Interesting thanks.

strings says I have the user-space component on my system, but it's been a long time since I used it so I didn't realize the kernel-support might have gone away.

Actually iptables does have support for matching based on the process. You might have run commands that include "-m recent", or similar. The "-m" is used to specify a module-name, and there are many matching modules available and included by default.

For example on a CentOS system you might allow your webserver to make outgoing SMTP connections via something fun like this: "iptables -A OUTPUT -m owner --cmd-owner httpd --dest-port 25 -j ACCEPT". (Why CentOS? Because it matches the command against HTTPD. On Debian systems the webserver process is more typically called 'apache2'.)

Hope that helps.

It wasn't so long that tom-tom were criticizing openstreetmap, and trying to pretend their data was better than crowd-sourced data.

That's actually pretty interesting - As it says that about 50% of the users with the packages installed are using it.

Higher than I'd have imagined.

I agree.

I had virgin internet, telephone, and TV for five years in my flat in Edinburgh. I've only ever suffered about one outage a year during that time, and after the first time I learned it was easier and less effort just to turn everything off and try again tomorrow. Definitely easier than fighting their phone "support".

There were three special episodes - I know because I watched the first two and skipped the last (exactly as I did with the Star Wars prequels!)

Although I love the early series 1-4, 5 at a push, it had changed a lot since the writer split and I just lost interest.

Don't worry, you're only a danger to the public if you had sexual thought about somebody < 16 years old...

It isn't bad, I just feel a little disappointed that computers are commodities these days and people don't need to understand things. Sure it is a form of snobbery, and I'm sure there are similar groups such as mechanics who feel very similar. But over time we've evolved into a situation where people are no longer encouraged to experiment, or use trial & error to solve computer problems. You see this most obviously in schools where kids are taught little "recipes" on how to use Microsoft Office, but any error message is cryptic and best ignored..

I'm still quite amused by the current crop of "hackers" who think they're all that but never built their own computer from chips and raw PC boards. Building a PC these days is something grade school kids can do.

I've been thinking that for a long time now, even though I didn't start that far back myself.

I started with the z80-based ZX Spectrum, and then graduated through a series of early PCs. The earliest one running GEM with a hercules (monochrome) graphics card.

As there wasn't much real software about then if you wanted it you wrote it yourself, reading the programming guides, and Ralf Browns' interrupt list.

These days there are people grown up who've never known anything before Windows 95; they grew up with the GUI and an environment which just worked. They never had to tinker, they never understood from the ground up how the PC works, and have little incentive to experiment. Back in my own personal olden days you had debug, you had built in support for programming. Nowadays its' all hidden away.

Don't even get me started on people who don't understand what pointers are, or how they work...

I don't really read news sites myself, I read stories that I found links to. But I don't really go to a newspaper site and just read all the stories. So it would be NOT 1 pound per day, but 1 pound per article. So I just wouldn't.

I think this sums up most people's interactions with online news very well.

I do read almost every story on the local Edinburgh newspaper website every few days, but I only do that because it covers local news. Otherwise I read articles I see linked to from places like Slashdot, Reddit, or email from friends.

I imagine the immediate effect of a paywall is that fewer such links will be shared, unless there is something akin to lwn.net's "make a free link" which allows a subscriber to share a protected article for free for a period of time. (That is something I love about lwn.net; and I have a paid account there.)

I find people don't want to touch my keyboard, because I have one of those "split" ones.

Side-Talking!

Inconceivable!

I have to say that I thought that "Batman Begins" was a fantastic film, and easily my favourite of the whole series.

Mostly though I'd agree with other comments there are a few series that would be nice to be reset, but on the whole I'd rather see new things.

(e.g. My personal pick would be Dark Angel.)