palordrolap

Meh. They’ll continue to lie until they get caught and then lie that they believed what they said to be the truth.

Even, nay, especially in cases when that admission would indicate that they were an absolute clown lacking the capability to distinguish their rear end from their elbow.

Lies upon lies until a lie is reached whose truth is hard if not impossible to prove and the whole stack of lies will rest on that in an uneasy balancing act.

It’s not like they haven’t been doing that for centuries already. They attend courses on how to do it, for heaven’s sake.

Case in point: A reality TV show called Big Brother, named after the nebulous, terrifying, all-powerful overseer in George Orwell’s 1984, was created specifically to rob the name of its power.

The way things are going, libraries themselves will be outlawed.

It’s complex I guess. There’s a stereotype that doing a good deed in China usually ends up backfiring on the doer of the deed.

Here she died and was praised, but then, the backfire had already taken effect.

We could conclude from this that the only correct way for a Chinese citizen to do a good deed is to die in the process.

Then note that the praise could be not for doing the deed but for saving whatever other forces are at play from having to provide the backfire.

The hard part is determining the shades of truth of all the various aspects here.

Unsure if sarcasm

The real punishment ought to be an atomic wedgie. For everyone who was a C-level for more than a month at that company in the last 10 years.

This ought to be the punishment for a lot of unethical business practices. You can’t delegate that to a customer’s wallet.

If we tried this in the UK with someone like, say, the late David Coleman, I’m not entirely sure anyone who remembers him would be able to distinguish - other than, as I said, the knowledge that he’s been gone for quite some time now.

Coleman, was considered a go-to commentator for decades despite being gaffe-prone even at the best of times. He was occasionally oblivious and apparently lacking any self-awareness too. (He did kind of learn to laugh at himself though and was a good, well, sport, about it all.)

Sounds very AI to me. Come to think of it, he may even have been kept around precisely because of the entertainment value.

I assume that Al Michaels is not of this bizarre calibre and it wouldn’t take long for people to notice.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: There are better things to attack Trump for than how he looks, what physical conditions he has or how he smells.

At face value, those sorts of things have little effect on the ability to run a country well.

Even his hair is a better target because how he wears it would appear to show vanity, a quality that might actually interfere with stable management. That’s still a relatively big stretch without other evidence (of which there would appear to be plenty) though.

Attack his ideas, his intents, his politics. He makes this easy enough, right? Start there.

“LOL u smel” is something you expect in the playground. Something Trump himself might use, perhaps.

We have to be better than that.

For “academics” read “two guys we found in the cafeteria at a local university” unless otherwise specified.

You joke, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s at the back of some people’s minds.

There’s also the whole association with Red Hat, and since Red Hat got bought, went corporate and murdered CentOS, Fedora is tainted somehow.

These things aren’t necessarily good reasons to not recommend Fedora, (for those see other comments) but they’re reasons nonetheless.

An analogy:

My Swiss Army knife has a screwdriver on it. It’s nice to have, and I even used it recently.

It juts out perpendicular to the middle of the knife’s body though, making a literal " |- " shape, so for many applications it’s too awkward for the job.

I also have a more traditional screwdriver. As and when I come to build a new PC, I don’t think I’ll be using the one on the knife.

xterm is a terminal emulator, not a shell. Anything that produces a terminal-compatible text stream can be started as the first program.

e.g. xterm -e nano, assuming you have the nano editor installed, has no instance of a traditional shell (e.g. bash, zsh) running between the xterm and the editor, but the editor still works.

You could argue that makes the editor itself a shell of sorts, because it’s interactive and you can do things with it, but it’s still not the xterm that inherits that title.

I always figured that Ksh / POSIX / Bash shell arrays are kept as they are because anyone with a serious need of arrays ought to be using something better than a scripting language.

Would some variant of “snauk(t)” or “snaught” work for you? Your brain might be expecting ablaut in the style of “teach” / “taught” or “catch” / “caught” rather than that of “sing” / “sung”.

How do you feel about “(p)reached”? “Snaked”?

A fun fact about “caught” is that it’s a relative neologism. It uh, caught on after people decided they didn’t like “catched” for whatever reason. (I guess it has something to do with tangibility / concreteness. Most other -atch words are used for objects.)

That’s not strictly true. If it doesn’t cause a dip in profits, or even might increase them, they’ll sing truth like the purest angel.

Unfortunately, pulling out of Russia would lose them money so they lie. And hey, maybe that lie will make money if people believe them. 10/10 would lie again.

Number must go up. Down is bad. Only up.

That’s called “time to get a new job.”

Before I came in here, I assumed that’s what “or else” meant, and I’m still not sure it doesn’t mean that.

Asking him to auto-cannibalise? I like it.

You might have some files hard-linked across directories, or worse (but less likely), there’s a directory hard-link (not supposed to happen) somewhere.

For the uninitiated, a hard-link is when more than one filename points at the same file data on the disk. This is not the same as a symbolic link. Symbolic links are special files that contain a file or directory name and the OS knows to follow them to that destination. (And they can be used to link to directories safely.)

Some programs are not hard-link aware and will count a hard-linked file as many times as it sees it through its different names. Likewise they will count the entire contents of a hard-linked directory through each name.

Programs tend not to be fooled by symlinks because it’s more obvious what’s going on.

Try running a duplicate file finder. Don’t use it to delete anything, but it might help you determine which directories the files are in and maybe why it’s like that.

Also back up everything important and arrange for a fsck on next boot. If it’s a hard-linked directory fsck might be able to fix it safely, but it might choose the wrong name to be the main one and remove the other, breaking something. Or remove both. Or it’s something else entirely, which by “fixing” will stabilise the system but might cause some other form data loss.

That’s all unlikely, but it’s nice to have that backup just in case.

This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x’s “Recent Documents” feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to “clear recent documents” it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.

At the time, the “Recent Documents” feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.

Or perhaps more relevantly, that one Steam bash script that could delete things it shouldn’t under some very rare circumstances.

Conscription? You’ll need more than that. You’d have to press-gang those kids into service, and then hope they don’t revolt.

Other alternatives: 1) Becoming the enemy - telling them their families’ lives are forfeit if they don’t pass muster. 2) Some really top-notch propaganda.

I can think of at least one country that would do both of these, but would deny the first one.