Warning heeded and understood:-) There isn't a policy against me doing what I want - just a strong reluctance to fiddle with something which isn't broken for everyone else.
Incidentally - I've discovered corkscrew - which I think I might be able to use with SSL tunnelling to achieve my goals... Not tried yet.
I'd love to be able to get my email over a commercial firewall too... the bureaucratic overhead involved in getting ports opened is not justifiable - making interactions over HTTP via the proxy the only viable approach. I don't like web-mail at all - I'd far rather have my mail app poll for new mail in the background. I've been thinking about running a web server at home (on broadband) and establishing some RPC over HTTP like wrapper for IMAP/POP3 for some time... though I find it hard to believe that no-one has beaten me to the punch. Some transparent proxy for POP3/IMAP4 over HTTPs would be very useful to me.
Yes - I vaguely recall that disaster product... It failed for the same reason Apple did - IHMO - while I suspect many users would prefer a tall screen over a wide one value-for-money over-rules this concern.
It makes a lot of intuitive sense to me to prefer tall screens over wide ones. When working on complex documents it is usually a big advantage to get as much on-screen as possible to avoid tedious un-necessary scrolling... but I (and maybe everyone) finds it difficult to follow very long lines of text or figures without loosing my place... [I suppose that is why newspapers usually use a columnar format.] There is no such problem when a large number of lines are displayed - which I would have imagined would make taller displays an obvious choice once we reached horizontal resolutions of 1280+.
4:3 is far from perfect - but it suits my needs much better than 16:9 (or even 16:10.) Now if I could get a 1200x1920 at 17" - that would be an improvement over my UXGA 1600x1200... but I'm not holding my breath - a 17" TFT display makes dollar signs sp light up in the eyes of monitor manufacturers.
I assume now (having done some research) that _your_ WUXGA is 16:10 and not 16:9 then?
The argument about screen area stands... I would still prefer to use a 15" UXGA in 4:3 than a 15.4" in 16:10 as both have the same vertical resolution (which matters most to me) yet the WXGA is significantly physically smaller in the vertical dimension and smaller overall.
While I accept that the 16:10 ratio WUXGA would have square pixels at ~147 ppi, this certainly isn't how the ratio appeared when I last used a WUXGA TFT. I wonder if my perception was skewed by the fact that I find single pixels at resolutions above ~133 ppi very difficult to distinguish? In my opinion wide screen aspect ratios and higher resolutions have a far greater interdependency with fonts and user interfaces than it appears most have assumed.
My argument about widescreen formats suiting marketing (and definitely not all users) stands. I still believe that most consumers would assume a 15.4" display has noticeably greater screen area than a 15" - while this is absolutely not the case. Even with a 16:10 ratio the screen has ~2 square inches less physical screen area.
I wonder - am I the only one who wants a tall screen more than a wide one anyway? I vaguely recall Apple(?) launching a portrait A4 screen back in the 80s - that physical shape would suit me better than even a traditional 4:3. I'm mainly miffed that so many manufacturers have opted only to supply high end notebooks with widescreen - in spite of the fact that widescreen isn't necessarily better for every application.
Hmmm - maybe - I use thunderbird for my 'occasional use' home machine - where the only real problem is spam (a noise which out-numbers signal 1000 to 1. Thunderbird folks make a big song and dance about the Bayesian filter - but in my experience it has been useless. Ideally I'd run a dedicated mail serve for home - but to be honest - I just can't be bothered. Spam-pal with thunderbird impressed me as it works pretty well with little or no configuration. This combination is something I'd feel confident to recommend anyone to try without expecting to be asked to hand-hold every step of the way.
I suspect that these lack-lustre sales are made worse by recent laptop trends. I've an 18 month old laptop I intended to replace after 2 years. The old laptop has a great 1600x1200 UXGA LCD screen. While I could make use of the higher performance processors found in more recent notebooks and would welcome a DVD writer and larger hard disk - these concerns are secondary to my ability to display my work on-screen. Almost every high spec laptop today comes with a "Wide" screen - WUXGA or similar - these wide-formats just don't suit my needs. I use small fonts which become unreadable on WUXGA as the aspect ratio changes sufficiently to cause eyestrain - when I increase my font size sufficiently to read my data on WUXGA I've lost any horizontal resolution advantage I may have gained.
The reason for this move to wide format screens is (sadly) obvious (once you break out a calculator). Screens are marketed upon diagonal size - but manufacturing cost is more closely related to screen area. It is interesting to note that 15.4" wide LCD has almost exactly the same screen area as a 15" LCD of traditional ratios - yet even apparently savvy buyers are mislead to believe they are getting a larger screen.
Thunderbird spam filtering didn't meet my needs either - but SpamPal in combination with Thunderbird works fantastically. I'm using the service (Beta) Spampal build - I've had no problems so far.
My experience about why people run infectious attachments is different to yours - it refutes entirely the idea that users do not know that it is a bad idea to open these attachments. If you were to time travel back to a couple of minutes before someone infects their PC they are likely able to tell you that what they are about to do is stupid - and usually have a decent explanation as to why that should be the case. There are several problems:
Users find it difficult to believe that their expensive computer stuff could be so crap as to be screwed up just by doing a few obvious things.
They feel that in the big wide world of the Internet they are insignificant - so no-one would bother irritating them.
In their recent memories they've not heard of their circle of friends being attacked by a virus which caused anything more than a disruption. "Computer people" were always able to sort out the problem... and if the problem took the "Computer people" a long time to solve then that vindicates their egos after having had to ask for help.
If every computer virus caused a real problem for the user - for example causing their PC to explode, or by emptying the victims' bank accounts without trace (say) then I think you'd find people would learn from their experiences much more quickly. The masses are now convinced that unreliable computers are to be expected - and that there is no real risk in contracting a virus. If a virus were to prevent meeting a deadline it is perceived as being a valid reason for an extension - or a justification for failure without accepting any responsibility.
This was a suspicion of mine... if an engine were to be multithreaded (i.e. capable of simultaneously processing several queries - unlike early DB2 offerings) yet only use a single processor - then it would likely not utilise native treads - but rather make use of something like Java green threads or Python threading. While this would clearly work - it would likely imply performance restrictions relative to modern DBMS which employ native threads and can run a single "engine" (in the sense of a single address space and context for transactions.) with freedom to schedule native threads to best manage IO delays and available processing hardware. I would imagine that this would be a significant restriction on the capability of the DBMS to perform under load.
Does this mean that Sybase is not multi-threaded? If it were multi-threaded then surely linux would schedule different threads on diffierent CPUs?
If Sybase is single-threaded then if it is limited to a single process (as the single engine explanation suggests) - does that mean it is a single user system? Does it mean that queries are executed sequentially from all users (damaging interactivity)?
You've just piqued my interest... (Not about tar one-upmanship - but about building your own releases.)
I would like to tailor my own pre-configured installation CD with only a very minimal BSD install and a single custom application... It feels as if this task is something BSDers might well have tackled previously... I was wondering if you could point me at a 'howto' kind of guide, and/or any tools which would likely be helpful in this task?
High resolution (but not necessarily high colour) screen (SVGA?)
Battery life of days not hours - shouldn't get warm.
802.11g, Bluetooth and IRDA
Large screen (similar to a standard paperback novel please) in a slim rugged (and reliable) device.
Great handwriting recognition - should be no slower than writing on paper.
LOTS of storage space (preferably encrypted) - 10-20Gb would be great - I'd like more!
Great communications software - I'd like it to connect via any available network to grab RSS news, exchange email and automatically synchronise with nominated backup servers.
I've a suspicion that the problem is more thorny and subtle than even that. I think the open source community shy away from the idea of writing a grammar checker as they are perfectionists - and writing a "correct" grammar checker falls somewhere between difficult and an exercise in understanding futility. The real world is able to accept that the grammar checker will not be of literary standard - and recognise that even an imperfect tool is useful. Conversely, there is little motivation to someone to work on such a difficult project where even when substantially useful is likely to attract more criticism than praise.
In my opinion, YES - in quite a number of environments a grammar checker is a vital feature of a word processor. I don't want to take ultimate control away from the user but I do want an optional feature to highlight syntactic structures which are not 'straight forward'.
To all the trolls who insist that a grammar checker is a crutch which will ultimately damage the user's literary skills, all I can do is recommend you try to read some hastily written factual documents from an average office worker who does not use a grammar checker. I consider a grammar checker an essential tool - it is such a pity that the best available at the moment is Word's somewhat lack-lustre effort. I'd also welcome an extension which verifies consistent style.
Bring me any open source text-editing program that checks grammar better than word does (which shouldn't be hard - lets face it!) and I'll evangelise.
The reason women do not have as many of the 'top jobs' in this world is economics. If you hire a woman and she has a kid, then she will be gone for several months and you will have to pay her maternity leave even though she isn't there. Economically speaking, it's better to hire the man. I don't mean that a woman does not deserve the job or isn't capable of doing it, but managers look at the demographics and see that it is more profitable to hire a man. You could even argue that they are obligated to hire the man for the sake of the shareholders.
Interestingly, most European nations take care of this disparity by granting new fathers potential leave as well.
...and, curiously, statistically fewer men take the leave to which they are entitled.
Your comment about gender-specific driving insurance is interesting. The first thing I wonder is if gender differences are actually relevant. I have a suspicion that if we were ever to see a purely objective study we would find that the average female driver has more accidents than the average male driver - but that the average male accident is significantly more serious. My hypothesis is that this is down to testosterone simultaneously encouraging risk taking and increased sense of alert. If this hypothesis holds it would make it easier for insurance companies to discriminate against bad female drivers based upon their claim history - whereas a bad male driver might still be the boy-racer who mows down and maims someone next week. The other obvious discrimination in insurance is age where many young drivers suffer significantly adverse insurance due to the prejudiced decision that others of their age act immaturely. The "experienced" justification just doesn't wash as elder drivers are seldom asked about their driving experience - an elder driver may well have less experience than a 20 year old.
Since the beginning of this week I've seen a 75% reduction on spam volume over 3 accounts after a 2% day-by-day increase over the last couple of months. This might be a coincidence - but if those cretins who spam me the same advert several times per hour to the same email address are now facing prosecution... all I can say is that it's about time!
Re:Mobile phone with Bluetooth and MMC
on
Portable Storage?
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm - I've been considering abandoning my USB key and buying a Nokia 6230 with Bluetooth/IRDA and an internal CF slot that should take a 1Gb card. I'd certainly welcome reports from anyone who uses one of these for backups of essential day-to-day data... the blurb talks about putting MP3s onto the phone... but I'm more interested in bunging 7zip archives of my 'home' directory onto it.
I've no idea how fast it would be - and wonder if I could get a PCMCIA Bluetooth card which would fit flush into my laptop as an alternative to IRDA.
What are you using? What's data transfer speed like?
I've started using SpamPal (N.B. the Beta is much better than the stable release) and have it configured for DBSBL, "Peer to peer" (DCC) and spam-assassin style regexp matching. After a few nasty surprises with probabilistic mechanisms I don't trust the Bayesian strategy - but I've been immensely impressed by SpamPal in my current setup.
I can't stand the type of work it is ( running aorund, chatting it up with people, lying for a living). However, that does not mean that I hold PR people in a low regard
I would suggest that by accusing PR of being liars that you do in fact hold them in low regard. The logical extension of this is that as you are a liar too - maybe you are perfectly suited to PR work?
I don't agree with your view - my experiences and opinions are significantly different. Of all the industries I've encountered people in the IT industry have shown the least sexist behaviour of any in my opinion. The stereotypical IT environment, IMHO is frequented by chivalrous though not especially tolerant men who are not seen by the general public as particularly interesting people. I believe it would be equally difficult for men or women to make their mark in an IT environment - the only extent to which I see sexism adversely affecting women is that as new recruits both sexes are less disposed to take constructive criticism from their opposite.
Arguing that the "best" candidates are female - is baloney. I'm not saying that women don't tend to get better academic grades - but something far more significant. The best candidates for IT are those who have an interest and a passion for the subject (in addition to a solid education). The worst candidates find IT a dull way to acquire an above average wage - and it makes not one jot of a difference if this person has an IQ of 200 or 20. There is absolutely no reason to assume that good candidates are always more intelligent or better qualified - nor the converse. The gender split in the IT industry is interesting - but only a cretin would try to engineer the public without first understanding the problem... even if this seems to be exactly what is being proposed. If I were female I'd be disgusted at someone suggesting I needed special consideration based solely on gender... especially as IT is one of the few industries in which physical gender differences have absolutely no impact on performance.
I have a problem with a technology used to automatically detect when a driver violates some rule - principally because I am unconvinced that this would not be a policy driven (pardon the pun) by some ulterior motive. If it is completely unacceptable to "break the speed limit" and we have the technology to establish when this rule is broken, then surely we should fit all vehicles with speed limiters to make it impossible for drivers to inadvertently break the law?
My personal belief is that speeding is the unholy bogeyman of the motoring world. Sure, speed can be a contributory factor in serious or fatal accidents but it is only one factor. It would be safe to travel at any speed if it were possible to guarantee that there would be no collisions! Here in the UK there was a TV advert showing a car travelling at 35mph in a 30 limit, a child running into the road, the car being unable to stop and the child knocked down. I guess the intent was to suggest to drivers that it's not OK to slightly exceed the speed limit - but I think the advert scored an own goal on several counts. The driver was passing too close to parked cars and pedestrians (even if he were to obey the speed limit) and the old car appeared to have defective rear breaks. Was the message supposed to be to watch your speed - or that drivers of modern, well maintained cars with a driver employing common sense can travel substantially faster than the car in the advert without incurring any additional risk irrespective of speed limit? You don't have to be travelling quickly to kill someone - 10 mph should do it given a suitable accident... shouldn't we all reduce our speeds to below 10mph?
Slashdot Mirror
Warning heeded and understood :-) There isn't a policy against me doing what I want - just a strong reluctance to fiddle with something which isn't broken for everyone else.
Incidentally - I've discovered corkscrew - which I think I might be able to use with SSL tunnelling to achieve my goals... Not tried yet.
I'd love to be able to get my email over a commercial firewall too... the bureaucratic overhead involved in getting ports opened is not justifiable - making interactions over HTTP via the proxy the only viable approach. I don't like web-mail at all - I'd far rather have my mail app poll for new mail in the background. I've been thinking about running a web server at home (on broadband) and establishing some RPC over HTTP like wrapper for IMAP/POP3 for some time... though I find it hard to believe that no-one has beaten me to the punch. Some transparent proxy for POP3/IMAP4 over HTTPs would be very useful to me.
Yes - I vaguely recall that disaster product... It failed for the same reason Apple did - IHMO - while I suspect many users would prefer a tall screen over a wide one value-for-money over-rules this concern.
It makes a lot of intuitive sense to me to prefer tall screens over wide ones. When working on complex documents it is usually a big advantage to get as much on-screen as possible to avoid tedious un-necessary scrolling... but I (and maybe everyone) finds it difficult to follow very long lines of text or figures without loosing my place... [I suppose that is why newspapers usually use a columnar format.] There is no such problem when a large number of lines are displayed - which I would have imagined would make taller displays an obvious choice once we reached horizontal resolutions of 1280+.
4:3 is far from perfect - but it suits my needs much better than 16:9 (or even 16:10.) Now if I could get a 1200x1920 at 17" - that would be an improvement over my UXGA 1600x1200... but I'm not holding my breath - a 17" TFT display makes dollar signs sp light up in the eyes of monitor manufacturers.
I assume now (having done some research) that _your_ WUXGA is 16:10 and not 16:9 then?
The argument about screen area stands... I would still prefer to use a 15" UXGA in 4:3 than a 15.4" in 16:10 as both have the same vertical resolution (which matters most to me) yet the WXGA is significantly physically smaller in the vertical dimension and smaller overall.
Hmm - I guess it might be important to know if you've a 16:9 or a 16:10 ratio WUXGA...
:1600x1200 :15" :4:3 :12" :9" :108"^2 :133.3... :133.3...
:1920x1200 :15.4" :16:9 :~13.42" :~7.55" :101.32"^2 :~143.1 :~158.9
UXGA (4:3)
Pixels
Diagonal size
Ratio (H:V)
Horizontal size
Vertical size
Screen Area
Horizontal ppi
Vertical ppi
H-V ratio : 1:1 [i.e. square pixels.]
WUXGA (16:9)
Pixels
Diagonal size
Ratio (H:V)
Horizontal size
Vertical size
Screen area
Horizontal ppi
Vertical ppi
H-V ratio : 9:10 [i.e rectangular pixels]
While I accept that the 16:10 ratio WUXGA would have square pixels at ~147 ppi, this certainly isn't how the ratio appeared when I last used a WUXGA TFT. I wonder if my perception was skewed by the fact that I find single pixels at resolutions above ~133 ppi very difficult to distinguish? In my opinion wide screen aspect ratios and higher resolutions have a far greater interdependency with fonts and user interfaces than it appears most have assumed.
My argument about widescreen formats suiting marketing (and definitely not all users) stands. I still believe that most consumers would assume a 15.4" display has noticeably greater screen area than a 15" - while this is absolutely not the case. Even with a 16:10 ratio the screen has ~2 square inches less physical screen area.
I wonder - am I the only one who wants a tall screen more than a wide one anyway? I vaguely recall Apple(?) launching a portrait A4 screen back in the 80s - that physical shape would suit me better than even a traditional 4:3. I'm mainly miffed that so many manufacturers have opted only to supply high end notebooks with widescreen - in spite of the fact that widescreen isn't necessarily better for every application.
Hmmm - maybe - I use thunderbird for my 'occasional use' home machine - where the only real problem is spam (a noise which out-numbers signal 1000 to 1. Thunderbird folks make a big song and dance about the Bayesian filter - but in my experience it has been useless. Ideally I'd run a dedicated mail serve for home - but to be honest - I just can't be bothered. Spam-pal with thunderbird impressed me as it works pretty well with little or no configuration. This combination is something I'd feel confident to recommend anyone to try without expecting to be asked to hand-hold every step of the way.
I suspect that these lack-lustre sales are made worse by recent laptop trends. I've an 18 month old laptop I intended to replace after 2 years. The old laptop has a great 1600x1200 UXGA LCD screen. While I could make use of the higher performance processors found in more recent notebooks and would welcome a DVD writer and larger hard disk - these concerns are secondary to my ability to display my work on-screen. Almost every high spec laptop today comes with a "Wide" screen - WUXGA or similar - these wide-formats just don't suit my needs. I use small fonts which become unreadable on WUXGA as the aspect ratio changes sufficiently to cause eyestrain - when I increase my font size sufficiently to read my data on WUXGA I've lost any horizontal resolution advantage I may have gained.
The reason for this move to wide format screens is (sadly) obvious (once you break out a calculator). Screens are marketed upon diagonal size - but manufacturing cost is more closely related to screen area. It is interesting to note that 15.4" wide LCD has almost exactly the same screen area as a 15" LCD of traditional ratios - yet even apparently savvy buyers are mislead to believe they are getting a larger screen.
Thunderbird spam filtering didn't meet my needs either - but SpamPal in combination with Thunderbird works fantastically. I'm using the service (Beta) Spampal build - I've had no problems so far.
You mean "Guns don't kill people [wr]appers do." by the GLC
If every computer virus caused a real problem for the user - for example causing their PC to explode, or by emptying the victims' bank accounts without trace (say) then I think you'd find people would learn from their experiences much more quickly. The masses are now convinced that unreliable computers are to be expected - and that there is no real risk in contracting a virus. If a virus were to prevent meeting a deadline it is perceived as being a valid reason for an extension - or a justification for failure without accepting any responsibility.
This was a suspicion of mine... if an engine were to be multithreaded (i.e. capable of simultaneously processing several queries - unlike early DB2 offerings) yet only use a single processor - then it would likely not utilise native treads - but rather make use of something like Java green threads or Python threading. While this would clearly work - it would likely imply performance restrictions relative to modern DBMS which employ native threads and can run a single "engine" (in the sense of a single address space and context for transactions.) with freedom to schedule native threads to best manage IO delays and available processing hardware. I would imagine that this would be a significant restriction on the capability of the DBMS to perform under load.
Does this mean that Sybase is not multi-threaded? If it were multi-threaded then surely linux would schedule different threads on diffierent CPUs?
If Sybase is single-threaded then if it is limited to a single process (as the single engine explanation suggests) - does that mean it is a single user system? Does it mean that queries are executed sequentially from all users (damaging interactivity)?
That looks really handy... Thanks...
You've just piqued my interest... (Not about tar one-upmanship - but about building your own releases.)
I would like to tailor my own pre-configured installation CD with only a very minimal BSD install and a single custom application... It feels as if this task is something BSDers might well have tackled previously... I was wondering if you could point me at a 'howto' kind of guide, and/or any tools which would likely be helpful in this task?
I've a suspicion that the problem is more thorny and subtle than even that. I think the open source community shy away from the idea of writing a grammar checker as they are perfectionists - and writing a "correct" grammar checker falls somewhere between difficult and an exercise in understanding futility. The real world is able to accept that the grammar checker will not be of literary standard - and recognise that even an imperfect tool is useful. Conversely, there is little motivation to someone to work on such a difficult project where even when substantially useful is likely to attract more criticism than praise.
I've posted about this before...
In my opinion, YES - in quite a number of environments a grammar checker is a vital feature of a word processor. I don't want to take ultimate control away from the user but I do want an optional feature to highlight syntactic structures which are not 'straight forward'.
To all the trolls who insist that a grammar checker is a crutch which will ultimately damage the user's literary skills, all I can do is recommend you try to read some hastily written factual documents from an average office worker who does not use a grammar checker. I consider a grammar checker an essential tool - it is such a pity that the best available at the moment is Word's somewhat lack-lustre effort. I'd also welcome an extension which verifies consistent style.
Bring me any open source text-editing program that checks grammar better than word does (which shouldn't be hard - lets face it!) and I'll evangelise.
Interestingly, most European nations take care of this disparity by granting new fathers potential leave as well.
...and, curiously, statistically fewer men take the leave to which they are entitled.
Your comment about gender-specific driving insurance is interesting. The first thing I wonder is if gender differences are actually relevant. I have a suspicion that if we were ever to see a purely objective study we would find that the average female driver has more accidents than the average male driver - but that the average male accident is significantly more serious. My hypothesis is that this is down to testosterone simultaneously encouraging risk taking and increased sense of alert. If this hypothesis holds it would make it easier for insurance companies to discriminate against bad female drivers based upon their claim history - whereas a bad male driver might still be the boy-racer who mows down and maims someone next week.
The other obvious discrimination in insurance is age where many young drivers suffer significantly adverse insurance due to the prejudiced decision that others of their age act immaturely. The "experienced" justification just doesn't wash as elder drivers are seldom asked about their driving experience - an elder driver may well have less experience than a 20 year old.
Since the beginning of this week I've seen a 75% reduction on spam volume over 3 accounts after a 2% day-by-day increase over the last couple of months. This might be a coincidence - but if those cretins who spam me the same advert several times per hour to the same email address are now facing prosecution... all I can say is that it's about time!
Hmmm - I've been considering abandoning my USB key and buying a Nokia 6230 with Bluetooth/IRDA and an internal CF slot that should take a 1Gb card. I'd certainly welcome reports from anyone who uses one of these for backups of essential day-to-day data... the blurb talks about putting MP3s onto the phone... but I'm more interested in bunging 7zip archives of my 'home' directory onto it.
I've no idea how fast it would be - and wonder if I could get a PCMCIA Bluetooth card which would fit flush into my laptop as an alternative to IRDA.
What are you using? What's data transfer speed like?
I've started using SpamPal (N.B. the Beta is much better than the stable release) and have it configured for DBSBL, "Peer to peer" (DCC) and spam-assassin style regexp matching. After a few nasty surprises with probabilistic mechanisms I don't trust the Bayesian strategy - but I've been immensely impressed by SpamPal in my current setup.
I can't stand the type of work it is ( running aorund, chatting it up with people, lying for a living). However, that does not mean that I hold PR people in a low regard
I would suggest that by accusing PR of being liars that you do in fact hold them in low regard. The logical extension of this is that as you are a liar too - maybe you are perfectly suited to PR work?
I don't agree with your view - my experiences and opinions are significantly different. Of all the industries I've encountered people in the IT industry have shown the least sexist behaviour of any in my opinion. The stereotypical IT environment, IMHO is frequented by chivalrous though not especially tolerant men who are not seen by the general public as particularly interesting people. I believe it would be equally difficult for men or women to make their mark in an IT environment - the only extent to which I see sexism adversely affecting women is that as new recruits both sexes are less disposed to take constructive criticism from their opposite.
Arguing that the "best" candidates are female - is baloney. I'm not saying that women don't tend to get better academic grades - but something far more significant. The best candidates for IT are those who have an interest and a passion for the subject (in addition to a solid education). The worst candidates find IT a dull way to acquire an above average wage - and it makes not one jot of a difference if this person has an IQ of 200 or 20. There is absolutely no reason to assume that good candidates are always more intelligent or better qualified - nor the converse. The gender split in the IT industry is interesting - but only a cretin would try to engineer the public without first understanding the problem... even if this seems to be exactly what is being proposed. If I were female I'd be disgusted at someone suggesting I needed special consideration based solely on gender... especially as IT is one of the few industries in which physical gender differences have absolutely no impact on performance.
I have a problem with a technology used to automatically detect when a driver violates some rule - principally because I am unconvinced that this would not be a policy driven (pardon the pun) by some ulterior motive. If it is completely unacceptable to "break the speed limit" and we have the technology to establish when this rule is broken, then surely we should fit all vehicles with speed limiters to make it impossible for drivers to inadvertently break the law?
My personal belief is that speeding is the unholy bogeyman of the motoring world. Sure, speed can be a contributory factor in serious or fatal accidents but it is only one factor. It would be safe to travel at any speed if it were possible to guarantee that there would be no collisions! Here in the UK there was a TV advert showing a car travelling at 35mph in a 30 limit, a child running into the road, the car being unable to stop and the child knocked down. I guess the intent was to suggest to drivers that it's not OK to slightly exceed the speed limit - but I think the advert scored an own goal on several counts. The driver was passing too close to parked cars and pedestrians (even if he were to obey the speed limit) and the old car appeared to have defective rear breaks. Was the message supposed to be to watch your speed - or that drivers of modern, well maintained cars with a driver employing common sense can travel substantially faster than the car in the advert without incurring any additional risk irrespective of speed limit? You don't have to be travelling quickly to kill someone - 10 mph should do it given a suitable accident... shouldn't we all reduce our speeds to below 10mph?