Fuck it doesn't even support ASCII, let alone Unicode.

Try doing an English pound sign:

£

Nope.

You can argue semantics ("can do" vs "can legally do"). Fine.

Until you sell the house and have to do those home reports. Because if it's not up to spec, or the new homeowners find this post, that's a criminal act. You can say it's as daft as you like, it's still illegal to do and can come back to bite you years later - e.g. have you noticed that high-power switches (e.g. cooker switches), terminal covers, consumer units, etc. are date-coded in most instances now? How do you go about explaining the 2015 date code on something in a house you bought before then, sold after then, and have no works receipt from a Part-P installer for? It's actually just illegal. And you can be made to pay someone registered to come in, strip it out, and do it properly, at any point.

Fuck, if your windows aren't FENSA-registered-installer fitted and you sell your house, they will make you pay for insurance for them now (assuming your buyer is happy to accept that) unless you can provide a valid cert from an installer for them.

We were all taught to wire plugs in school. That's the extent of the works you can legally undertake on your electrics now. It's actually part of the Building Regs now, so selling house means it can crop up and it's treating just like knocking down walls, stripping out firewalls, playing with the gas, etc.

"And no, an electrician doesn't test every single phone and laptop before it gets plugged in because WHAT FUCKING PLANET ARE YOU FROM."

The UK. Where PAT testing of every "portable appliance" is mandatory for schools.

Yes, we have to test every single cable that gets plugged in. For precisely the reasons stated (student buys cheap-shit Chinese charger rather than expensive Apple charger and ends up catching the classroom on fire... been there, seen it, done it).

The outlets in questions are NOT for public use. There may be ones for public use on some trains, but not on the Overground (those are locked ones, with a hex-key, for cleaners only).

It has nothing to do with neurotic dictators - UK and EU electrical law is just stricter. You can't modify cabling in your home without being Part-P certified, you certainly can't modify cabling in a school without being insured and certified and ALL portable appliances need to have an annual test (and/or a test before first use) unless they are literally brand new out of the box.

Same as the last 15 schools I worked in (state, private, primary, secondary, further, consultancy, permanent position, it doesn't matter).

Technically it's theft. You've cost the rail company money (pittance though it may be) and potentially risked a fire by plugging an unknown device into an electrical socket.

Even in my workplace, that will get you disciplined. You at least have to get a PAT test before you can do that and it's only by the goodwill of the employer that they let you use the sockets.

Incredibly petty? Maybe. But that's not the point. And getting aggressive about it is what really gets you arrested and in trouble, you could have talked your way out of the first "arrest" without problem but it may have made you late for work.

But, yes, technically, it's not your socket, it's not your electricity, the sockets are CLEARLY marked that you're not allowed to do that, you didn't ask permission.

In my workplace (schools), we have told off parents for doing exactly this during open-days, etc. They just wander into the school and plug into the first socket they see and then leave the device on and charging and wander off.

We use threat of the same law to stop them doing it (but we probably wouldn't go so far as arrest, but arrest is NOT a charge - people always confuse this distinction - you arrest somebody to stop them leaving while you work out if they've actually committed a crime that anybody cares about), but we're not worried about the electricity cost as much as the electrical safety implications. If their cheap shit Chinese charger catches fire and burns down the school, we don't care who was liable, but our insurers and lawyers sure will.

And I'm not talking tiny state schools, but large independent (private) schools where pissing off a parent costs you more money than you earn in a year if they pull their kids out. But still we don't let them do it.

It's petty. But it's still theft, effectively (the name of the charge is just a specific one for theft of electricity). Arrest may be an overreaction but arrest is not charge. Getting aggressive over something you know you shouldn't have done (no matter how petty) gets you arrested twice, and certainly charged at least once.

Don't plug into other people's sockets without asking. And if you can't ask or think the answer might be no, don't plug into the socket anyway.

And then there's the question of how did you activate the socket because all the UK train sockets I see are keyed with a large hex-key in order to turn them on. It's not just a case of plugging in by accident not realising the socket wasn't for public use.

HTTPS interception? Pretty bog-standard nowadays, you shouldn't need to explain what it is on here.

Why it should break non-web stuff? Fuck knows. You need to sack your IT team or get them to make exclusions for the sites you need.

Joining your computer to a tethered phone and then later reconnecting to the corporate network? Sackable offence in my workplace.

You're both being dickheads. But the question is really do you *need* access to external git/svn/etc.? If so, then working around it in such a way is not the way to do it.

"This website is blocked.

Category: Whatever.

If you wish to unblock, please contact Administrator."

Anything else is just open to abuse and you may as well not have a web filter at all (P.S. This has NOTHING to do with your firewall).

You still have voicemail? That's cute.

The rest of the world moved on from the 90's.

My Android phone has a data measuring tool built-in and also warns and stops when you hit the limit. It's not rocket-science, it's already there in the settings on any vaguely recent phone (fuck knows about Apple, because I don't care about them).

If you don't have a vaguely recent phone then install something like Onavo, which does exactly that.

Also, if you're doing 2Gb on a mobile, stop using the mobile for data, connect to Wifi, or up your package. How hard is this? Pissing about shrinking images hasn't done much since the days of Opera Mobile and WAP.

This is Slashdot and you HAVEN'T worked this shit out?

Is it 5GHz yet?

Maybe pure water, but handling pure water is a pain in the butt and the slightest contamination will make it conductive.

A value that fluctuates every single second (e.g. an exchange rate between Euro and USD for instance)
A value that decreases over time (inflation, etc.)

Do you understand sharing billions among the governments so that every country owes every other country money and vice versa? Because I sure as hell don't.

Do you understand Quantitative Easing? I don't.

Do you understand quite a lot about any currency whatsoever beyond you earn a number, you have that number in your bank, and at some point you "cash out" that number for physical goods that may, or may not, be the same price as last time you did that?

How much is billions of Euros of Greek asset worth at the moment? How about Zimbabwean dollars?

Bitcoin is no different to anything else. Your USD or GBP or Euro means NOTHING except by common agreement between all parties as to what it means.

So don't give me that shit.

Every laptop I've ever had died from hinge-strain breaking the hinges.

To the point that I'm always ultra-careful opening and shutting any laptop, but it still happens.

I'm quite impressed that the Samsung I use at the moment isn't showing a single crack yet, but I imagine it won't be long.

This just seems like the worst of bad ideas possible. And it hinges on the side? God, that's going to put tremendous strain on parts of the screen that were never designed to hold weight.

Even if it's not just a con, there's no way that's a practical product unless the original laptop is designed for that extra weight and strain. And, I'm incredibly suspicious of the price, and also incredibly suspicious of quite how you're going to get that to work with any laptop.

Try tponline.co.uk - which is the UK , Teacher's Pension (and List 99 temporary criminal record check before the "proper" check is done) website.

Ironically, it's one of the few website that REQUIRES a client certificate for every user who logs into it (which is a pain in the butt and costs a fortune as only they can supply the correctly signed client certs).

The signup page, however? SSL v2.0 and vulnerable to EVERYTHING:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltes...

An "F" rating on SSL Labs. First time I've ever seen that on a domain that I've thought to check.

Well.. personally speaking I don't expose any functionality to the net unless it can be updated, authenticated, secured, QoS'd, logged and monitored.

So pretty much all those devices shouldn't BE on the boundary of your network, the only thing standing between you and the outside world.

If you want to do that, use reverse proxies, not port-forwards, use VPN's, not opening up some cheap Chinese webcam to your home network and the random people of the Internet.

So it doesn't actually matter if they used TLS or not - they are communicating only across a secured network anyway. You may as well just HTTP or telnet into them from your VPN.

Just make sure that your frontline, Internet-facing, open-to-attack-from-the-Internet device if secured. So your VPN/firewall. And that's it.

Ah, this would be the Iceland that "had to obtain emergency funding from the International Monetary Fund and a range of European countries in November 2008". And also the Iceland whose economy is "small and subject to high volatility".

The Iceland whose GDP is worth less than what the UK spend each year on weddings alone. The Iceland whose debt to other countries is actually more than 100% than that pittance of GDP.

With 3 people per square kilometre and less than the population of a medium size town in the UK (or any one single London borough).

Sorry, pal, you can make all the claims you like. The ONLY counterexample you provide is actually doing no better than anyone else, and is on a scale so small as to be statistically useless anyway.

I'm not a banker or economist, by the way, just a mathematician.

And when the Icelandic banks crashed, other countries had to compensate savers who had been using them as the Icelandic banks had zero actual protection for their customers at all. All that teaches you is that people WON'T invest in Icelandic banks because they just lose their money if it all goes wrong.

Sure, there's a point at which you have to let the banks fall over to save other things, but that's true of anything - even Greece today. We're choosing to let them collapse rather than extend more and more bailouts to them. It's just a question of scale.

An country that's got the population of Pittsburgh and the GDP less than a UK mobile phone network's entire worth is - pretty much - a nonsensical thing to extrapolate to the world economy.