radio4fan

I (partly) got into Linux because I needed a cheap postscript printer: my (awesome but quickdraw-only) StyleWriter mangled everything QuarkXPress sent it.

So an old 386 laptop, slackware (on floppies), ghostscript and some jiggery-pokery gave me an AppleTalk Postscript printer for peanuts. It showed up in the Chooser as a LaserWriter II and worked just the same (except for smaller margins). The biggest cost was a RS232 to Apple-style cable.

The alternative would have been paying out for a (at the time) expensive laser printer.

And I could leave that stylewriter unused for months, yet when I came to print, the quality was perfect: no missing lines or head cleaning required. I only got rid of it when I ditched Quark.

> You can not understate its importance!

Challenge accepted! It's not important.

;-)

French also uses informal. "... c'est à toi qu'appartiennent le règne"

You've really never heard of VLC (admittedly hardly a startup, but certainly a project) or Feedly?

> Iterm2... One of the most awesome features is it’s ability to trigger a full screen, semi-transparent console at the push of a hotkey.

How did I not know about this? I'm almost looking forward to going to work tomorrow.

Works fine in iTerm2 1.0.0.20140112

Does for me.

iTerm 2.0 Build 1.0.0.20140112 (latest version)

Bizarrely, in the UK there is a law which mandates daily religious worship in all state-maintained schools:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130401151655/htt...

"Since the 1944 Education Act, re-enacted in all subsequent Education Acts, there has been a statutory requirement that all maintained schools must provide a daily act of collective worship for all registered pupils, unless they have been withdrawn by their parents. The Education Act 1988 removed the requirement for this to take place at the start of the school day. Collective Worship can now take place any time of the school day."

In practice, the law is widely ignored.

On the other hand, Barcelona is a great place for young people to live.

I know plenty of people here in Barcelona who could earn much more in their home countries, but choose to live in Barcelona for the better quality of life.

A web developer would probably earn twice as much in London (where I'm from) than here in Barcelona, but they would have to spend all the increase on rent to rent a nice apartment. Forget buying in London on a junior- to mid-level salary, but here you could buy a nice apartment in a nice part of the city.

Not to mention the weather, scenery, beach, cheaper restaurants and bars (with better opening hours), lack of violence, and sheer excitement of being in a foreign country.

Because there are more than 70 carcinogenic compounds in tobacco.

> When future arrived we just did not miss it.

This might hold water were it not for the fact that pretty much all console unix tool users started off on Windows or Mac.

> GUIs are more natural, it's much better then learning each tools crappy mini console DSL.

Yes, GUIs are more natural. But for most of us, the time spent learning how to use common unix tools pays for itself very quickly by increasing productivity: it's an investment.

> It is well established that prices RyanAir advertises are not prices passengers pay.

The prices on the website are exactly what you pay, as long as you pay by debit card and don't check luggage.

Source: I live in Barcelona, and travel monthly to London.

Former?

Do you know something I don't?

;-)

FTA:

>I had a brief Twitter conversation with Anand Shimpi of Anandtech about this, and he was as perplexed as I was. Nobody could explain the technical basis for this vast difference in idle power management on the same hardware. None of the PC vendors he spoke to could justify it, or produce a Windows box that managed similar battery life to OS X. And that battery life gap is worse today – even when using Microsoft's own hardware, designed in Microsoft's labs, running Microsoft's latest operating system released this week. Microsoft can no longer hand wave this vast difference away based on vague references to "poorly optimized third party drivers".

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant.

This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.

-- Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers

> Quite frankly I'm frightened to pass through UK ports now to visit family after reading about Schedule 7 powers.

I'm not going to worry about it too much, myself. The statute is quite clear that you can only be questioned to establish whether you appear to be a terrorist. The law has been broken in the case of David Miranda. I hope he will sue -- as he has threatened -- so that Special Branch know that they can't get away with breaking the law in this way.

Chapter and verse:

Schedule 7, 2 (1) An examining officer may question a person to whom this paragraph applies for the purpose of determining whether he appears to be a person falling within section 40(1)(b).

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/7

...

40 Terrorist: interpretation.

(1) In this Part “terrorist” means a person who— (a) has committed an offence under any of sections 11, 12, 15 to 18, 54 and 56 to 63, or (b) is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/40

If you're worried about this, perhaps you should also be worried about entering the US -- including in transit -- in case you are declared to be an unperson and sent to Gitmo with no trial or legal recourse. It's a bit worse than a maximum of nine hours of pointless tedium and handing over your Gmail/Facebook passwords which -- let's face it -- the spooks will have if they want them anyway.

As for Assange, if they get their hands on him, they will ship him to Sweden. He's spent the last year holed up in one room: I doubt another nine hours would bother him too much.

>>> If he was working for the Guardian why didn't he ask for a lawyer from the Guardian?

>> He was not technically entitled to a lawyer. The Guardian sent lawyers to the airport when they were told of his detention. The lawyers were not allowed to see him.

> I know he wasn't technically entitled to a lawyer but he was offered one

Not from the Guardian, though.

I really can't work out what point you're trying to make. Is it that this story is a conspiracy by the Guardian to make the UK & US look bad?

> Why didn't the Guardian say OK, take us to court when they were threatened for example.

This is a totally separate event, but (Guardian editor) Rusbridger says in the comments to his article:

"Play out the scenario for me in which fighting this case in court would have enabled us to do a better job of reporting the Snowden documents. I'm not sure I quite see it..."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-m...

He further says in a comment to another article:

"A plausible alternative to what actually happened is that the UK would have gone to law (as threatened). From that moment the court would be in charge of the Snowden material. The penalty for destroying it or refusing to hand it over could be extremely punitive. I mean, unlimited fines - not jail ."

https://id.guardian.co.uk/profile/alanrusbridger/public

He was not technically entitled to a lawyer. The Guardian sent lawyers to the airport when they were told of his detention. The lawyers were not allowed to see him.

As for the second question, who can say? I'd say it's worked out pretty well for the Greenwald and the Guardian though.

Canonical are a UK company.

Not that that will help much.

That's a perfectly valid opinion, but if you RTFA you'll find that the headline is poorly written: it's about sex-related content, not porn.

Hookup apps and dildonics are not porn.

Yeah, who here is interested in articles about startups, the internet giants, VC funding, etc?

> So, you're not free to speak.

But everywhere has some practical limits on free speech. It's a question of where the line is drawn. Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, threatening the President, you get the picture.

Of course we're not all going to agree on where the line should be drawn, and some would like there to be no line at all. You can't please everyone.

In France and Germany, it's illegal to deny that the holocaust happened, but it's not in the UK or Spain, for example.

> Because somebody else gets to decide what's "hate speech".

We decide what is hate speech, through our elected representatives. It's far from perfect, but it's the better than all the alternatives.

> Don't agree with the humor and tact of this letter even though "it worked".

Personally, in the UK, I would have written: "We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram".

The reply in question was "Fuck off". This is well-known in the UK amongst journalists, lawyers and people who follow media law.

http://jackofkent.blogspot.com.es/2010/05/reply-given-in-ark...

It's reasonably straightforward au-pairing legally in the US. You just need to be represented by one of the officially sanctioned au pair agencies, and you get a J1 visa.

So I guess they're miffed that girls are trying to cheat the official (rather inflexible IMO) system.

There are huge numbers of American girls in Europe doing a similar thing -- legally and illegally -- and in some countries you'd get the same hard-assed attitude.

In Germany, au pairs don't need a visa at all.

France, being France, they require a work permit (unless you're from CN, NZ or AU).

Spain is easy (just apply to the nearest consulate and it's rubber-stamped) and you can work there for up to two years.

In the UK, it's super-complicated. The UK authorities simply don't want non-EU workers under any circumstances (but what's the point in au-pairing in another English-speaking country?).

However, French and German girls are awesome, so please keep it up and with any luck, more will come here to Spain.

;-)

The problem with that in this context is that they expect it to work if the user's clock isn't set accurately.

Sure.

99.5 days of management busy-work, and 4 hours coding, testing and deploying.

So it does.

Well, in that case it's a piece of piss to implement as claudius says below.

"The corporation also added that it would take around '100 staffing days to make the changes involved in switching to an independent clock'."

I'd like to see how they're going to implement that without relying on the user's time settings in some way.

Sure, they could get the system timezone offset, but that's not really any more safe than using the system clock.

GeoIP lookup? Surely location services won't fly because of the scary browser message.

Any other ideas?

Man, you had me worried for a second.

But I just googled '0% fat greek yogurt ingredients' and the top four brands (Fage, Total, Liberté and Chobani) contain only skimmed milk and bacterial cultures.

Same with the brand I use here in Catalonia.

Looks like the same concept as http://eatwith.com/

I'm going to my first eatWith event tomorrow night...