Hmm... test towers...?

I use Llama to turn on my phone's wifi when I get near home. I live in a village, so I would assume there can't be more than a handful of cell towers in range of my house. The thing is, I have found I'd get home and my wifi wasn't on, so I get Llama to 'learn' the area, and all is well again until the next time. I think I got to 23 cell IDs before I cleared them all and then started from scratch. Over a period of a few months, I've got 22 in there right now.

One thing Llama doesn't do is tell you when a cell ID was last seen - but in the absence of better information, does anyone know what could be going on here?

Yes, but unlike every idiot with a smartphone, he doesn't suffer from Vertical Video Syndrome (VVS) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

True, but if you've got too fat to get out of bed, then having a fitter, slimmer, maybe 'ripped' body on stand-by could be useful (even if the body was the same age as your head). Likewise if you get injured, or have some localised disease or whatever.

I wonder what the psychological effects would be? I mean, I'm very used to my body - if I got a new one, would I miss the old one? Would I look at myself and think "who's that!?"? What about when gettin' it on with the Mrs? Would it feel like someone else was doing it all and I was missing out? I guess with a life expectancy of one day, it's not too much to worry about right now.

As David Attenborough said on a similar subject "that's sort of not the point". The point is that if temperatures are rising, human encouraged or not, we're still in trouble. Whilst cutting pollution to zero might not stop the rise, it presumably would reduce it and thus doing something about it would make sense as it would prolong the time we have with the world sort of as it is now.

I know enough about history to know the Romans (in part) came to England because they could grow wine here. We're getting back to having vineyards here, but they're relatively new and not at their peak yet. However, the question is... do we want to live in a world that has long since past? Maybe we can and do, but maybe our way of life depends on the current environment more than we'd care to admit.

+1 for this, and a strong caution about using someone else's server to host your stuff. One day, Github might well end up doing the same thing (yeah, I know it seems unthinkable now, but SF looked pretty cool and was never going to do something like this just a few years ago too).

PS. This post noticed that you have a virus on your PC. Please download AwesomeSuperWhizzoCrap and run it to fix the problem.

Since no one batted an eyelid to 'enhanced security measures' at airports meaning you needed to get to the airport an hour earlier than you used to, I guess the industry thought there was little point in trying to save the customer any time, and rather to focus on saving them some money instead. Probably a short-sighted view from us customers, particularly those that travel for work.

My first hack was realising that when copying an old BBC Micro game (I forget which one - probably wasn't a very good one), if the destination disk was write protected, the game would run, otherwise it wouldn't.

More recently, a fun one I did was at work. I was given a wireless headset for my desk phone which came with a 'handset lifter'. I found it 'lifted' whenever the phone was picked up, so I stuck it to the monitor arms and attached some chopsticks and a bit of paper. I then had a little flag that went up whenever I was on the phone :-)

The Linux equivalent client for Windows SSH is called 'telnet' ;-)

It's easy to go faster than light. All you do is construct a magic tube that's really really long. You fly that tube at (say) 0.75c. Inside the tube, you fly down its length at 0.75c and before you know it - you're going faster than light.Of course, no one can see you doing it, so you're not breaking any laws.

It's sort of how Warp drives work, only I've dumbed it down for the level of brains in TFA.

In my experience, IT gets zero priority elsewhere in the business. It's rare you'd ever get a really clear business case for work, and so it's rare you ever get any traction from elsewhere when you need it.

As an example, say you've got $pileofshit software that's umpteen years old, not used by very much and all the people who ever knew anything about it have left. Probably the "best thing" (for different views of "best") would be to schedule some dev work over the next few months/quarters to get rid of the legacy and move over to new stuff. That would give the remaining users of it the benefits of whatever replaced it, and gets rid of a management headache for the IT folks. Seems pretty reasonable, right? Well, not so much once it goes out "to the business". You'll get comments like "well, it seems to be working, right?", "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and "we've got higher priorities right now" etc, without anyone thinking about it in any depth at all. A more enlightened view would be to say "get rid of the legacy and it means the IT folk can be more nimble", but I've yet to really see anyone ever think like that.

It could be that all the IT departments I've ever worked at all just talk techno-babble to the rest of the organisation and so no one understands our awesome wisdom. It might be that I'm a perfectionist that expects every last little scrap of a problem to be eradicated. Or maybe, just maybe, the rest of the organisation just can't quite meet IT half-way and think outside their own little bubbles because "IT is too hard"?

So it seems to me that if an organisation has a problem with its IT department, it should probably look at itself as much as it looks at IT. Just as your finance people can't keep track of the money if you never keep any receipts, your IT department can't do every single thing you ask without question. If they're not doing what you need, you're not "working" them right.

The army said something wasn't bullet-izable? ;-)

It's also a contradiction of sorts.

If a god created every detail of the earth and universe around it, then that same god has created the environment for us to live and learn in. Thus, that god is responsible for people becoming more atheist in the western world, and people learning about (very convincing) science that contradicts the bible or whatever other texts. Thus, no matter what the creationists do, they cannot change the ultimate outcome.

If on the other hand, god simply created the building blocks for life (perhaps god pointed his finger in empty space and created the Big Bang?) then it gives way for all that free thinking and whatnot. It also makes the "beauty of a sunset" more of a coincidence than a specific desired outcome (and so doesn't look a lot like 'intelligent design' as it's generally defined). In this world, creationists can have an effect, but by definition their belief system is inaccurate.

Or then again, the FSM might have just farted out the universe by accident and it just so happens that we grew out of the smell of last nights curry.

Back on topic though - Google and all the others use various sources on the Internet to build 'graphs' which they use to tweak the search results. Wikipedia is a major source of such information, although I suspect other sources are gaining traction because of the vandalism that occurs on there.

If you're going down that route, then maybe Drupal might work out too? It needs a RDBMS, and is used for some pretty large scale stuff here and there. It's got some OO, but isn't hell-bent on it (yet), and is relatively easy to pick up (after an initial 'hump'). It means you can still use your front end skillz, you might still get some Perl time if people have some backendy stuff to do, but PHP isn't hard to learn from a Perl background.

That said, almost every place I've ever worked in has some surprisingly large and important Perl knocking about (even if the 'official' language has moved to to Python or Ruby or something). There's still perl-with-sysadmin work around, although maybe people aren't quite admitting it on the job spec.

...so it can do more of the recognition tasks it already does (like voice search, face recognition in photos, and others) in the phone without having to send them off to "the cloud" for processing. "Lighter" tasks such as predictive text and so on can be done faster (and consume less power), and so have more room to be better, if done in dedicated hardware.

So in terms of tracking, this could/should lead to less, not more tracking.