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vincebowdren

Re:Azure Outage on Wednesday October 29, 2025 @12:12PM (#45748863)
UK, and other regions too; our APAC installation in Australia is affected.
https://archive.is/wOP3A (the site seems to be struggling under the load, e.g. not showing images)
Re:Ansible: Pure (Only in Its) Pragmatism on Monday April 21, 2025 @09:47AM (#43751977)
Nice article, thank you. I've been landed in an SRE role (having been a devops engineer / platform engineer) with an inheritance of various tools I didn't previously know, including Ansible, and this kind of overview is just what I need.
I am amazed at that too! This is (according to the article) defence industry and government jobs, which you'd thought would take these things more seriously.
There's a few things I don't get about this. Are they after primarily the salaries? In which case, the NK worker is going to try and work well enough to keep the job and remain undetected. Or is it for commercial espionage and blackmail? In which they'll be doing little real work but will be stealing information rapidly. Also, what changed in the US to make the scam more difficult there?
Re:A quick review of file watchers on Sunday February 09, 2025 @10:54AM (#42991404)
Listing 33 different file watcher programs for linux, with strengths and weaknesses
> I.e. common people had access to the land

Only in a limited sense. The public did not have access to the land; specific "commoners" (local farmers) had specific usage rights e.g. for grazing.

Another bit of ignorance: they refer to 'commons' as if that meant, in English, unrestricted public use or access. It doesn't. A commons is a piece of land with specific usage rights for specific people - e.g. local farmers allowed particular grazing rights. "give the commons back to the public" implies a history which this country has never had.
This article never mentions the existing access setup:

1. a really dense network of rights of way – almost entirely on privately-owned land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_way_in_England_and_W...

2. open access to unimproved wild land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#England_and_Wa...

The way this article reports the campaigners, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there are no existing rights of access in law, and for thinking that private ownership of land necessarily means absolute access restrictions.

This is not just a problem with this specific article; I've seen it numerous times, and it makes me think that this is a consistent pattern of this campaign; the campaigners are either wilfully ignoring the rights which already exist or are themselves woefully ignorant. Either way, they're doing the public a disservice by spreading what looks a lot like misinformation.

Re:British Placename Mapper on Wednesday April 10, 2024 @11:14AM (#39991655)
It's from an Old English toponym, and those are sometimes quite variable across the country; for example locally in Sheffield any steep hillsides are named 'cliffe' e.g. Attercliffe, Brincliffe.
Re:Asian elephants mourn, bury their dead calves: Study on Saturday March 09, 2024 @08:05AM (#39651363)
Maybe? But a few things count against that hypothesis. Elephants are already very mobile animals, so they can simply move away if they don't like the smell; dislike of the smell would, you'd think, drive them to move away rather than remaining with the corpse, moving it around, and trumpeting loudly. Secondly, do elephants do that with other animal corpses they discover in their travels? We would expect not, though this would need observation and trials to find out for sure. Thirdly, does this way of burying the corpse make it more difficult for scavenging animals to discover the corpse? If so, that counts for the other hypothesis.
Re:Why tiny homes could be a big deal on Monday August 07, 2023 @09:10AM (#37033938)
> Take Joyce Higashi, a San Jose homeowner who built an ADU in her backyard. She now rents out her 500-square-foot abode for $3,000 per month to traveling nurses.

That's not scalping, though is it? Scalping is when somebody illicitly buys up a lot of a limited resource (e.g. concert tickets) and then pushes the price up.

What this person has done is to add to the stock of the resource (rentable property), and rent it out at the market price.

Re:Fairy Tale as MFA Antidote on Friday February 03, 2023 @06:48PM (#34649528)
I realised a while ago that I dislike the "Show, don't tell" rule; I much prefer writers who allow themselves to tell, to be story-tellers.

A couple of particular examples: Angelica Gordischer's Kalpa Imperial, and all of Susanna Clarke's writing. Both quite storyteller-y, and better for it.

Re:Beauvais Cathedral on Sunday January 29, 2023 @06:10PM (#34573784)
The comparison with the previous cathedral, the Basse Œuvre - which is still there - is astonishing. In this photo, that's the tiny-looking red-tile-roofed building on the left: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cath%C3%A9drale_Sain...

It really shows how building technology had advanced in just a few centuries.

Re:Snowdon to be known by it's Welsh name Yr Wyddfa on Friday November 18, 2022 @05:10PM (#33663103)
In retaliation, the Yorkshire Dales national park are proposing to rename Pen-y-ghent to something more English.

(this is a joke; the point is that there are lots of places in Britain with unexpected, non-local-seeming language roots)

The discoveries that are being made about plant biochemistry (and soil and fungi and so on)and the implications for agriculture remind me a lot of the debates about diet and nutrition. It keeps on emerging that we have such limited understanding of these very complex dynamic systems, and that all the technologies that have been applied have been based on massive over-simplifications and have accidentally made things worse.
The key is to think about it, not in terms of just the money brought in, but the wider benefits to society: keeping traffic off the roads is a big one. That is what makes running national infrastructure difficult; it's never entirely obvious how to balance the different factors.
Re:Marriage Markets (and Muscularity) on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @10:04AM (#31097124)
The studies weren't asking about marriage success, but about mating success. Female preferences can be pretty different between those two.
Re:Common Jobs in a Medieval City on Monday December 06, 2021 @07:53AM (#29459113)
Weaving and making clothing was done mostly within the household, by women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_medieval_clothing#:~:t....
Re:The last great mystery of the mind – inner voices on Monday October 25, 2021 @07:33PM (#28994563)
I'll start; I don't often have an inner voice (as in, formed of a sequence of words); my inner world is sometimes abstractions, sometimes words - if I'm rehearsing an anticipated conversation for example - but more often music. I'm not a musician, and the music in my head is far from savant-level (always a melody, sometimes a bit of harmony or chords, but not much), but it's there more often than anything else.
Re:The last great mystery of the mind – inner voices on Monday October 25, 2021 @07:33PM (#28994561)
Full title: "The last great mystery of the mind: meet the people who have unusual – or non-existent – inner voices"
Re:Weaponized Architecture on Monday October 18, 2021 @08:11AM (#28904592)
> The order is not targeted toward actually changing the design of federal buildings. Rather, it is being used to attack modern art and suppress the ideals that it stands for.

Strongly disagree: it's both. The makers of the order, and its supporters, really do care about architectural styles and they really do think modern buildings are ugly.

The essay-writer is assuming that their political opponents are acting in bad faith, but that kind of suspicious conspiratorial thinking does little to help understanding here.

Indeed. The adversarial court system means that every lawyer involved is on one side or the other; the judge is both neutral and in charge overall, so it makes sense for the judge to make that decision.
Re:Hillwalkers should love the Comte de Buffon (2020) on Monday July 26, 2021 @01:23PM (#27962213)
Naismith must have been a hard mountaineer; I can't keep up with his timings, certainly not in Scottish hill country.
The sociobiology debate was a relatively high-profile and personal debate primarily between Wilson and Lewontin and their supporters. A good brief overview is given by John Nerst in his review of Segerstråle's "Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate": https://everythingstudies.com/2021/06/23/rereading-defenders... Lewontin doesn't come out covered in glory.

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