In true British fashion the requirements for draught beer and cider are in pints, while wine is sold in millilitres.

Of course. You're not going to buy a pint of wine.

A third of a pint is 189.3ml, a large glass of wine 175ml. Two thirds of that (2/9 of a pint) is almost bang on a small glass of wine, 126.2ml vs. 125ml. Could work if they wanted

That's fair, can't argue with that one.

Personally I'd have us use what the Royal Navy used to serve its rum ration in, the half-gill. This is 1/8 of a British pint or 71 millilitres, and the rum would have been a minimum of 54%!

Fractional gills were the pre-metric shot measure in the UK, but they were still pretty stingy. 1/6 gill in England, 1/5 or 1/4 gill in Scotland, and 1/4 gill in Northern Ireland.

When my mates at school had the aero glass effect on the new Windows, my ancient hand-me-down laptop wouldn't even try to run it. It could however run Compiz somewhat if it was persuaded very hard!

That's basically the reason I learned Linux initially, and those hours debugging video driver issues would serve me well later on.

Using an inequality symbol to highlight inequality is elegant, I wish they'd gone with that!

> On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?

If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Politics and the English Language aimed at the language sins of attention economy era social media.

and then I'd show him a news broadcast from last week, where the president of the United States of America literally said "War is peace".

Is the use of "literally" here, and the use of quotes, meant to be taken literally (as in, he literally said this)?

Or is this the sense of "literally" which actually means "figuratively"?

I love that we ruined our escape character in language.

We now need a new way to convey to listeners that our words need to be taken literally. Perhaps the VBA method and just double the 'literally's:

I took a flaming shot of tequila and my mouth is literally literally on fire

The escape term is "actually". "My mouth is actually on fire".

A post to the Truth Social account for Donald Trump included: "The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!"

That's the closest thing I'm finding. Not seeing reporting that he literally said "war is peace".

That sounds more like "peace through superior firepower" rather than "war is peace".

There's a vast gulf between "having" superior firepower as a deterrent and "using" superior firepower for mass murder, particularly against elementary schools and desalination plants. The latter is war, at its worst.

Can we be literal? It means peace through using superior firepower to kill people.

Sure, but it's not equating the states of war and peace, but asserting that war is a method for achieving peace, presumably when everyone on the other side is incapable or undesirous of attacking or threatening same.

Are we forgetting the context of who started the war?

It's just not relevant to the statement "I'm punching until they can't punch back" who threw the first punch.

I'm not sure I follow.

What I mean is that it makes no sense to say you're fighting a war to achieve peace if you're the one who started the war, breaking the peace that existed before then.

If peace is your goal, then the status quo was already in line with your goal. Starting the war contradicts your stated goal of peace.

Do I really have to spell all that out?

There are at least two ways to view this in the "war for peace" proponents' favor, I think:

First, it could be that you believe that war is already happening. In this case, Israel and other opponents of Iran might think that the status quo was a shadow war, and they are just continuing the war in a way that is to their advantage.

Second, even if peace technically exists at the moment, one side might believe that the other is moving toward war, and if allowed to complete preparations, will be significantly harder to overcome when they start a war in the future. In that case, preemptive war might be thought to engender peace in the medium or long term.

We don't have to agree with these casus bellis to acknowledge that they are at least superficially reasonable justifications, presuming they fit the facts.

Right. Only problem is, I wouldn't usually take into account hypotheticals that don't match reality. And neither would any reasonable person.

Beatings will continue until morale improves?

You can't make this up.

There's still one example of a working offshore radio ship, the Ross Revenge in southern England which you can go and visit. She's one of the former Radio Caroline ships, the studios are still fired up every month for a weekend of broadcasting and they run tours. Radio Caroline themselves are still alive and kicking as a legal station broadcasting 24/7 online and on 648 AM; ironically the latter transmission comes from a former BBC World Service site. She wasn't really a 'pirate radio' ship as she was a Panamanian-flagged vessel in international waters so not subject to the Wireless Telegraphy Act in theory, but British citizens specifically would have committed an offence working on her in her free radio days. What really did Radio Caroline in as an offshore broadcaster was the Anglo-Dutch action against the clandestine organisation which supplied the ship, that and the move from a 3-mile to a 12-mile limit which forced her into more exposed waters.

Other than the RNI ship she was probably the best-equipped radio ship that ever put to sea, and certainly the strongest. She was a long-range trawler built for Arctic conditions, and the engineering which went into the radio station was really impressive; Peter Chicago her engineer by all rights should be up there with the greats in hacker lore. Most radio ships were clapped-out old vessels at the end of their lives, they were essentially slapped with transmitters and sent to sea to die since you can never take a radio ship back into port once it's broadcast. The Ross Revenge on the other hand was a very strong ship who was left purposeless midway through her life due to the Cod Wars. The generating and transmitting facilities were really sophisticated for radio pirates, there were plenty of redundancies and the ship could radiate multiple medium and short wave services.

The broadcast studios and accommodation are still active but most of the machinery spaces and the hull itself aren't in good condition. They've raised half a million pounds for repairs, but that's not actually all that much in the maritime conservation game. Hopefully it will be enough to stabilise the immediate problems with the hull and open a door to lottery funding though. If you're in the area I'd go and see her while you've definitely got the chance!

My favourite OSX in terms of visual design was the Panther/Tiger era personally. Leopard looked good, but there was something really cheerful and friendly about Tiger. The iPods of those days were also really well thought-out in my opinion.

Definitely a world apart from the utilitarian Windows 98 UI.

And personally I preferred the XP/Vista era, having search was so much better than not.

However, that just shows how far behind Windows was. Spotlight was much better.

That's wild to think about, I've been playing the guitar longer than that yet his are heights I'm unlikely to reach. He was such an innovative guitarist.

He played 24/24 tho, there's stories about that in his military service he was always on the guitar

I disagree, my problem with claims of machine consciousness is that they are effectively unfalsifiable without both an adequate theory of consciousness and a way of measuring it empirically. We don't have these, so in my opinion while this is a question we may answer in the future, we definitely lack the theories and tools to make particularly credible claims at the moment. Neither pessimism nor boosterism is warranted yet in my view.

I suspect the space of forms consciousness can take is enormous, and it likely can exist in many forms other than the one we usually experience. I wouldn't rule out machine consciousness as a possibility, but without an adequate theory of consciousness it's just not something I think we can claim is possible or impossible yet with much credibility. That's not a religious argument, if anything it's the argument of an agnostic.

The problems with any claim of consciousness are that they are unfalsifiable.

But it seems to be pretty hard to come up with a coherent claim of meat-consciousness that really excludes the possibility of machine-consciousness without some kind of really motivated reasoning.

I agree that all our theories of consciousness are deeply inadequate. And it it were purely a scientific question, I'd be fine holding off on this question. But consciousness plays a huge role in most theories of ethics, and agnosticism with a negative prior will inevitably lead to unethical actions, if there are any beings that exist outside our "is it human?" heuristic.

Other adult humans? Babies? Fetuses? Brain dead patients? Severe Alzheimer's? Higher apes? Mammals? Vertebrates? Jellyfish? Trees? Organic aliens? Inorganic aliens? A pile of dirt?

Without a good theory of consciousness, we can't answer yes or no for any of them. And yet we don't have a good theory of consciousness and still want to make ethical decisions. What do? We have to rely on gestures toward a theory of consciousness and make decisions based on it, despite its flaws.

I wonder if more European pirates will appear on medium wave as commercial and state broadcasters abandon the band. Many countries have exited entirely already, meaning it's sometimes possible to hear these pirates at great distance. Most are from the Netherlands but I'm fairly sure every country has these 'hobby' pirates which broadcast sporadically.

Its /significantly/ more challenging to setup a medium wave station as you will need a giant antenna.

I absolutely love AM radio and would prefer to run an AM station but there is no realistic path, legally or technically, to doing it as a micro broadcaster, other then the Part 15 route which I have done.