The whole article was AI written, the headings the “voice” scream AI

But you didn’t access a BBS via an ISP, that’s one of the key differences. You dialled your modem directly into the BBS

BBS’s pre-date what we know as the internet - that is, commercially available interconnections via an ISP to a “wider web” of servers. Pedantically you can argue there is overlap with the period when only universities and a couple of tech companies were interconnected but calling that the internet is like calling a horse and buggy a car because it has wheels and carries passengers

Re-read what they said. They’re talking about modem dialup to a long distance number, so the phone call the modem made was long distance and hence charged at the higher rate.

It’s ok to not get it, this is pre internet and a very long time ago

LOL, yeah fair. I have it for a family member whose taste is a little iffy.

after more than a year of U.S.-led peace efforts

How can a serious journalist say that with a straight face ? There has not been any US led peace effort - they’ve had a chat with Putin then tried to browbeat Ukraine into surrendering multiple times. That’s not an attempt to broker a peace deal, that’s performance art.

The current seeder / leecher ratio on Big Bang Theory, this is one of the worst I’ve seen - I’ve dropped my seed limit from 10 to 7.5 because this is just poor form

Righto, I’ve spent several hours searching on the subject and the unequivocal answer is it pre-dates Billy Butcher saying it on The Boys by at least a decade, but probably considerably more than that:

The Boys quote is 2024 (to my surprise I thought it was earlier than that) - It occurs in The Boys season 4, in the episode “Beware the Jabberwock, My Son”, broadcast 2024. The wording is “I’d call you a cunt, but you ain’t got the depth or the warmth”, spoken to Annie January (Starlight).

It is unclear with whom the phrase orginated as it seems to be an alteration of an earlier common phrasing.

In 2018 Eddie Vedder refers to Trump in the same manner in a concert in London

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/eddie_vedder_does_anti-trump_standup_comedy_during_pearl_jam_gig_id_call_trump_a_cunt_but_he_lacks_depth__warmth.html

In 2012 “Megan” attributes it to Jummy Carr https://xcancel.com/mgetoffmylawn/status/193400754487304192?lang=en But there’s no other record of Carr saying it that I can find

And in 2010 a student (hydrochloricacd) at Boston University reports it as having been said to her in her LiveJournal blog.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120403115750/http://hydrochloricacd.livejournal.com/data/atom

Note the 2012 day is the time of the archive snapshot, if you go to the entry for 2010-08-10 you’ll find it - or just search cunt

(Sorry it’s in raw xml as the wayback machine refused to give that page in formatted html for some reason)

So…that’s as far back as I could find evidence for that exact phrase BUT there’s an identically constructed phrase from the British Army dating back to 1914 where the lack is “usefulness” rather than warmth and depth, but still keeps the same phrasing of “you’re not a cunt, a cunt [has positive attributes]”

Source: Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, revised by Paul Beale, 1985

"old cunts. A Regular, then gen., Army c.p.: since 1914. A gloss on the latter: an exacerbated sergeant or sergeant-major often adds, ‘You ain’t even that: a cunt is useful.’ The former ‘was the usual reply to a man who tried to claim superiority by reason of his long service’ "

I’m very sure that it pre-dates “The Boys” by several decades as I am positive I’ve heard it before, at least as early as the 2000s. I can recall an incidence of a much younger me thinking I was very clever repeating it (spoiler I wasnt nearly as clever as I thought I was).

My vague memory is it came from British or Australian comedians (Derek & Clive, Kevin bloody Wilson sprang to mind)

I can’t however find any attribution for it in a search other than the Billy Butcher quote. So I’m afraid that is an unreliable anecdote.

Actually that’s a silver lining to Hormuz I hadnt thought of, so thanks for that. At the rate Raytheon builds patriots we have a couple of years now. Hopefully mango mussolini will be dead before they’re ready to invade Greenland

1933 referendum is a bit more than 50years ago by my count…

If you’re thinking of Lang Hancock’s campaign in the 70s there was no referendum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessionism_in_Western_Australia

BTW it’s secession and seceding - spelt with a u it means something totally different

Still.

No you don’t. That’s a deliberate misreading of a (proposed. Is it in place yet?) inheritance tax change as being an ongoing tax. It is not.

Don’t believe everything Jeremy Clarkson says, he literally bought tgat farm to dodge inheritance tax and is on record saying so.

Logical fallacy. Just because I rebutted the assertion that no one asked for the internet, does not mean I support the assertion it was being used to rebut (that no one asked for AI).

The internet was absolutely desired and wanted and actively built by thousands of hands in academia as well as privately, it didn’t need to be pushed by corporate interests.

I’m happy to accept that the chemistry research industry wanted AI, I have zero knowledge of it, the question I have is whether this LLM monstrosity is what you had in mind ? I did see an LLM came up with a design (is that the right word ?) for a bacteriophage - is it doing positive things for you guys ? Or is it causing as much confusion as it does value like it does in IT ?

Lol. It’s a potted history of networking not computing for a start. And if you’re not happy with it knock yourself out posting a better version.

Moaning & whining isnt helpful, add some positive value instead of adding negative value

I’d agree. It’s the scaling beyond a small group that is the problem that I dont see as resolveable.

Aggressively implementing democratic socialism (if thats the correct term) seems the practical path. State ownership of monopoly infrastructure and social support of the disadvantaged, socialised medicine etc. All doable. Any more than that. I can’t see it.

I live in Europe, I know plenty of people who grew up in (supposedly) communist Warsaw pact countries.

Few liked it, that was lived experience. Not CIA propaganda.

OTOH, I’ll buy the “USSR wasnt really communist” argument - true enough.

Problem is I doubt it’s possible to ever get communism without human venality subverting it off into a dictatorship with elites taking out-sized advantages.

TL;DR Communism is a great idea that founders on the rock of selfish human self-interest. It ignores human nature and fails because of it

Yes they did.

People wanted two computers to be able to talk to each other, so we wired them together when we got sick of walking punch cards and tapes back and forth.

Then we wanted multiple of them to be able to talk to each other so we invented a way to hook more than two together,

Then we wanted that to happen at distances further than we could just run a cable, so a bunch of different solutions were created, one of which was to connect over normal phone lines, one of which required dedicated telco cabling between big university computers and big business computers. Then clever people found solutions to making many smaller computers connect to fewer large computers for business and academic reasons, and then all those got connected and

Voila ! The internet.

It grew organically out of the need to transmit data.

If you meant the world wide web protocols and not the actual internet network, then that also was designed in response to a demand, and got popular because it met a demand.

Do you have any solution that produces a result in a quantifiable amount of time?

I’m going to set aside the fact that it is impossible to guarantee a timeframe on anything, and assume you meant “realistic suggestions to end the war”.

But, oh you won’t like my suggestions one little bit and we have proof from the thread to date you won’t actually engage with them, you’ll just dismiss them.

So, the minimal effort response is - Russia has already been ground to a halt - they’ve not been advancing in any significant way for at least 2months. What makes you think Russia can win from here ? They can’t get fuel into Crimea where they’ve been staging attacks from, they can’t get supplies into their troops on the frontline in many areas, and on the home front there’s plenty of footage of farmers going broke for various reasons and not being able to produce. Famines are always great for home-front morale so that contributes to one of the options you ignored. Troops without supplies and ammo can’t fight and will have to withdraw that contributes to another.

TL;DR more money and supplies to Ukraine, much more than we are currently supplying. They’re doing a great job of making it difficult for Russia to continue.

We’ve been hearing the “Russia is on the verge of collapse” narrative for years.

If you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth ?

Russian propaganda have being doing variants of this dance for years with the intent to weaken the western resolve to stick to sanctions. It has invariably been Russian aligned sources that have pushed the “russia is about to collapse” as a strawman to then knock down.

The point of sanctions is to weaken Russian capability. It’s never been a position of the West that it will cause Russian economic collapse, although that is in fact now the direction of travel that has become apparent lately, it’s not something that is a goal (in fact the US went to a lot of trouble to hamstring Ukraine to try and prevent it in the Biden years).

Whether Russia will collapse economically is simply one of the many options you chose to ignore to further your narrative. It could, plausibly, happen, although it is not certain, but nor are any of the options you tabled.

What we do have very very clear evidence on, is that Russia (post USSR) breaks every treaty it makes with Ukraine, so the option of a negotiated peace has to be off the table as it is a near certainty they will break it (please don’t give me the battered spouse “this time it will be different” response).