"The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information. The idea of a central database was later dropped in favour of a scheme requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers’ expense. But the whole idea was cancelled amid severe criticisms of the number of public bodies which could access the data, which as well as the security services, included local councils and quangos, totalling 653 public sector organisations. Labour shelved the project - known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme - in November 2009 after a consultation showed it had little public support."
So it's just the same plan probably being pushed for by the same security service lobbyists for a second time, this time with more success because "the Olympics".
Well, it's clearly not going to be for everyone, but it left me feeling pretty excited about equal rights and feminism in general. Anything that leaves a lasting impression has got to be a good.
It sounds a little vapid from the blurb but it's funny insightful and seemed to resonate with a few things that I experienced growing up.
Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic.
1913 – Suffragette throws herself under the King’s horse. 1969 – Feminists storm Miss World. NOW – Caitlin Moran rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool and demands to know why pants are getting smaller.
There’s never been a better time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven’t been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain
Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should you get Botox? Do men secretly hate us? What should you call your vagina? Why does your bra hurt? And why does everyone ask you when you’re going to have a baby?
Part memoir, part rant, Caitlin Moran answers these questions and more in How To Be A Woman – following her from her terrible 13th birthday (‘I am 13 stone, have no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me’) through adolescence, the workplace, strip-clubs, love, fat, abortion, TopShop, motherhood and beyond.
Here are some different books from different genres that I have particularly liked and read recently. They're Steam Punk, Cyber Punk, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Space Opera, and Dystopia. If you like this sort of thing I've got more on my Goodreads profile.
Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette.
Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire -- and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate.
With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London's high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Finally, who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?
Decades into the future, near the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians, by making an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer". Seattle Weekly called Stephenson's Snow Crash "The most influential book since... Neuromancer."
About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She'll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace—and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.
And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly's Dust—and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.
As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can't control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren't so clear
Probationary Constable Peter Grant dreams of being a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police. Too bad his superior plans to assign him to the Case Progression Unit, where the biggest threat he’ll face is a paper cut. But Peter’s prospects change in the aftermath of a puzzling murder, when he gains exclusive information from an eyewitness who happens to be a ghost. Peter’s ability to speak with the lingering dead brings him to the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who investigates crimes involving magic and other manifestations of the uncanny. Now, as a wave of brutal and bizarre murders engulfs the city, Peter is plunged into a world where gods and goddesses mingle with mortals and a long-dead evil is making a comeback on a rising tide of magic.
John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-and aliens willing to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place. So: we fight
because talking to your phone makes you look stupid.
I've heard a bunch of people say this but like, does no one use their phones to make phone calls any-more? (I do agree, but this is a pretty silly reason.)
The user is a developer, and the code will crash if they do, so that's their own fault. The point is to make sure damn well they know what they are doing if they do.
When programming, the language should take care of the type checking, and the programmer should take care of ensuring the data that was input to the function was valid within that domain. This can be achieved by defining a new type if it's a new type of data (for example an class for an IP). Then the user won't be able to pass the wrong type of data. This is part of the reason why OOP is powerful, it adds type checking to the compiler. PHPs OOP support added the ability to restrict the type of a variable, with non freely converted types (int, string, etc), with once exception.
It's a flaw in PHP that you can't force a user to pass an array, even though PHP doesn't automatically convert between it and primitives.
As this is not a domain validation check, leave it to the compiler to find the flaw.
It's a waste to add checking like that to code as it doesn't offer any benefit for the end user of the code. The person who is visiting a website or whatever doesn't care that that parameter passed is an array or an int (they do however care that the value of that array or int is within the correct domain)
You can tell from the function definition what the inputs should be.
The same affect can be achieved by documentation (I do also stick a bit of PHPDoc with it in too) but not every ones IDE supports PHPDoc. Most everyone's IDE supports getting the function with variables.
This save a little bit of time faffing about figuring out what the inputs should be.
This may seem redundant in a weakly typed language like PHP. However, things get messy when you start writing Object Orientated PHP, and you can't force a user to pass you an array, or an int. You could code in checks for it, but that's simply more code that could have a bug in it.
In the office, with my boss at the other side of the office. I do get more done in a more formal environment.
However, my boss recently switched seats to be behind me, and I'm just not as productive any more..
The optimum position seems to be, boss close enough to be able to be friendly with him, but far enough away that I don't feel pressured by his presence
If he has copies of out-of-print books and he is worried about a monopoly, why doesn't he start off a little project of scanning them himself, or allow some students to do it.
Wow, managed to fuck that up even though I'm sure it looked alright in the preview.
It should read:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". However you can differentiate based on the assumptions each argument makes.
The difference I can see in the two is one assumes that a race after a large period of time developed technology that we see as impossible. A fair assumption, as we can see this in our own recorded chronology.
The Supreme being makes a much larger assumption, the supreme being must somehow exist outside of the rules that all the other characters live by, and be able to affect those who are constrained by those rules. We cannot see this from our own chronology, or anywhere that has not later been re-explained, and re-attributed to something living within the rules of the system, through investigation using the scientific method.
This is what I see as the difference between the two, and why for me, any explanation that amounts to "God did it", or "It was all a virtual reality" will be a cop-out (both situations where something exists outside the set rules of that reality). Especially in fiction, when you can make up any plethora of more exciting endings, which fit.
However, you could argue that this ending does fit the series, as it is constantly mirroring western theology, and implying someone knows what's going on.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". However you can differentiate based on the assumptions each argument makes.
The difference I can see in the two is one assumes that a race after a large period of time developed technology that we see as impossible. A fair assumption, as we can see this in our own recorded chronology.
However, you could argue that this ending does fit the series, as it is constantly mirroring western theology, and implying someone knows what's going on. The Supreme being makes a much larger assumption, the supreme being must somehow exist outside of the rules that all the other characters live by, and be able to affect those who are constrained by those rules. We cannot see this from our own chronology, or anywhere that has not later been re-explained, and re-attributed to something living within the rules of the system, through investigation using the scientific method.
This is what I see as the difference between the two, and why for me, any explanation that amounts to "God did it", or "It was all a virtual reality" will be a cop-out (both situations where something exists outside the set rules of that reality). Especially in fiction, when you can make up any plethora of more exciting endings, which fit.
I was attempting to download the file to have a fiddle with it, and the JavaScript prevented me from clicking the download link by being too persistent in poping up JavaScript Cancel/Ok boxes.
They should do usability testing before releasing a product onto a production site like that.
I agree strongly with this opinion. If you want to chat with your friends, they are much more fully featured ways of doing it via other social networks. Most of these have mobile application for them too. For example Facebook, which is (or was) based around a shared photo album, as well as your twitter like statuses, and walls for public messaging.
Twitter also doesn't work well for notifications, as you only have 160 characters, and it's pretty hard to get a full title + URL in there, let alone a summary. RSS, Atom do this much better, offering no limits on the article size. As well as this feeds are much better integrated with your browser, phone, as almost everything has a feed reader now.
That is because HP (Compaq), and Dell are big fans of the BCM43xx chipset which has long been a problem for Linux due to Broadcoms hostility to it. But this has been solved in the kernel after the current one (.25) because the B43 driver now supports Rev 01 and Rev 02 chipsets without being buggy. All you have to do is paste the firmware into the firmware folder, I presume for the next release Ubuntu will have a GUI clicky thing for this. Unfortunately Hardy is the.24 kernel, but full support isn't far away:)
Written from a laptop with a BCM4312 Rev 02 on the.25 kernel
Not sure if Toshiba are a fan of Broadcom, but they probably are.
Mod perant up. While this may benefit a select few, those that were already achieving well, those that aren't doing so well now have less places to look for good study practice, which I have found (at least on me) rubs off.
When you're working with people who party all the time, you tend to work less, when you are with people who study more, you study more. So now the struggling student has even less of a work atmosphere than before, and the students that don't need more of a work atmosphere and are doing fine are being skimmed off to be in one.
Slashdot Mirror
It still exists, people have just stopped calling it "Hypertext Literature". Checkout The SCP Foundation. Or read though any wiki at all on a Computer Game or IRL gaming experience.
"The scheme is a revised version of a plan drawn up by the Labour government which would have created a central database of all the information.
The idea of a central database was later dropped in favour of a scheme requiring communications providers to store the details at the taxpayers’ expense.
But the whole idea was cancelled amid severe criticisms of the number of public bodies which could access the data, which as well as the security services, included local councils and quangos, totalling 653 public sector organisations.
Labour shelved the project - known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme - in November 2009 after a consultation showed it had little public support."
So it's just the same plan probably being pushed for by the same security service lobbyists for a second time, this time with more success because "the Olympics".
I adore The Culture universe from Ian M. Banks books. Its by far my favourite SF Universe
Well, it's clearly not going to be for everyone, but it left me feeling pretty excited about equal rights and feminism in general. Anything that leaves a lasting impression has got to be a good.
It sounds a little vapid from the blurb but it's funny insightful and seemed to resonate with a few things that I experienced growing up.
The Atrocity Archives - Charles Stross
Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic.
Forgot one that left a big impression on me that wasn't Fiction.
Biographical: How To Be a Woman - Caitlin Moran
1913 – Suffragette throws herself under the King’s horse.
1969 – Feminists storm Miss World.
NOW – Caitlin Moran rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool and demands to know why pants are getting smaller.
There’s never been a better time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven’t been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain
Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should you get Botox? Do men secretly hate us? What should you call your vagina? Why does your bra hurt? And why does everyone ask you when you’re going to have a baby?
Part memoir, part rant, Caitlin Moran answers these questions and more in How To Be A Woman – following her from her terrible 13th birthday (‘I am 13 stone, have no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me’) through adolescence, the workplace, strip-clubs, love, fat, abortion, TopShop, motherhood and beyond.
Here are some different books from different genres that I have particularly liked and read recently. They're Steam Punk, Cyber Punk, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Space Opera, and Dystopia. If you like this sort of thing I've got more on my Goodreads profile.
Steam Punk: Soulless - Gail Carriger
Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette.
Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire -- and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate.
With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London's high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Finally, who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?
Cyber Punk: The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - Neal Stephenson
Decades into the future, near the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians, by making an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer". Seattle Weekly called Stephenson's Snow Crash "The most influential book since ... Neuromancer."
Fantasy: Poison Study - Maria V. Snyder
About to be executed for murder, Yelena is offered an extraordinary reprieve. She'll eat the best meals, have rooms in the palace—and risk assassination by anyone trying to kill the Commander of Ixia.
And so Yelena chooses to become a food taster. But the chief of security, leaving nothing to chance, deliberately feeds her Butterfly's Dust—and only by appearing for her daily antidote will she delay an agonizing death from the poison.
As Yelena tries to escape her new dilemma, disasters keep mounting. Rebels plot to seize Ixia and Yelena develops magical powers she can't control. Her life is threatened again and choices must be made. But this time the outcomes aren't so clear
Urban Fantasy: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Probationary Constable Peter Grant dreams of being a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police. Too bad his superior plans to assign him to the Case Progression Unit, where the biggest threat he’ll face is a paper cut. But Peter’s prospects change in the aftermath of a puzzling murder, when he gains exclusive information from an eyewitness who happens to be a ghost. Peter’s ability to speak with the lingering dead brings him to the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who investigates crimes involving magic and other manifestations of the uncanny. Now, as a wave of brutal and bizarre murders engulfs the city, Peter is plunged into a world where gods and goddesses mingle with mortals and a long-dead evil is making a comeback on a rising tide of magic.
Space Opera: Old Man's War - John Scalzi
John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife's grave. Then he joined the army.The good news is that humanity finally made it into interstellar space. The bad news is that planets fit to live on are scarce-and aliens willing to fight for them are common. The universe, it turns out, is a hostile place. So: we fight
I've heard a bunch of people say this but like, does no one use their phones to make phone calls any-more?
(I do agree, but this is a pretty silly reason.)
You could lobby the media to make a voting system where 3rd parties are more effective an election issue.
Then vote for the party that is most likely to implement it...
They have probably blocked the site so they don't need to pay for the bandwidth that is being used to attack it.
Bah, crappy auto-submitting moderation
The user is a developer, and the code will crash if they do, so that's their own fault. The point is to make sure damn well they know what they are doing if they do.
When programming, the language should take care of the type checking, and the programmer should take care of ensuring the data that was input to the function was valid within that domain.
This can be achieved by defining a new type if it's a new type of data (for example an class for an IP). Then the user won't be able to pass the wrong type of data. This is part of the reason why OOP is powerful, it adds type checking to the compiler.
PHPs OOP support added the ability to restrict the type of a variable, with non freely converted types (int, string, etc), with once exception.
It's a flaw in PHP that you can't force a user to pass an array, even though PHP doesn't automatically convert between it and primitives.
As this is not a domain validation check, leave it to the compiler to find the flaw.
It's a waste to add checking like that to code as it doesn't offer any benefit for the end user of the code. The person who is visiting a website or whatever doesn't care that that parameter passed is an array or an int (they do however care that the value of that array or int is within the correct domain)
You can tell from the function definition what the inputs should be.
The same affect can be achieved by documentation (I do also stick a bit of PHPDoc with it in too) but not every ones IDE supports PHPDoc. Most everyone's IDE supports getting the function with variables.
This save a little bit of time faffing about figuring out what the inputs should be.
I use Hungarian notation in PHP.
This may seem redundant in a weakly typed language like PHP. However, things get messy when you start writing Object Orientated PHP, and you can't force a user to pass you an array, or an int. You could code in checks for it, but that's simply more code that could have a bug in it.
In the office, with my boss at the other side of the office. I do get more done in a more formal environment.
However, my boss recently switched seats to be behind me, and I'm just not as productive any more..
The optimum position seems to be, boss close enough to be able to be friendly with him, but far enough away that I don't feel pressured by his presence
If he has copies of out-of-print books and he is worried about a monopoly, why doesn't he start off a little project of scanning them himself, or allow some students to do it.
Seems like a quick solution to his worries to me.
Wow, managed to fuck that up even though I'm sure it looked alright in the preview.
It should read:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". However you can differentiate based on the assumptions each argument makes.
The difference I can see in the two is one assumes that a race after a large period of time developed technology that we see as impossible. A fair assumption, as we can see this in our own recorded chronology.
The Supreme being makes a much larger assumption, the supreme being must somehow exist outside of the rules that all the other characters live by, and be able to affect those who are constrained by those rules. We cannot see this from our own chronology, or anywhere that has not later been re-explained, and re-attributed to something living within the rules of the system, through investigation using the scientific method.
This is what I see as the difference between the two, and why for me, any explanation that amounts to "God did it", or "It was all a virtual reality" will be a cop-out (both situations where something exists outside the set rules of that reality). Especially in fiction, when you can make up any plethora of more exciting endings, which fit.
However, you could argue that this ending does fit the series, as it is constantly mirroring western theology, and implying someone knows what's going on.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". However you can differentiate based on the assumptions each argument makes.
The difference I can see in the two is one assumes that a race after a large period of time developed technology that we see as impossible. A fair assumption, as we can see this in our own recorded chronology.
However, you could argue that this ending does fit the series, as it is constantly mirroring western theology, and implying someone knows what's going on.
The Supreme being makes a much larger assumption, the supreme being must somehow exist outside of the rules that all the other characters live by, and be able to affect those who are constrained by those rules. We cannot see this from our own chronology, or anywhere that has not later been re-explained, and re-attributed to something living within the rules of the system, through investigation using the scientific method.
This is what I see as the difference between the two, and why for me, any explanation that amounts to "God did it", or "It was all a virtual reality" will be a cop-out (both situations where something exists outside the set rules of that reality). Especially in fiction, when you can make up any plethora of more exciting endings, which fit.
What a poorly designed Malware site.
I was attempting to download the file to have a fiddle with it, and the JavaScript prevented me from clicking the download link by being too persistent in poping up JavaScript Cancel/Ok boxes.
They should do usability testing before releasing a product onto a production site like that.
Brilliant! I was just about to start hunting for this quote
I agree strongly with this opinion. If you want to chat with your friends, they are much more fully featured ways of doing it via other social networks. Most of these have mobile application for them too. For example Facebook, which is (or was) based around a shared photo album, as well as your twitter like statuses, and walls for public messaging.
Twitter also doesn't work well for notifications, as you only have 160 characters, and it's pretty hard to get a full title + URL in there, let alone a summary. RSS, Atom do this much better, offering no limits on the article size. As well as this feeds are much better integrated with your browser, phone, as almost everything has a feed reader now.
B43 has massively improved support for Broadcom wireless.
You shouldn't have any trouble with Broadcom wireless now.
That is because HP (Compaq), and Dell are big fans of the BCM43xx chipset which has long been a problem for Linux due to Broadcoms hostility to it. .24 kernel, but full support isn't far away :)
.25 kernel
But this has been solved in the kernel after the current one (.25) because the B43 driver now supports Rev 01 and Rev 02 chipsets without being buggy.
All you have to do is paste the firmware into the firmware folder, I presume for the next release Ubuntu will have a GUI clicky thing for this.
Unfortunately Hardy is the
Written from a laptop with a BCM4312 Rev 02 on the
Not sure if Toshiba are a fan of Broadcom, but they probably are.
Mod perant up.
While this may benefit a select few, those that were already achieving well, those that aren't doing so well now have less places to look for good study practice, which I have found (at least on me) rubs off.
When you're working with people who party all the time, you tend to work less, when you are with people who study more, you study more. So now the struggling student has even less of a work atmosphere than before, and the students that don't need more of a work atmosphere and are doing fine are being skimmed off to be in one.
Lets hope it does, because maybe it will have applications in renewable energy :)