palordrolap

Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.

Government creates announcement feed. No-one knows about it because they can only advertise it on their own announcement feed.

What now?

Terry Davis tried to do for the PC with TempleOS what the C64’s BASIC and KERNAL did for its hardware.

Terry was all the more a mad lad because he didn’t get to create the hardware spec he was working with.

Could you imagine someone doing the same as Commodore did but starting with 64-bit era hardware?

Taking it another direction, there are free and paid “easy programming” platforms that provide a sandbox not unlike a modern version of what it was like to program a C64.

At a pinch, DOSBox and a copy of QBASIC might suffice.

The 64GS was one of Commodore’s last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.

It wasn’t based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.

And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.

They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.

What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.

… and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.

As long as it’s not Kekistan.

@rglullis@communick.news @abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es

It may not be a public place per se, but it is a place where a very large cohort of the general public go.

Perhaps my analogy should have been “This is bit like saying that governments shouldn’t make announcements on television and radio stations not under government control.”

The same logic applies there. Of course they should. A large cohort of the general public watch television and listen to the radio (less so these days in the age of the Internet, but people do still watch and listen there.).

This is a bit like saying that governments shouldn’t post notices in public places.

One of my biggest shocks of recent years was when an Internet acquaintance in Trinidad came out as a Trump supporter.

I was like “You’re brown. He’d hate you.”

Except I didn’t actually say that. I did the internet equivalent of walking backwards slowly and carefully while smiling and quietly blocked them.

I guess my former acquaintance’s sentiments extend to the government there.

An elderly person I know got it in their head that the people coming across the Channel in boats were a serious problem.

“Thirty thousand a year!” they complained. “It’s an invasion!”

So I said “The population of Britain is 70 million people. At 40,000 a year for the next 25 years, ignoring all other increases in population by people already here, do you know what the population would be? 71 million. You don’t need to worry about it. And stop talking about an invasion. If it was an invasion, they’d have guns and we’d shoot them first. Most of them are trying to get away from guns.”

(This is not to say that there isn’t a heavy humanitarian and financial burden involved with dealing with those people, only that it’s not the problem some people think (or want us to believe) it is.)

“But they don’t live like we do.”

“I don’t live like you do. I eat foods you won’t touch and spend all my life on a computer. Where are you going to deport me to?”

Either I’m getting through to them or they know not to bring it up around me any more.

Surely you’re not saying they shouldn’t have had a Twitter presence?

Or is this more of a “they should have left when Elon took over” kind of thing? In which case, they probably thought that the majority of people who follow(ed) them on there wouldn’t have left immediately - not least because there weren’t any good alternatives* at the time - so it would have made sense to maintain a presence, which I think is what’s actually going on.

* Yes, Mastodon existed, but you’ve got to think about the average person here. There’s a reason the first people on there were academics and tech folks.

You really think there’s anywhere that’s far enough away?

Ah. There it is. The distinction you’re making that wasn’t clear. You don’t take what they say seriously, but you take them seriously otherwise.

Well, let me tell you, when a despot says they’re going to do something despicable, it doesn’t matter whether they’re wearing clown makeup when they do so.

Sounds an awful lot like you’re taking Batman, a person you said was a clown, seriously.

I mean, I get you. Bruce Wayne is a capitalist, but depending on the writers, his philanthropy is incredibly deep and he’s doing the best he can, crazy as he is.

But you (deliberately?) missed the surface level message I was going for. You don’t turn your back on the Joker and you take him seriously.

And even if Bats is also a clown, are you saying you wouldn’t take him seriously if he started causing havoc?

Tell that to Batman.

There is a legit criminal in the White House, clown or otherwise, and we should be taking it as seriously as Bats does the Joker.

Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

He’s the leader of a “country” that exists in the hearts and minds of every Catholic as well as the Vatican proper. There are bound to be people who love him and those who hate him within that “country” the same way it works with any country and as such, his office has influence.

Is it any more than if he was merely the leader of another city state? I’d say so.

Tell me, without looking it up, who the leader of San Marino, the other Italian city state, is. (And if you can, how many other people, especially outside Italy, could do the same?)

I never thought I’d be on the side opposing the US in WWIII, but hey ho, here we go.

(And this might even mean I’m on the side opposite my own government depending on how things progress here in the meantime.)

Many things can be done using the GUI in Mint, but because there’s a lot of different ways of doing things at the GUI level, and no two desktop environments are exactly the same, the command line is often the best fallback, and so instructions for that are generally what’s found (out of date or otherwise) in online guides.

And as you’ve noticed - and it is somewhat annoying - technology continues apace and things often move around so that old guides don’t quite match up with how distros are now.

As for the graphics card, I’m guessing you probably want the proprietary legacy Nvidia driver if the default Nouveau one doesn’t get the best out of it. (I had a GTS450 and it was a sad day when that got moved to the legacy driver. Still worked fine afterwards though.)

It’s worse than that. They don’t want the Palestinians to die. They want them to suffer.