At yesterday's BALUG meeting, someone hauled out an old chestnut:
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary
and those who don't. -- Unknown
I mentioned that there were a couple of responses to that, that I had
converted to .signature files. The first was by a poster named Ron
Fabre on the Linux Users of Victoria (Melbourne) mailing list (whose
comment I .sigged):
--
Cheers, There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who
Rick …
[View More]Moen know ternary, those who don't, and those who are now
rick(a)linuxmafia.com looking for their dictionaries. -- Ron Fabre
McQ! (4x80)
Being also on that mailing list, I couldn't help doing meta-commentary:
--
Cheers, There are 10 types of people in this world, those who know quaternary,
Rick Moen those who only recently figured out Ron Fabre's "ternary" .sig, those
who're completely confused, and those who hate self-referential jokes.
I also like:
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who can extrapolate
from incomplete data
and
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand
hexadecimal and f the rest.
and
Q. Why do mathematicians confuse Halloween and Christmas?
A. Because 31 Oct = 25 Dec.
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tl;dr: https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns
In the wake of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, controvery arose about
dealings between him and the (also now-late) MIT AI scientist Marvin
Minsky, and about MIT administration actions related to Epstein.
Richard M. Stallman is intimately associated with not just the Free
Software Foundation (that he created) but with MIT CSAIL (Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) operation. Fairly
recently, there was a discussion …
[View More]on one of CSAIL's unadvertised and
privately archived mailing lists, csail-related, where Stallman posted
comments.[1] Those comments (mostly about matters peripheral to the
late Dr. Minsky) became known to MIT alumna, grad student, and
mechanical engineer Selam Jie Gano, who is said to have been sent them
by a subscriber. Ms. Gano was very incensed by Stallman's views that
she asserted were, among other things, 'defending Epstein'. She
publishes an essay on Medium entitled 'Remove Richard Stallman. And
everyone else horrible in tech':
https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794
She also provided what is asserted to be the entire thread to Vice.com's
regular 'Motherboard' feature, which published a rather inaccurate piece
based largely on her allegations, though providing a curated copy of the
mailing list thread with all participant names except Stallman's blacked
out.
Article:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-…
Direct link to Vice.com/Motherboard's curated thread copy:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-09132019142056-0001.html?em…
Quite a number of other outfits have picked up the story in various
ways. Stallman responded by objecting (with perfect justification, as
far as I can see) that in no way was he defending Epstein; that this is
just not at all what he said.
The persons now running Software Freedom Conservancy took advantage of
this squalor by 'calling for' Richard to retire from the free software
organisation & movement he created (unsigned because they have _that_
little moral backbone).
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/sep/16/rms-does-not-speak-for-us/
There was also pressure for Richard to resign from his position at
CSAIL (where ISTR he's been Visiting Professor). He has now done so,
citing 'pressure on MIT' -- along with resigning as President and Board
of Directors member at Free Software Foundation.
IMO, this affair (e.g., things like the unsigned editorial from the
jackals at Software Freedom Conservancy) has opportunism written all
over it.
One of the less-sucky bits of news/analysis (apparently just before
things came to a head) was here:
https://fudzilla.com/news/49393-stallman-defends-himself-over-epstein-comme…https://lwn.net/ have not yet caught up with events, and can be expected
as usual to be guarded to a fault when they do.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/ has some
discussion, but likewise has not caught up with events.
[1] None of what I'm writing here imply endorsement of Richard's
assertions in the mailing list thread, by the way. In fact, I very much
do not concur with some, and would have, among other things, politely
corrected his factually incorrect understanding of the legal concept of
'assault'.
--
Cheers, Views expressed are my own.
Rick Moen
rick(a)linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)
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Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand
hexadecimal and f the rest.
Also saw the following variant:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: the 1 who understands
hexadecimal and f the rest.
aaronco36(a)sdf.org
---
Another trending topic that tonight's BALUG meeting attendees might
consider discussing in-person is that of
o RMS's controversial resignation from FSF and from MIT CSAIL.
See at least these earlier BALUG-Talk posts before this
one, today, at ...
- https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-talk/2019-September/000174.html
- https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-talk/2019-September/000175.html
- https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-talk/2019-September/000176.html
aaronco36(a)sdf.org
---…
[View More]------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2019 20:31:53 -0700
From: Michael Paoli <Michael.Paoli(a)cal.berkeley.edu>
> REMINDER: BALUG MEETING TOMORROW!:
> From: "Michael Paoli" <Michael.Paoli(a)cal.berkeley.edu>
> To: BALUG-Announce <balug-announce(a)lists.balug.org>
> Subject: BALUG: meeting: Tu 2019-09-17 & other BALUG News
> ------------------------------
> For our 2019-09-17 (3rd Tuesday) BALUG meeting:
> We don't have a specific speaker/presentation lined up for this meeting,
> however ...
> Bring topics/questions you'd like to discuss - many interesting
> discussions/meetings happen that way.
> We may well also discuss some topical item(s) at least some of us have
> been working on or poking about recently, e.g.:
> o WordPress - site migrations, self-hosting, plugins, backup, ...
> o DNS, DNSSEC, AAAA & CAA records, letencrypt.org & certs, etc.
> o virtualization & live (host) migrations
> o automatic web site updates, shell/scripting languages, crontab/at/...
> o Lists, forums, & management thereof
> o [L]UG management, dos/don'ts, venues, ...
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