palordrolap

Distrowatch may still rank by number of clicks on a distro on their site. I have been convinced for a number of years that MX Linux has maintained its top position there because people click on it wondering what the heck it is, keeping it at the top in a self-perpetuating loop.

This is neither an endorsement nor a criticism of MX Linux, by the way. Maybe it’s awesome. I’ve just never used it, and probably never will.

I never said the cameras should exist. And if there’s already been a class action lawsuit (or whatever the equivalent is for getting cameras taken down in this man’s jurisdiction) please direct me to it.

The last town I heard of that got rid of their Flock cameras did so because people started putting in Freedom of Information requests for them. The authorities didn’t like the idea of the public having access to that information at all, and they knew it wouldn’t stand up in court because the usual excuses wouldn’t work. (Namely “think of the children” and “national security”.)

The only way to win is to make them take their own cameras down and rethink their ideas otherwise they’ll just keep on replacing the broken ones, charging the public for the privilege and locking up the offenders.

And finally, if there truly was no other option, which I’m yet to be convinced of, he shouldn’t have acted alone.

Destroying the cameras doesn’t stop the city / corporate espionage either, it’s only a bump in the road to them.

You have to at least try doing it by the book. And then you put bags over the cameras or stick things over the lenses. Outright destruction only gives them a ton of ammunition to “prove” that the cameras are needed. Blocking its view is still ammo, but it’s not as much.

Did I say the blackmailer was home?

Maybe I should have said breaking the blackmailer’s windows or messing up their car. The blackmailer here is the city. “The city” is effectively alive, in that the people running it are.

I’m not trying to discredit him. I’m just suggesting there are things that might need to be tried first before going nuts and destroying property, and in absence of evidence that he’d already done that, I assumed he hadn’t, because people really like going to the destroy phase straight away.

Disagree. This is more like firebombing a blackmailer’s house.

I would have thought that the article would have mentioned it, because that would make for an interesting part to the story. It does not seem to do so.

Edit 2: The below sentence does not contain an “as” between “might” and “well”. I’m wondering if people are seeing one there and are thinking I’m saying something that I’m not, because that word completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

He has fallen into the trap of making constitutional decisions for himself and others rather than going through the proper channels and so they might well throw the book at him.

Yes, I know “the proper channels” will do their very best to ignore, deny or obfuscate as long as they can in order to avoid the question of constitutionality (or legality) of such systems, and that’s why he did it, but he might have had a slightly better defence if he’d at least tried to sue or challenge Flock’s existence and use by less destructive means before doing this.

Edit: Based on the number of downvotes, it seems like a lot of people know something I don’t. The only comment that suggests anything at all though, provides exactly the same amount of evidence that I have for my point of view than they do for theirs.

Given the context, the four “Follow Us” links going to proprietary services does seem somewhat antithetical to .self ideals.

At the very least set up a Mastodon account somewhere in addition to those.

DuckDuckGo is my default engine. It assumed I meant “extract” and gave me a dictionary definition along with links to download WinZip and WinRAR. When I told it I actually meant what I typed, it put it in quotes and returned no results.

It was not obvious that I should have omitted the X and the T.

What I apparently didn’t do was try Google afterwards, and I’m a little disturbed that I didn’t. Adding !g to the search in DDG is usually the first thing I do when it can’t find anything, but my browser history suggests I didn’t do that.

What’s ext4rat? Web searches don’t turn anything up and I must have missed out on whatever it is, or was. (Which wouldn’t be the first time.)

I did find a Python script called ext4ract which apparently pulls files out of an ext4 filesystem, but it doesn’t seem to be a hugely well-known tool and I’m not sure how it’s relevant here.

I was going to say that the animal on the cover ought to be a human, given that furries (et. al.) are animals of a sort, and what’s on the cover should be “opposite” somehow to the reader, but then I realised that the book is for someone who presumably isn’t a furry, and so the cover should indeed be some kind of animal.

The potential problem is that the animal should be entirely unrelated. The wolf (dog? canid?) is thus a bad choice because - from what little I’ve seen - canids seem to be pretty common preferences*. Thus it ideally should be an animal that it’s incredibly unlikely anyone would identify with. Or as.

Thus, may I suggest: a paramecium

* I’m not sure “preference” is the right word here. I may need a copy of this book.

$ yes n
n
n
n
n
n
n
...

I kind of want to go back in time and make it so that the original yes always printed the first letter of the name it was called by. That way you could symlink any name you like to it and it would do the right thing. Called as no it would print ns, etc. The optional parameter would still be there for longer strings or alternate uses.

The reason time travel would be needed is that there’s bound to be, or have been, someone who has done something weird regarding symlinking yes that relies on it always printing y when it has no parameter, and the name trick would be a breaking change.