whamill

There are two aspects to the current debate: - The 'child porn keyword' web search filter mandated on all UK ISPs with no opt-in or opt-out - The 'opt-out porn block' which will be applied to all internet connections, from which people can opt-out in order to receive unfiltered results.

The first part hasn't received as much attention because it's harder to write a punchy article about the malicious nature of a government-supplied permanent search filter blacklist, and it isn't as easy to attack as the blocking of legal content such as pornography but this is where the real danger lies.

Once the government add all their 'illegal search terms' to the blacklist and have the appartus for such wide-ranging censorship set up, what is to stop them from adding terms unchecked and unguided to filter any "unwanted" material from web searches? If this had existed in the US, for example, when the NSA Verizon/PRISM stories were leaked, how easy would it be for them to simply add "Edward Snowden" or "The Guardian" or "PRISM" or even "NSA" to the search term blacklist? They would easily justify it on the grounds that the material leaked was classified or damaging to national security.

At this stage a majority of people would in hindsight agree that this leak is hugely important and in the public interest, but if these terms were blocked by the government then what?

Why would installing them on only new devices make a lot of sense? It doesn't achieve the stated goal of "protecting the children" if they are using any one of the millions of devices currently in use.

Moreso, why default to blocked and not unblocked, allowing people to opt-in?

Ah but then we'd be back in the rational and current position of giving people the ability to install blocking software or filters if they so desire...

Sloppy effort on behalf of the developers. Andreas (author of the blog post) was right to deny it permission to use his Twitter account the first few times but gave in eventually because of the nagging.

If there was a way to see expanded permissions before allowing a program to update perhaps he would have not updated at all?

Okay, so you have given a few examples of sexism.

So why do you think we shouldn't talk about this? Don't you think that what you've just described, being more prevalent in the US, warrants the discussion? Don't you think it's irrelevant and destructive to play the quote at the end of your article telling us just to get back to work?

Tweets in a timeline, on the Twitter feed in the web client, all have the retweet/quote/reply/favourite actions per-tweet so I would expect that they mean each and every tweet displayed anywhere.

I like www.mind42.com - a decent web based mind-mapping tool that allows you to share the mindmap with other people. Also it's free, which is a plus. I like mind-maps for any kind of stream-of-consciousness note taking and idea documenting.

Edit: Apologies, my bad. Misread.

The Arab Spring.

I'm looking into that suggestion. Thanks for the advice. :)

That's what I recalled from when I read through it before signing (evidently not in close enough detail...)

However, the phrasing is: "any invention wholly or partially made by the Employee at any time during the course of his employment with the Company (whether or not during working hours or using Company premises or resources, and whether or not recorded in material form)."

Which does seem pretty open-ended :(

Yes, hindsight is a wonderful thing - I signed this 3.5 years ago fresh out of university and didn't pay enough attention to the small print, I realise that now - I'll contact someone in the legal profession that I know for a more qualified opinion.

As to it being normal, most of the friends of mine who went to work for medium to large enterprises say that they've got the same type of clause in their contracts. From what I've read it appears that employers are typically recommended to make their phrasing as wide-ranged as reasonable.

I've been considering a 13" Air for a while now - incidentally the one advantage of the 13" Air over the slightly more powerful 13" Pro is the screen resolution: 1440x900 on the Air vs 1280x800 on the Pro. Probably not a huge deal if you plug it in to a monitor a lot but I'd be going for the Air for portability!

The scourge of the off-by-one error strikes again.

That's actually more depressing than if this were real.

Sounds like you've got a real use case for the Opera face gestures then? http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/labs-introducing-opera-fa... (April fool 2009 but maybe now more realistic...?)

Not needing a middle mouse button. Like on a trackpad.

Indeed. The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.

Perhaps the JS community you portray doesn't just exist in two discrete attitudes. As far as I see it, JS is a fact of the current web so trying to get the best from it is the easiest way to dull the pain of what is often clumsy and irritating. There are certainly places and uses where static typing would be great and the web is no exception but JavaScript isn't suddenly going to go away just because it's easy to write bad code, or because a load of 'hipsters' are making some flavour of it popular at the moment.

Get a hold of Douglas Crockford's 'JavaScript: The Good Parts' book. JS is so incredibly pervasive you're going to have to put up with it, so you may as well see if you can get along with the nice features like closures, functions as first class objects and prototypal inheritance.

They can't win with some people. Either they ignore it and those people say they don't care about privacy, or they rattle the sabre (for their users' benefit, for once) and people say they're posturing or spinning a nothing into something positive for them. I guess it's the PR department's job to do this but I get the impression that for some they're the new big company that you can love to hate.

Personally I think it's better that they said it, whether the reality of these increasingly common stories is actually so common or not.

In case you ever fall into deep water?

They use lots of confusingly contradictory language to puff up the arrest, like: "the head of LulzSec" then immediately following with "the loose network of hackers", and contrasting "loosely organised" with Sabu being at the "nerve centre", and also "perhaps thousands of hackers" whereas they claim to know they're arresting "top-ranking members".

So simultaneously acknowledging they taking out a member of a distributed network but also talking up the importance of that member. Strange.

They're not mutually exclusive.

I've used Sencha Touch before to provide a nice fat-finger-friendly version of Sencha's Ext-JS user interfaces on the iPad and it's a nice framework for providing rich UI components and also helps you segregate your UI itself into models, views and controllers.

I've used PhoneGap to wrap web-based projects for native device access to APIs you can't get a hold of using plain javascript or that wouldn't be exposed via Sencha Touch - PhoneGap provides an app shell, a UIWebView to execute your web app inside and a lot of nicely wrapped device level APIs accessible to your javascript code.

If you just want the web app stuff, Sencha Touch is really nice but a little heavy compared to options like jQuery Mobile so I'd use it in future for things that are very custom-component heavy like grids and complex forms, and for bigger applications where compartmentalisation is more important - whereas I'd stick to something like jQuery Mobile for just mobile-friendly UI elements like buttons and basic form controls or for a more simple app.

Sencha Touch has a bit of a learning curve compared to typical web app work, as the entire interface is typically declared within Sencha and UI elements instantiated and passed around, whereas with jQuery Mobile or the likes you can get away with just making it up mostly in HTML and throwing in JS components as and when you need them. To me, Sencha Touch is a slightly bigger all-or-nothing approach.

PhoneGap I would use in general any time I had to get access to device level APIs that ST v2.0 hasn't provided or anything else in bespoke native code that can't be done within a web app.

Well I haven't done any studies on it but I'd assume that the number of people going to the toilet and then immediately touching the way-out door handle without washing their hands is probably higher than the number of people going to the toilet outside the bathroom and then touching the door handle on the way in...

Not to mention that bathroom door handles are pretty good conditions for germs: warm (indoors), damp (from people who haven't dried properly), lots of new germs from people who haven't washed.

Well the difference between the pre-bathroom door handle and the post-bathroom door handle (opposite sides of the same door, presumably) is that one of them is much more likely to have been touched by someone who may have just been to the toilet without washing their hands.

You wouldn't be that worried about touching the door on the way in especially if you knew you were going to be washing your hands in a moment.

Because they're broadened their experience and knowledge with new languages and learning new things. My point isn't so much about learning the very latest thing so much as it is about learning in general. At the very least the people who spent the last 4-5 years learning new languages will have been exposed to different ways of doing things and different ways of looking at the common problems - something that someone who didn't learn anything except repeating their experience over and over wouldn't have learned.

I wonder how the author's outlook has changed since 2007? Has he spent the last 4-5 years learning new technologies or constantly bettering himself or just stuck with what he learned in 2007 and become bitter at the reality of the industry moving on? Sure, COBOL programmers from back in the day are still in demand in certain scenarios, but his anger seems to be to stem from an unwillingness to learn; an expectation that once one has learned something they should simply be further rewarded for having learned it and continued to use it for a long period of time.

The fact is that if you learn some programming language in 2007 and just do the same stuff for the next 4-5 years without expanding your education, your experience or what you try to make of it, you're going to be behind the 'cool kids' that spent the last 4-5 years learning every new language that popped up. But if you spent the 4-5 years with just that one language learning new ways of implementing things, learning how better to take a higher level view of programming and software design and other facets of use in this industry - then he wouldn't be behind anyone else.

It would interest me to find out how things have progressed for the author given his rant at generalists, project management and learning new things

Basically the book for that language which is considered 'The Bible' by its developers. The K&R book for C (http://www.amazon.co.uk/C-Programming-Language-2nd/dp/013110...) or the Camel book for Perl (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Programming-Perl-Theres-More-Than/dp...) are this type of book.

I do the same thing, I find it's a great way to compare the differences in implementing similar designs and functionality across platforms and languages. Highly recommended.