Whilst I find the 'joke' to be far from funny, and posting it on the "Find April" page of Facebook in particularly poor taste, I am increasingly concerned by the enthusiasm with which the Crown Prosecution Service seek criminal convictions for posting bad taste jokes, or unpopular opinions, when these could be quickly and easily removed by the moderators of the forum in question.

I'm not a Facebook user personally, but most online forums have some means of moderation in their online forums - I would be extremely surprised it wasn't possible to report the comment to Facebook, and have them take action against the user concerned (such as removing the comment and blocking their account).

As someone else has commented, there are "comedians" who specialise in this kind of joke. Personally I don't find them funny, so I don't go to see them. Likewise, I know when I go on to an internet forum (even those of the broadsheet newspapers), I am likely to come acrosss offensive material (although I am more usually offended by the lack of originality and intellect than the comments themselves).

A country where the State legislates to prevent people from being offended is only a small step from a country where the state legislates to prevent people from voicing politically unpopular opinions. As a UK citizen, one is increasingly concerned at the level of routine surveillance and intervention by the Authorities in day to day life.

20 years ago, I was running a DX 386 with a Hercules graphics card. It ran at 720 x 348 in mono. When I went to University in the early 1990's one of the perks was getting to use the latest NeXT workstations with the "MegaPixel" display at 1120 x 832.

Towards the late 1990's, 1600x1200 would have been considered a very high end monitor, my first monitor which could handle such a resolution was the eye-wateringly expensive Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 when it came on the market around 1998 - 1999 in the massive 19" format. The thing I remember most about that monitor wasn't the amazing flat screen, or the super sharp resolution - it was the weight... that thing practially had it's own gravitational field!.

The first machine I recall running a widescreen resolution was my Mac Powerbook G4, which I purchase in 2005 (it's still running and in regular usage!). Given that Apple pretty much blazed the trail for widescreen displays, I'd be surprised if anyone was running 1920 x 1200 even 10 years ago.

I think the parent...

...was making a witty retort to the grandparent:

It made me chuckle anyway, the thought of a nation of possums. I didn't see any offence intended towards Americans at all, just a play on words.

As for your wider question:

I think you'll find that's for the same reason many American's think it's ok to force their political ideals on to other countries without stopping to question whether it's an appropriate course of action. Call it ignorance, if you will. The world isn't short of people who believe their country is the best and everyone else is beneath them, any more than it's short of people who believe theirs is the "one true religion".

As someone who's lived and worked in America, Europe and Russia, Xenophobia and nationalistic insecurity often seem to me to be the views of those who have seldom experienced the world beyond their own borders. There's a difference between the business world, which pretty much gets on with it all, regardless; the political world, which huffs and puffs and spouts endless rhetoric according to when the next elections are; and the opinions and insults of those who have never visited the country in question. I wouldn't get too wound up about the latter two if I were you.

The problem with most ideological stances, is that they only work if the ideolody is applied to everyone else

Hence, Wikileaks stands for openness and public scrutiny of everything and everyone except Wikileaks. How much money has Wikileaks received in donations, and how much of it went in to Assange's pockets? Maybe an insider could post the answer on Wikileaks. No, wait...

Communism works great if everyone is equal and everything is shared equally... unless you happen to be a Party Member, in which case you have have all the trappings of Capitalism

Democracy is great idea, giving everyoe an equal say in how things are run. Until you get elected, then you don't need to worry about the electorate for another 4 or 5 years.

Dictatorships work well unless you disagree with the ideology of the dictator

Freedom of Information is a great idea, until you realise that all governments and companies need to undertake certain discussing in private in able to function effectively.

I do find it rather worrying that my home country has developed a propensity for locking people up because "they said things" over the past few years.

In general, the kind of things which are said I would view with disdain at best, or more often than not deem them pitiful. I do worry, however, about the level to which UK law is prepared to intervene to stop people from hearing things they might not agree with.

There are plenty of things I don't particularly like to hear or see - swearing in front of children, for example, or pontificating extremist views be they political, religious or racist. I am extremely uneasy, however, at the State deciding what is and isn't offensive on my behalf. The irony appears to be lost on our elected representatives, when they object to other countries enforcing the moral values of the state (eg Sharia Law) on to the general populace.

When I was a youngster, the standard response to any spoken insult was "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me". Sadly over the course of the last 30 years, we seem to have been taught to take offence easily, instead of feeling pity for the ignorance of someone who can only communicate in insults.

In the case of blatent harrassment, there is an argument for striking the balance between maintaining the right to free speech, and the desire to regulate - but recent over regulation has resulted in a culture where even when there is genuine reason to highlight an issue or question which relates to a "minority", it is impossible to speak freely for fear of being charged with a "hate crime"

I personally consider I probably have fairly conservative (small "c") views on most things, but I regard the risk of being offended by the opinion of others as simply the price of freedom. It wouldn't be a very free country if everyone had to think the same as me.

I couldn't say for sure now as it was a long time ago, but it was the recollection of Mondex cards being handed out in the streets which made me think of it as an anonymous system, along with the emphasis placed on the value being stored in the card itself.

I certainly think it had it's advantages, whether anonymous or not - I don't generally carry cash with me, and get caught out anywhere that doesn't take cards (eg the coffee stall on client sites) or has a minimum transaction fee (my local newsagent). Obviously if you only load up via ATMs, or by debit card then there is a level of traceability, but I honestly can't remember the original privacy specifications now.

Having done a bit of digging around on the Internet this evening, it seems the Mondex was bought out by Mastercard in the late 1990's - long after I'd moved on to other things. I guess it's safe to say that in whatever guise any of the Mondex technology exists these days, it's unlikely to be anonymous.

There is an interesting site showing some of the examples of the early cards I remember, and the original logo

Back in the 1990's, I was working on payment machines when the Mondex Trial started out in Swindon.

Essentially, this was just a smart card which you could load up with cash - if you lost your card, then you'd lost whatever cash was on it at the time.

At the time, I thought it was a useful idea, and it did take off to a certain extent for micropayments, particularly in newsagents, but as far as I recall, the trial fizzled out an died after a while. I do recall at one point the promoters were trying to hand out free Mondex cards loaded up with £5 but the general public just weren't ready for the concept 20 years ago.

This was also the case in the UK when the Net Book Agreement was in force in the early 90's.

For a while, everyone played ball, the smaller retailers were able to stay in business because nobody could undercut them, and a book cost the same price no matter where you bought it. Two larger booksellers (Dillons and Waterstones) then started to exploit a loophole by either punching a hole in the cover, or marking the edge of the pages with a pen. Then they could sell books at a discount as they were "damaged goods"

The Net Book Agreement stopped being effective for this reason, and was eventually formally scrapped.

I've spent the best part of my career undertaking tasks like this (as an external consultant), with my average time on an assignment lasting somewhere between 18 months and 3 years.

My aim on every project is to make myself obsolete - in that I try to get documentation up to a point where a suitably qualified individual could come in, read the documentation, and work the rest out for themselves.

My primary objectives are to implement some form of inventory control to document the what / where / why...

• What - What have you got (servers, software, services, contracts, operating systems, databases, users)
• Where - Where is it - where are your servers, what machine is this software licence running on?
• Why - What is the Business Justification for this service - what is the Business Impact if this database stopped running tomorrow?

Once you've got to that stage, then you're ready to get in to the real technical details. Remember that you are pitching your documentation to your successor, or to some imaginary "suitably qualified individual", so documenting what a system does and why is a higher priority than commenting every line of code.

It is possible to do with one person, depending on the size of the organisation, it can be particularly rewarding to do on your own - in a small business you often find some of the users have a good understanding of some of the systems, or are keen to learn.

You stated in your post that you've assumed the role of programmer and sole IT personnel - which means you need to learn to think like a manager as well as a techie (which is harder than most people imagine!). Once you learn to focus on the business priorities, you'll understand where to begin with the technical detail, and what level of documentation is required.

Here in the UK, drones have already been used by civilians to survey the masonary of the Stirling Bridge

The civilian contractors, however, appear to be more adept at handling the technology than Merseyside Police, who forgot to get permission from the Civil Aviation Authority to use their drone, before crashing it in to the River Mersey a year later.

I noticed some "Black Friday" emails from Amazon.co.uk and thought it was weird to name a promotion like a stock market crash. I honestly thought from the emails that they were running a consumer electronics promotion, and the only tenuous link they could find between all the offers was the colour black.

It was only when I saw this poll on Slashdot that I bothered to google "Black Friday" and promptly lost interest, as it has as much relevance to me here in the UK as "Thanksgiving" (which I discovered was last Thursday, only by googling "Black Friday").

Personally when I'm interviewing for staff (in the UK), I only look at what university they went to, not what they studied.

I'm not sure what other countries are like, but over here everyone under 30 years old has a degree, so the only interest I have in their university experience is whether they went to a "Red Brick" (Ivy league equivalent) or a "modern" university (re-branded technical college or polytechnic)

The fact you have a degree shows your ability to learn. What you learned in the past 4 years of University is of less interest to me compared to your potential to learn over the next 30 or 40 years of your career.

I personally value the fact someone even managed to get in to Oxford or Cambridge higher than someone else's 2:1 "degree" from some "university" I've never heard of in the North of England. Sadly this is what happens when governments devalue higher education with misguided targets such as 50% of the population must have a degree.

In ye days of antiquity, before even single digit /. UIDs, my parents actually used to drive a Ford Prefect. Well sometimes they drove it - the rest of the time they had someone tow it.

I can't say I've ever felt the need to use Public Transport to get to and from work, but if I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't try to VNC or SSH on to anything during the journey. Maybe this is how I get by with a small amount of RAM?

Incidentally, I'm typing this on a mobile dongle as I'm not near any wired or wireless network tonight. The mobile package I have is pretty cheap - about £15 per month for unlimited bandwidth. I've never noticed any particular performance issues with SSH on this setup, and don't use VNC, so couldn't comment on that one

Because I don't do anything that requires heaps of RAM. My main Mac has 4 GB, which is plenty for what I do - and I'm typing this message on my 7 year old G4 PowerBook which has 1.5GB of RAM and I've never even felt the need to upgrade it to the maximum 2 GB.

I guess I just don't need heaps of RAM to send emails, post messages on Slashdot, and run a Terminal window to SSH in to anything I have to do real work on!