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In US law they pronounce the “v.” in case names as “versus” or “vee”. So we get the famous case of Roe v. Wade. But in English law for civil cases like this we pronounce the “v.” as “and”, thus rendering the case name as “row and wade”.

Or so I thought. It occurred to me just now that if the case had happened here, it’d be a judicial review. So would be called something like R (Roe) v. Wade, pronounced “the Crown (on behalf of Roe) and Wade”.

But! It was in 1973 when we wrote judicial review case names differently. It would probably have been something more like R v. Wade ex parte Roe.



Idly reading about New Zealand's court system. Amusing to me was the way Māori introductions in New Zealand courts became the norm. A judge decided it would be good, so did it, and then a barrister for the Crown followed suit. Obviously at this point defence barristers couldn't be outdone, so... youtu.be/ycL-cKQ_0tU?si=imaGLw…
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I am endlessly fascinated by the unique way colonialism and decolonialism have played out in Aotearoa.


Watching the darts on Sky Stream, and it's got a bit confused. It's really weird when the sound and picture get out of sync and you hear random plunks while the player is preparing to throw. (Pause and play fixed it.)
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Yeah We had a similar problem earlier today. Same solution. I shall will be reporting said issue next week when I return to work.



Inspired by a blooper in yesterday’s Wallace and Gromit, does anyone here know why the Western Region of BR stuck with lower quadrant semaphore signals when the rest of the network standardised on upper quadrant after nationalisation?

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in reply to Mike

@MikeFromLFE working on an old GWR branch line, you get this kind of insight. Often used phrase “there’s two ways of doing things, the Great Western way and the wrong way”
@Mike

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AI is a marketing term, not a technical term: Exhibit 1 in what is likely to become a continuing series.

This aircon unit is set to auto. But the icon on the remote shows “AI” instead.

I can state with reasonable certainty that there is nothing in this aircon unit that computer scientists recognise as “AI”, even under archaic definitions.

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Looks like this person got a visit from the ghost of cybersecurity "foreseeable consequences".

"I harassed my users into not opening any emails they aren't expecting, and now they won't open any emails they weren't expecting!"

#phishingtraining

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in reply to Matt Linton

The "anti phishing" campaigns, when fake phishing emails are regularly sent out and the unlucky ones who click on a link in them have to do additional training, are very efficient in training employees to never click any link in an email.

If there is something urgent, I'll be contacted some over way.



What Lego have done with their PoweredUp stuff is very cool. You can control it from a remote control or from your phone using Bluetooth. But this means that when you’ve not played with this stuff for a while and just want to make the train go forward you have all this technological baggage. I miss the joy of being able to press a button to make it go.


Is it silly to feel a bit nervous around people on the train wearing Harry Potter gowns (not just ordinary academic gowns, but obviously embroidered with Griffindor etc.)? It feels silly, and yet…
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I've not got the impression that the people being poisoned by JKR's transphobia are actual Harry Potter fans, primarily. It's not people with HP avatars who tweet out the bigotry, it's single-issue shouty types, different demographic. So many HP fans are sound people, they support Daniel Radcliffe in his vocal support for trans rights, even the ones who keep wearing the shirts etc. This is what I choose to believe, anyway.
in reply to xanna

@xanna Yeah. Most of them are almost certainly ok but it doesn’t stop it being entirely rational to be wary.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I don't think so, no. I mean, it could be they're unware of the views of the author... but at the same time...


Wake up. Ask Siri what the time is. 05:56. The radio alarm goes off at 06:00. How on earth does my brain do that?!

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The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED BUT REPULSIVE", "WRONG BUT WROMANTIC", "FREQUENTLY MISUNDERSTOOD", "NOBODY BOTHERS WITH THIS BIT", "SHOULDN'T REALLY BUT WE WON'T JUDGE", "REQUIRED IN ORDER TO WORK AROUND EVERYONE ELSE'S BUGS", "YOU DO YOU", and "OBVIOUSLY ABSURD BUT VERY COMMON FOR SOME REASON" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

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in reply to Simon Tatham

@mwl

haha, 2119 was written by "sob[at]harvard[dot]edu," that makes me laugh.



Interesting conversation the other day. In relation to the ban on GnRH agonists I said that the requirement for puberty blockers before hormones at 18 was a sop to the cis. A friend pointed out that my experience was very gender binary and that blockers might have a role for those whose gender identity is more complicated or in flux. Food for thought.


Curious thing I’ve just noticed about my progesterone prescription. It’s for 28x100mg capsules, fine, but the capsules come in packs of 30. So every month the pharmacist cuts two capsules from the blister pack before sending the rest to me.

What happens to these little pairs of progesterone capsules? Is there someone who finds themselves with a box containing 14 little two-capsule blister packs? Is any of this worth anyone’s time and effort rather than letting me have an extra two?

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I have a medication that comes in 28s, which I am prescribed in an odd multiple of 14. I can receive that as all sorts of random offcuts, presumably from others with more fiddly quantities.
(It's a lifelong, cheap, uncontroversial medication, so indeed it seems like unnecessary faff for everyone to dole it out a month at a time -- even increasing the interval to 2 months would mean no-one would have to faff around cutting up anything.)
in reply to WOMUMP

@womump While I have one that comes in boxes of 84 as 3x21s and am prescribed 28 at a time, so I *usually* get one full strip and a 1x7 cut off another. But not always.

I am on some things which are one-month-at-a-time only, and this isn't one of them.

(Also, the chemist has an auto-repeat system which works on a calendar month, which is 🙄 )



I like words that end in -id. Placid. Flaccid. Limpid. Insipid. Intrepid. Turgid. Putrid.

Seems weird that they sound negative even when they're positive.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

lucid and, dare i say it, pellucid

livid, morbid, rigid

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amazon.co.uk/Na%C3%A7%C3%A3o-C…
I've been reading this in Portuguese, because I enjoyed another of the author's books and because I find the level of Portuguese very easy to follow. The best thing about it has been some of the idioms I've met along the way.

“Pôr a carroça à frentes dos bois” - to put the cart in front of the oxen.

“Tremer como varas verdes” - to shake like green twigs

"tirar nabos da púcara” - to pull turnips from the clay pot. Metaphorically to tease something out or to go on a fishing expedition in the journalistic sense.

"Engolir o sapo" - to swallow the toad. Kind of "bite the bullet"

"sair pela culatra" - to exit through the breech, i.e. to backfire

"caça às bruxas" - a witch hunt

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

*to shake like green twigs*
We have a similarly arboreal expression in German: zittern wie Espenlaub (to tremble like aspen leaves)

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"Queer Labour" is like having an "African Americans for the Confederacy"

You are not 'changing things from the inside' you are a prop to be used and discarded by Centrists who only look out for coin, not us.

#Labour #UKPOL #Ukpolitics #LGBTQIA

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Unknown parent

@HarriettMB @rlstone4dems lol, what tragic, empty lives.
You just know these people are single and hate themselves and now their lives have turned out.

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Every Queer in England spit in Wes Streetings Queer hating face

#WesStreeting #LGBTQIA

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Why is it that whenever there's an Israeli drama about Mossad or Shabak, the Israeli intelligence services are portrayed as completely incompetent buffoons? Even by the standards of thriller TV, agents are so absurdly unable to follow orders that you do wonder if they'd do better ordering them to do the opposite.

Or maybe this is just the Israeli dramas that are selected to be exported to the rest of the world via Netflix and Apple TV. Perhaps Israel is less threatening if you associate it with 007 in clown shoes.



In case anyone didn't understand the doctrine of fundamental breach in contract law, the OU have a helpful illustration.


You can tell I'm getting to the nitpicking and rewording stage of writing an assignment for the OU when I go on flights of sfnal legal fantasy instead.

A bunch of senior members of the judiciary have a time machine. When a miscarriage of justice is discovered, they use the time machine to wind the unverse back to before the miscarriage. Obviously this looks splendid, and nobody in the rewound universe (handwave handwave) suffers the consequences of long prison times.

Unfortunately, a convicted criminal learns of the existence of this machine and on his release uses it to rewind so he committed the perfect crime...




Amusing subtitling in this Hebrew-Farsi-English language drama I'm watching. "Server Farm" in the dialogue becomes "Data Center" for some reason.

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Rwanda’s rapid Marburg response is a lesson in global health
Another win for Rwanda. In October, it reported its first Marburg virus outbreak, for which there are no vaccines or treatments. Following a COVID-19-style mass test, track, and trace operation, the case fatality rate plummeted, and the outbreak has now been declared over - it's been a month since the last death was recorded. NPR buff.ly/49f7esn
#ShareGoodNewsToo

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Kind of miss the trains from Cambridge that used to tell me about Blundon Kings Cross


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The people who are most optimistic about AI are people who've never tried to use it for anything they're expert in. Its reputation seems to rely almost entirely on the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. I try to explain this to people; I just wish people who know something about something just ask it a question.

I keep on giving it a go our of desperation, just to get some kind of lead in something I can research manually (which I'd investigate separately).

It always disappoints me.

Here's a great example:

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in reply to kæt

I tried an AI about a subject I know (the types in C). It made mistakes. I pointed them out to it. It acknowledged them. It was extremly courteaous. And the next time I asked a question, it continued to make mistakes with the same coutreaous politeness.

Unfortunately I can't remember the questions. It's a pity it was interesting to see how incompetent an AI can be.

Very quickkly it proposed me to send money to continue to use its expertise. I turned off the computer.

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in reply to kæt

I worked on an AI based news engine 2 decades ago. It was obviously much more primitive tech, but I saw a similar effect and it was what ended up tanking the project.

We were using vector based AI to find and categorize obscure news items. Human editors were used to babysit and fix the results when it was wrong.

The AI outperformed the editors at first, but within a couple of months, the human editors started catching up and eventually became better than the AI. At some point, it was a waste of time to use the AI as anything more than a brute phrase matching engine to shovel stuff to the human editors.



When he's done travelling the Clapham Omnibus the reasonable man turns out to be handy for my mental health. I am very harsh on myself and very strict when I'm interpreting instructions and deadlines others give me in words, so it's useful to have the reasonable man point out that it isn't quite so cut and dried.



There's this thing that seems to be happening in western democracies recently where leftish liberal politicians look at their right-wing-going-on-fascist opposition and say "they're right, but don't vote for them". The result is that people shrug and think they may as well vote for the real fascist rather than the guy doing fascist cosplay.

But does this ever happen the other way around? You never get Trump saying "The socialists are right, don't vote for them". Possibly I'm asking why the Overton window only ever goes rightwards.

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in reply to Alexandra Lanes

It occurs to me that on a small scale politicians know it’s not a good idea to agree with your opponent too much. Remember “I agree with Nick” from the first leaders’ debate in 2010? IIRC Clegg got a bounce in the polls and public estimation after that debate. “I agree with Nick” was not uttered again.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

The real problem to me is the left/liberal pretending the populist far right is just another player in the democracy game, when it obviously isn’t. They’re treating equally something that is not equal. They’re debating something that can’t be debated, with people who go to debates do everything but debating. It’s like history taught them nothing and they don’t understand this is something that needs to be eliminated while we can, before we need to do it with guns and bombs again.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Xelä is a cheap smart lightbulb that can change colour or brightness but not both.

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TIL: In Middle English, "if" was sometimes spelled "yiff".

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Somewhere in my past there is an officious bystander trying to point out that I obviously didn't intend to be doing a law module, a Portuguese course, and a work project all at the same time.

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We've released #PuTTY version 0.82.

The biggest change is improved Unicode support. Usernames and passwords read from the terminal or the Windows console now support full Unicode, so that you can use characters outside the Windows system code page, or the character set configured in PuTTY. The same is true for usernames and file names provided via the PuTTY tools' command line and via the GUI (but unfortunately not yet if you save and reload a session).

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mastodon - Link to source
Colin Watson
@xdydx You mean X-style selection? The behaviour is configurable, but I thought it was that way by default on Linux, and the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0… seems to agree.
in reply to Colin Watson

@xdydx But if you mean "select to copy to X's CLIPBOARD selection", then there's an "Auto-copy selected text" section on that page that describes how that can be configured.




One entertaining detail from last night's bad dream: the loo doors in the building were labelled with various chromosomal makeups. (Wasn't a "plot" point, just something people tutted and said "yeah I know" at.). Anyway, one of the doors was labelled ZW.

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Researchers from Zayed National Museum have discovered text concealed beneath a layer of gold leaf on a page of the Blue Qur’an - one of the world’s most well-known Qur’an manuscripts.

zayednationalmuseum.ae/en/abou…

#islam #religion #IslamicArt
@histodons @historikerinnen @medievodons @dh #MiddleEast #geschichte #histodons #MedievalStudies #medievalists #MiddleAges #Mittelalter #ReligiousStudies #paleography

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in reply to Sarah Brown

@John_Loader that makes sense. I was thinking if it was a real problem I would have seen one of the activists somewhere mention it at least once.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Wow. He was a bit OTT, but a lot of early rights campaigners in various movements felt obliged to be that way to force change and get people to sit up & take notice.