graemep

I think that data only goes back to 1936? its too recent.

It may also have been more popular in the UK than the US.

Lots of actual Scots where kilts for formal occasions. The current King of Scots sometimes does too.

Straight men wear "kilts" or "sarongs". If you think either is not entirely and unarguably straight and male I would invite you to repeat your views in certain places....

Tony is also common in the UK. Anton in parts of South Asia.

Chris can be short for Christian.

and Bess

I am appalled by that comment. Cedric, Lord Fauntleroy does not cry!

Those are good reasons but lots of people use Ubuntu where neither apply.

> Ubuntu was one of the first distros that allowed one to easily download proprietary WLAN drivers without dealing with the terminal, ndiswrapper, or compiling half-broken OSS implementations

None of which was a good reason to use it on servers. Even if you were familiar with Ubuntu there is very little difference between an Ubuntu server and a Debian one.

I am not sure what to make of this, but the names there are ones that sound very American to me.

However the most popular names in the US are not that different from those in the UK, with few of the girls' names sounding American or unusual: https://namedaisy.com/blog/us-vs-uk-top-100-baby-names-2025 and not that many of the boys'.

Hilary is a boys name that became a girls name. It is also a surname (although the latter usually has a double L).

Stevie is Stephanie which has always been very much a girl's name. Abbreviations have a tendency to collide.

Quite a lot of subsequent European history was attempts (with varying degrees of success and longevity) to unify chunks of it. Even before Charlemagne, Justinian tried to reconquer the west.

On the other hand some people think the fact that Europe was hard to unify lead to it period of dominance from early modern times to the 20th century.

That implies you also ensure that they monitoring system is isolated from the control system. No one can be bothered to do that, and no one wants to spend the money on an extra microcontroller (a tiny fraction of the cost of each unit, but it comes straight out of your margin because no one pays extra for security).

Its convenient and saves money to manage things centrally.

Going through the possibilities:

1. British people will get it. Jokey references to the country are common here.

2. People who are interested in these changes globally will want to read anyway

3. Regular Register readers will probably get it

4. Social media shares often add comment or being seen mostly by one of the three categories above

5. Search engine results might or might not show a snippet that clarifies.

6. Sharing the link in places that do not allow clarifying the headline is evidently a problem.

It was obvious to me. The article uses "Britain" and "UK"

I agree, but its happening.

Its the same in the UK. The government (specifically Tony Blair) decided a long time ago to greatly increase the number of school leavers going to tertiary education. Parents and teachers push university as they only way to get a good job - this is not even true given a trade will give you a better income than many degrees.

Funding this massive expansion has also spread government funds thin so it has made university more expensive, which pushes people to make a financial decision. At my daughters' sixth form college far fewer people are doing music or drama and far more doing maths at A level, as they want to do "useful" subjects at university.

The impact is even worse if you are male. The number of men doing subjects like archaeology (which my younger daughter is currently doing) has fallen sharply, and its becoming a "rich girl" subject. Its actually a secure career (there is a shortage!) if not well paid, but people do not know that. When people think about jobs they think STEM or business.

We even have a system here whereby you can do both for vocational subjects. My older daughter did a degree apprenticeship (in engineering in her case, but also available in law, accountancy, etc.) which means you work while doing a degree. Fees paid and you get a salary. People are waking up to this but it needs to expand.

As I said in another comment the cost of university in the US seems to vary a great deal. Can Americans explain how much is typical? It sounds like you start saving for it before you know what university they will go to and what they will do. How much do you typically aim to save?

Americans have told me in the past how much they personally are expecting to spend and its often a huge amount, but I have no feel for what it typical, or how much it varies.

Indoor lifestyles mean even people living in sunny climates can have vitamin D deficiency, as can light skinned people.

You seem to have a weirdly sexualised idea of what "exploring" means.

I think you have a point, but intellectuals as a class also played a role in opposing things like that.

I agree with you, but this varies between countries. Americans seem to pay a lot more which makes it hard to appreciate either the personal or social benefits. In the UK people have before more focused on subjects as its become more expensive over the decades.

In England (Scotland, Wales and NI are a bit different) its £10k/year for fees (except three or four universities), plus living costs (which will vary depending where you are). Fees plus an amount for living costs (reduced as parental income rises, and you get more if studying in London) can be funded by a student loan, which has returned to interest at the rate of inflation (it was higher, and close to commercial rates for a few years, very unfairly on those in that scheme).

This is not as good as some European countries, but it seems to be a lot cheaper than the US. its hard to compare because fees vary a lot more and American universities are more generous with financial aid. What I can say is that parents in the UK do not spend a lot of time worrying about how to pay for university.

To me the ideal is that the colour of someone's skin is a minor and unimportant physical attribute - like the colour of their hair or their eyes.

A lot of liberal Americans argue against this.

I answered to the sibling comment. Saying it is one thing. Being consistent with that position is what seems to be missing.

I think that is true when considered in isolation at an intellectual level, but when any issue is discussed in more detail the assumption creeps through. Maybe because it is hard to internalise. Maybe because of the deep division: one thing very odd about the US is that black and white people from the same area (and whose ancestors have lived there for generations) speak different forms of English and/or have different accents.

For example, take the example I gave above. People will not accept self-identify of "race" and have their own ideas of what someone "really is". In America it is often based on the one drop laws of segregation: someone whose ancestry is predominately white can be considered "black".

Also, consider the term I mentioned, coined by liberal Americans. It embeds the racist assumption that the world is divided into white and non-white people: that everyone who is not white one group.

I do not think American racism is inescapable. I do think it is more part of the culture than it is in other places: like caste in India. It makes it more difficult escape because race is treated as an important and immutable characteristic. I find it odd that so many liberal Americans can accept the idea that gender is a matter of identify, while race is a fixed biological characteristic.

The other oddity is a tendency to lump everyone non-white together. Think of phrases such as "global majority".

I agree the browser monoculture is a huge problem, but I do not think its such a problem on the server because JS is not the only backend language.

Her other book, Caste, was what made me understand American racism, and how it differed from racism in societies I knew. I strongly recommend it.

i have a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different/

I think there are a lot of people who are not comfortable with vi. Its much the same reason that some Linux distros default to nano.

I spend a fair bit of time on Linux command lines, but I use a mix of different TUI and GUI editors (including ones that work over ssh for editing files on servers), and none of those are vi. I can manage vi if I must, but its an effort and distracts from the task because I have to think about how to do things in vi.

There is a point to source code:

Lots of tools for analysing and debugging it

It can be cross platform - the same source code will run on x86 and ARM, and in many cases on Windows and Linux.

Changes have predictable consequences because compilers and interpreters are deterministic.