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Comment Re:Predictive policing and religious conservatism (Score 1) 166

What you're claiming is that somehow there's an international cross party conspiracy between American government agencies, American religious fundies and some much more left wing governments in Australia, France and the UK, and somehow no one has blabbed.

There's no organized conspiracy as much as a less-formal worldwide shift in the Overton window toward more surveillance and less tolerance of erotica and nontraditional gender expression. Left-wing governments in other countries are just as eager to surveil their citizens. Look at how the People's Republic of China has expanded criminal background checks into a numeric "social credit score." The UK has its own share of conservatism; just look at Brexit and the "TERF Island" movement. And as long as global economies depend on hydrocarbon fuel from the Middle East, Salafis (Arabic for "reactionaries") will continue to have a platform.

Comment Predictive policing and religious conservatism (Score 1) 166

Who is "them"?

Anonymous Coward mentioned two categories of "them". In case you don't see AC comments, I'll rephrase:

1. Government agencies interested in performing the same sort of predictive policing that led to Terrorism Information Awareness of the early 2000s.
2. The sort of religious conservatives who ultimately want sex and violence purged from even media intended for grown-ups, as we saw with Collective Shout pressuring payment processors to pressure itch.io to remove erotic works.

Comment Re:Of course (Score 1) 166

Telcos have offered for ages SIM with plans with a safe site firewall option

Wider deployment of TLS over the past 12 years, wider use of too-big-to-fail CDNs for DDoS mitigation (such as Cloudflare), and DNS over HTTPS have made firewalls operated by the ISP less effective by hiding from the ISP what websites are being visited.

Comment Re:Homework (Score 1) 192

Boils down to one thing:

Teach them.

Homework doesn't teach them - that's "independent learning" which, though a skill, isn't something you can really instil in them, but which they have to bother to learn themselves... it's also, incidentally, how private schools achieve results. They encourage independent learning, and they more use it to PREPARE, rather than after-the-lesson chores. "This is what we'll be doing next week, read up on it now so I don't have to explain all the minutiae when we get to that part."

But without a teacher in the class, the significance of where/what they learn is diminished and turns learning into a chore. The biggest assets in a school - any school - are not budgets, facilities, fancy tech... it's parental motivation, and teacher skill. Private schools already have parental motivation ("I lose 30k if you mess about", says Dad, and the school won't tolerate you risking their 600k of tuition income across that class just to keep your 30k).

His last paper was a multi-year study on the different methods to teach boys and girls science (especially physics) and maths in Kuwait (where they have segregated classes for such things) to achieve best results for each... I'll see if I can dig it out.

Comment Re:Snap (Score 1) 135

RAM isn't the issue.

But some software is trapped forever in old, outdated (and insecure) versions and never gets updated.

Some software is trapped in a "bottle" and you can't explore the filesystem (e.g. you can't save your downloads / other files created in it anywhere sensible without tweaking a load of things).

And some software just plain doesn't work but it's still on the store.

If I were to introduce a newbie to Linux, they would be led to use snap, and so much would be incredibly frustrating / out of date / not work that they'd think it was awful. I think snap does Linux a MAJOR disservice. I would have to recommend people switch the Ubuntu store to prefer apt, for example, before I could just leave them to use it on their own.

Comment Homework (Score 1) 192

My father-in-law is one of the most highly-educated people I know (several PhD's in education, etc. plus any number of bachelors, masters, etc. in all kinds of subjects), and teaches all over the world and is HIGHLY sought-after. Chinese schools were offering him huge sums, Kuwait, the US, Spain, UK, all over.

He has a bunch of published papers on education, and has been teaching for over 40 years.

He has always, and still is, against homework in all forms.

Same guy, for reference, who took a job at a school in Spain purely to get my daughter a place in one of the top private schools there. The condition of him working there was that she got a free place. They agreed.

He took the worst classes and transformed them within a year. To the point that the school accused him of cheating on the exams. So, because his students loved him so much, he had another teacher set another exam, and the same students VOLUNTEERED to come back under exam conditions, sit a similar exam, in invigilated conditions, without any influence, connection or presence of him... and they all passed on their own merits... every one. Not just passed. A's all around.

Then he left, because he was insulted by the accusation. But he just needed to prove his point.

Any number of doctors, lawyers, etc. owe their education to him, all over the planet.

And he hates homework and never sets it or, if he's forced to, it's always pathetic and he doesn't bother marking it. He thinks it's an absolute waste of time.

As someone who has, similarly, spent their entire career in education... I can't say I disagree with him on that.

Comment Snap (Score 1) 135

Oh, good, they're only snaps.

Because snaps are shite and I turned them off.

Brand-new, fresh, Framework, highly-Linux-supported laptop, clean install of Ubuntu on it, over Christmas.

I'm willing to try almost anything... so I went with the defaults.

And within the first week I found myself uninstalling every snap package and replacing it with a traditional apt one.

Steam snap - simply doesn't work. It makes it look like Steam is shite, in fact, and it loads but NONE of the games work properly. Uninstalled the snap, used the "Steam recommended" download/method, and it worked perfectly every since.

Vivaldi snap - downloads and stores shite in ridiculous paths that you can't find easily. Constantly out of date. Gave up trying to play nicely with it, copied the data to the apt-package locations and it worked perfectly with predictable (and useful) paths immediately. Uninstalled the snap.

qBittorrent, Shotcut, VLC, etc. - all had RIDICULOUS problems with the snap version and I'd had enough by then so I just uninstalled them, disabled the store install snap by default, and used apt for everything.

Roll out what you like via snap, because I ain't gonna be touching it. Honestly... I tried. I tried not to be an old fuddy-duddy Linux guy and to just use the stuff they foisted on a "new user" to "get with the times". And I lasted a week.

And this is someone who had the patience to run Slackware 3.9 as a primary desktop for many, many years, build their own distro, modify and compile their own kernels, etc.

I was honestly hours away from just choosing another distro until I realised what the core problem was and just got rid of snap.

Comment IOW, Debian stable is like Ubuntu LTS (Score 1) 135

Debian releases every two years, and they have a sane release cycle which freezes software versions some months before release.

So basically the same thing that Ubuntu's two-year "LTS" track does. Ubuntu 24.04 "noble" is feeling fairly old at the moment. Ubuntu 26.04 "resolute" was released a week ago to users on the semiannual "interim" track, and it'll be offered to LTS users come the first point release about three months from now. Drinkypoo has a point, however, that Debian has no direct counterpart to Ubuntu's interim track.

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