* Posts by Pompous Git

3087 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2014

Google: This may shock you, but we also banked thousands of dollars to run Russian propaganda

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Re: "Democracy is safe with that. Not."

"This is the same H. L. Mencken who as a supreme court judge authorised the sterilisation and institutionalisation of millions of poor white folk, non-white folk and promoted eugenics? The one that would have comfortably fitted in with the National Socialist Party of the Wiemar Republic?"
Mencken was a journalist, not a supreme court judge. Here's an extended "quote" from "this esteemed gentleman" and very amusing, too as is most of Mencken's writing:

A Constitution for the New Deal published in The American Mercury, June 1937.

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"Those 12 votes are what could have swung it."
And they'd have elected Tweedle Dumb instead of Tweedle Dumber! Or should that be the other way around?

Vive la différence...

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Re: And of course --

"interfering in the internal affairs of Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Congo, etc."
Don't forget British Commonwealth countries like Grenada and Australia!

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Re: And of course

"..there's no evidence whatsoever that other government agencies, including the US, haven't been doing similar all over the world for years."
Growing up in UKLand in the 1960s I recall Voice of America on shortwave radio. The purpose IIRC was to destabilise government in the USSR.

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Re: More bullshit

"Hillary's campaign alone spent $1.4 billion (Trump a bit less than a billion). Even if these numbers for an alleged Russian spend are real, and represent only 1% of the true amount ... that's still just a rounding error."
So... the less you spend, the more effective you are. If the Hildebeast had spent the same amount as the Russkies, she'd have shit it in!

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Re: "Democracy in danger"

"If I remember correctly, Hillary Clinton raised half a billion dollars, and she did not get elected.

It would be a bit weird if 100k spent on Google ads were enough to upend the election, considering they represent 0.01% of the money involved."

Unless the Russians are really, really smart and the Merkins are as dumb as a bag full of rocks. Which seems to be what they are implying.

Cortana, please finish my sentences in Skype texts for me

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Re: Make my more eloquent *what*?

"Make my whore eloguent"
That would be a profound misunderstanding of what her lips, tongue and throat are for...

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Re: I wonder how quickly 4chan will make Cortana a Nazi?

"we don't need to simply accept racism anymore than we would accept that a certain percentage of women will inevitably die in childbirth."
I don't seem to have much problem accepting that there's a 1 in 10 chance of my dying after undergoing general anaesthesia. Why should pregnant women not be subject to the fact that medicine at its best is imperfect? How do they claim exemption?

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Redmond's AI assistant can now scan your messages and make your more eloquent

Your what? Penis? Left nostril? Belly button?

2019: The year that Microsoft quits Surface hardware

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Re: Thin margins are their own fault

The new Surface Pro looks very interesting from the POV of a digital artist. It comes with a Wacom stylus with the erasing tip, it runs Photoshop and Corel Painter, and it has a trackpad. The iPad Pro is anaemic by comparison.

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Re: Isn't it obvious

"Again - horse shit.

Unless ubuntu now installs in less than 5 minutes and you have no real work to do...

My laptop is an old (4 years) yoga 2 Pro... I can do a fresh install of windows and be at the desktop in around 20 minutes... Unless you're installing it on an old 486 there is no way that you are waiting that long for windows to get ready..."

Back at you: horseshit!

When the Gitling gave Mrs Git a Le Novo Thinkpad with w10 there were issues. So I broke my oath to have nothing to do with w10 for the second time. In for a penny, in for a pound... I installed w10 on my main desktop machine. Core i5-2500K @ 3.3 GHz, 16 GB RAM, Samsung 850 Evo SSD, Radeon RX550 graphics. Booted from the USB I'd made following original DL of w10 and I have no idea when the install finished. It was still going 12 hours after I started... It was finished when I returned to the machine 24 hours after commencing the install.

My "Ubuntu" is Mint 17.2 and took less than 30 minutes to install from DVD and apply updates.

New coding language Fetlang's syntax designed to read like 'poorly written erotica'

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Re: Idiots in the IT field.. too many in the last few years...

"There was also a line printer image with a lady in a bikini if I am not imagining it.."
Bikini?

ASCII nude

Hey, IoT vendors. When a paediatric nurse tells you to fix security, you definitely screwed up

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Re: IoT vendors bad for health care?

"As long as someone couldn't remotely reset your heart when the license expires,a WiFi connection that reports your heart status is acceptable."
The earlier reported vuln means a miscreant can reset the device. However, it requires the device to be set into receive mode by placing a powerful magnet very close (in contact with the skin). It also requires a dedicated machine to do the controlling and that has to be no further than 3 metres away. It resembles a conventional laptop except it doesn't have a keyboard or mouse. The software is dedicated, not generic and runs on Linux. You would also need considerable training to use it. The technician I see told me it took 12 months to train her assistant who was already trained in more general medicinal care.

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Re: Happened to me in the last month

"The trouble with your proposed scenario is that a cardiac monitor actually IS one type of device that WOULD need a 24/7 connection, for the simple reason that it has to operate on a panic trigger."
You're obviously not familiar with the devices. The transmitter that sends info from the device to the cardiology team via the telephone lines sits on the head of my bed. It has a range of ~ 3 metres. The messages the receiving system sends to the cardiologist are SMS and/or emails.

Built into the device is a defibrillator that resets the heart if it goes into fibrillation. No need for any other defibrillator + person trained in defib use required.

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Pint

"an Internet of Medical Devices is not the same as an Internet of Lightbulbs."
Precisely. You're obviously not a ding-dong...

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"Does an insulin pump or a heart pacemaker really need 24/7 connectivity?"
We've discussed my St Jude cardiac implant before when it was deemed insecure. While it's capable of transmitting 24/7, it can only be reprogrammed when a large magnet is placed over it. This happens at three-monthly intervals and the window of opportunity for putative hackers is less than half an hour. During that period, Miriam, the technologist I see, is monitoring the device and likely to notice anything unusual.

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Re: IoT vendors bad for health care?

" the obvious solution is to ban IoT devices from hospitals :)"
After receiving my cardiac implant, I was given a portable EKG that reported my heart status to the nurse workstation via WiFi. Being ambulatory, it meant when I awoke in the night I could go take a piss. The old way I would have been wired to a device and need to ask for a bottle to piss in. I have never during previous hospitalisations been given a bottle in less than 20-30 minutes. Until I was recently prescribed Duodart, I had 10 minutes or less after awaking to get to a toilet to relieve my bladder. Frankly, I don't think changing bedclothes in the middle of the night is a good use of nurses' time.

FWIW the portable EKG was a bit of an antique; the workstation was running XP. Yes, things need to change, but not by reverting to how things were done in the distant past.

Is that a bulge in your pocket or... do you have an iPhone 8+? Apple's batteries look swell

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Jesus phones

Self-disassembly does not a Jesus phone make. When they start reassembling themselves, or turning water into wine on the other hand...

Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull hints at surveillance expansion

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Re: Mission creep?

The creeps are definitely on a mission.

Computers4Christians miraculously appears on Ubuntu wiki

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Re: @ WolfFan

"Doesn't the "Red Cross" count, they are neither political not religious ?"
They would if they provided the same services as The Salvation Army, but they don't. Sallies provide cheap and free accommodation for the homeless, drug and alcohol counselling for addicts, court and prison services... The Red Cross collect blood and provide transport for the elderly to get to non-urgent medical treatment. Important too, but not the same services. As stated earlier, the Sallies collect donations in the pubs on Friday nights and have an annual door-knock. The Sallies are volunteers for the main part. The Red Cross employ telemarketers and I have grown to loathe telemarketers. Not that I have trouble with telemarketers since installing Call Guardian.

FWIW we do support Médecins Sans Frontières even though they provide no services in our country and never have. We also support the Menzies Research Foundation and other sectarian charities. But my original question was "What's the name of this atheist equivalent of The Salvation Army?" There isn't one.

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@ WolfFan

Despite your claim that Médecins Sans Frontières provide the same services as The Salvation Army, it appears this is false. The only other organisations providing poor relief where I live are Anglicaire, St Vinnies and Hobart City Mission all of which appear to be Christian Organisations.

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Re: penguin carrying a crucifix

"When I looked it seemed that the penguin was carrying a cross, NOT a crucifix."
I imagine that's because penguins have difficulty holding the hammer to knock the nails in...

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Re: RE: Sisk

"I merely pointed out how ridiculous and bigoted some of the book is that you hold dear and you got defensive."
Bullshit! You wrote: "Here's a novel idea - if you find it hurtful then actually read your Bible." That was offensive and pretty obviously intentional.

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Re: @Pompus Git

"You must live in a rough neighbourhood."
Not particularly. The Sallies fund-raise in Australia's pubs regardless of locale. I never heard of them being attacked; rather the reverse. Pretty much everyone gives them their loose change knowing it's for a very good cause. I'd rather punch out the secular fund-raisers who phone incessantly that you know are only doing it to make a quid for themselves. At least with the Sallies you know your hard-earned is going where it's needed: to poor relief.

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Re: RE: Sisk

"Here's a novel idea - if you find it hurtful then actually read your Bible. It's the quickest way to become an atheist."
Given that the first explicit writing in favour of atheism was French Catholic priest Jean Meslier's Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier ... Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World written in the early 18th C, maybe it's the slowest rather than the quickest.

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Re: @Pompus Git

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9decins_Sans_Fronti%C3%A8res"
I'll watch out for them in the pub on Friday night then...

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Re: @Pompus Git

@ Fluck Kores

What's the name of this atheist equivalent of The Salvation Army? I don't seem to have come across it. What makes you the expert on why my son helps the homeless on the streets? The reason my son gives is that having been helped, he wanted to help others in turn as a kind of payback. This has nothing whatsoever to do with belief in an afterlife.

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Re: Direct link to Deity

"I am sorry for your depression and glad you were helped. But I would say it's a very edge case for claiming that supernatural forces exist just in case belief in such can help people in that way.

If religion didn't exist, you could just as easily have been helped by a rational humanist for example."

The problem here is that rational humanists don't go on the street to help their fellow human beings. Them who believe in Big G do because they are commanded by Big G to do so.

My oldest son is a believer who does that kind of thing. The existence/non-existence of God is irrelevant. The belief in God and His commandments is not.

Dumb bug of the week: Apple's macOS reveals your encrypted drive's password in the hint box

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Re: Indian...

"Looks more like cowboy coding to me."
Buffalo Bill Coding; no doubt about it...

Geoboffins claim to find oldest trace of life in rocks 4bn years old

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Re: Title wrong

"What's 450 million years between friends?"
Kinda sad when you think about it.

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Re: "...Canadian rocks 3.95 billion years ago..."

"Rocks can't claim rocks."
Gneiss point...

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Re: More fake news

"You have not cited him correctly though, because you wrote "contradicts science", and at the time what we call science today did not really exist."
Sensu stricto, but then the meaning of science in the modern sense dates from the late 19th C, a bit late for Augustine. Looking into my trusty Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy I find that he wrote "sciences" (knowledge) which included what we now call scientific knowledge.

"So, whoever apprehends what is transmitted in the sciences, admits without any hesitation that this is absolutely true; and it must be believed that it could not be apprehended, if it were not illuminated by another sun, as it were, of its own."

(Soliloquia I.5)

My original point remains: Augustine did not even remotely take the Bible to be a special sort of physics textbook. As Galileo so neatly summarised Augustine on this point: "The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go."

I've never met anyone who actually believes the Bible is literally true. Nor have I found any among the several medieval scholars I've studied.

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Conflict Thesis

The Conflict Thesis maintains that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science, and it certainly has its adherents among commentards here. This despite the fact that you will find no historians supporting it prior to its inception in the mid-19th C or after its utter demise in the late 1960s. Ditto for philosophers of science.

"White's and Draper's accounts* of the actual interaction between science and religion in Western history do not differ greatly. Both tell a tale of bright progress continually sparked by science. And both develop and use the same myths to support their narrative, the flat-earth legend prominently among them".

Stephen Jay Gould's words in Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History, New York: Crown: 38–52. Perhaps you were referring to a different Stephen Jay Gould, Voyna i Mor. ;-)

* Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom 1896

John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science 1874

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Re: More fake newst

"and (as usual ) Pompous Git tried to confuse the issue - by referring to 19th century debates which took place in an environment in which the modern understanding of the Bible didn't exist. I suggest he tries reading Stephen Jay Gould's books."
I suggest that you stick to facts, rather than supposition. The most represented author in my extensive book collection is Stephen Jay Gould and I have read all of them. Your "modern understanding of the Bible" would appear to be at odds with considerably more than a thousand years of Official Church Doctrine. I suggest you consult with the Papacy before altering it.

I also suggest you read Phil Dowe's Galileo, Darwin, and Hawking: The Interplay of Science, Reason, and Religion ISBN-13: 978-0802826961.

Pompous Git Silver badge

Re: More fake news

"Simple; it was a category error to involve the Bible but at the time it was not recognised by many people in the West that Torah was not a science textbook."
Really? Back in the 5th C, Augustine of Hippo, that eminent Church Father held that when a literal interpretation contradicts science and our God-given reason, the Biblical text must be interpreted metaphorically. While Scripture has a literal sense, this "literal sense" does not always mean that the Scriptures are mere history; at times they are rather an extended metaphor. [De Genesi ad literam 1:19–20, Chapt. 19 [408], De Genesi ad literam, 2:9].

I think you will find that this has been Official Church Doctrine for more than 1500 years. The concept of biblical literalism is a modern conceit.

"To confuse science with history of science is also a category error."
I think we can level this accusation at the Uniformitarians. They insisted that because Noah's Flood was a story in the Bible, therefore there could never have been such catastrophes in the past. This somewhat bizarre belief led to J Harlen Bretz's work on the Spokane Floods* being dismissed by the establishment when he first published in 1923. He wasn't vindicated until he was awarded the Penrose Medal (the Geological Society of America's highest award) in 1979, at the age of 96. He told his son: "All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over."

* JT Pardee assisted Bretz in his research, but his employer (USGS) forbade him publicly supporting Bretz's theory. Pardee estimated that flood waters in excess of 45 miles per hour were required to roll the largest of the boulders moved by the Spokane Flood. The water flow was nine cubic miles per hour, more than the combined flow of every river in the world. Current estimates place the flow at ten times the flow of all current rivers combined.

Life began after meteorites splashed into warm ponds of water, say astronomers

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"Sounds like religion to me."

Then a miracle occurs...

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"The planet would be a far better place if religion DIDN'T exist."
Just imagine what a better place it would be without religious institutions like hospitals, schools, universities... Yeah, let's get rid of them!

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Re: Old theory, old pattern of behaviour

@ Archtech

I was amused some years ago when some of Wikramsinghe's students sent a balloon into the stratosphere. It brought back samples of bacteria that couldn't possibly have originated on Earth because no plausible mechanism for them getting there. Atmosphere too thin apparently.

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"I'm satisfied that we're here based on an incredible string of random chances over an insanely long period of time"
90 million years is only an insanely long period of time if you haven't studied geology. It's less than 2% of the lifespan of Earth and only half as long as the Mesozoic Era.

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"Well said, Dr Syntax."
Indeed! Also worth reading is Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe 2005. If you've read Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life you will recognise him as the hero of that wonderful book.

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Re: Why highlight meteorites?

"Any delicate carbon compound in a meteorite would probably be vapourised by the impact."
You've not heard of the Murchison meteorite then?

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The Molecular Biologist’s Dream:

“Once upon a time there was a prebiotic pool full of β-D-nucleotides. . . .”

Orgel and Joyce have published extensively on the RNA World hypothesis.

Prospects for Understanding the Origin of the RNA World

Bad news! Astroboffins find the stuff of life in space for the first time

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Re: Word Salad vs Gobbledegook

"Some, I think, did have a great deal of depth to them."
John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett / Deep & Meaningless

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Re: Nothing new here...

"Panspermia is nothing more than physicists trying to take over a branch of biology for themselves."
There ya go! And I thought Francis Crick was a biologist. What a fool I've been...

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Re: Word Salad vs Gobbledegook

"PG, your problem is you link to papers which are often either (a) not actually related to the matter in hand or (b) you have misinterpreted."
And not explaining my "misinterpretation" helps how? You may be able to become informed telepathically; I cannot.

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Re: Word Salad vs Gobbledegook

"Please note ..... registering a thumbs down vote is moronic without an accompanying explanation as to the offence caused."
Er... you're not used to that yet? I find that linking to scientific papers supporting my posts is a sure-fire way to get downvoted with no reason given.

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Re: Nothing new here...

Not forgetting that Fred first formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and did most of the heavy lifting on developing it. I've long lost count of the number of other scientists who have called him "an idiot". Jealousy I guess...

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Devil

I can't believe I read this...

"Based on our discovery, organohalogens are likely to be a constituent of the so-called 'primordial soup', both on the young Earth and on nascent rocky exoplanets."

Oh noes! A Young Earther!

Li-quid hot mag-ma: There's a Martian meteorite in your backyard. How'd it get there?

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Re: Dammit

Wow! Happy, happy, joy, joy! A new Sparks release. I didn't know. Thx...

Oath-my-God: THREE! BILLION! Yahoo! accounts! hacked! in! 2013! – not! 'just!' 1bn!

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Re: It sounds familiar, like AOhell

"Ya who?

Is anyone still using them?"

They were useful when I participated in some group discussions. Then I got locked out. I don't know the correct answers to my secret questions... apparently. Maybe this stuff-up explains that.