Posts by Francis Davey 1

they just want to get the job done early (and badly)

Well, I think the Census are wrong in suggesting that the form can be sent back early as I commented:

http://www.francisdavey.co.uk/2011/03/dont-return-your-census-form-early.html

but to suggest you *have* to send it back early is truly barking. I've emailed them about this (which must put me on their peacock pen list) and their response was to explain how helpful it was to have the forms back early. I bet. But that doesn't mean its either a good idea or legal. Sigh.

All lies probably

How is a search for "adult dating" or "sex" for that matter a search for *pornography*? Or perhaps Online MBA are a bit weak on what "pornography" means. In statistics the easily spotted rubbish is usually just the tip of the iceberg. I strongly suspect that not much of what comes out of this is of much use.

Chrome is not fit for purpose

Many of us - and an increasing number of us - use the web as our primary workspace. SaaS means that the browser is, for us, a primary operating system. It is therefore surprising that google have totally failed to learn important lessons from earlier operating system failures.

For example, if I accidentally hit CMND-Q (on my Mac, other key combinations on other systems), Chrome quits without complaint. All open tabs and running applications die. If Windows, Linux or MacOS behaved like that we'd all be screaming blue murder, but google don't care:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=147

They think they know better. Their attitude seems to be "the world ought to work differently, so we won't change".

Sure, one *can* rebind keys in the OS and so on, but having a one-click kills everything out of the box is so obviously a wrong decision and yet they totally fail to engage with the numerous users who have reported it as a bug. Doesn't bode well.

I'll stick to FF.

No need to worry just yet

@Andrew Jones 2: at the moment the bill doesn't affect you and your business because not only has no code of practice governing the initial obligations been approved one is yet to be drafted. As this article explains, there's still a lot of detail to fill in. That detail will, crucially, decide whether you will have anything to do at all and, if you are required to do anything, precisely what.

This is why lawyers are generally not rushing forward with guides to the DEA - anything we write now would be full of so many ifs and buts its not likely to be particularly helpful.

That is already the situation for an open wifi operator, as I observed a while ago, in theory you could be made to do a lot of work recording details of the use of your system, but in practice you aren't, see:

http://www.francisdavey.co.uk/2009/04/data-retention-and-open-wifi.html

I hope to post some more useful analysis of the DEA as the codes of practice become clearer.

Inadvertent

Its hard to get in the minds of people who draft legislation - one of the reasons the courts are very reluctant to try to do so and lets be thankful for that. I can only guess what was going on in the drafters' minds so I could easily be wrong. That's why I said "my suspicion". Best guess.

The point is that even if I am right and this is just a mistake, rather than a deliberate power grab, its still a dangerous power that will almost certainly be misused in the future. An assurance from the government of the day that its not what its meant to be used for or that's not how its going to be used is rarely worth anything at all.

Have a read of the Bill for yourselves though. There's enough signs in there of poor drafting to suggest I might be right. For example the wonderful reference to an "internet portal address" later on. Cobbled together really doesn't cover it.

Learn some geography

As an earlier poster pointed out Orange's (and therefore yours because you didn't comment on it) geography is really poor. The West Midlands does not center on a point North of Manchester, never has, never will. I grew up in Merseyside and now live in London. I wish I could go back, but there isn't the work *there* its not just a question of a pay cut, its any work at all.

More shocking than we first thought

Personally I think the truth (as opposed to the Telegraph's sloppily researched story) is actually rather worse. Posting something disparaging about a government minister on a web forum means lots of people can read it and that might bring the department into disrepute (though exactly how if it was anonymous is hard to see) but sending something cross to an MP which only that MP and their assistants will ever read should really not get you sacked and shouldn't be treated this seriously.

@Charles King: they work for you is not really intended to be a site people leave comments on. Ages ago we all realised that the nature of the material meant that doing comments right on it is almost impossible, so that is left to blogs and other sites pointing to it. TWFY is there to present the underlying data as clearly as possible and aggregate useful things about MPs. Its a source not a sink.

Resolution?

My experiences of playing with a 3d (autostereo) display in the early 90's was that switching from 2 to 3D made a blocky low-res picture look much better. Your brain already does a lot of smoothing. I'm not sure that you need quite the same picture quality as you do with 2D, or at least that its not completely obvious that you do.

Nonsense

This sort of report is just nonsense. The regulations are pretty sensible, there's an explanation on the Defra website:

http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/2009/090612d.htm

Which is rather clearer than the Sun's garbled account. All this is about is making sure that horses that are owned in a normal way (i.e. not wild) are marked as either (a) food or (b) not food. You can't inject nasty unhealthy things into horses you are going to make into food.

That's really nothing to get excited about. Stupid Sun for making a fuss and stupid Register for doing the same.