On that site:

Our electoral system needs upgrading, and if you join us then collectively we can influence the next government to upgrade our democracy so that every vote counts.

It’s extreme wishful thinking to expect the next Labour government to change a voting system that just gave them a landslide to one that would have them governing in coalition.

Surprised it’s not Crapita.

And if the school hadn’t been run like this for years and it being known it was like this for years there wouldn’t have been a TV programme to make. I think you’d have to be pretty gullible to believe their statement.

An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren’t all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls)

$ ls -l
sh: ls: command not found

So he went on over to the system admin’s office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:

# rm -rf / tmp/*.log
^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
# ls -l
sh: ls: command not found
# stat /bin/ls
sh: stat: command not found

A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn’t been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.

There’s more to this than just th ORR being mean, the WCRC have not been holding up their end of the bargain:

You are failing to ensure the health and safety of your passengers and crew, thus putting them at risk of serious personal injury, as you are not implementing the controls identified in your risk assessment for rolling stock fitted with secondary door locking, in that:

1. Passengers are being told by train crew to operate the secondary door locks;
2. Stewards are not preventing passengers from operating the secondary door locks;
3. Stewards are not preventing passengers from leaning on train doors or from leaning out of the open droplight windows in train doors of moving trains; and
4. Secondary door locks are not in the ‘locked’ position or are being opened by train crew before the train is stationary; Therefore, creating a risk of persons falling from a train or being struck by infrastructure being passed by the moving train.

The WCRC have form for poor adherence to railway operating rules - they’ve been banned before once, see the Wootton Bassett Junction near miss (where one of their steam tours came within under a minute of colliding with a high speed train due to train crew routinely defeating safety systems) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Wootton_Bassett_rail_incident - in brief, this ended up with WCRC being banned from the national rail network for a time, the notice stating “the operations of WCR are a threat to the safe operation of the railway”.

As a workaround, you could use OBS and use OBS’s virtual camera so Discord is streaming what it thinks is a camera, and set up whatever you want to share on your desktop through OBS.

Carrier grade NAT. For instance, on our local mobile phone network, thousands of handsets will have the same public IP address.

You can get soft silicone ear pickers with a built in camera now so you can see what you’re scooping.

How old is “older?”

I run the latest Debian on a 10 year old Macbook Pro. Linux has given this laptop a second life as a lab machine - it’s still plenty fast enough and it has a really nice screen (Retina) which Debian gets right out of the box with no tweaking. The only thing I needed to do when installing Debian is manually get the drivers for the WiFi hardware during the install (although Debian has the non-free firmware by default these days, they aren’t permitted to distribute all firmware and the WiFi hardware in this machine unfortunately happened to be one of those).

Never. We had a work lunch and one of the guys a few days later said “I just tested positive for covid, better test”. About 2 days later I was testing positive, but none of us in the household ever had any symptoms other than testing positive (about 4 days in, the LFT was going bright red as soon as the liquid reached the test line). None of us ever had so much as a sniffle. The guy we got it off was really rough for a few days.

I think 30fps (25fps in PAL-land) became the standard because televisions were 30 FPS (NTSC) or 25 FPS (PAL) due to interlacing. While the screen redraw on a NTSC television is 60 per second, it’s done as two fields so you only get 30 actual frames per second. This was done so you could have a decent resolution (525 lines for NTSC or 625 lines for PAL) while maintaining reasonable RF bandwidth limits for the TV signal by sending a single frame as two fields, half of the picture in each field on alternate TV scanlines.

So you probably have a lot of industry inertia to deal with so 30 fps (or 25 fps where PAL was formerly the standard) ends up being the standard. And for video it’s good enough (although 60fps/50fps is still better - until fairly recently, this would entail too much bandwidth so sticking with the old NTSC or PAL frame rates made sense).

But for computers no one really used interlaced displays because they are awful for displaying the kind of things computers usually show (the flicker is terrible with a static image in an interlaced screen mode. While it’s true there were some interlace modes, nearly everyone tried to avoid them. The resolution increase wasn’t worth the god-awful flicker). So you always had 60 Hz progressive scan on the old computer CRTs (or in the case of original VGA, IIRC it was 70 Hz). To avoid tearing, any animated content on a PC would use the vsync to stay synchronized with the CRT and this is easiest to do at the exact frequency of the CRT and provided very smooth animation, especially in fast moving scenes. Even the old 8-bit systems would run at 60 (NTSC) or 50 (PAL) FPS (although 1980s 8-bit systems were generally not doing full screen animation, usually it was just animating parts of the screen).

So a game should always be able to hit at least 60 frames per second. If the computer or GPU is not powerful enough and the frame rate falls below 60 fps, the game can no longer use the vsync to stay synchronized with the monitor’s refresh, and you get judder and tearing.

Virtual reality often demands more (I think the original Oculus Rift requires 90 fps) and has various tricks to ensure the video is always generated at 90 fps, and if the game can’t keep up, frames get interpolated (see “asynchronous space warp”) although if you’re using VR if you can’t hit the native frame rate, it’s generally awful having to rely on asynchronous space warp which inevitably ends up distorting some of the grpahics and adding some pretty ugly artifacts.

The Delorean only needed 1.21GW for a very short period of time (they never specified, but the duration of a lightning strike was enough - the average one lasts just over half a second). So in reality, it could send almost 6 Deloreans back to the future per second when running at rated power.

Bikes don’t go very well in neutral, I’ve found.

A good curry the night before usually guarantees at least two.

Honda. The answer is Honda.

Why we won’t raise our kids in suburbia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

Renewables are already viable in the UK and making up an ever increasing percentage of electricity generation. Additionally, the time when it’s windiest in the UK is also the time when electricity demand is at its highest.

Using coal for electricity in the UK is now rare. Coal only made up 1.5% of electricity generation in the UK in 2022. Just ten years ago coal generation was nearly half.

You can use dd on another machine to make a bitwise copy of the card before you first use it.

Debian (a very conservative distro) switched to Wayland by default in debian 10 if I’m not mistaken (we’re now on 12).

I didn’t notice the change until I tried to run a niche program that really needs X11. Unless you’re doing this kind of thing, then you can probably just use Wayland. At least in Debian it’s really easy to switch between Wayland and X11 by selecting the session type when you log in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

“I’m also very happy to point out that nVidia has been the worst […] so nVidia, “fuck you!””