...or the small ones only hire people who believe the same things as the company. That is, if you're small (and you believe in privacy), you can only afford to hire people that also believe in privacy, have integrity and can keep a secret. Big companies cast their net much wider, and by the miracle of crap middle-management ensure that those people only do as they're told and don't think for themselves. Thus, those people need to be told to observe privacy through training courses.

Ultimately, privacy is either a feature your company bakes into what it does or else it's not. If it's not, then it only makes an appearance if people are told to do it (which won't happen unless someone sees some 'bottom line' in it).

Water and gas are delivered by 'tunnel' and they seem to work just fine. If you think of this as a refinement of that, then it makes a lot more sense. If they need to dig human-safe tunnels, then yeah, it's going to get expensive, but a "fat pipe" network seems pretty simple. The things that go up and down oil pipelines prove that we can have machines in pipes doing jobs for us, so I'm sure moving some boxes around is quite possible.

That said, I seriously doubt we'll all have a chute outside our house where we drop off or collect things. I guess the local shop might have one, but even then I doubt it. Some sort of depot network could work, and I guess each depot could be small so long as there was a hulking big warehouse somewhere nearby. The thing is, you wouldn't want to rent your depots because you can't move to alternative premises if the landlord jacks up the rent, so that means buying property which is expensive (at least up front). It could scale, but it's got a huge upfront investment and as Doddle (https://doddle.it) are finding, the 'depot' model isn't actually all that compelling and competing in a market where price is king isn't easy.

...and it seems to have sparked a lot of people into saying "they should have shot him before he got anywhere close" or similar. That really means "I want my politicians even more remote and inaccessible than they are now". This guy's got more to accomplish than he first thought :-(

Actually, I suspect there's some good in there somewhere. I have no idea, I've never interviewed there, and never worked there, but being slashdot, that won't stop me voicing an opinion ;-)

Whenever I've done any interviewing, I've always struggled to 'measure' the candidates in any verifiable way. I guess I just work on the feeling I get about them. However, if I had a nice intranet tool that could give me a few relevant questions to ask them, then maybe I could actually get a (technical) measure of their worth in addition to my gut-feel. In my experience though, the question/answer part of any interview is either completely convoluted, or else it's irrelevant, and so I wonder how Google keeps the quality up (partly by making the questions optional, I expect).

Either way, some of the stories I've heard of their interviewing 'techniques' of-old would have had me standing up, thanking the interviewer for their time and politely leaving. I guess I'm not a 'good fit' for Google, or wasn't when they did that stuff.

All those people who have multiple 30-40 inch monitors could buy one 50-60 inch monitor and have everything on one screen. Traders (for example) typically have four screens arranged in a square - they could just have one 'super screen' instead and get to use the 'gaps' between screens. I'm not in that league at all, but work gives me two screens to do devops. I'm not sure but I suspect the multiple monitor refresh affects my vision, so I'd love one massive one that did it all. Whether I'd pay early-adopter money for it is another matter though (and I'm sure my buy-shiny-screens-because-they-are-five-quid-cheaper-than-the-matt-ones employer definitely won't).

His owners are the same ones that own all of UK politics: The US.

People here in the UK are supporting the likes of UKIP because they'll keep those pesky Europeans at bay - the thing is, Europe is like a pussy cat compared to the behind-the-scenes back-channel under-the-counter pressure that comes from the US.

Whilst I dispute the claim about Drupal being crap, the core works just fine on Postgres (although you will have to live without a good chunk of the contrib modules, but in my experience most of them fall into your PHPtards category).

There is one very, very good module called dbtng_migrator which can take one type of Drupal database and convert it into another one. I just used it to convert some old MySQL based sites to Postgres. There are comments on the website about someone using it to convert from something to SQLite to 'sunset' a couple of Drupal sites. Either way, it's excellent - and means there's literally no reason to use MySQL (unless you want to). I'll be converting my home projects to Postgres when I get time to do it.

So what you're saying is that if "they" made the whole presidential race thing less boring, more people might be inclined to vote usefully?

It certainly sounds sensible to me - here in the UK we've got to endure something like 4 months of "cam-pain", during which all that really happens is a whole lot of name calling and seeing politicians doing things (very badly) in suits where they should have worn jeans and maybe practiced ping pong, cricket or digging holes or whatever they're doing. All pretty boring, and not at all inspiring to vote for the person you think is the best - you almost have to vote for the least worst because they've all engaged in the name calling, and they've all had lots of dirt thrown at them.

In the US it seems like an almost endless schedule of "woop woop" rallies and pseudo-religious pseudo-monarchy praising. I cannot imagine ever wanting to go to any US political rallies - I could barely hold myself back from slapping most politicians in the face if I ever met them, so doing lots of cheering and clapping and then crying when you get to shake their hand seems like a very strange idea to me.

With all the dozens of different Linux/BSD/Unix variants, and the different window systems they have, as a full time IT worker, I'd have a hard time working out what was what on them all. Good luck to the rent-a-goon at customs when I pull out my FreeNAS box with VMware hypervisor with an Ubuntu guest with Xmonad windowing system with an AES encrypted partition that's mounted by cryptsetup based bash script.

...and it didn't work in a lot of cases. In fact, it failed to meet half of the targets set for the programme (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/9087049/Iris-recognition-gates-scrapped-at-two-airports.html). All this, after the government touted the scheme as "watertight". Just goes to show the standards the government works to, eh?

No - that's the chinese ;-)

I'll bet most of them have an iphone though (instead of an Android of any variety).

Which one is going to get a girl to say "ooh, nice watch!" though? That's what'll matter to Apple.

I recently 'discovered' duplicity - it's very good for this sort of thing, but it can't use this or Glacier as a store. I can use S3 though, which you can use as staging for Glacier.

Personally, I use Duplicity to backup my NAS to another disk. I then have a script that copies full backups up to Glacier (and then deletes them). I'm working on a nicer glacier client for this, but the java one I downloaded from github works well enough to get going.

After a burglary:

Officer: Oh, so you have a camera right over your safe. Was it on and recording?
You: Yes, I have the guys face nice and clearly, good resolution, lighting etc.
Officer: Can we have a copy, please? We'll run it against our mugshot database
You: No, but you can give me your mugshots and I'll run it though my system if you like

As an aside, I got burgled once - I was the nice bloke in a crappy neighbourhood. I had 4 computers in the house at the time - only my laptop got nicked - I'm sure I could have had camera all over the place and got pictures of the guy. Not sure it'd have helped all that much back then though.

The beat cops asked for a crime scene investigator because they found a bit of a boot print on the floor. She came next morning (Saturday), and looked and sounded like she had a hangover. She wasn't impressed with the boot print. Eventually, another cop came over to sort of round things off. I asked what was really going to happen about this - to his credit, he was honest - he said not much, but it'll go on the crime map so will be contributory to any possible future work if there's a pattern. Never did see my stuff again, and whilst the insurance paid out well, you never replace everything exactly as you'd like it.