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Submission + - Events Calendar for Local Community

hughbar writes: I live in a London suburb that has many activities and classes, yoga, IT [of course], running, art, assorted volunteering and many others. With the help of the local council, we'd now like to make a centralised, searchable database of these, with a number of helpful features:
  • Easy to make submissions, otherwise the whole thing will always be out of date
  • Web accessible [obviously] but mobile phone friendly as well
  • Maybe, publish and subscribe, so people can 'subscribe' to yoga listings for example
  • Handles repeating events, like a classical web calendar
  • Maybe, can be consolidate with nearby events calendars

I'm aware of http://mrbs.sourceforge.net/ and webcalendar: http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.... for example. But I'm wondering whether there are other suggestions, especially as this is a useful social application. And, yes, I'd like it done with open source, then we can tailor it.

Comment Re:Accenture? (Score 1) 284

Thank you. I'm 63, in the UK, have been alongside Accenture [Arthur Andersen as it was then] for about forty years during various projects. Every one has been a mess equally composed of their arrogance and incompetence.

I say this without bitterness, never worked for or been fired by them, for example. However a great deal of my tax money has been wasted by them, since, for reasons that no-one sane understands, they seem to be a darling of governments nearly everywhere, that does include the UK.

In the larger picture we badly need to fix the 'gap' between dot gov and sane IT, make a lot of stuff better, improve personal outcomes and save us a bunch of public cash. None of the big contractors seem to be very effective, but Accenture is surely one of the very worst.

Comment Thanks goodness for that... (Score 2) 331

As a 63 year old, life spent in IT, I fear e-books: DRM, can't share, they will be very selective about texts [blockbusters, crowd pleasers], 'book' can be removed remotely etc. etc. That's apart from the pleasure of having a house full of book, trashy science fiction from the 60s and 70s, crime novels and even a few serious books too.

Comment Fahrenheit 451 Got a Lot Easier Recently (Score 1) 548

For those younger readers of slashdot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

We don't need firemen to burn books now, we just need Amazon and all the big corps that control the various e-readers to send 'censor with extreme prejudice' packets [I've made that up, but it'll come] to those naughty people who read naughty books. We must think of the children, mustn't we?

And of course the next thing is radicalism [people really need protecting from Karl Marx don't they] and unpalatable material [people need protecting from Mein Kampf too]. Let's not forget cult movies etc. which we can dump in the constant change of format from VHS to DVD to Blueray to next-profitable thing.

The world will be really lovely when we've finished all this, just Disney, idiot talent competitions and gameshows. Personally, I can't wait, can you? Meanwhile, I'm stocking up on physical books whilst they're still available, that way they have, at least, come around and break the door down to get them.

Comment Re:Who is really endangering agents' lives? (Score 1) 165

And also, the MI5 [internal security service for the UK, as opposed to MI6 or the secret service] do a pretty good job of losing data themselves: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/03/28/second_spy_loses_laptop/ Sometimes, one feels, it's questionable whether they need help from journalists, simply for the act of 'losing' anyway.

Comment And the UK is heading the same way (Score 1) 835

Robert Peel, the founder of our police, believed in 'policing by consent'. We, in the UK, are drifting further and further from that with armoured police vans, tasered up thugs 'patrolling' and [one recent incident I witnessed] 10 police for one angry unarmed man in a incident in a bus queue. Birghtly painted cars including one I've seen recently marked 'interceptor', they've obviously been watching Mad Max. They are rude and patronising if you ask them something and violent towards any protestors. Crime is declining here too.

Most of the bad trends tend to drift in here from the US and this is one.

I was mugged last year. It wasn't very serious, but, in spite of 12 similar incidents they couldn't catch the guys because their main 'method' was 'look at CCTV footage', they are not 'near' the community, something that would enable them to do 'police work'. Go figure.

Comment Re:err, can you walk me through it? (Score 1) 250

Skynet jokes aside, it's [my opinion] a general problem with sub-symbolic and also, in a related area, data mining. It works [sometimes], produces a number rather than a model or chain of reasoning and we can't really follow it. I wouldn't be really happy to have something like this in an autopilot, for example. Losing control and depending entirely [no shutdown and back to 'manual'] on systems that we don't completely master [actually with the amount of things that are 'connected' we're heading there anyway] is not a great recipe for the future.

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