With enough short-sighted right-wing politics and populism, I wouldn't be surprised if the UK became a destination for transportation these days.

I'm not at all surprised. Years ago (around 2002-3, I guess) I wrote a little honeypot website - it would emit random words and phrases from the titles of songs, actors/actresses, movies etc, appended with various file extensions. The kicker: all the "links" were handled by the same script that only ever emitted text/html with yet more links...

That garnered an officious legalistic DMCA screed back in its day; my colo ISP was suitably amused when he heard the nature of the site.

Goes to show they just ran brute-force searches for keywords and automated the sending of offensive emails. There's a word for bulk unrequited email again, isn't there? :P

The Palaeolithic era ended 10k years ago.

Get as much sleep as you want, use sleepbot and/or fitbit to measure it and add your own quality ratings, grab the data and run it through R to plot a histogram for yourself. It's more scientific than assuming the past should dictate such things as "people may be meant to sleep".

FWIW I enjoy 7.2hr on average. Over 8 is nice but tends to be met by a sub-average duration the next night to compensate.

This is emacs. The question is not whether it can read email, but which way you want to do it.

One of my colo servers has a permanent screen session in which one virtual terminal is dedicated to running emacs -f gnus. I access it daily (normally when email needs rescued from procmail+bogofilter).

Ten years ago I'd've laughed at you and pointed out that even experimental things have to become mainstream somehow.

I wonder what the demographics of yea/nay-sayers are like?

Reminds *me* of Slowlaris.

Must be one of those `enterprise' things.

*Are* rules about drunk-driving, speed limits and seatbelts actually necessary?

The way to look at it is this: some eejit over ----> there writing a "rule" down on a piece of paper is not going to have a measurable effect on whether I crash or not in a given period. Laws are not there to prevent Newtonian physics. Accidents gonna happen. However, they *are* there in order that, when you wipe-out and take a bunch of folks with you, they then have grounds on which to prosecute your piddly ass - the same set of grounds as anyone else doing the same silly thing. That's where the fairness comes in.

For this reason, I suggest that people chill out about use of mobiles whilst driving - stop treating the act as inherently wrong, but by all means consider it a potential contributing factor when an accident occurs.

Has anyone made a study of how much mobile usage in a car does NOT result in crashes?

I can guarantee that 100% of crashes involved oxygen, so we really must ban oxygen use in cars.

It should be pretty obvious that another missing, presumed unconsidered, dimension is people's ability to choose when they might reasonably use a mobile device whilst driving, and for how long.

It's a lot harder to prove that something doesn't exist, especially once we know it *can* exist.

I think it's pretty obvious that no one IDE is going to be the best. What's actually needed is the understanding that, no matter how many IDEs you care to standardize upon, the compiler only cares about the language. It's the fact that you're calling free() before you malloc() that causes a segfault, not whether you push F9 or F2 or type `make' to compile it. Expect text-editors to edit text and choose the one(s) that make your job easiest. The supposed integration between IDE and language just makes for a layer of glue that can come apart.

It's the large IDEs that I hate. I've tried Eclipse 3x in my life and each time has resulted in very quick uninstallation.

Kate is quite adequate. A few "sessions" for work and evening projects, and easy switching between them, a few shell functions to build+install projects... I'm happy enough. Lets me concentrate on the project and the language(s) involved with minimal environmental fuss.

The BBC news is reporting that apparently it's not as bad as it could be because it's not storing the content of phone-calls made, just who was called and when.

Anyone who wants to know just how powerful mere "metadata" actually is should go read http://kieranhealy.org/blog/ar... .

"computer science and related professions useless"

Hardly. All this does is show an assumption that the life of the modern geek is wasted on frippery such as social sites, etc.

Maybe we won't have electricity for a while. We'll remember, and recreate it. Meanwhile, a knowledge of computability, efficiency and optimization, security and ethics is transferable to other fields.

Security by blocking bad things is a very bad idea, a completely false sense of security.

Couple these together instead:
default-deny (got that much correct);
incoming, open stateful continuations of established connections;
incoming, open ports for services you run (e.g. web- and dns-servers, etc), with rate-limiting per source.

iptables will allow this, no problem.

There is no point in "automatic" firewalls that detect bad things and block sources; all they do is clutter-up your firewall rules for the sake of an event that (1) comes under default-deny and (2) is already history - people doing bad things are mostly operating fire-and-forget.

This is the same VW that have failed to diagnose my faulty immobilizer 3 times now, is it? If I knew the exploit then at least I could disable the blasted thing myself and get moving again when it plays up!

Or maybe I'm being hacked remotely and don't know it...