The instruction set is not the issue, the issue is on ARM there's no standardized way like on x86 to talk to specialized hardware, so drivers must be reimplemented with very little documentation.
The monarch being Commander in Chief is ceremonial. Everything is done on the advice of the Prime Minister and their cabinet.
The chance of the monarch overriding said request is less than 1%.
Even then, parliament is sovereign. Whilst the logistics are complicated due to how things are introduced to the house, if parliament says no to a prime ministers decision, it overrides anything the prime minister who has no absolute power like a president does.
Monarchists can't have it both ways, though. Making him a ceremonial CiC isn't going to provide you with much of a bulwark against abuse of power by parliament. Or he isn't ceremonial and he could become a threat himself.
Windows will also prioritise to keep the desktop and current focussed application running smoothly, the Linux kernel has no idea what's currently focused or what not to kill, your desktop shell is up there on the menu in oom situations.
I refuse to pay the license fee and watch BBC content simply because how TV licensing is enforced is grotesque and the cover ups of child molesters committed by the BBC.
Put it behind a subscription and give me a choice whether the BBC deserves its revenue, my current opinion falls firmly on no.
How, dare I ask, does one "opt out" of a govt subscription service ?
Some private companies make it so hard these days (Adobe & NYT being the kings of subcription dark patterns), I am curious how the process goes with a govt entity like the BBC ?
Quite easily. I haven't had a licence for over twenty years.
TV Licensing has no right of access to your home, so if they turn up, you can turn them away. You also ignore their letters. TV licensing is actually a private company separate from the BBC and the government.
In order to get access, they have to apply for a warrant to get into your home. To do that they have to fill out a lot of paperwork. If you have a TV (and I don't), it should not be visible or audible from anywhere outside these little toerags can hear/see it.
The justification is pretty simple, even if you disagree with it. It goes something like this: we, the people of the UK, believe that a non-commercial broadcaster and news and production company are of significant value to us, and that in order to fund these social goods we will levy a license fee on the use of any television within the UK.
Now of course, you can disagree about the value proposition, and you can disagree about the choice on how to fund it. But that's the justification, and it's not hard.
If that justification held up, the BBC would have no trouble staying afloat through voluntary subscription fees, pay to watch content and advertising revenue. Instead, they harass anyone who doesn't pony up the license fee and put the onus on them to prove they aren't in violation.
The BBC was set up to be advertising free, so that option is not a part of the current structure.
The license fee was established because of fundamental beliefs about issues like free riding, externalities and more. You might prefer a subscription based model - I'm sort of on the fence myself, but it's not obviously wrong - but the BBC license fee was set up out of an explicit disbelief that such systems would work. Granted, some of the issues were technological - you couldn't actually stop people watching OTA broadcasts at the time. But even though those have changed, the beliefs about the funding structure have not.
The BBC does have some advertising on it, if you can call it that. Most of it tends to be inhouse. So in addition to TV programmes, in the past I have seen them advertising "Radio Times" (a magazine they used to own giving TV listings), tie-in books, TV licences, DVDs/VHS, and their other channels and digital services. They also cross-promote their material. When David Tennant was playing Doctor Who, you would frequently see BBC News 24 being featured in the programme.
Nowhere near as bad as other channels in that sense, but still there.
Historically, there have been also been substantial numbers of people who watched the BBC without licences in the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands, but they couldn't do a thing about it. The BBC tended to be watched in the east of the Republic of Ireland and near the border with Northern Ireland. (Not so much in France from what I can tell.) Many of the houses in Dublin used to have massive tall TV aerials to receive it. Most have been removed now. (Within the Republic of Ireland, RTÉ is funded by their own licence system, but also has proper advertising on it, unlike the BBC. It has had similar questions about it.)
Well, I can. I'm old enough to remember "Radio Times", and other magazines, being advertised quite openly on BBC1 and 2 as well as their radio stations. I think they had to sell their share in "Radio Times", after government pressure, but they still do many tie-in books. (Especially true of their science fiction franchises such as "Doctor Who", which has dozens of official books based on it.)
The other advertising includes heavy promotion of BBC linked charities such as Comic Relief, Children in Need and so on. These charities make big money and there have been some questions about how that money is used and where.
BBC advertising is less obnoxious than commercial channels, but it is still there. In addition, the BBC owns BBC America (which carries commercial breaks), as well as having shares in services accessible in the UK including the "BritBox" streaming service, and the digital channels "Dave" and "UK Gold" which all have normal commercial breaks.
1) I suspect that I am older than you, but either way, probably the same cohort.
2) I have a very hard time considering a media organization mentioning its own products and activities in its content as "advertising". If you want to use the word that way, be my guest, but my understanding (and I think most people's understanding) of the term implies a 3rd party paying a media organization to include marketing content in their output.
3) Fair point about BBC America, but I don't think it really invalidates the point.
The BBC does not carry advertising in the same way as ITV, but a certain amount of content qualifies. I don't include trailers, but I do include promotion of their own non-TV products, the TV licence, promotion of the corporation as a whole (the BBC has done a number of nostalgia reels and songs — their cover of "Perfect Day" years ago would qualify.) and so on.
The BBC has a perpetual Catch 22 around self-advertising, much like the NHS.
You aren't required to pay the licence fee simply for owning a television. It's required if you're using it to watch OTA channels and/or iPlayer, as I understand it?
> By law, each household in the UK - with some exceptions - has to pay if they:
> watch or record programmes as they're being shown live on any TV channel
> The rules apply to any device on which a programme is viewed, including a TV, desktop or laptop computer, mobile phone, tablet, games console or set-top box.
The BBC also behaved indefensibly when covering Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
Their behaviour is largely what led to me siding with the Palestinians plight some years ago, the use of words on Israel's side VS Palestinians was enough to lead me down a rabbit hole and I have never seen the BBC the same since.
It is literally state news with amazing bits of other content.
>I refuse to because they have very consistently relayed communication from Hamas as news without attributing the source is Hamas.
I'm a US-ian and have no particular dog in this hunt, but could you relate any instances where this led to the British public being significantly misinformed about a major event?
Everything I've seen, including recent statements from the Israeli government, indicate that the Gaza Health Ministry (often referred to by Israel-sympathetic press as part of Hamas, rather than part of the government of Gaza which Hamas currently dominates) death toll statistics from the Gaza war were largely accurate.
Is there a case of BBC reporting "Hamas-sourced" information in a way that was notably harmful to the British public's truthful understanding of the conflict?
For example, BBC tweeted "Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say", which turned out to be disinformation from Hamas (although they did attribute the claim, but still).
While it's less about Hamas, another incident that stands out was their documentary with "sanitized" translations, like replacing "jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces".
>"jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces"
But isn't this a fair editorial change? "Jihad" just means "fighting for a noble cause", and most Palestinians don't like to refer to the proper name "Israel" since they feel it validates the existence of that country. Thus, they tend to refer to "Israelis" by the ethnic designation that they came to be known as during the colonial era - "the Jews".
If the editor hadn't made that correction, Jewish people living in London or New York City might believe that Palestinian resistance groups intend to fight them, while the correction makes the true context much more clear?
If I didn't like to refer to the US by name because of my personal hatred for it, so I called it the Great Satan instead, would it be fair game to edit that back to "the US" in subtitles?
Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud". There's the widely used Arabized transliteration of Israel, or "occupation forces", "enemy forces", etc. When someone says "Yahud", it's because they're referring to Jews, not because some limitation in their language forced them to say it.
But even if (hypothetically) language limitations plausibly forced a certain "unintended" choice of words, it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say. If they were worried that a literal translation would led to confusion, they could have just omitted the quote.
It's apples and oranges to compare an externally-imposed nickname like "The Great Satan" with an ethnic designation that was the group's primary identity within the lifetimes of still-living people. There were no Israelis during the colonization of Palestine, recall. There were "the Jews", however, which is when the term entered the region's popular lexicon.
FWIW though, if there was some other group called "The Great Satan" that wasn't the US, and you were a journalist reporting on what someone had said about the US while terming then "The Great Satan", yes, you would still want to clarify that, I think?
>Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud".
Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.? And wasn't that what most Palestinians, including Jewish ones, called the Jewish colonial population of Palestine prior to Israel's formation in 1948?
>it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say.
But it isn't fundamentally different, when understood in the likely intended context. Jihad just means "fighting for a noble cause", and "the Jews" to anyone in the region clearly refers to Israelis, so there's no change in meaning, just the opposite - the chance of a drastic misunderstanding is reduced by the translation.
Israel has existed for 78 years now, and it didn't take long for us to update language, like replacing "Jewish militias" with "Israeli forces" to reflect the present reality. Such updates happened universally, across nations and languages (Arabic included).
Even political leaders who don't recognize Israel as a state still mostly refer to it by name. The few holdouts who refuse to say "Israel" are doing so out of hatred, not because 78 years wasn't enough time to work out the proper linguistic updates.
> you would still want to clarify that
Yes, but not by changing the statement and sanitizing its meaning. The usual method is to add bracketed context, like "The Great Satan [reference to the US]".
> Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.?
Both are in fact references to the Jews, not to Israel. The latter is just a weird metaphorical statement.
Thanks for taking the time to share your views! I don't know that we'll be able to reach much more consensus, but I appreciate hearing your perspective. Cheers!
100% this. They published straight up misinformation as fact first, announced it as breaking news, pushed it to BBC app, then corrected it all later then pretended nothing happened.
I don't pay for a license because the programming is crap now though.
>They published straight up misinformation as fact first
Can you add some specifics to this claim? I'm unaware of the BBC having reported "Hamas-sourced" substantial misinformation as fact. I'm sure some errors and retractions have been done - especially given that BBC like all Western media continues to be forbidden to operate freely in Gaza.
During the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital incident they posted an entirely unverified and unattributed story stating that the cause was an Israeli air strike, pushed this as breaking news and 43 minutes later changed the attribution to Hamas and PIJ sources confirmed.
This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionists.
This happens a lot with the BBC in the rush to publish. It is not an excusable situation. There are real consequences. The decline is parallel to the rise in social media and moving the news teams out of London and attention dynamics.
> This lead to two of my female Jewish friends getting spat on and having their hair pulled on the tube and called murdering zionists
Do you think this is specifically and only due to that specific, single story, or do you think it might be a cumulative effect due to all the rest of what's been happening? Not that this excuses or justifies random attacks on other people simply because they happen to be Jewish, that's how the cycle of reprisal happens.
There was a major uptick after that. The BBC were quoted over and over by social media influencers which lead to further blanket demonisation of Israelis and Jews. It simply legitimised violence. Hence my point about there needing to be editorial considerations made as there are consequences.
You know the stupid shit thing though? My friendship group has an Iranian, a Palestinian, a Saudi, two Jews and a bunch of English people in it, a German and I'm literally descended from a nazi and everyone is quite happy and gets on fine.
I'm not going to dispute what you're saying, but the causal relation (between BBC and the attack, or especially their faith and the attack) and the overall context seem murky and very ambiguous.
I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again. At some point it becomes institutionalised at which point you become a propaganda outfit for a foreign entity publishing their statements verbatim.
See my other post in the thread for some further extrapolation of the side effects, but this was quoted over and over again by social media using the BBC's reputation to legitimise it.
>I'm not saying it was entirely intentional or there was an agenda, it's just unprofessionalism over and over and over again.
A few things here:
1) I'm not seeing the "over and over again" part at all, can you help me there?
2) The more scrutiny we give to this claim, the more the strength of it seems to fade. We went from BBC critically misinforming the British public by uncritically reporting Hamas statements, to the BBC misattributing an attack in a war full of misattributed attacks on both sides, which was corrected within hours.
3) Do you think there are similar examples of BBC reporting or publication that could be used to make the opposite case - that BBC holds a pro-Israel bias?
Telegraph is paywalled, got a source I can read without forking out?
Beyond that, what you're presenting appears to be much more generalized than the original claim that I asked for examples of. For example, the Reuters story is about a BBC editor resigning over an edit to a Trump documentary - not relevant at all to what we're discussing!
I'm specifically looking for cases of BBC reporting disinformational Hamas statements as fact, in a fashion that did or was likely to have critically misled the British public. That's what was supposed to have been happening, so I'd like to review the examples myself.
As I started reading through the report (published in the Telegraph, almost entirely about bias in BBC Arabic coverage), I found it rather humorous: the incidents mentioned are undeniably instances of bias, but the few cases the author of the report was able to painstakingly find over 2 years of coverage were a rounding error in comparison to the daily pro-Israel bias in every major Western publication.
It stands to reason that it'd be a rounding error, both because of the overwhelming, omnipresent pro-Israel bias displayed by the mainstream media and almost every government, in full opposition to the popular sentiment and the communications of NGOs or humanitarian law institutions, and because of the complete disconnect between the casualties on the Israeli side versus the many tens of thousands of dead in Gaza...
Then I got to the section of the report that questioned the casualty numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health... This has been a consistent target for criticism by Israel, but the criticism has repeatedly failed to find any purchase: the MoH methodology is widely understood to be a (severe) undercount of the dead, there has been no reasonable deconstruction of the methodology, there has been no estimates (outside of genocide apologists) that have been below the MoH numbers. At this point, criticism of the MoH methodology is about as credible as descriptions of Gaza protests as "pro-Hamas protests".
So when I got to this section, I just stopped reading, because every other claim, which had already been laughably limited in scope, became outright questionable.
Just posting this here to avoid someone seeing 2 links (including "honest reporting"...) and believing that the "pro-Hamas bias" accusations against the BBC are in any way robust.
Words have different meanings in different languages and regions, also words themselves change meaning over time.
I've seen GIMP deployed in British schools with no issues. We should all start being adults and stop fussing because some pixels on our screen might spell out a word that in a certain context and certain part of the world might be seen as offensive
What is the name for this fallacy, "We should all start being adults"? Everyone who is an adult can understand that names matter, especially ones intentionally chosen to cause offense or a ruckus.
First, it doesn't matter how much you or I or the commentator above us changes to "be adults". Only the saddest and most lonesome people will be the sole decisionmaker in every context they exist in.
Sometimes, you exist in a context where you need someone elses permission to use software. This is often the case for employed people.
Second, other adults will disagree with you. It doesn't make them any less "adults".
On the other hand, someone would not be unreasonable to consider you childish if you're so stuck up on your software opinions that you'll disparage everyone around you in the defense of your obscure preferred image editing program. Could you imagine implying to a room of peers that you're the only adult?
It's wonderful for you that GIMP's name has never been a problem for you. But there are about 8 billion people who are not you, and a few dozen of them are fellow GIMP users.
I've been using GIMP for most of its existence but I've faced difficulties trying to use it in school and work. Where I live, "gimp" is a word which means either a slur for someone with a motor disability or as a form-fitting leather sex torture-fetish full-body garment.
(For what it's worth, the G was added in order to reference the form-fitting leather sex torture-fetish full-body garment in Pulp Fiction. The program was called 'IMP' beforehand.)
There are over 7000 languages in the world, around half of them dying or having already died due to linguistic domination, in large part English, each with its own set of culturally sensitive words.
To follow the above mode of reasoning without advantaging one or few languages, you would have to change an enormous amount of words in all languages, if not basically all. This is obviously not feasible.
If GIMP was a dirty word in a Native American language, or a native African language, there would be no debate. That we are debating this at all is because English has privileged status due to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony.
Hence, you are expecting us to give special, privileged treatment to the linguistic sensitivities of your dominant culture. Which is unfair, especially historically, because the hegemony was achieved by mass land steal and many genocides, which we shouldn't be rewarding by allowing further claims.
So yes, it should be expected from an adult anglophone to tolerate the existence of sordophones, words that are dirty in their dialect but not in others, especially in an international, multilingual setting. This is what it means to abstain from linguistic imperialism. This is what it means to tolerate and respect other cultures.
And to enforce tolerance, indeed it may be needed to view those who fail at this as childish.
I feel somewhat sorry to say this, but I need to be assertive here.
> And to enforce tolerance, indeed it may be needed to view those who fail at this as childish.
No, it's not necessary to denigrate other people under the belief you can police others by proxy.
"Is this derogatory or offensive?" is a basic localization question that is constantly asked in many languages. Yes, including Arabic.
I generally agree about the evils of linguistic imperialism. But I'm describing the world I live in, not the one I want to create.
But that's beside the point. "Linguistic imperialism" is the wrong lens to use here to defend the name. GIMP is not a sordophone, it's the opposite.
GIMP was named by American-born English speakers with the intent to have an edgy name. GIMP was chosen in reference to the full-body sex garment, because they were college kids and that's funny when you're 23.
The intent was offense. It worked well. It's no surprise that GIMP is only well-adopted where the word doesn't carry its offensive meaning.
>"Is this derogatory or offensive?" is a basic localization question that is constantly asked in many languages. Yes, including Arabic.
While it is pragmatic to chose new names to be appealing to members of dominant societies (I do that too), it is problematic when dominant groups view themselves as entitled to that, which is the case here, and which is why we have this discussion.
>The intent was offense.
First, I am not aware of any evidence that there was an intent to offend. The only source for etymology I know here is an old interview with one of the original developers where he said that he blended the words GNU and Image Manipulation Program, and soon afterwards realized that he heard that word before in a film. There was no suggestion there that he wanted to upset others.
And even if the name was really intended to be edgy, the current developers, who have inherited the codebase from the original authors over two decades ago, view it differently and dissasociate themselves from that etymology in the FAQ. This should be sufficient to close this line of reasoning.
Finally, regarding adoption: I can't tell for sure what it is like for graphics editors, but I haven't ever seen anyone not using SRAM memory and OSRAM lightbulbs in Poland because their names are sordophonic to Polish verbs about defecation (in fact, because of that OSRAM is the only lightbulb brand that I can name from memory). Or even anyone complaining about that, apart from being amused. And I wouldn't dare to demand for these names to change just because they have dirty associations in my language when read a certain way.
> problematic when dominant groups view themselves as entitled to that, which is the case here
That is not what is happening here.
> There was no suggestion there that he wanted to upset others.
As someone else pointed out, that's a misunderstanding of the interview. As I've said several times, the GIMP is named after the full-body sex garment. (It's just an unfortunate thing that the word is also a slur for someone with motor disabilities).
> the current developers ... view it differently
I would need a source for this. My understanding is everyone is aware of the name and has been steadfast by it for years.
> This should be sufficient to close this line of reasoning.
No, it is not. You imagined how the developers must feel. And even then, it does not matter how the developers feel.
> I haven't ever seen anyone not using SRAM memory and OSRAM lightbulbs in Poland
That's wonderful, but this is not an analogous situation. I don't think you're even reading my post. "Gimp" is not a sordophone, it's a derogatory term and the name of a full-body sex garment.
> I wouldn't dare to demand for these names to change
Congratulations for you, but nobody's talking about that. It's not the question at hand. The question is whether or not GIMPs adoption and investment was hurt because the images the name conjures up.
And to be clear, I don't think it's a given! The most generous interpretation is that they chose the name to deter users, contributors, and investment. These aren't necessarily measures of success.
For example, if a friend named their bicycle repair shop "Grandma's Diarrhea Yogurt Warehouse", I'd wonder why they chose that name, but I'd assume they aren't trying to run a profitable business. If they told me it was actually an elaborate acronym, we'd both know that they're acting facetiously. (Of course, this is not analogous, as 'Grandmas Diarrhea' is not as belligerent a term as 'gimp'.)
All I'm arguing for is that GIMP is less adopted and less used than it would have been if it were named better. I am describing things that we already know to have happened, and which I and others in this thread have observed firsthand. There's nothing to do thought experiments about.
Exactly. As I think about it, I believe we have a pretty good thought experiment. What if "Audacity" (a program that's doing pretty good that IMHO actually also has a pretty crappy UI) was called, like "flatulence" or "Impotence?" I doubt it would be sitting on the 100 million ish downloads it has today.
mikolajw> I am not aware of any evidence that there was an intent to offend. The only source for etymology I know here is an old interview with one of the original developers where he said that he blended the words GNU and Image Manipulation Program, and soon afterwards realized that he heard that word before in a film.
That's wrong on every count. The primary source is Peter Mattis' own words in the GIMP Gazette interview, January 1, 1997, by Zachary Beane:
Mattis> "It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for."
So the sequence was: IMP (rejected) -> XIMP (rejected) -> Pulp Fiction inspires "GIMP" -> they reverse-engineered "General" as the G. The Pulp Fiction reference was the generative act, not an afterthought.
The GNU backronym came later. Same interview:
Mattis> "the GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program, but has since been dubbed GNU software by Richard Stallman (with our agreement). Spencer and I decided that GNU Image Manipulation Program is a better usage of the 'G'."
He didn't "blend GNU and Image Manipulation Program." He didn't "realize afterwards he'd heard the word in a film." He was a college kid at UC Berkeley in 1995, Pulp Fiction was everywhere, they needed a name, and the word popped into his head. He says so plainly.
Note Mattis' original Usenet announcement uses the phrase "The GIMP" -- with the definite article, exactly like the movie character is called "The Gimp." That's not how you title software. You don't say "The Photoshop" or "The EMACS." You say "The Gimp" because there's a character called The Gimp, and everybody in 1995 knew exactly which one.
Peter Mattis' original Usenet announcement, comp.os.linux.development.apps, November 21, 1995:
Thanks for correcting me, I should have read the interview more carefully.
>That's not how you title software. You don't say "The Photoshop" or "The EMACS."
Nitpick: The Sims, The WELL, TheFacebook are all attestable. But yeah, fair.
>The number one association most of the population of Earth have with the word "GIMP" is:
>Bring Out the Gimp - Pulp Fiction (9/12) Movie CLIP (1994) HD:
I suppose that here you didn't mean that most of the population of Earth watched and understood the English version of Pulp Fiction, or that the majority of people in the world will associate the word "gimp" with anything else than the graphics editor (certainly neither would be true), but that the second most-common association among all anglophones taken together after the GIMP editor itself is the Gimp character from Pulp Fiction.
Gonna have to say this a bunch around here, but yours is yet ANOTHER comment shooting the messenger. You (theoretically) are championing an idea of freedom in language or something like that.
Look, people, this is PR. The author wondered out loud "why isn't he more recognized" and a reasonable answer is that "People like me, in America, who love free software and try to get people using it, run into trouble that could have been avoided if the name was changed."
You want your lesson out there on freedom of language, fine, that's what you all got. Just be honest about what you may have missed -- which I genuinely believe could have been a world in which Adobe was nowhere near as annoyingly powerful as it is (or at least had been).
Yes, every time I post this point, I get this sort of "but I'm not offended" response.
I'm not either, personally. But I live in America, a pretty strong force, for better or lately probably worse. And GIMP is very good software, but the name makes it hard to recommend or take seriously. Not even in terms of "I'm offended" but in terms of "if you thought this software was good why would you name it something like that?"
GIMP perhaps could have competed with Adobe stuff, but we will never know because this name doesn't make it out the door for a number of related reasons. Don't shoot me on this fact, I'm just the messenger.
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