eponeponepon

Oh yes - definitely not for me generally! I find them okay for some gaming purposes though, oddly enough.

Neat news. I've been thinking about trying one of those out for a while now - I really want to find a pointing/clicking device other than a traditional mouse as my hands age, but nothing's properly worked yet.

One of those accounts uses a different name for him ("Crispus"? Maybe? You'll have to forgive me not looking it up, but it eludes me and I don't want to disappear down a wiki-rabbithole when I should be wrapping presents..!) and has later been interpreted as referring to him; the other account is a focus of great controversy as to its genuine age.

I'm not necessarily trying to pull your point apart, just pointing out that it's not clear-cut. Personally I've never really made my mind up, but at the moment I lean more towards a conglomeration of folk-tales and the lives of several men. I'll probably change my mind again soon.

I think the previous poster's point was precisely about the vernacular - don't forget the flags in the articles derive from news headlines, of which the vast preponderance are very much expressed in the vernacular.

Speaking for myself, growing up in the 80s, I definitely wasn't completely aware that Russia and the USSR were separate concepts, probably until the latter's break-up.

A similarly tiny percentage of your users are blind. Another tiny percentage are dyslexic. How many different tiny percentages can you justifiably invite to "go somewhere else"?

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice".

It's hard to say - "never ascribe to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity" is all very well, but on the other hand, sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from stupidity...

Crikey, yes. I hadn't seen the video - that's pretty bad.

Fingers crossed this was a one-off, I guess.

These things can be done in an organised and controlled fashion - one has to hope that those in charge did so. There's no particular reason to assume that "a horde" of journalists were allowed to rush in, though.

Fundamentally it's a judgement call for the archaeologists as to whether the tomb is in good enough condition and the photographers are trustworthy enough.

I don't think there's any perhaps about it - the visual surroundings of our childhood and youth will always have particular associations.

FWIW, I've been stoically making every desktop I've used look as close as I can make it to the Windows 2000 desktop I had at university for years now.

There is still a limit, and beyond that is Sagan's 'Forbidden Zone'. We can move the line, but only infinitesimal amounts.

There are two ends to the true picture here - they do exist to protect and maintain the status quo as you say, but the underpinning (largely unspoken) assumption is that the general public, as the GP hopes, are among the set of 'those that benefit', on the basis that the continued existence and flourishing of the state is beneficial to the public.

That's the theory. In practice, of course, the truth has been weighted more to one side or the other at different times and in different places.

An important subtlety that's often missed. The iterations before it would have been numerous.

Strikes me that you meant this as a joke - but whether you did or not, it is not such a bad call.

I think LetsEncrypt uses it, no?

For the sake of anyone uncertain what to search for: hit 'start searching' and then 'random result'.

It's a worthwhile endeavour.

Well, no. People are trying to draw a functional distinction between two types of libraries that isn't really there.

First, old-fashioned academic libraries existed; later, public lending libraries existed, but only because various people noticed that the existence of academic libraries was a good thing thing that should be more widely accessible to people outside academia and/or religious institutions. At no point has the purpose of public lending libraries been to provide the community centre and entertainment resource that some people want them to be.

What kids should be encouraged to do is not merely attend a library as if simply being there is an end in itself, but to learn to appreciate and enjoy quiet, reflective learning.

Good luck taking a Gutenberg bible or a Shakespeare first folio away to read quietly at home.

No, that wouldn't be ideal - but that's also not how it is.

The point here, though, is that it doesn't matter whether the driver could've seen them, because culpability rests with the driver by default (except, as mentioned, in situations such as motorways, where pedestrians aren't allowed).

In very general terms, as a pedestrian in the UK, you have no particular right to step into the road other than at marked crossings, but as soon as you do, you have total right of way, no matter how stupid it was of you to step into the road.

There are various crimes in the vein of 'obstructing a public highway' and so forth, so you aren't completely free to be an asshole, but even if you are, it's still on drivers to avoid hitting you; in my experience, this tends to make drivers more careful and aware of nearby pedestrians, so I'm fully in favour of the status quo.

I risked reading below the line on the article, and among the frothing rants is one very salient point - not that long ago, old-guard public utility companies (the example in the comment is AT&T prior to the 1980s, but other firms in other countries are also good examples) had everyone as a customer, and nothing seemed to stop them from providing at least a bit of personal support. It may have been second-rate a lot of the time, but one could contact them, and directly - in the case of the telephone network, one could speak to an operator more or less immediately and more or less any time of day.

Obviously it isn't the case that Google's support operation is in the exact same problem-space, but I was interested to realise that the pure statistical "there are too many users" argument doesn't immediately excuse them.

Neither proposition is true to the exclusion of the other. British ${plumbers} have had it easy; those from the East will work for less.

A lot of countries had their own educational computers for a while - like the BBC in the UK.

I wonder if there's lingistic study that could be done on modern programmers working in today's standardised languages that could identify differences in their coding style stemming from the local language they played with at school.

    > you may find that the ones who 
    > your pogrom are more willing to 
    > fight, and to fight dirty.

...neatly justifying your continuing oppression of them and others and investment in your security machine.

This stuff is frequently by design.

An authoritarian government that has declared as a matter of policy that the system on which it has spent billions is flawless doesn't need to worry that it isn't flawless. You'll say that wasn't you entering the subversive bookshop - but sorry, citizen, the system is infallible, so why are you lying to us?

I think I've told this story before, but several years ago I discovered this stuff for myself.

I had tidied up a script distribution that had been unloved for a while and got a bit out of hand. I'd been working at home on a Debian laptop, and committed my changes back to Subversion - one of which was to gather up and organise some auxiliary files into one neat and tidy directory. Naturally, since the script already had ./bin, ./lib and ./etc, I went with aux.

I came into work after the weekend to find my Windows-based colleagues, who were in the habit of checking out a single working copy of the entire repo, in full panic mode because "Subversion is broken, IT say we might have lost everything"...

These days I name aux directories 'etc'.

I'm also no lawyer, but it's worth pointing out that there are plenty of publishers (and not a few authors) who will argue that corner - they certainly think it reasonable.

Taking an existing website and removing Javascript may well be a challenge.

But building a website and simply not adding unnecessary Javascript in the first place? Far less of a challenge.

Instinctively, I want to think that post-quantum crypto means both ends. That is to say, if it transpires that quantum computing can break all pre-quantum encryption schemes, it ought to follow that there will be post-quantum encryption schemes that it can't.

I don't understand quantum computing well enough to know if that's a reliable instinct though. Is it anywhere near the mark?