AnyOldName3

You’re thinking of firmware, not drivers. To make a GPU work, you need new enough versions of the kernel, driver and firmware. The open source drivers for Nvidia GPUs are still slower and less featureful than the proprietary ones.

Oops. I’d somehow missed that there was now a third kind of JPEG.

The compression technique it used was patented, and the licence fee was extortionate. By the time the patent expired, other, royalty-free, techniques were available that outperformed it.

The good advice that they just won’t take is spot on for the Arch Wiki, though.

That’s not the conclusion the study’s authors drew. The particles being airborne for longer means they can float further and contaminate things further away from the toilet, and also are more likely to end up inhaled. That could be a bigger problem than the number of particles initially released, so the study didn’t make a recommendation of whether the lid should be up or down. More research is required before anyone should be issuing definitive commands in bold to strangers on the internet.

My comment was explicitly pointing out that closing the lid can have the opposite of the intuitive effect and make things worse even though you’d expect it to make them better. It seems that I misrepresented the study’s findings, though, as while closing the lid does make particles remain airborne for much longer, so my overall point is sound, closing the lid does reduce the number of particles that initially become airborne.

I can’t get the full text, but https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/acmi/10.1099/acmi.fis2019.po0192 has the abstract. It looks like I misremembered its findings (or remembered an article that oversimplified them), though - having the lid down does something to the released particles to make more of them stay airborne for much longer, but it does reduce the number that escape, like you’d expect.

There’s a University of Cork study showing that putting the lid down aerosolises more material so spreads bacteria etc. over the whole room, whereas having the lid open produces a smaller number of larger droplets that nearly all just fall straight back into the toilet. The lid is not sealing the toilet and preventing the need to clean the bathroom.

With how the law is written, if you think anyone might ever make a mistake (likely), think the government might ever bother going through the hassle of enforcing it (probably less likely if you’re not running a big website), and don’t have loads of spare money to pay huge fines with or to pay an age verification service with (likely), then blocking the UK is the only way to be compliant. It doesn’t require a technicality. The law just doesn’t have any leeway for honest minor mistakes or small hobbyist websites.

Some instances use the image proxy and others don’t. It seems that mine doesn’t.

Fun fact: I can’t see the screenshot as I’m in the UK and your instance has taken the maximally paranoid literal meaning of the OSA and blocked access just in case anything’s accidentally not flagged as NSFW.

Windows permissions are more flexible than basic Unix ones. A file doesn’t just have an owner and a group, it can have individual permissions for arbitrarily many entities, so taking ownership doesn’t remove any of the permissions from anything that already had access, it just adds more. The command shown here is closest in effect to deciding you’re always going to log in as root from now on, although Windows has a way to effectively do that without modifying the ACL of every file. Either way, it’s silly, and usually people who suggest it are under the impression that XP did permissions right by not meaningfully enforcing them and not having an equivalent of a root account you can temporarily switch to, and Vista only changed things specifically to annoy people, and not to be more like Unix.

Those photos are of Shah-era Iran, when the West was propping up (including providing weapons, training and funding to) an unpopular authoritarian that had been installed by the UK and US when the previous democratically-elected government dared to attempt to nationalise the oil industry, which was owned by BP. Under the Shah, traditional Islamic dress was outlawed, which is why everyone’s in 1970s clothes. If you disagreed with the Shah, the secret police would take you away and kill you.

Eventually, a coalition of leftists and religious leaders overthrew the Shah. The religious faction then assassinated all the prominent leftists and switched the secular authoritarian dictatorship for a theocratic authoritarian dictatorship. Under the Ayatollah, traditional Islamic dress was mandatory, which is why women in contemporary photos from Iran always have some kind of headscarf unless it’s in a news report about a protest that someone got executed for. If you disagree with the Ayatollah, the Revolutionary Guard will take you away and kill you.

So Iran’s had laws forcing women to wear only the clothes approved by a dictator both with and without help from the West.

Godwin’s law isn’t claiming that it’s fallacious to compare things to Hitler or that the person who first mentions Hitler is wrong, it’s just observing that comparisons to Hitler eventually happen if an argument goes on long enough. It’s kind of obvious, too. Reductio ad absurdum is a valid form of argument, and as long as whoever you’re discussing something is isn’t ludicrously off the deep end, they’ll agree that Hitler is obviously bad, so if someone says something, and that thing when taken to its logical conclusion would imply (in the logically guarantees sense rather than subtly suggests sense) that Hitler wasn’t bad, it’s quick and easy to point that out as a demonstration that the thing must be wrong.

In this specific case, though, it’s even simpler. Hitler and Thatcher are both obviously bad, and they were putting words in my mouth about Thatcher when objecting to a comment where I’d explicitly called her evil to suggest that I was claiming she wasn’t evil.

But her favourite story book said that if she destroyed all the industry then the invisible hand of the free market would liberate all the workers from drudgery and they’d all become doctors and live lives of luxury and never have to do any work.

Thatcher was a die-hard believer in Ayn Rand’s economics, and a core part of that is that people are poor because you give them the opportunity to be, and then through several unexplained leaps of logic, that if you take away the option to be a bit poor, instead of making everyone even poorer like obviously happens in real life, somehow they’ll instantly gain qualifications in unrelated fields and become rich. It’s insane, and yet somehow a wildly popular worldview among the ‘intellectual’ right, despite being dismissed as moronic by anyone with two braincells to rub together and every serious academic.

It’s roughly equivalent to claiming we should enslave short people and call them house elves and then as a result we’ll all get wands and certificates from Hogwarts that let us do magic (except the house elves, who wouldn’t need wands), but then instead of being placed into a secure hospital to protect the public, you get put in charge of one of the most influential countries in the world, and by an unrelated coincidence, the North Sea Oil Boom happens and makes that country more wealthy, so then decades later, magic being accepted as fact despite being purely from a fantasy novel full of plotholes.

Stating that Hitler thought he was helping Europe by slaughtering millions of Jews and other minorities doesn’t imply any degree of approval for anything he did or acceptance that if he’d been right, the end state he was aiming for was worth the atrocities committed trying to get there. Evil in the real world isn’t like a cartoon where the bad guy just enjoys being bad for its own sake. Pretending otherwise just makes it harder to recognise when people are doing evil things again just by being simultaneously incorrect and in charge.

It seems like you’re under the impression that thinking you’re doing something good is virtuous, but I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think morality should be solely judged by outcomes, either, but rather whether you take reasonable measures to ensure that even if you’re wrong, you don’t make things worse. Everyone hears the phrase the road to hell is paved with good intentions as children, so should know that having good intentions has little to no bearing on whether they’re a good person unless they’re also making sure they’re not doing evil by recklessness or negligence.

It being obviously fucking stupid to anyone with the slightest grasp of reality doesn’t mean that Thatcher didn’t think it was true and wasn’t one of the people unwilling to think. She should have been sectioned for being deluded into thinking Atlas Shrugged was real life, but instead managed to get elected, and decades later, we’re still dealing with the consequences of putting the country in the hands of someone guided predominantly by their favourite storybook.

There’s really clear evidence that there was an attempt to make normal people buy stocks in water companies in the fact that there was heavy television advertising in the run-up to privatisation encouraging people to buy stocks in water companies while they were still a fixed price. Post-Thatcher privatisation of UK infrastructure and public services, on the other hand, has always been done behind closed doors straight into the hands of hedge funds, venture capital, and individuals capable of buying the whole thing. The end result is always the service going to shit once there’s a profit motive conflicting with the service motive, but if you compare the percentage of these companies that are owned by pension funds and individuals who hold less than a few hundred pounds worth, it’s clear that the water companies have much more of their ultimate ownership in the hands of normal people than, for example Royal Mail. Obviously (to sane people), it’s way less than if the state owned the water companies, but it’s not nothing.

Accusing a post of whitewashing Thatcher when its opening line explicitly states she was evil is a pretty big leap. Calling someone evil should be the opposite of whitewashing, and isn’t inconsistent with saying they thought they were helping. Plenty of evil people are deluded into thinking they’re doing something moral and that, because of that, the ends will justify their amoral means, or they don’t even notice their means are amoral.

It was a Thatcher-era thing, and despite being evil and wrong about nearly everything, she at least thought what she was doing would help normal people. In the case of privatisation, it was accompanied by a big push to get normal people to buy shares in the newly formed companies. As a result, the water companies are mostly owned by pension funds and there’s a large chunk that’s normal people owning a tiny bit each. That’s then meant that any attempt to claw back illegally paid dividends (the companies have a legal duty to invest in keeping the water working and haven’t been doing so) would tank loads of people’s pensions, as would dissolving the companies or putting stronger restrictions on paying out dividends.

The whole system’s all knotted together in a way that makes all the obvious solutions cause other big problems, and the government can’t afford to cause big problems when the polls have Reform so far ahead on account of them just claiming the obvious solutions will work flawlessly and not giving a shit about whether that’s true. Everything’s so on fire that it can’t be extinguished within a single electoral term, let alone rebuilt, so it’s become the priority to avoid upsetting anyone before the next election, lest the flamethrowers get voted in again only with napalm as fuel this time instead of petrol because the Tories have been eclipsed.

That will be in large part because of the changes to the non-dom tax rules, where (broadly speaking) you could live in the UK, but opt out of the UK’s tax system and pay tax somewhere else where there wasn’t any tax. The people who left will largely be people who weren’t paying a meaningful amount of tax anyway.

That doesn’t stop Americans signing up with the instance and then dominating all discussion there.