Safety

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not dedicated to ensuring your safety, which is why we are endorsing software that will, when you are visiting our GPD County Offices, inform you that actions you are about to take would be considered betraying us and not let you do it without an override password.  Our goal is to eliminate accidental treason on our premises.  It should be at least as effective as this gem, which prevents you from using a specific brand of 3D printer to accidentally print a firearm.  We think that protecting people from accidental mistakes will be an effective way to prevent people with intent to harm us from being able to do so from within the confines of our offices, and thus enhance safety, as long as people use our offices to commit treason, which sounds entirely reasonable.

The Revenge of our New (Former) Editor

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not embarrassed at the course of events over the last couple of weeks.  Many of you have been wondering why we haven't posted since we revealed that we had let our former editor go as she had been trying to prevent us from posting anything to this forum.  Unfortunately, since we imprisoned Gertrude in the GNU Public Dungeons we have been unable to return to this forum to post anything.  Gertrude, as she was being interviewed before her imprisonment, must have sensed that we were on to her and planted in this forum a time-release malware that would steal all of our posts and send them instead to search engines.  We discovered her sedition a few days later, but it has taken us until now to clean up the mess.  Gertrude was, apparently, a much more formidable enemy than we gave her credit for.  To make matters worse, we found out that somehow she was able to put Greta in her prison cell, leaving us looking a bit foolish for having hired her, let her ruin our blog for a while, and then not even been able to capture her properly.  Greta has been released into house arrest, just to make sure there's nothing funny going on.

The bottom line, however, is that at the GPD we still believe nothing if not that we should help those in need of help, but we have learned an important lesson about checking out our employees more thoroughly.  You would have thought that the policies we put in place after the Quisling incident would have been sufficient, but evil seems to find a way.  We'll be reviewing our policies, but initial reports suggest that it was the fact that we didn't know that Gertrude or Greta existed prior to our run-in with them that allowed her to game our system.

Our new (former) editor

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not generous, which is why when we met an out-of-work editor early last week we decided to help.  She told us her name was Greta Jenkins, and that she had been an editor for an underground magazine called Subterranean for most of the last two decades, and since at the GNU Public Dictatorship we do not believe that people should receive assistance without donating their time and talents to the betterment of society, we promptly created the position of head editor for this forum.  All of the pieces we submitted to her were held in review until right before we wanted to publish them and then returned with comments like the following:

• Too much passive voice, make it sound more exciting!
• You use too many words the average world citizen may not understand, please simplify your vocabulary
• You ramble a lot, and never really get to the point.  Please be more concise

While anyone who works in the editing industry knows that these are valid concerns, we became suspicious when we resubmitted our work and didn't see it published the next day.  We asked Greta about it, and she immediately handed us back our new versions with more annotations like the following:

• This passage is too exciting, please make it more passive
• You are reusing the same words too often, please use some synonyms
• You are too concise here.  If you were to ramble a little, you would keep the readers' interest longer

Any astute reader will immediately recognize what was going on: Greta was an agent of the New Company sent to infiltrate us and keep us from spreading our message of freedom, equality, and independence from addiction to brads and other evil office products.  After we dug into her cover story a little more we realized why we hadn't caught her before.  Greta Jenkins had been an editor for Subterranean, but this was not Greta Jenkins.  It was her long-lost twin Gertrude Jenkins, who was kidnapped at the age of seven and apparently raised by the Brad Guys.  We spent the next week or so feeding her misinformation which she dutifully passed on to the New Company and then, when we called her in to talk to her and she thought she was going to be promoted we fired her and sent her to live in the GNU Public Dungeons for a while.

We are sorry that we haven't been posting a lot lately, but we are pleased to tell you that Gertrude gave us a lot of insight into the Brad Guys and the New Company.  This insight could be key to defeating our enemies once and for all!