mackwinston @ mackwinston @feddit.uk

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2 yr. ago

Honestly, I go watch this video from time to time whenever I need a lift.

Sometimes the issues with WiFi chipsets is not the distro but the manufacturer. Debian for instance now includes non-free firmware on its installation ISO image, but some manufacturers do not allow the distribution (e.g. Broadcom) of firmware, so Debian can't legally include them. And unfortunately the manufacturers don't make it easy to "just download the firmware" so you can put it on the USB stick so the installer can see them. (Literally the only issue with putting Debian on my old 2013 Macbook Pro was the Broadcom firmware - but fortunately, having a Debian desktop I could install the firmware downloader there to get the two files the installer needed).

This is not a fault of the Linux distro, but a fault of the hardware manufacturer. Unfortuantely, like the smell of piss in a subway, we all have to deal with Broadcom.

People are imperfect. People have left laptops full of personal and/or commercially sensitive data on trains or planes, had them stolen from cars and houses etc. Full disc encryption is a defence against data breaches especially for computers that are not bolted down. Or it might be as simple as a person not wanting the embarrassment of their porn stash being found.

I find it stressful enough doing an update on a remote server (where there's someone in support who can reboot the box if it all goes wrong). It's got to be something else to send commands to a spacecraft that's now light hours away. It's not just that you can't exactly go out and troubleshoot the hardware, it's also that the ping time is rather extreme so you won't know for hours if you've screwed up or not!

Black cats are the best.

I always liked the way BoJo was sometimes called the "Poundshop Trump".

One person commented: “Targeting hardworking people just trying to get by, well done.”

One thing I've noticed when I get those Police postings on FB and places like that - if the Police FB posting is about stopping a driver/rider and doesn't mention the nationality half the comments are "Why don't you catch real criminals" and the other half are "Why are you targeting people just trying to earn a living?". If the Police post mentions that it was a foreign driver/rider, all the comments are "Well done for keeping us safe" "Keep up the good work!"

Then your (presumably Canada) country needs to start re-doing the cities so they aren't dependent on private cars. NL was also going that way in the 1970s until they changed direction. The best time to do it would have been back then, but the second best time to do it is start now.

Mods and admins will always be like this, this is not a Reddit thing. The trouble is the people who want to moderate a community are the type who generally "want the power". It's a people not a technology issue and unfortunately not one that can be solved.

The way communities are federated. They are still centralised. The Usenet/Fidonet model (where the communities were distributed) from decades ago was superior (the communities themselves don't have a depenency on a single instance). While the Usenet model would require a bit more work to implement particularly around identity/moderation, it would make the system so much more resilient.

A lawn needs neither of these things, or if you choose just to have plants instead (which we did in our small garden) then that needs neither water nor pesticides. Occasionally I might pull by hand some straggly stuff, or use a small electric strimmer to tidy things up (e.g. the garden path when stuff starts growing between the paving).

Unlike artificial grass, and even though my garden is small, this spring I had two birds nesting, I see quite a lot of bees and butterflies, and I just let the ants get on with doing their business. Pesticides and herbicides are never used. If there's a plant I don't want growing somewhere I can pull it up manually. There's no need for the area to be super manicured.

We used to have a stronger E-W connection, the Woodhead line. It was even electrified before being finally closed, the track lifted, and the tunnels filled in.

The ticket office staff don't merely sell tickets - and I know because I've done the job - much of the job is assisting people in a way a machine still cannot.

They aren't sitting there twiddling their thumbs for 12 hours, they are providing a service which evidently people value. "Savings are savings" is the kind of argument an accountant who knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing would make.

We were out in a group and very drunk, and he said I could kiss him, but it ended up being this weird lunge and everyone fell about laughing.

He did stick his hands down my shorts later, so it wasn't entirely a failure...

Ticket staff in the UK don't work 24/7. I used to work at a very large railway station in the UK and the ticket office was only open for 12 hours a day and only fully staffed at peak times, and employed the lowest paid staff in the station. (I'm guessing because you talk of railroads and dimes you probably don't live in the UK, we'd be talking about railways and pennies here). The proposal is not to remove ticket staff at major stations, but at the minor ones, and there just aren't that many staff at all the minor stations put together. Allied with the penalty fare system and the general unreliability of the ticket machines, and neither ticket machines nor guards on trains taking cash any more, having the busier smaller stations unstaffed is going to take mobility away from the most vulnerable.

Many ticket machines are not fit for use either - some of the ones on GWR for instance (of which lamentably I have first hand experience) have some of the buttons so close together on the touch screen they are a challenge to operate even by a young person with perfect eyesight and eye/hand coordination.

The drop in the ocean saved won't lead to any meaningful improvements.

You also have to figure in what the savings actually are. For the railways in England, the staff costs (all of them - from signallers to drivers, maintenance workers, cleaners, guards, ticket office staff) are 20% of the cost of running the railway. Getting rid of a relatively small number of the worst paid staff on the railway will not do much to reduce the cost of running the railway - certainly not £5 per ticket's worth, and the very small overall savings will not get passed on to the customers anyway.

What huge sacrifice?

We eat far too much meat, and the huge overconsumption of meat is not only very bad land use, it's very bad for us personally, leading to chronic illnesses in later life.

I'm not vegan, I'm not even a vegetarian, but I've massively reduced meat intake of all kinds (and very very rarely touch red meat these days). I don't even miss it, and I don't count it as a sacrifice. I have discovered all sorts of plant based foods which are to be honest better than meat, so it's a "negative sacrifice" - not only is my health improved, my food is more enjoyable, too.

The expectation to have meat every single meal is frankly ludicrous.

Cateractonium sounded like an interesting town to live in...

(A quick search shows today it's known as Catterick)

Then there's the indirect deaths caused by chronic lack of exercise, brought on by car dependent suburbs.

Not Just Bikes argues it's the trucks (ever larger SUVs and light pickups) that are doing a lot of the killing. I saw an interesting diagram recently showing you can see a child out of a main battle tank more closely to the front of the tank, than you can in front of most American pickups and SUVs.