David Cameron, Children, and Porn
According to the Telegraph David Cameron and his Conservative party – the party that wants less regulation, less red tape, less pointless wastes of public money etc. – are planning to implement a means by which they can keep children away from porn sites. Or, to put it another way, the Conservatives want to censor the internet. Internet censorship. That’s the sort of thing they do in Iran and Syria and China and never, ever, ever here in our wonderful, democratic, enlightened society. And it’s not censorship if it’s called filtering. Always remember that. The bad guys censor; the good guys filter. Whether you want it or not. And cens… filtering works, people! It doesn’t block things it shouldn’t. This website, for instance, definitely isn’t blocked for being a porn site on some networks. I am, of course, lying. Despite not being a porn site this site is actually categorised as one by some web censoring software. Filtering software. Luckily, it’s a simple process to appeal being blocked incorrectly and it’s a simple matter to determine if you’re on the censorship list. I am, of course, lying again. Internet cens… filtering will be a totalitarian, opaque means of restricting access to anything that those in charge deem is unsuitable. That’s not paranoia; that’s an inevitability that comes from allowing those with a little control to get a little bit more. And then maybe a little bit more. And some more for your safety. And won’t someone think of the children? So, yes, the political party that doesn’t want to interfere needlessly wants to interfere needlessly and the only real reason seems to be to slip censorship into accepted usage because censorship equals power and politicians are nasty, power-hungry bastards at the best of times. Lucky for them then that the interfering, know-nothing busybodies of the NSPCC and similar “concerned” groups who think their opinions outweigh that of everyone else have come along to offer David Cameron and his cadre a way in. Let’s examine how this plan concocted by people who have no clue how the internet works will work. Ah, software we can all trust on every computer in the country! Nothing to worry about at all. Nothing can possibly go wrong. Under the plans, anyone turning on a new computer for the first time will be asked whether there are children in the house. […] Filters against pornography and self-harm sites will automatically be left on if parents just click through the options quickly and select ok to every question. As we’ve already seen, cens… filters can’t be trusted to do their jobs. A filter that knows...
Old Computer Magazine Adverts
I recently bought a set of DVDs containing a ZX Spectrum emulator, hundreds of games, videos, and magazine scans. Ah, what a wonderful trip down memory lane they’re providing. Yes, I’m enjoying playing the games – some I had and used to love, most I’ve never played (or heard of) before – and I’ve even tried my hand at some very simplistic but satisfying programming since that’s where it all started for me, but by far the most fun I’m having is reading the old magazines; titles such as Big K, Your Sinclair, Computer Gamer, and others that I remember fondly from my youth. The articles are great, the predictions are dreadful, the program listings fill me with nostalgic bliss, and the adverts… heaven! I, like many thousands of people, spent a stupid amount of time playing Football Manager for the Spectrum. As a young teenager on the weekends it was not unusual for me to stay up through the night trying to get Portsmouth out of the fourth division and winning the F.A. cup. This advert featuring the bearded visage of Kevin Toms was a common sight in the magazines of the day and it’s interesting to see that nearly three decades on he’s still working on the game, this time for the iOS platform: http://blog.kevintoms.com/ I was not familiar with System 3 Software (although they’re still going today: System 3) or, at least, not with the games promoted above but this advert jumped out at me because of the wonderfully, obviously unlicensed versions of Star Wars and Tron, Deathstar Interceptor and Lazer Cycle respectively. I think it’s the blatancy of the games that hits me most; you couldn’t get away with something like this today. It also doesn’t quite fit in with the blurb on the company’s About page which describes their “development ethos for producing truly original gaming experiences for everyone” but that almost makes it even better. I don’t know who Keith Dean was (or is) but I am quite interested in finding out whether he ever got any of the hackers he was after. I never bought the “fabulous Cassette 50 from Cascade” but I remember seeing the advert a lot in the 80s and I remember being very tempted. Fifty games! Fifty! Still, maybe I was demonstrating some of the skepticism early on that would serve me well in later life because there’s something not quite right about the description: “it is impossible to tell you everything about the 50 games on Cassette 50”. Indeed. Still, something might have been nice. Finally, Llamasoft, and the games from the mind of Jeff Minter. Who...
The Importance Of Information
Five o’clock, one evening at work. It’s dark. A message comes in from a customer to my boss: The home pages for the international stores on UAT(*) have suddenly all gone blank! (*) UAT = User Acceptance Testing. When we produce sites for our customers they’re developed locally, then pushed to a virtual copy of the live environment called UAT which allows the customer to agree to the site’s functionality as per specifications, identify bugs, or request further changes; when everyone’s happy the site then gets moved to the Web Staging environment which is a duplicate of the live environment running off the same data as a last chance sanity check before it gets transferred finally to live. You don’t get to be boss by fixing issues like this so a message goes from the boss to me first thing the following morning: The home pages for the international stores on UAT have suddenly all gone blank. Can you take a look? Strange, I think. I was on UAT at four o’clock that evening and it all looked fine. I take a look and yes, the pages are blank. Very odd. I load up the local environment from which the UAT system was deployed. The pages are fine as I’d (if not expected, at least) hoped. So, something happened on UAT after four that caused all the home pages to go blank. I hope it was nothing I did but, then again, I didn’t do anything; I was just double-checking the layout conformed to certain requirements so as to properly reply to an email. Okay then. I “take a look” as asked/instructed. Has someone tampered with the home page views, I wonder? I look and they’re all indicating that they’re untouched. I compare them against the local versions and, yes, they’re matching just fine. I compare against the current live views since they shouldn’t have changed and confirm that everything is as it should be. Has the data been erased somehow? I compare with a copy of the site and check some URLs that should be referenced on the home pages and they’re all showing up just fine. I launch a remote session onto the virtual machine and run some smoke test queries against the data. Nothing obvious comes up. Maybe it’s the access permissions! I could check individual access rights for the user I’m logging in as against the content that should be displayed or I could simply hit the “Rebuild access control permissions” button in the configuration section and see if that fixes the problem; it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve needed a kick up the...
Currys Online Ordering
Currys do a reasonable job of giving you information about products when you order from them online. If you order from them online. Which is something I’m less likely to do in future. Here’s why: This order confirmation – at least to me – says that I will be able to collect my order from 5pm on Friday the 7th of December, the date of its delivery to the store. And this email on the morning of the delivery day – again, to me – indicates – and maybe I’m reading too much into it – that the delivery was on its way to the store. I had high hopes that popping into the store after work (well after 5 o’clock in the evening, just so you know) on the Friday dated the 7th December would allow me to pick up the object I’d paid for online a few days earlier and which I’d been assured was on its way there in an email sent about nineteen hours prior to my arrival. It wasn’t there. And the staff at Currys couldn’t have looked more disinterested in checking where it was if they’d just come back from a week’s training in caring less where they’d picked up the coveted Shrug d’Or top prize for being unhelpful. I’ve since discovered (from talking to a very helpful woman on the Currys helpline who was both very efficient in determining the information I requested and suitably apologetic for the piss-poor performance of the company she was representing) that when you see something like this: you should not assume it means that your order is on its way because it won’t be, it’ll still be in the sorting office, the weekend will have rolled around, nobody delivers over the weekend, and while you might imagine it’ll turn up on the Monday coming up it’s probably best to wait until at least the Wednesday (i.e. seven days after you’ve ordered and paid for (don’t forget: you’ve already paid for it; Currys already have your money)) before checking back again as experience indicates they are this hapless. My Currys experience: I rate it yellowy-brown on the colour scale of customer...
British Pride
There’s an unwritten rule if you want to keep your sanity intact while browsing the internet: don’t read the comments on a public Facebook page dedicated to racism disguised as national pride. I’ve just written that rule down. And the reason I’ve done that is because I broke that rule and need to punish myself for this horrible lapse in common sense. I visited this page: Poppy Burners In Court 23rd Feb Like This Page To Lock Them Up. What was I thinking? Let’s be clear: the likers and commenters in support of that page’s publicised goal are morons. Racist morons. Horrible people. On the plus side, however, they are publishing their horrible, racist, often illiterate rants on a public page so it’s nice that you don’t have to guess whether these people are intolerant, mentally-limited arseholes any longer. People like these: Ann Wharton from the Wirral (currently working abroad, helping the economy of a foreign country) and Jonny Blythy from just outside Middlesbrough showing that they were probably skiving on the day their respective schools (massive assumption that they went to any taking place here) were teaching how to spell racial epithets. And, of course, Ann Wharton is a horrible, horrible person for wishing rape upon another person’s wife. Daryl Brunton from Lincoln is very angry at immigrants coming over to our country and – if I’m interpreting this utter mess of a diatribe correctly – stealing all our dictionaries. It’s very easy to mouth off but it’s something else to get up, get out there, and just do something, and Neil Maybury falls firmly in the latter camp. Neil wants babies. Lots of babies. White babies. More white people babies than dark people babies. And he wants them now. For Britain. His Britain. He’s so damned proud of Britain and its white babies, but he must have more white babies for Britain because there just aren’t enough white, British babies being born. So he’s moved to Birmingham, Alabama. And he might have gone there with several of his sisters and some close cousins. Just saying. Expect some white, American-born, British, low-IQ, genetically-weak babies very soon! A lot of people think it’s okay to advocate murder on a public forum and far and away the most popular form of murder that these particular commenters appear to be in favour of is that of burning other humans alive. These delightful specimens of human shit – Sheffield’s David Raw, Steven Seago from Grays, Land Rover mechanic Drew Perilmeadow from Basingstoke, Swinton Insurance sales executive Neil Passey from Worcester, and Manchester’s Jay Rayner – are just a handful of the many...
Previously, In Science
A round up of recent science news stories and my take on them. Let’s start with this article from the BBC: Big Bang: Is there room for God? Perhaps a padded one so he doesn’t hurt himself. Otherwise, I’m going to go with no on this story. The general gist, though, is that some physicists, theologians, and philosophers got together to talk about what happened before the Big Bang. This is never going to be a productive meeting and will only ever end up with the the rational members either saying something to offend the loonies or backing down to appease the nutjobs and end the round-and-round-the-facts game being played. You might as well replace “theologians” with “reptilian overlord conspiracy theorists” for all the good ever bringing them to a discussion about things that actually exist are concerned. And as for philosophers: I’ve sat through some talks with philosophers and I’ve got a real problem with them (you’d never guess). Just like theologians their whole essence of being is in talking about unknowable concepts. Endlessly. Question them on anything and all you get is “are you sure?” with a knowing smile. Demonstrate that what they’re saying is gibberish and you’ll get a reworking of the same point of view in order to make it more vague than it already was. It’s the antithesis of science where contradictory evidence is followed by refinement or discarding. Gah! Next, an Earth-sized planet has been discovered pretty close by in Galactic Terms (always in proper case, always italicised): Alpha Centauri has a planet! The planet orbits close in to Alpha Cen B, and is technically called Alpha Centauri Bb – planets have lower case letters assigned to them, starting at b. Its mass is only 1.13 times the Earth’s mass, making this one of the lower mass planets yet found! But don’t get your hopes up of visiting it – its period is only 3.24 days, meaning it must be only about 6 million kilometers (less than 4 million miles) from its star. Even though Alpha Cen B is a bit cooler than the Sun, this still means the planet is baking hot, far too hot to sustain any kind of life as we know it, or even liquid water. Even though it’s close enough to visit with today’s technology within a lifetime I’m always impressed by the science behind even making finds like this. Consider this: if our sun were a bowling ball then Earth would be a pea about twenty metres away. Look up at the night sky and find Alpha Centauri; it’s smaller than a bowling ball. It’s smaller than...
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