I opened two tickets with Evri recently.

Both tickets had the same reply.

Both got the reply wrong.

One can only conclude that: 1) no actual person looked into them. 2) they send the same reply to everything.

What is the point contacting Evri if nobody reads and the replies are bots without any logic?

I am documenting below what the bot says to all or most tickets (identical words):

Exactly the same as the last.

Is failure intentional?

o in mid-May they replaced all the major internal parts of our washing machine. We had paid a lot of money for warranty and now, only 3 months later, the machine makes odd noises. As if those machines are made to fail no matter what… and extended warrantees are a waste of money.

That is “on purpose as designed + built” according to a friend.

We’ll have to call them some time to schedule another visit. Are “modern” washing machines made to fail no matter what – to the point where more than a few components aren’t meant to last beyond 4 or 5 years? What components do last a decade or longer?

Staying in Manchester all August

HIS month is nearly over and we did not leave Greater Manchester, only Manchester ‘proper’.

Next year we plan to go somewhere sunny.

Thankfully Manchester was very sunny almost the whole month. It’s not good for Manchester’s water reserves and for nature; but it makes Manchester feel a bit like a holiday resort.

HE good news of the day is, RMS is open to feedback – including to criticism – on systemd.

I myself am not a fan of systemd, I think it exists for business reasons rather than for purely technical reasons. Considering the core developers, it’s not a hobbyist or community project.

A friend said to me: “I am not in the mailing list to which RMS sent that message. RMS does not see the forest for the trees. While, yes, the licensing is free, the code is written in such a way that only dedicated (paid) coders with the both the time and the will to sort through the intertwined, uncommented, interdependent base can even consider modifying it. Thus it is able to violate the spirit of software freedom by providing code which is unmodifiable in practice.”

One can modify it, like Linux, but one won’t manage to keep up with further changes and future versions (releases) . With many CVEs to address, any fork of Linux would quickly become obsolete.

Linux is legally “free software”, but in practice it has been sort of monopolies by a collective of large companies. There must be some term to describe such software or phenomenon.

“The license is only the necessary first step,” the friend said. “The code has to be written in such a way that it is also in practice, 1. [usable or] compilable by any reasonably skilled practitioners; 2. readable by any reasonably skilled practitioners; 3. actually modifiable without an unreasonably high barrier to entry…”

“Microsoft’s Poettering’s systemd fails on all three points.”

Wayland has extensions-type abilities, but so does X. So it does not quite change the fact that Wayland can only be developed by few people in a cabal of large companies. Salaried by particular interests.

There are examples of the same further away from the kernel stack and in userspace.

As the friend put it: “Some of the containers and other systems (BigBlueButton) fail on point #1 as well. Point 1 is a prerequisite for Freedom 0, the freedom to run the program for any purpose. Point 2 is a prerequisite to Freedom 1, the freedom to study how the program works and change it so it meets one’s computing wishes.”

At the end, it is all about users controlling their computing and being able to tailor program or rely on others doing so.

Continuing the above: “Overly loquacious, convoluted, uncommented, and interconnected code / modules violate that quite clearly. If one only looks at the license and nothing more then systemd is Free software. However, if one looks at how (if) it fulfills the goals of software freedom then it fails on all fronts. Microsoft must not be allowed to continue to game the licensing.”

“However, I no longer have links to any of the above observations.”

ime flies.

It’s almost the end of the week already! Before too long it’ll be Sunday (tomorrow night there’s a match at 8PM), then Bank Holiday, then everyone here will be back to work. The following Sunday marks 2 years since I sued Matthew J. Garrett and Rianne did the same, then some days later it’s our wedding anniversary.

welve years ago we travelled around the same time SCOTUS delivered Alice and with 35 U.S.C. § 101 it became easier to squash software patents in the US. Now in Europe we see the opposite trend. This means I’d need to get back to writing a lot more about patents.

he thing you want to do to women is put them in cages (even your own wife!)
You insist women are not women and then argue about nature, replacing science with ideology
You naturally come to realise women keep a distance from you (they probably explain to one another why)
You cheat on women casually
You assume what’s theirs is actually men’s (like you)
You antagonise women except those who flatter you