Posts by Pyromancer 18 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2007
Google has an advantage, their main business is showing ads to people. So they don't need to try and charge people for posts or run down the free service to make users pay, all they need to do is get lots and lots more people using G+, and show them all lots more adverts.
Leaving aside the odious Clause-28, the gentleman in question needs a better web designer. One who understands the correct use of the alt attribute. And a host that knows what reverse DNS is for might help, too.
Viewing sites in Lynx is always instructive when people start ranting about their Google rank dropping.
On the Clause-28 issue, you don't need to be gay, or even know anyone who is, to know, if you're a decent person, that all forms of discrimination against minorities are evil. When we have a genuinely equal society, when people in schools neither notice nor care that another kid has two dads or two mums instead of one of each, or what skin colour they are, then there will be no need for teachers to have to teach that different people live in different ways. But until that time comes (which, TBH, is probably "never"), then action to protect minority kids from thoughtless bullying by "the majority" will always be needed. Clause-28 was a terrible mistake. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Almost every retailer seems to have made the same mistake - Boxing Day this year was Mon 27th, not Sun 26th - Boxing Day can't fall on a Sunday. Next time it happens is apparently 2021 - repeat fail on the cards for then. IT angle? Lots of people running retailers obviously need scripting to tell then when Boxing Day actually is. 11 years to develop it - even a government contract should manage that (as 8x original estimate price, or course).
The idea that the taxes paid by drivers should only be spent on roads makes no sense - unless people also think that the taxes paid by drinkers should only be spent on building more pubs (or brewing better beer) or that the taxes paid by people buying computers should only be spent building datacentres. Though I imagine some of us here might be in favour of those ideas too! :-)
Plus the "road ripoff" argument is an old and flawed one, in reality, once all the costs of the road network are factored in, including costs of policing and NHS costs dealing with the aftermath of the frequent accidents, plus the environmental costs, roads make a loss - taxes paid by non-drivers subsidise those who drive. Most voters drive however, so the government keeps things balanced in the favour of motorists.
The real problem is the gross under-payment made by the HGV industry, but no-one really wants to tackle that as doing so would lead to a rise in prices of goods in the shops. Foreign trucks really should be made to pay for a viginette, as ours are in Europe.
So the steampunk dream comes true as all the Somalis currently zipping about the Gulf of Aden in speedboats start hoarding hydrogen and take up new careers as airship pirates? :-)
Seriously though, airships for freight, and possibly for ultra-luxury passenger cruising, will become reality when lightweight high capacity rechargeable batteries do. Once you can store a few MVA in a battery bank weighing no more than a tank of diesel does just now, you cover the skin of your airship in PV cells, which both charge the batteries and provide power during the day, and then run off the batteries at night. Electrically driver propellers (electric ducted fans even?) drive the ship through the air.
Once the technology for that exists, you've a ship that effectively flies for free. That will compete effectively with both airline freight and sea freight for some cargoes, mainly stuff that isn't too heavy, but doesn't need the all-out speed of an airliner.
The cache poisoning vulnerability is a function of how DNS itself works, as opposed to being anything specific to any particular package, and all servers are affected by it to a greater or lesser extent. At least DJBDNS has never had remote root or remote crash exploits. Some of us still remember the seemingly monthly updates needed with BIND some years back.
"Do not fear the penguins, fear the black hats instead".
Not only does this need to be settled in the hippodrome, but in fact with the protagaonists and their followers battling it out in mud, mud, glorious mud, there's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood (though whether of Mobypottomi or Porcinepottomical origin will have to wait for the referee's judgement).
All the people going on about handsfree being safe because you don't have to hold it to your ear are missing the point. It's not the phone that's dangerout, it's the conversation. Phone conversations cause the callers to shift their mental focus to the call. Most of us can carry on doing other stuff, like driving, because most of the time it's not that difficult to do.
Right up until that point when someone steps out in front of you. At which point the person on the phone will kill the pedestrian, while the person not on the phone has at least half a chance of stopping / going round.
Not sure I could live with an avoidable death on my conscience. Presumably all who insist handsfree is safe aren't fussed.
Am I the only one who thinks what really happened here is something along the lines of:
"Oh bother, we've lost that memory stick with those kids details on it. Still, either no-one will ever find it or if someone does they'll most likely delete / refomat it and stick their own stuff on it, so we'll just claim there was nothing important there and forget about it".
Then whoever found it did hand it in (presumably after looking at the data to see who's it was, unless there was a label on the outside), and the plan derailed all wheels.
TBH as long as organisations allow staff to use computers which are either connected to the Internet and/or have sockets for things like memory sticks, leaks and losses will continue unchecked. It would be possible to install totally secure networks with no external connections and no USB ports or removable disk drives - but the staff would probably then complain they couldn't do their jobs properly, and given the amount of work lots of people in things like education seem to take home with them, that could well be right.
Electronic voting devalues democracy. As do all the other attempts to make it "easier", with postal ballots for people who don't need them, etc.
Elections matter, voting is important. Far to important to be entrusted to machines or code.
Paper ballots cast in secret at physical polling stations are the only safe way to conduct elections. Just say no to anything else.
Re-reading the article, it was a Baptist Church hall she tried to hire. The Baptists are nothing to do with the CoE and hence their property is all self-funded (presumably from their followers and/or investments).
So the hall is private and they can impose whatever rules they like.
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