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Comment May have been oversold... (Score 1) 30

Allegedly this was a permitted practice; but the speed with which they said that they will be abandoning it once it became public knowledge; and the number of federal IT people ProPublica was able to find who had never heard of it, suggests that either the proposal that was approved was not entirely candid about what the plan was; or the approver was too low or obscure to actually approve.

This certainly wouldn't be the first time that something perfectly on the up and up was abandoned for PR reasons; but MS would probably be loathe to give up the ability to whitewash whoever into sensitive projects by having an $18/hr copy-paste pal in the loop; so they must see the exposure as potentially serious.

Comment Re: You keep using that word. I don't think it mea (Score 3, Interesting) 68

English doesn't need confusing synonyms, we relish them!

It's a very mongrel language, based on a Germanic grammar, a large number of Norman French imported words, then we just started grabbing vocabulary from every available source. Also we spent about 600 years with educated people obsessing about the purity of Latin and trying to impose Latin rules on a Germanic language. There have repeatedly been attempts at imposing regularity, none have worked.

Funny things about genders though is they are in the middle of undergoing a shift and have noticably changed during my lifetime.

When in the 80s it used to be common (if a little old fashioned, in, day the 50s it was ubiquitous) to refer to groups or individuals as default masculine if unknown [*]. In the 80s you'd have sounded a bit fusty for doing that, but it was not uncommon. Now that's basically gone with neutral words being used instead, and you really sound like your making a point if you speak in the old way. The one that's currently in progress is words with gendered suffixes dropping out of use, like waitress and actress is becoming less common with waiter and actor becoming greener neutral terms.

That's one's ongoing, no one will look at you weird for saying waitress today, but it's a noticeable shift. I reckon in 20 years it'll sound weird and old fashioned.

Anyway, English has been slowly losing gender for about 900 years, it's interesting to see one bit being chipped away in real time rather than reading about it. I wonder what's next?

[*] Funnily enough "man" in old English is gender neutral person and the apparently gendered phrases like "mankind" derive from a non gendered root. At some point Wer for man vanished and man was coopted to mean, well, man. Wer remains only in "werewolf". So you shouldn't really have a female werewolf, it should be a wyfwolf. Anyhoo...

Comment Re:Azov Brigade (Score 1) 171

I wasn't raised to despise "the Soviets", not as individual people. I didn't even know about Holodomor until relatively recently.

I wasn't even raised to despise the Germans, even though the attitude of my grandmother was "the only good German is a dead German". American History wasn't really covered much anyway, and for done inexplicable reason British history sorry of skipped from Henry VIII to world war 2. Can't imagine way. Can't say the British have a great reputation during them empire days but then again my family was allowed to settle here which they did to avoid Pogroms in eastern Europe and Tsarist Russia.

We didn't cover the famines and mass deaths under chairman Mao either. For some reason neither do you since you appear obsessed with capitalist.

You seem obsessed with being taught to hate the right kind of people. Have you tried not hating instead?

Comment Re:Shouldn't users be suing google ? (Score 1) 13

As usual the summary is shit, it left out the most important detail.

Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which has ensnared more than 10 million devices running Android open source software.
These devices lack Googleâ(TM)s security protections, and the perpetrators pre-installed the Badbox 2.0 malware on them, to create a backdoor and abuse them for large-scale fraud and other illicit schemes.

These aren't Google Android devices, they are running some variant of AOSP.

Comment Re:Second Verse, Same as the Frist (Score 1) 68

My hope is that it will make sense to switch to using this new minipc for my interface, and to leave it running for long-running tasks. I have a 5900X desktop with a Nvidia card that I'm tired of dealing with video driver problems with. Speaking of Debian updates, I run Devuan. The main install on the system is an update from the prior version, and my fresh "recovery" install on another disk has no video driver problems...

Comment Re:Second Verse, Same as the Frist (Score 1) 68

It's why I wouldn't have run this one even if I had heard of it. I really liked Moblin, but it wouldn't run on anything non-Intel anyway, so I never put it on anything else. I think I might actually have that Acer still, but I do not use it.

I am waiting for another AMD-based PC to come in the mail right now, a mini with a 5825U — the last AMD notebook/minipc processor I could find with really low consumption, 15W... And I have a Zen3 desktop too, so I can share optimized binaries between the systems.

Comment Re:less of a barrier than their terrible UI (Score 1) 71

I find most Office UI to be pretty good, though I don't mean 365 here. The performance is terrible, though. This used to be true of LibreOffice, and Calc still crumbles if you really load a lot of rows into it and Excel doesn't, but the UI is really painfully slow on desktop Office now and I've no clue why. Nothing else I run on the same machine has this problem. e.g. I can scroll a PDF really fast and it draws fine, but if I don't scroll a Word or Excel doc really slow, it can't keep up.

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