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146
General Software Discussion / Re: Mozilla shoots itself in foot
« on: May 05, 2019, 10:57 PM »
...Farewell, Mozilla. This was one middle finger too much for me.

That echoes my sentiments too, except my patience with Mozilla wore out quite a long time back.
Judging by its results, they seem to have a bunch of monkeys running that outfit now.

147
Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Clipboard Help+Spell errors
« on: May 02, 2019, 05:24 AM »
I just realised that CHS writes the file CHSDatabaseLockFile.lck to the ImDisk RAMdisk (R:\TEMP) without any apparent problem, so it's not totally "allergic" to the R:\TEMP directory.
Don't know if that helps any, but I thought I should mention it anyway.

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My mind can't abide a puzzle. It habitually seems to set itself in a sort of alert, problem-solving state, almost as though looking for something to occupy itself with. When it finds something interesting - which could vary from (say) figuring out the best way to clean a laundry utility-room, or fixing a car's wing mirror, or analysing a puzzling situation, program error, or maths puzzle - it becomes fascinated and won't let it go until satisfied that the area of interest has been understood sufficiently fully. Very often, it won't let me sleep. It's difficult sometimes to determine which part of me is the master and which the servant.

At school, I had a pretty useless maths teacher and so I used to teach myself maths, using books of past UK Cambridge GCE "O" Level exam papers, with worked examples of all the answers. I would study at night up till bedtime, and sometimes - with a particularly knotty problem - I would refuse to look at the worked answers and would go to bed with an unresolved math question still puzzling my mind, and I would tell my mind to solve it whilst I was asleep. Invariably, the answer would be clear in my mind on waking. I had read about this idea in a book on self-hypnosis, so I applied it, and it seemed to work.

Well, I had invested quite a bit of my cognitive surplus in the subject of this interesting post by @holt and it must have grabbed the attention of my subconscious, because, though I thought I had finished with the subject by contributing what I did above, for a couple of days I have had a niggling feeling - my subconscious sort of tugging at me - that I was missing something very relevant to this subject, that I actually already knew about, but had not put in the puzzle to explain it.
When I woke up this morning, it was there in my mind - I already knew about the type of legal, government-sanctioned corporatised, careless and indiscriminate killing of innocents that the Boeing case seemed to typify - the word "Aberfan".

I went to school in North Wales. An important aspect of the Welsh character is that they understand the need for education as a tried-and-tested way out of serfdom/poverty/dependence, and they take up teaching posts where they tend to remain fiercely nationalistic and teach that nationalistic sense (as propaganda - e.g., making Welsh compulsory) to children in school – and why shouldn’t they? It’s their country (or it was), after all, and they are heartily sick of the history of the English trampling all over them and oppressively milking them economically for all they are worth – e.g., in the coal and slate mining industries. – and with an utter disregard for the safety/lives of the Welsh (No, don't mention all those accidental pit deaths. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.).

If there is any single event that indicated unequivocally that the English were unfit to rule Wales – either economically or otherwise – one that stands out would have to be the Aberfan disaster. (Refer Wikipedia, and which I wrote about in
Re: Thermageddon? Postponed!
as an example of corporate psychopathy.)
This was a disaster waiting to happen – a manmade ticking timebomb building up in Aberfan. It was the catastrophic collapse of a colliery spoil tip in the Welsh village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, on 21 October 1966, killing 116 children and 28 adults. It was caused by a build-up of water in a waste tip, the accumulated rock and shale, which suddenly started to slide downhill in the form of slurry.
The black humour at the time had it as: “What’s black and goes to school on Friday? A number 7 tip.”

This was an avoidable disaster: it had been predictable and was a predicted risk, yet the risk had been ignored in characteristically cavalier fashion by the English National Coal Board. The official inquiry blamed the National Coal Board for extreme negligence, and its Chairman, Lord Robens, for making misleading statements. Parliament soon passed new legislation about public safety in relation to mines and quarries. (Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.)

The Welsh were arguably second-class citizens then, and will probably remain such until they gain full sovereignty for Wales. After that, they will only be able to hold themselves accountable for any further corporate negligence.

You could thus label the Boeing 737 MAX crashes "the Aberfan syndrome", because the Aberfan event predated the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. They are of the same type - i.e., legal, government-sanctioned corporatised, careless and indiscriminate killing of innocents. But that's not enough - what about the cause? The resulting disasters are created/caused by a Corporate Psychopath.
In the film The Corporation, they reviewed the personality disorder "psychopathy". (A psychopath is a person with chronic psychopathy, esp. leading to abnormally irresponsible and antisocial behaviour.)
They gave this checklist of criteria to identify the disorder:
    1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others.
    2. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.
    3. Reckless disregard for the safety of others.
    4. Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit/financial gain.
    5. Incapacity to experience guilt.
    6. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours.

In the film, these criteria were shown to be met by many/most of the legal entities (legal persons) known as "corporations", thus demonstrating that society has legalised these special kinds of psychopaths to operate in society, where they can and do cause tremendous harm - e.g., including such things as economic dependency and control of communities, or a deadly (toxic) environmental footprint - sometimes both, as in the case of the US corporation Exide in their factory in Mexico.

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@mouser:
...it seems that somewhere people are getting the idea that our license keys work for Pokemon Go.
Wait...you mean that DCF license keys don't work for Pokemon Go? Oops.

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...it was an unfortunate move! That being said I'm very happy to hear that it works locally. If it ever stops working it looks like there might be a way of exporting the tag information to lightroom
Hmm. I did a post somewhere (in this thread, I think) about the trouble with inconsistent image tagging standards, and Picasa's sorta workaround to that. Fortunately, it seems that most/all of the comments and other tagging (meta)data is written out to the .JPG image file .EXIF/IPTC fields, rather than retained in a proprietary Picasa database. Thus, one can migrate the images to another PC, install the Picasa app, and Picasa can fairly rapidly rebuild its database using the data that it had previously attached to the images. Phew! A lifesaver.
I swear some pretty farsighted and smart cookies must have been responsible for designing/developing that app. It's almost a perfect design. It even seems to be forwards compatible to some extent with Google Photos!    :o
...Interesting.

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