Craig Murray is basically a decent guy. He fell out with the British government when he was ambassador to Uzbekistam and broke protocol by protesting about the treatement of Uzbeks by their government - being boiled to death etc. He was subsequently bullied, disciplined and dismissed from his post for acting with humanity and integrity. I think he was traumatised and experienced something akin to a psychotic break, after which he saw conspiracies everywhere in officaldom. I used to follow his blog and it was a mixture of reasonable analysis and unsubstantiated consipiracy theories. In this case, he was clearly in the wrong - he is a blogger with a big following, and he posted material in breach of the injunction. This is why the authorities went for him: (1) breaking a court order, and (2) potentially identifying a sexual assault plaintive. In the UK the authorities don't muck around if you behave like that. This is why he is in prison.
> He fell out with the British government when he was ambassador to Uzbekistam and broke protocol by protesting about the treatement of Uzbeks by their government
Sovereign nation states have no morals or ethics, they have interests. To represent these interests to other sovereign nation states, they have ambassadors. So, for ambassadors, "acting with humanity and integrity" when that is not conducive to their nation's interests is a grave dereliction of duty. (Not saying this is a nice state of affairs, but if even I know that's how the world works, how could he not know? Also not saying acceding to Uzbek human rights abuses actually is in Britain's best interests; only that apparently the establishment in Britain thought so.)
> I used to follow his blog and it was a mixture of reasonable analysis and unsubstantiated consipiracy theories.
If he's "a decent guy", he should have known he wasn't cut out to be an ambassador and should never have taken the job. The more I read about him, the more it seems his problem is that he's just simply pretty damn stupid. Weird, one wouldn't have thought jobs like ambassador routinely get offered to stupid people.
> [O]ne wouldn't have thought jobs like ambassador routinely get offered to stupid people.
One would be wrong, then. Ambassadorial appointments to countries of little geopolitical significance are often used as favors for political supporters, particularly the "more money than sense" sort.
In other cases, where the country only presents diplomatic downsides (IOW, the best-case scenario is "nothing newsworthy going on"), it can be difficult to get anyone to accept what amounts to a hot-potato appointment, especially if they are smart.
I have seen this stated before. What is your source please? This is false: SARS-CoV-2 is significantly more lethal than seasonal influenza for all ages past puberty. In fact, at 50 it is almost 15 times more lethal.
https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr
If you are below 50, risk factors play a significant role in determining your actual IFR, while if you're above 70, your age is the primary risk factor.
I don't think your graph adjusts for that, and I think the difference in IFR between covid and the flu for healthy people under 50 is smaller. We're already at pretty small risks for those ages, and even if the difference is still 10x, it is - to use a highly scientific term - whatevs.
So if you are healthy and under 50, you won't die from covid, and you shouldn't jump the queue. Better?
Sure, but that doesn't change the argument. I napkin-mathed the QALY difference between vaccinating a 30yo compared to a 70yo elsewhere in the thread, feel free to continue that by adding long covid into the mix.
If anything, I bet it will strengthen my case, because older people are more likely to get sick from the virus, and therefore more likely to develop long covid than younger people, which means the "QALY utility" of vaccinating an older person becomes even greater, which makes GP an even bigger immoral asshole for skipping the line.
You're moving the goal posts. I'm not saying it's okay to jump the queue, but it's not "old people", it's "old people and people with other health issues that are risk factors".
A significant minority are quite sensitive to salt. I fixed my high blood pressure by reducing salt intake. I got it down to hunter-gather levels - less than 1 g per day and combined with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables for potassium. It took a week before I started to notice my BP falling. Came down from 135/85 to 115/70 over a period of 12 weeks. Also cut out alcohol, anything more than a glass of wine raises my BP for a day or so afterwards. Of course, you can't eat any pre-prepared food this way as it has way too much salt. No bread, cheese, butter etc. Food begins to taste much better after a couple of weeks on a low salt diet as salt dulls the sense of taste.
Can confirm. I cook a salt-free cuisine for my relative [1] who has kidney disease and must aggressively control their blood pressure and I can go entire months without eating anything with any salt at all. There was a bit of an adjustment to be had in the first few months, from what I recall, but I was surprised to what degree my taste buds adjusted after a while. Nowadays, I can't enjoy normally salted food because it registers as very salty. I have particular trouble with cheeses, even cheese like feta or camembert that only have about 1.5 - 2% salt.
Speaking of cheese and bread, most of the internet will say it's impossible, but I've found some evidence online (reddit threads and blog posts and the like) of people who actually make both bread and cheese without salt at all (because of hypertension) and they seemed to be doing fine. This was about half a year ago so I can't find the sources again, but in any case salt-free cheese and bread making is possible. I've made a few loaves of bread without salt myself and they're OK, though they taste a lot better when they're made wth sourdough (which is a pain to maintain) rather than dried yeast, because the sourdough adds taste and the dried yeast only air!
What's the problem with butter? I can find both salt-free and salt-full in most countries in the EU that I've visited.
Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough for butter. I was mainly using it for cooking and ended up using olive oil for most things. I used to have a bread machine, and bread seemed to bake just fine without salt. Store bought bread without salt was impossible to find.
Well, olive oil is supposed to be better anyway. Although it seems to me that everytime I find a study that claims health benefits from olive oil consumption it's conducted by a Spanish or Greek university (I'm Greek btw, so made of ~80% olive oil).
I can find salt-free bread from local bakeries in Greece. Also, salt-free rusks (popular in Greece) seem to be a trend, there's three or four different brands that sell them in supermarkets.
Yes, the UK police caution is "You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
(I'm not a native speaker) It seems like it's really a kind of cruel joke of an acronym, and those of us who don't recognize it just get the worst of both worlds - a bad name and no joke.
Scala means ladder in Italian and Sega means handjob
The French Word fiche means casino token and has been popularized by American Casinos and movies, yet in Italian it reads fike and it's a quite vulgar slur which literally means vaginas but it's used to say "nice looking girls"
It's the plural of fica, which sounds exactly like the Swedish fika, that means coffee break
You can imagine how that sound for an Italian to be offered a fika
Lumia means prostitute in Spanish
BTW a preservative in French is a condom...
The world does not speak English as a native language
Edit: but, as usual, judging from the immediate downvote Americans won't accept that they are only 5% of the World population...
Do not ever try to say you are going to search something or someone in Polish if there are any Czech speakers nearby - the results might be surprising.
The open source world, by and large, uses English as its lingua franca. Of course we're well aware that sometimes commonplace words in one language can mean something offensive in another language.
But I think it highly likely that the original developers of the GIMP knew exactly what it meant in English and probably chose the name because of its English meaning, as a joke that may have been funny in geek circles back then, but now we realize is just in poor taste. (I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were probably more targeting the sexual connotations of "gimp" and weren't making fun of physically disabled people.)
The downvotes are likely because it seems like you have an axe to grind about English being the de facto common language of the internet, not because people think you don't have a good point to make or because of some silly nationalistic reason.
I speak Italian as native language, for me GIMP is just a name, like the BALKARP IKEA sofa, I consider it a bunch of letter stuck together that represent something, but don't mean anything and if they sound like something real, it doesn't really matter.
I also speak English, Spanish, some French, some German
Of course I would never call my product "ugly bitch" but of course I wouldn't also call it pizza
And yet Martin Odersky language before Scala was named pizza
I wouldn't call it merda (it means shit, in the worst possible way)
There's an American band called black merda (in Italian it translates as black shit) they used it because it sound like murder in English
You have to understand that English is not the Lingua franca of anything, at best English spoken by non native English people is
You have to accept that speaking someone else's language doesn't mean you have to accept every cultural issue that people born with it might have
Photoshop is as ridiculous as gimp and I would never take seriously a software in Italian that is called "negozio di foto" from a company called "addobbo" for the operating system "finestre" or "mela"
It's something that would make me think of the kindergarten
But I accept it, ridiculous as they sound, because they are just brands, you get used to it and live on
GIMP is the best of the lotto because it means GNU image manipulation program, it's the most professional name of them all
And GNU is not the animal, is an acronym
If English people have a problem with their language, it's not a global problem
and btw, what all of you are getting wrong by supporting this infinite rant on the name of this particular program that come out every single time it is mentioned, is that the name is GIMP the all uppercase acronym not gimp the noun
Like IBM or IKEA or SKYPE or YAHOO (yes, they are all acronyms, funny that nobody seems to have anything to say about the professionalism of a software whose name is pronounced "sky pee" while billionaire CEOs use it and refer to it all the time...)
It's a GNU tradition to use them
Only who knows nothing about GNU and free software could find it offensive
BTW we don't say "mamma mia" so much, in that way, maybe you should check what you think of other cultures, before getting offended for a software using the name GIMP
So the edit, yeah, was to prove a point: Americans can't accept that their culture is meaningless globally and their puritans problems have no significance for 95% of the World population.
This isn't Reddit, I known this is a circle jerk of people thinking they are better than redditors just because it's what you are supposed to think here.
On Reddit at least people don't downvote you without commenting on why
> maybe you should check what you think of other cultures, before getting offended for a software using the name GIMP
I have no idea what that has to do with my comment, I didn't say anything about that.
But even so, how does one offensive stereotype mean that something else, also offensive, should be dismissed as non-stereotypical?
If you feel so strongly about "mamma mia", then you should have no problem with other people feeling strongly about the implications of 'GIMP', regardless of its origin (which you haven't mentioned once; it's a film reference).
If you don't feel that strongly about people saying "mamma mia" as an Italian stereotype, naturally you would have no particular interest in GIMP. So why the passion and derision for those who do care?
I know why.
To throw in a cheap shot at Americans.
Disclaimer: I'm not American.
> Edit: but, as usual, judging from the immediate downvote Americans won't accept that they are only 5% of the World population...
> Americans can't accept that their culture is meaningless globally and their puritans problems have no significance for 95% of the World population
Your vitriol against Americans, as though anybody expressing an opinion with which you don't agree and speaks English must be American, speaks more to me about your position on this matter than anything else.
That's one reason I downvoted your comment.
> This isn't Reddit, I known this is a circle jerk of people thinking they are better than redditors just because it's what you're supposed to think here.
Second guideline from the bottom: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
Because yeah, people getting upset about downvotes is dull. Moreso when it includes a needless dig at our users and American friends.
That's another reason I downvoted your comment.
> On Reddit at least people don't downvote you without commenting on why
Actually, they do. It's a well-known problem that people don't just downvote for content that they think is inappropriate or irrelevant, as per reddit's guidelines, but rather downvote content or comments with which they don't agree.
Heck, that was the motivation for hiding actual vote numbers a few years back. It's a known problem.
Besides, people on HN do tend to comment because constructive argumentation is generally encouraged by the community guidelines. So long as it leads somewhere.
> If you feel so strongly about "mamma mia", then you should have no problem with other people feeling strongly about the implications of 'GIMP', regardless of its origin (which you haven't mentioned once; it's a film reference
Pffff
That's some heavy twisting of my words
Or some kind of cognitive dissonance
I don't feel anything about "mamma mia", I feel that the people that invented a false stereotype, which is also offensive to many, because it's not representative of Italians just like Nazis are not representative of Germans, has no right to feel offended by something that is their own creation.
Stephen Frey gave the perfect definition of this behaviour
> It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what.
I pointed to Americans because they are the only ones who constantly whine about everything, not knowing that they are a very very very small part of the World population and their whines are insignifcant
They really can't understand it
Either because they are dumb or assholes is yet to be determined, but it's a fact.
Constantly lamenting that GIMP is offensive on every thread about GIMP or GTK or even something not directly related like someone posts "have you ever tried GIMP" or "that could be solved with some GIMP-FU", while it is actually not a problem for billion of people, is so annoying that I wish Colombo stayed home sick that day he left for the Indias.
> Actually, they do. It's a well-known problem that people don't just downvote for content that they think is inappropriate or irrelevant
That's because the majority of Reddit users read subreddits where the majority of commenters are American
It's just a bias towards the platform given by the fact that the majority of its userbase comes from the same country with the heavy social issues I was talking about fee paragraphs before.
I don't hang out with American redditors anymore, I only read subreddits of things I like that are not of interest to American general population and my opinion of Reddit completely changed
I also met a lot of Americans there who share this sentiment on their country and are sad of the state of the things, just we were when Berlusconi was an important politcal leader
HN, on the other hand, can't change because there's only one HN and you can't make your own sub HN
What Facebook's system does by design is to propagate and amplify simplistic, emotionally potent narratives. These tend to be fictional i.e. misinformation because reality is nuanced and boring. Further, this has been used by bad actors to seed social discontent and affect democratic elections. Facebook know exactly what is happening on their system and by whom.
The BMJ is not a credible source, it is the Daily Mail of medical journals. The author of that article, Peter Doshi, has form:
"I think the first thing we to review is who is Peter Doshi? And why is he so insistent on getting this data?
Peter Doshi received his BA in anthropology from Brown University, MA in East Asian studies from Harvard University, and Ph.D. in history, anthropology, and science, technology and society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Those would be fine credentials for someone who is going to teach history or anthropology."
I didn't cite the BMJ as the source, but nice try. The sources include Cell and Nature, but unfortunately for you that might mean having to read something in order to discount it, which you seem unprepared for.
The Rayleigh limit in spatial resolution of an image forming device is given by:
l = 1.22 * λ * L / D
Where λ is wavelength, L is distance and D is optical element diameter.
For satellite at an altitude of 150 km with 2.4 m diameter mirror and 0.4 μm blue light, this gives a spatial resolution of 0.3 m. To read a number plate requires an order of magnitude better than this.
