I was at Cisco for over 12 years and this kind of announcement isn't really news any more. Employees at Cisco are little more than yearly contractors. John Chambers, the former CEO, used to talk about Cisco being a family. If it is, then it's a highly dysfunctional one now!
My girlfriend got caught by some nasty OS X malware very recently from an ad network. It disguised itself as Flash Player and instead was CleanMyMac.
It had a valid developer certificate from Apple and she's aware enough to know that Flash Player needs updating. She didn't expect something bordering on a virus to change a load of settings and demand money for made-up problems.
For as long as I can remember Macs had avoided this kind of nastiness and there was a great community of great apps without spyware/malware etc (remember QuickSilver back in the day?). All good things come to an end and I guess soon we'll have to start unchecking boxes on installers, removing browser toolbars and generally avoiding predatory money grabbers as much as possible.
Preferences and then:
"editor.cursorBlinking": "solid",
Job done!
In most countries it's very common for children to walk to school in the mornings, especially when they get to 10/11 years old.
I understand the US is less pedestrian friendly as a general rule (outside of larger cities) but walking/cycling to school was one of my fondest memories, not to mention both healthy and social!
What is the motivation for having this banned in the first place?
I've owned a Slingbox since the mid-2000s and been very happy with the service. For those unfamiliar, you hook it up to your set top box and it rebroadcasts your signal over the internet and provides things like a remote control library so you can manage your device 100% remotely.
When I first got it, it came with Desktop software for Windows and Mac. This was replaced with a plugin based web interface a few years ago. For iOS and Android devices you have to buy a (rather expensive) dedicated app. I thought this was good value for money so invested. It's especially useful as I travel abroad a lot and UK-based services are almost all geofenced.
In the past 6 months they have been putting advertisements in the web app. Because Chrome has deprecated NPAPI, they released a Desktop application again (the old one doesn't work properly on recent versions of OS X). This Desktop app now inserts mandatory advertisements.
As a long-time customer it's infuriating! I paid good money for my Slingbox which originally had a Desktop app with no ads. The sale promise was "Watch TV anywhere with no subscription". I consider advertisements a subscription.
The web 20 years ago was a dark and miserable place. Netscape was the dominant player and their Navigator product was clunky, with a very awkward rendering engine and a lot of proprietary web extensions.
Microsoft, never being one to miss a trick, launched IE4 in 1997 which in many ways was a superior product. It supported dynamic content a lot better than Netscape (still in a largely proprietary way), was faster etc. It was so integrated in to Windows that it could replace your entire shell on Windows 95 or NT4. Windows 98 continued this.
Anyway, whilst IE4 and later 5 were unstable, they were subjectively better and easier to obtain for Windows users. Netscape was such a mess that they gave up entirely on their code base and created the Mozilla project for a next-generation browser. Microsoft launched IE6 in 2001 with just the right mix of Netscape compatibility and proprietary (shiny) extensions that everyone went for it. At one point, IE had almost 90% market share!
With this dominant position, Microsoft basically gave up developing their clunky, insecure web browser as businesses flocked to make applications require it. The Mozilla project spun out of the AOL-owned Netscape and launched a niche browser 'suite' which included email and web page editing all built in. It was slow, buggy and bloated - but very standards based (contrasting to IE).
A group of people took the good bits from the Mozilla project (browser) and tidied up the extension engine. They called it Phoenix and added useful features like tabs, download management etc. This got renamed to Firebird and then to Firefox for trade mark reasons... The world was given a browser that could take on IE. On launch day they had elaborate marketing schemes like full page adverts in the press and heavy promotion via Google.
Mozilla alone created a product that could take on Internet Explorers dominance, forced Microsoft to continue to develop IE towards a more standards-focussed goal and empowered us users to get back the web.
As Chrome (and Blink/WebKit) become more dominant it's critical that we have choice. The web was a dark place with too many sites requiring proprietary Microsoft extensions just to run apps. Lets hope it never happens again!
To be fair, he's just a low level back-bench MP without too much power. It's like we found the dumbest guy in the country and elected him president or something.
Still, you have a point. We have yet to see an atheist Prime Minister. Can't seem to abolish the monarchy.
Both Clement Atlee and James Callaghan were atheists - that's two.
Fortunately though religion has been at the fringe of our leaders manifesto and I hope it long continues!
I hope this isn't what you actually believe, as it sounds like an authoritarian nightmare to me! What would happen in your little imagined scenario is that the powers of control would inevitably extend to all undesirable* behaviour and would one-day collapse under its own weight or civil war -- after millions suffered.
* Undesirable being defined by the same nutcases who put this law in to place and could include being homosexual, jewish or having drugs planted on them
Back in the real world, I firmly believe punishment should fit the crime. In the case of taking drugs I can't think why it's a crime and why we would seek punishment! Someone at home getting high doesn't even deserve a trivial fine, let alone having their life ruined.
The only time I see it coming in to play is when mixed with other activties. High controlling machinery or a vechicle? Harsher sentencing. High looking after kids? Child neglect, harsher sentencing. Vandalism or assault... you get the idea.
There will be a negative impact to society where people get hooked on drugs and drop in productivity, but we already have problems with alcoholism, gambling, etc...
I agree, except it's better to push people on to 802.11n in the 2.4Ghz space; it uses the radio space more efficiently and won't slow down your neighbours. It also adds range and reliability. Considering most complaints aren't going to be about the routing performance but the wireless coverage, upgrading to n would be a boon for many, especially dual-band if their devices can run on 5Ghz.
I agree and dislike this behaviour.
Fortunately others do too and there's a good addon already available:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=2141579
Kinda sucks having to get one just to hide the tab bar, but works well enough so far.
Ignoring the politics a little bit, there was a really good example of how this CAN work recently with the B4RN project.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21442348
A consortium of local farmers came together and allowed the use of their farmland and spare time to place fibre and hook up the local residents with gigabit internet speeds. By coming together as a consortium and being cooperative (rather than greedy) they have combined both entrepreneurial vigour with a sense of social awareness. I don't see why this model couldn't work in France too...
They compare it to the iPad, which is pretty bad to repair... However, as a general purpose computer running a full OS, a fair comparison would also be the MacBook Pro Retina.
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-with-Retina-Display-Teardown/9462/
This is a bad trend with custom screws, glue and all sorts of crap.
It's not about the ethics of the animal in question, it's about the promises made by the manufacturer (no mention of horse) and the questions of quality control, correct process and oversight.
My concern isn't "OMG HORSIES!"
My concern is "fuck you consumer" as they pump the product full of whatever they think they can get away with to turn a profit.
the United Kingdom still uses MILES to measure distance, MILES PER HOUR to measure speed, STONES and POUNDS and OUNCES to measure weight, and FLUID OUNCES to measure volume.
OK, I'll bite. Aside from miles to measure distance and speed on the roads, we certainly do not use pounds and ounces in daily life. All meat, food etc is sold in grams. Almost all drinks are sold in litres. Temperature is done in C on the TV and most cookbooks are metric (often with imperial translations).
The only exceptions I can think of are:
1. Beer and milk - we still buy these by the pint (with the metric equiv printed on the label)
2. Roads, as mentioned
3. Human weight is still often done in stones and lbs
Is it perfect? No. However, most people born in the last 30-40 years will have been taught exclusively metric at school. They're comfortable with it.
There is no way that anyone short of a politician would claim that the UK is "Metrified" (or metrificated) and yet they do.
Sorry, I know it's great to paint the US and Liberia as "holdouts". The truth is there are a lot of houldouts that JUST DON'T GET COUNTED.
E
The UK isn't perfect and we're not all the way there yet, but I don't think people are running around confused. We're getting there (to metric) it just might take a bit longer... The important thing is that we've started!
One thing I've always admired about you (but found difficult to emulate myself) is your steadfast consistency and refusal to compromise your principals.
With that said, are there any times when you look back and failed to do this - or perhaps wished you had been less hardline?
"Spock, did you see the looks on their faces?" "Yes, Captain, a sort of vacant contentment."
