We don't have "Flock-style" cameras at all. We have a statutory system with a strictly defined remit that was subject to years of argument, scrutiny and rewrites before it was turned on, not an invasive profit factory run by ruthless, messianic psychopaths. Secondly, our cops are all educated to degree level, they're not just a bunch of otherwise futureless thugs who sit a three-week impossible-to-fail class and are given a gun. Neither the UK ANPR system nor police are perfect, far from it, but both are orders of magnitude better than what you have the Land Of The Free™.

I know enough about the ANPR systems on public roads that the UK police have access to. Firstly, it's centrally managed through the PNC and every single query is logged: each query has to me made by an authorised officer who signs in with a federated identity and has to make the query in the context of an investigation - any query made without that immediately launches to an internal investigation and instant no-questions-asked dismissal is on the cards for anyone who makes a query without official justification. You know how American cops can shoot a protester and go back to full work after a two-week fully-paid break? Last month a cop in the UK was fired and blocked from ever working in the police, as a security guard or even as a doorman for the rest of his life without any possibility of appeal. He stole a reusable carrier bag from a supermarket.

Also, different people in different organisations have different levels of access. The DVLA can see if a particular license plate has been logged anywhere in a given month to see if an untaxed car is in use, for example, but they can't see anything else. A traffic cop can see if a car has insurance, tax and an MOT certificate, but not the owner's name or address. The biggest loophole at the moment is private car park owners who can ask the DVLA for the details of the owner of a car to issue parking fines, but that's being clamped down on and, regardless, is nothing to do with public cameras.

Also, also: as a public, statutory systen the UK system is subject to FOI and GDPR: anyone can demand a copy of all of their own records from it. Highly recommended.

The Fediverse is more than just ActivityPub. If open, federated social media ever becomes mainstream it's more likely to use AtProtocol.

People talk about the legacy of the floppy disk (mid-eighties to mid-aughts) being used as a save icon, but drive letters are even more extreme - and absurd - than that.

CP/M came out in 1974 and introduced drive letters A: and B: for floppy drives, and Microsoft copied that for DOS and the early DOS-based versions of Windows. Microsoft finally killed off the DOS lineage with Windows Me in 2000, so that was 26 years of drive letters actually being part of the OS' architecture.

Windows NT came out in 1993 - 19 years after CP/M - and didn't use drive letters but for the sake of backwards compatibility and familiarity it would emulate them. All versions of Windows since 2000 are based on NT. So we had 26 years of drive letters being needed, and 33 years of faking it for consistency.

Yeah, like how it's dumb for kids to not know about dialling rotary phones, manually tuning in a TV with a knob, being afraid of burning themselves of the incandescent bulb in their bedside lamp or rewinding a VHS tape before ejecting it from the VCR.

It's an interesting project to set up your own mail server but it's not simple, especially if you've never hosted a public-facing service like that before. It's a good way of learning the ins-and-outs of hosting, DNS, certificates, networking, etc but you really need to want to do it and it's not worth doing for its own sake, imho. Initial setup is a pain in the ass, but ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting is awful.

Benefits of having an old car with a full aerial.

Wot's charge? Eating me dinner? A succulent chippy dinner?

Your name is an anagram of "go, dragomen".

And then everyone clapped.

I was worried for a second that he was talking about the musician and I was like, "ah, fuck, I liked The Joker". Anyway, yes, agreed.

...so she's a bull in bed, presumably?

Sweet!