I heard of a company making little storage base stations that would provide local, fast access to stuff (slowly downloading from sat. sources, I believe). I don't know how sensible that is, but a local proxy could help out for normal web browsing. I'd imagine that browsing is the main activity that they're trying to 'enable' in far-flung locations - it'd be enough for a text chat, even if voice or video aren't really feasible.

I doubt this will replace your (probably fairly crappy) DSL connection at home, let alone any sort of fibre connections. However, for places where even dialup is not really feasible, it seems like something is better than nothing.

I've had a bit of time to play with Docker, and for the most part, it's gone pretty well and I quite like it (it feels like it has some rough edges, but I guess those'll get sorted out over time).

In a (possible) future, $work wants to replace VMs with containers. Some of those VMs are imaginary at the moment, as we'll tend to run multiple instances (of say Tomcat, Apache, Postgres, whatever) on a single box, and then 'migrate' some of them to another box when things get a bit short on resource.

At present, we find capacity planning pretty hard - we mostly just keep piling things onto a box until either the RAM is full, or the CPU looks like it's getting used up. How could containers help us here? I can see how to do it with VMs, but containers just throw processes all over the 'hypervisor' and so you're basically no better off than running without containers (in terms of capacity planning, at least).

For me at least, I can completely understand a 'private cloudy' future where everything is a VM. Unless I can get the same understanding with Docker (or any other container), I can't see how I could support/recommend using containers except for some (relatively) limited use cases.

I'm sure people far more clever than me have thought of this, but why couldn't you just tow a cable behind the craft and use that to communicate? I presume the cable wouldn't get too hot as it's long and straight, and behind whatever heat shield you have. I have no idea how long the plasma tail runs to, but presumably you could make the cable long enough to get into a bit that was 'washy' enough to communicate?

Piss off a psychic: throw them a surprise party!

I think we Brits are culturally different from the Americans, which is (in part) why this is the way things are here. I'd say, as a general rule, most Brits don't want to be the next Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or whatever. They'd be happy to just carve out a nice living from a job they enjoy. As such, the 'killer instinct' that so many of the 'big' American business leaders demonstrate (or write books about) isn't something we have much of. As a result, if you haven't generated any income (ideally a modest profit) then you're probably not going to make it because you don't have any "killer instinct" at all. A modicum of income/profit shows you're at least able to operate that way, and so may have a business that's a good investment.

I am of course generalising a lot here, and there are plenty of exceptions in both directions that either prove or disprove what I'm saying. You get the idea...

As for Dragons Den... I'd love to have a product that's an absolute no-brainer. I dunno, maybe an anti-gravity drive, or a teleporter or something. Then I'd like to rock up to Dragons Den, and ask for a million pounds in return for 1% of my business, just to see what they'd do.

And just to stay on-topic: I've visited Silicon Valley a couple of times. It's sunny almost all of the time, and generally I've found the people to be pretty nice. It's way, way to spread out though, so you have to drive everywhere (which means no after-work drinking). Probably just as well though, as it's something of cultural vacuum in my experience. A few places are nice enough, but not a great deal of depth to anything as far as I can tell. I'm sure the locals know better places than I ever found, but San Francisco, by comparison, is a far more culturally interesting place to live (and you can get public transport home after going out).

...which means any regulated industry (banking, financial, insurance whatever) now has a higher duty of care than the government. In regulated industries, you have to keep all emails - regardless of whether the user deleted them or not. You don't have to answer FOIA, but you do have to answer to the courts when asked to do so.

You'll also note that even bankers get worse pensions (pound for pound) than MPs. Yes, those feckers in Whitehall are getting paid plenty for doing less than anyone else.

Then why have we had to wait for so long? By whatever justification of the need to question him now, I can easily think of a counterpoint why it should have been done the moment he went into the embassy. The only reason I can think that this wasn't done sooner was in the hope he'd get pissed off and give himself up, which is roughly equivalent to the teenage ploy of "I'll piss $girlfriend off so much that she'll dump me instead of me having to do it myself". And so we arrive right back at the start - any justification for any of this is easily countered.

Not removing - adding.

They'll break a fibre in two places - one 'obvious' and the other not so much. It depends what detection the owner can do as to where 'obvious' might be. While the owner is detecting the problem, isolating where it is on the fibre and sending out crews to fix it, the tap is applied in the second location, along with suitable repairs and whatnot.

When the 'obvious' break is repaired, the owner just sees the light going down the fibre once again - they're not aware there's a tap. Indeed, if the tap consumes a little bit of light, forcing a recalibration at either end, it'll be attributed to the repair made at the 'obvious' break, and not the addition of the tap.

Sadly, I'm pretty sure we'll never know which one of us is right about this particular point though.

What if 'being ripped off by your bank' wasn't really a possibility because the regulator/laws made it so? Where I live, if my bank claims I authorised a payment and I say they didn't, they have to provide evidence that I really did do it. Since none exists, they have to pay for the fraud. As such, apart from 'reasonable steps', I feel no need to help my bank out with their fraud problems. On the other hand, they're very motivated to invest in proper technology that really does prevent fraud, rather than penalising their customers. For all intents and purposes, you have to use a bank if you want to live any sort of life - as such, you should be protected from them, no?

As for seeing you were in a bar and then in a traffic accident - what sort of law do you live under? Where I live, you'd have to actually be proven to be drunk before you'd be considered at fault because of intoxication. No need for location data there - just do a blood test. Likewise, just because your phone says you were at home or down the pub doesn't mean you weren't shooting the cashier at the petrol station. Maybe things are different in other countries though...?

If you want to tell your bank where you go, when, and for how long, that's up to you. For me personally, I don't see that they need that information, and so I don't give it to them. Should my bank ever decide adding this tracking into their app is a good idea, I'll uninstall it, and quite probably consider a more enlightened bank to look after my money for me.

> They are supposed to look out for the greater whole.

Most politicians are just on the look out for the greater hole :-(

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.