: include cows, horses, kangaroos, wasps & bees, and dogs."
The most dangerous animals in Australia are humans. Death by suicide is more common than dying caused by other humans' actions, so I respectfully suggest avoiding yourself is safest.

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Re: But how do they spread fires?

"However guinea fowl and some other avians I've kept seem extremely stupid."
You don't need to be intelligent when you are protected from predators and have your food and shelter provided by humans. A friend who keeps turkeys says that the juveniles have to be taught to eat; they are apparently too stupid to learn unassisted.

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Re: Fascinating

"Politely disagree. Scientists know that anecdote is anecdote, rather than empirical evidence."
When I first started suffering from arthritis, I was advised to avoid consuming produce of the nightshade family: potatoes, tomatoes, chilis etc. There is no evidence for the belief that such consumption aggravates inflammation. None whatsoever. But that doesn't stop the advice being universally given by medical practitioners. There is evidence that capsicain (found in chillies) is about as effective as the NSAID ibuprofen. Go figure...

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Re: Fascinating

"Sadly, empirical evidence is frequently dismissed by scientists, even though, by it's very nature, it is observed behaviour."
So very true. In 1772 the French Academy of Science appointed a committee to investigate reports of what are now called meteorites. Meteorites were dismissed as superstitions lingering from a time when Jove was thought to punish errant mortals by hurtling his thunderbolts at them. The evidence was that meteorites were only ever observed by superstitious peasants, never by sceptical scientists.

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Re: Fascinating

"lets get some non-Aboriginal people to see if they observed it"
Australian Aborigines have considerably higher visual acuity than whitefellas, so the latter may have trouble discerning what's happening.

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Re: Australian wildlife

"Spiders! You forgot the spiders!"
That's because the spiders are from Mars...

Linux Mint 18.3: A breath of fresh air? Well, it's a step into the unGNOME

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Re: Eh?

"'Can't judge a book by its cover' is not an aphorism, it's an idiom."

Jake, you really should get yourself a dictionary. From the OED:

Aphorism: Any principle or precept expressed in few words; a short pithy sentence containing a truth of general import; a maxim.

Idiom: The form of speech peculiar or proper to a people or country; own language or tongue. In narrower sense: That variety of a language which is peculiar to a limited district or class of people; dialect.

What you said was "To use the word 'book' when what you mean is 'person'". This is incorrect. I meant no such thing. I was referring to the slackware.com web pages (which can be considered a type of book, if you squint).

Well I completely misunderstood you there! I took the website to be the metaphorical book cover and Slack to be the metaphorical book content. BTW, most explanations for the meaning of 'You can't judge a book by its cover' refer to clothes and people.

"If the idiom is wrong, clearly your would have no problem purchasing a book based on the cover alone. Can I interest you in a near perfect, signed by the author in 1926, first edition, first printing Winnie The Pooh? I'll mail you pictures of the front & back cover, and the spine. That'll be all you need to verify my US$5,000 asking price is a good value, right?
Well, that's just gratuitously rude. Fuck you, too!

Clothes do NOT make the man. Shakespeare was a bawdy Elizabethan playwright, not a great sage or oracle. Clothes are just a tool, no more or less than a screwdriver or a typewriter. For more on my view on the subject, see this post.
Back in the 1970s, we tested this. We sent a recent university graduate for a job interview wearing jeans, T-shirt, sneakers and long hair. We had him use a false name. He didn't get the job. Then we gave him a haircut, a suit and tie and black leather shoes and sent him along for interview for the same job. He was offered the job. You might not like this, but no matter your feelings, appearances in our society matter a great deal.

But whatever. Clearly you have a pet peeve that isn't shared by the vast majority of the English speaking world. Hopefully you'll understand that I choose to bow out of helping to enable your quest. Enjoy the private crusade.
Presumably you believe the "vast majority of the English speaking world" defer to your private definitions of words rather than the Oxford English Dictionary/Merriam-Webster. You are delusional.

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Re: Eh?

"Focus, Jonathan. The hot potato here is the idiom "Can't judge a book by its cover", which I used in regards to the Slackware website. In this case, to the proverbial thinking man it should be quite obvious that my meaning was something along the lines of "Don't let the lack of bells and whistles fool you, there are plenty of GoodThings enclosed within slackware.com ... if only you have the wit to see them". Or words to that effect. Nowhere did I call a book a man; that was your invention."
So why didn't you say directly what you mean instead of being "clever" by using a very dubious aphorism? Nowhere did I call a book a man; you are the one making things up!

I do note that the opposing aphorism (and they always seem to come paired) is Shakespeare's "Clothes make the man." This latter we know to be true, so by the Law of Contradiction "Can't judge a book by its cover" must be false.

"You know very well that English allows words to have multiple meanings, and that idioms are a part of the language. To suggest that such figurative use of words is somehow wrong is daft. To argue the point with intentionally deceptive reasoning is the very definition of sophistry."

I do indeed understand that words have multiple meanings. That is why great care is needed in their use. I have nowhere suggested that "such figurative use of words is somehow wrong"; I have merely pointed out that one such use is clearly wrong both in its literal sense and by inference must also be wrong in its figurative sense.

Or do you believe Shakespeare wrong and that it matters not whether you wear clothes to go to work, or you do so in the naughty, naked nude?

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Re: Eh?

Is it really sophistry to point out that words have accepted, defined meanings? Maybe you're the dude who wrote the manual for my first computer (a Tandy 200). I couldn't get it to respond to commands as described. When I took it back to the Tandy store, I was told that was because I was typing a semi-colon (;) where I was instructed to, rather than a colon (:) that "everyone knows" was what was intended.

Never been too sure about what "hot cool jazz" might mean, but Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is one of my favouritest albums ever. Almost as good as In a Silent Way.

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Re: Eh?

I'm sorry that the nuances of communicating with the English language upset your world view.
I sincerely doubt that you are in the least bit sorry. FWIW I see the purpose of language to be communication (English or otherwise). To use the word "book" when what you mean is "person" seems to be directly contra communication. If book != book then I need to guess which of the many thousand possibilities you mean. What, precisely, is wrong with saying "don't judge a person by their appearance" when that is what you mean? If the meaning of words be entirely arbitrary, why the fuck do we have dictionaries?

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Re: Eh?

I'm the fool because your sainted mother didn't teach you that the meaning of the phrase is (roughly) "Not everything has a true appearance"? I'm OK with you thinking that.
No. My mother taught me to think for myself rather than passively accepting the opinion of authority. And I too can quote:
Sometimes I read the same books over and over and over. What's great about books is that the stuff inside doesn't change. People say you can't judge a book by its cover but that's not true because it says right on the cover what's inside. And no matter how many times you read that book the words and pictures don't change. You can open and close books a million times and they stay the same. They look the same. They say the same words. The charts and pictures are the same colors. Books are not like people. Books are safe. [Emphasis mine]

-- Kathryn Erskine

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Re: Eh?

Presumably, Git, your early years were filled with beautifully bound books with unimportant content.
Why would you presume that? You're the fool who stated that you can't judge a book by its cover.

My mother was an avid collector of books and being poor, they were second-hand. Most were published in the 19th C and therefore had sewn bindings unlike modern trade paperbacks. So, yes, they were beautifully bound for many decades of reading pleasure. Sad? Why would that be sad?

If, as you presume, their content was unimportant, do you approvingly refer to a quote from one of them? To wit, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot?

Every single one of the 2,000 or so books I now possess has its contents described on the cover; Title and Author always, but often descriptions by reviewers also. Only someone who is completely illiterate would presume that a book's contents and cover are unrelated.

NB By the sheerest of coincidences, George Eliot, my mother and myself were all born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

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Mac OS annoys me when I can't right click on an icon to get it's properties or perform a pre-defined action!
Why can't you? I could when I still had my Mac Mini. I suspect you never even tried...

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Re: Great OS

I do not understand any negative comments about Linux when Linux Mint is available and so easy to use.
Can no longer Alt-Tab between Civ 6 and any other running application. Video acceleration with my RX550 video adapter is non-existent. OTOH the persistent erroneous error message about the waster toner bottle in my Lexmark C543DN being full has gone away.

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Re: Eh?

Didn't your DearOldMum teach you the dangers of judging a book by its cover?
No, she did the exact opposite! "Jonathan", she said, "you can almost always judge a book by its cover. If it says 'dictionary' on the cover, it's almost a certainty that the contents will be be a dictionary. If it says 'Jane Austin' it's most likely a novel by Jane Austin". I know this doesn't comport well with Post-Modern Philosophy where bullshit reigns supreme. YMMV...

Qualcomm joins Intel, Apple, Arm, AMD in confirming its CPUs suffer hack bugs, too

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Re: The same bug.

" There is just no convergence on a single bug. This is a class of bugs that security researchers haven't examined prior to now."
Convergence happened, just not on bugs. Those of us of a certain age will remember the CISC vs RISC war. Today's processors use aspects of both design philosophies. It's hard to envisage any selection pressure to converge on an error.

Weed wish you a merry Christmas: Pot-toting OAPs tell cops 30kg stash is for pressies

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No?

But watch out for itchy areas

When you meet them Masturbarias

Captain Goodvibes

Cloud-building alien space rays altered Earth's climate – boffins

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Re: twofeathers

For example, it's pretty clear that over 100% of 20th century warming is down to GHG emissions (including natural feedbacks).
And warmists claim the sceptics are deluded! Presumably you also know how to get a quart from a pint pot...

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so how does that work with a 10 day forecast?
Here in SE Australia we have 7 day forecasts that are 70% accurate. Presumably if you are getting 10 day forecasts they are based on 10 day old data.

Huonville Forecast

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Re: Old News?

So the key CO2 one is sensitivity. That's generally X degrees per doubling of CO2. If X is high, more warming, low, less. And it's generally assumed the response is logarithmic.
The response to additional CO2 on infra-red light absorption by Earth's atmosphere was characterised by Svante Arrhenius in the 19th C.

It is not "assumed" to be logarithmic. It is logarithmic on theoretical and empirical grounds. As an analogy, think of CO2's infra-red absorption to be characterised as a sheet of glass between a light source and light absorber. To keep it simple, our sheet of glass absorbs 50% of the light passing through. Adding a second sheet of glass blocks 50% of the remaining light thus total absorption is now 75%. Rinse and repeat.

Calculating the absorption of infra-red emitted by Earth's surface for entails dividing the atmosphere into an arbitrary number of layers and summing the result for each layer. This would be tedious except for MODTRAN:

The MODTRAN® (MODerate resolution atmospheric TRANsmission) computer code is used worldwide by research scientists in government agencies, commercial organizations, and educational institutions for the prediction and analysis of optical measurements through the atmosphere. MODTRAN was developed and continues to be maintained through a longstanding collaboration between Spectral Sciences, Inc. (SSI) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

The high sensitivity to CO2 claimed by warmists is the result of an assumption. To wit, the so-called Enhanced Greenhouse Effect. This entails the belief that the slight increase in temperature caused by increased CO2 necessarily increases the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. As Paltridge, Rking and Pook revealed in their paper Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data there is no empirical evidence for this.

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Re: Interesting, but in which direction?

does extra cosmic ray input and more clouds make us warmer or cooler?
Depends. High cloud cools at night and warms during the day. Low cloud warms at night and cools during the day. Cosmic rays affect the intensity of warming or cooling.

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Would these cosmic rays have to be factored into weather modelling?
No. Weather modelling is based on data no older than 7 days. The effects Svensmark describes occur over periods of weeks to millions of years, so they can be treated as a constant in weather models.

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Re: The bad news

the anti man-made lot will jump on this as justification for doing nothing.
So what are you proposing we do about cosmic rays?

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Old News?

The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change. Svensmark's book was published in 2003.

Poor NASA sods sent to spend Xmas in Antarctic ahead of satellite launch

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Re: Accuracy?

Of course, that does assume that the ice won't move between the time they measure it and the time the satellite measures it.
Ice moves, but at a glacial pace. I guess that's why the ice in such places is referred to as glacier...

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Re: deja vu

how long do they last before they are covered in snow and can't be seen by the satellite?
Dunno, but Antarctica is the driest continent. Of course there's windblown stuff, but I imagine the cubes are placed where the stuff is being blown away, rather than accumulating. Bare rock may be a giveaway.

Why is Wikipedia man Jimbo Wales keynoting a fake news conference?

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Re: well i fucking love wikipedia

to those of you hiding behind online anonymity to assert that you tried to edit something, and were right because authority... i say, give us the name of the article and the fact you tried to correct, lets all go and look at what it says now, and argue about who is right because that's it's fucking beauty
First, I'm about as anonymous as HH Munro was when writing under the pseudonym Saki.Second, as I pointed out earlier, whoever is reverting these edits is also erasing their existence.