Just to illustrate the nature of that campaign, at one point and in order to accuse Corbyn of being anti-semitic, they said that he had sat on a panel in a conference where one of the members of the same panel compared the actions of Israel to those of the Nazis, “hence” (by association) Corbyn was an anti-semite.

The thing is, said member of the panel who compared the actions of Israel to those of the Nazis was a Jewish Holocaust Survivor.

If such words made Corbyn an anti-semite by association then, having said such words, said panel member would even more so have to be an anti-semite.

In other words, the anti-Corbyn campaign was so rabid ragingly extremist and sleazy that they were accused a Jewish Holocaus Survivor of being an anti-semite in order to try to taint Corbyn by association.

PS: And, by the way, this very newspaper - The Guardian - was an active participant in that campaign and published this slander, amongst others.

Sorry, but Russia has no legimitate grievances on anything that takes place inside of Ukraine.

Ditto on the NATO expansion and all that “argumentation” line you’re parroting: Russia and Ukraine are different soverign nations and none of them has any right to force the other to do anything, which does mean that it’s not up to Russia and never was the way Ukraine runs their government including which alliances they join, same as, for example, it was never up to the United States how Iraq was run (and why the American invasion of Iraq was just as immoral as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “Saddam was a murderous dictator” is a totally bollocks excuse).

Up and until the point one of those nations actually harms the other, none of the has any right to do anything to the other and as it so happens, it was Russia that harmed Ukraine by invading it, so the only nation there with any legitimate grievances is Ukraine.

In fact since the Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea, Ukraine and Ukraine alone is the one nation of the two with legitimate grivances against the other.

Your whole “argument” is predicated on the notion that Russia as the large neighbouring nation has a say in the affairs of its smaller neighbouring nation Ukraine, which is just a nakedly imperialist view of the relations between states straight out of XIX century political thinking.

Russian and American, though in the latter it was very wealthy individuals funding Leave rather than the State.

The money for Cambridge Analytica came from the US, not Russia.

The riff-raff are the true believers (in Israel, most being brainwashed since childhood with racial supremacist beliefs).

The leadership are just Sociopaths.

Sociopaths do what they do, no matter how abhoring, for their own personal gain and satisfaction, and dying from radiation poisoning ain’t good or satisfying.

Even the most perfect Democracy will only ever represent the wishes of the voters in that country and never those of people who don’t have a right to vote there.

Democracy is only less war prone than dictatorships for those situations were there would be large losses, because lots of soldiers coming back home in cofins doesn’t go down well with voters.

For situations were there is a huge power imbalance Democracies can be just as war-mongering as the rest, which is why you see lots of military interventions of the US against small countries or countries with ill-trained armies and equipment two generations behind or even, as very heavilly done by the very gentleman quoted in this meme, remote bombing of people in other countries who have no chance whatsoever to retaliate: Obama had no problem whatsoever with remote murdering of people in far away lands because there was no significant path for that to harm him politically (and there wouldn’t be even if the US was a proper Democracy rather than the Theatre of Democracy it actually is).

The hypocrisy is how some leaders (most noteable Americans, but far from just them) pass Democracy as good for people in other countries - sure, them having their own Democracy there will probably be good for them, but you having a Democracy makes no difference to them as they don’t have a vote in your Democracy.

I too once disguised to experience life as a Non-Famous Person, and it turned out to be exactly the same as my everyday life.

Well, that phone is a Xiaomi, not a Samsung (who had already made my shit list some years ago thanks to all their bloat), and the new ROM is just a bloat free MIUI, so from the same maker as the phone.

And yeah, as somebody else mentioned, if the banking app stopped working it would be the bank losing me - it wouldn’t be the first time I changed banks because they pissed me off.

Retail banking as a service is a commodity - they’re pretty much all the same - so sticking or not with a bank should be something one does based on cost and convenience and a banking app that doesn’t work on my phone reduces convenience.

As it so happens my banking app works fine.

That said, your alert can be important for other people and points one more reason to avoid Samsung like the plague.

Since that machine is mostly for gaming, I went with Pop OS!

Thanks in party to the spirit in Lemmy (thanks guys and gals) and getting pissed off at the ever more enshittification, I really went full-on on taking back control, and I don’t mean just changing my home PC (mainly used for Gaming) from Windows to Linux, but also replacing the TV Box that’s bundled with my ISP subscription (and will be changing ISP when the current contract is over) with my own Mini-PC with Lubunto and Kodi (which is also my Torrenting host with an always-on VPN and my home’s NAS) replacing the original Samsung Android (which had been bloated due to updates to the point of filling up all memory) of my aging tablet, with LineageOS and even doing the same on my brand new Smartphone.

Granted, I’ve always had the spirit of avoiding “smarts” in stuff that doesn’t need it - like TVs - but now I went and as much as possible took back control on even the stuff that does need “smarts”.

So far I’m quite happy with it all: I’ve maintained (improved, even, such as my Tablet now having more available memory) my level of Tech access whilst cutting of the ways in which companies exploited my time and patience for advertising money - I definitely feel I’m better now than before: a lot of things became more convenient and less restricted than they were before.

Things are becoming really bad out there when it comes to treating customers as cattle to be milked and I reckon that the only future were Tech is actually a pleasure to use for users is for those people who take control back from the corps on all of their devices.

Bullshit!

If it was about “just vote” you wouldn’t care who for.

That post of yours is such a perfect example of that very sleazy political propaganda I was talking about that the very first paragraph is already deceitful misrepresentation.

Then follows the customary use of political slogans from the Book Of Vote Lesser Evil: it’s “unprecedented” vote - again - “fighting for our rights” and, most hilarious of all for the “less fortunate” (trully beyond belief in a country with a grand total of 4 national politicians who are leftwing, and the rest being overwhelmingly hard-right ultra-neolibs or far-right fascists).

The whole thing reads like somebody who has swallowed the Cool Aid and is giving themselves an excuse to pester everybody else, all very similar to religious nutters proselytizing.

From the outside it’s like watching the Russian Elections but for a country with a Power Duopoly instead of a Power Monopoly, complete with people in their minds boosting way out of proportion the small differences between those two cheeks of the same arse that pass for Political Parties, to convince themselves they actually have a choice (lest they realize having the country governed for the many, not for the fatcats, is never going to happen in that electoral system and they have to do something about it) in some kind of country-sized Stockholm Syndrome.

It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

Don’t say, don’t ask.

His real crime was “Walking down the street whilst looking working class”.

I was already a dev in a small IT consultancy by the end of the decade, and having ended up as “one of the guys you go to for web-based interfaces”, I did my bit pushing Linux as a solution, though I still had to use IIS on one or two projects (even had to use Oracle Web Application Server once), mainly because clients trusted Microsoft (basically any large software vendor, such as Microsoft, IBM or Oracle) but did not yet trust Linux.

That’s why I noticed the difference that Red Hat with their Enterprise version and Support Plans did on the acceptability of Linux.

Just to add to this, early on there was no such thing as kernel modules, so you had to compile your own kernel with the hardware support you needed for anything beyond basic (if I remember it correctly, it was only basic processor stuff, keyboard and text mode VGA) hardware support.

CRT monitors internally use an electron gun which just fires electrons at the phosporous screen (from, the back, obviously, and the whole assembly is one big vacuum chamber with the phosporous screen at the front and the electron gun at the back) using magnets to twist the eletcron stream left/right and up/down.

In practice the way it was used was to point it to the start of a line were it would start moving to the other side, then after a few clock ticks start sending the line data and then after as many clock ticks as there were points on the line, stop for a few ticks and then swipe it to the start of the next line (and there was a wait period for this too).

Back in those days, when configuring X you actually configured all this in a text file, low level (literally the clock frequency, total lines, total points per line, empty lines before sending data - top of the screen - and after sending data as well as OFF ticks from start of line before sending data and after sending data) for each resolution you wanted to have.

All this let you defined your own resolutions and even shift the whole image horizontally or vertically to your hearts content (well, there were limitations on things like the min and max supported clock frequency of the monitor and such). All that freedom also meant that you could exceed the capabilities of the monitor and even break it.

In the early 90s all the “cool kids” (for a techie definition of “cool”, i.e. hackers) at my University (a Technical one in Portugal with all the best STEM degrees in the country) used Linux - it was actually a common thing for people to install it in the PCs of our shared computer room.

Later in that decade it was already normal for it to be used in professional environments for anything serving web pages (static or dynamic) along with Apache: Windows + IIS already had a lower fraction of that Market than Linux + Apache.

If I remember it correctly in the late 90s RedHat started providing their Enterprise Version with things like Support Contracts - so beloved by the Corporates who wanted guarantees that if their systems broke the supplier would fix them - which did a lot to boost Linux use on the backend for non-Tech but IT heavy industries.

I would say this was the start of the trend that would ultimately result in Linux dominating on the server-side.

The Political Propaganda machine in the US is now at full steam given how near their Presidential Election is, so we get innundated with “vote X” and “X is great” posts along with “Y is bad” ones.

Advertising has become so abusive that you can’t browse anymore without and AdBlocker, and Political Propaganda is just a more manipulative form of advertising, often pushed by people deeply emotional bound to “their club” (funnilly enough, I also avoid Sports stuff, as it suffers from exactly the same problem) hence far more insiduous and aggressive.

Then to make it even worse, this electoral cycle in the US is all about doom-mongering with not a single message of hope or a bright vision for the Future: in other words, everybody is selling Fear, which at least in traditional Advertising is uncommon.

Yeah, it’s maybe the greatest difference between Patriotism and Nationalism: the former is all about “I’ll work to make my house the best house” whilst the latter is about “Yield to me, as I am from the best house”.

Patriots want their country to be the best country, Nationalist want to extract gains from living in what they think is the best country.

You’ll notice that the only things Nationalists ever do for their country are things like “stopping others from coming here” or “celebrating the greatness of their country”, which aren’t at all about making the country better.

A lot of people reacting here with a “But they’re a Charity, so they most be good people” clearly are unfamiliar with the problems of Unpaid Internships in London and the scammy nature of so many UK-based Charities nowadays, especially the kind that’s based in London, has junior “Personal Assistant” positions and whose “charitable objective” is the same as their name, a “painfully obvious bad thing”, in a part of the “good will market” that’s not yet saturated (such as for example the fight against hunger would be) and for a problem so broad that them having no measurable impact is justifiable and which is a problem that will never be totally solved - the entire thing reeks of a “business” set up by a Politician or MBA to pay themselves vast fortunes as CxO by preying on the good will of well intentioned people.

I lived for over a decade in London and that whole advert rings several alarm bells in my mind.

I think the difference in posture towards this is to do with familiarity with the situation of Internships in London, UK as well as the massive scam that the kind of charity using “Personal Assistants” tends to be over there.

In many areas having an Internship in your CV is almost a requirements to get a foot on the door for one’s first job and in the last decade or so most such Internships are unpaid, which is especially taking the piss for London-based positions since cost of living over there is insane, so only young people who are the scions of the High Middle Class or above or whose parents live in London can afford to take such a position. This in not at all a Charity specific thing - you’ll see toons of those things also in For Profit companies.

Then on top of that is the ever more scammy quality of UK Charities, especially the “professional” ones led by MBA types, from Charities were only 30% of contributions end up actually going to the supposed charitable objective of that Charity, to fatcat salaries for Charity heads and board and even Charities pestering so much those older people who tend to contribute more that there have actually been suicides amongst said older people because of it.

The “Oh, it’s a Charity so it must be a good thing” reaction of many here is just the kind of deeply ignorant posture that has caused the whole sector, at least in the UK, to transform from mainly “well intentioned” into “so many scams preying on people’s good will that they even undermining the actual well intentioned one trying to do good”.

It’s perfectly normal that those in the know would be “skeptical until proven otherwise” in the face of and advert which is a combination of “London-based charity”, “UK charity that uses personal assistants” and “London-based Unpaid Internship”.