There's nothing requiring you to go to registered doctors or official hospitals.

When getting sick, why don't you fly over to Africa (the plane tickets cost you about as much as a night in hospital in the US), and ask some witch doctor to treat you (his fees for a full treatment may be less than what your regular doctor will charge you for a consult)? Maybe it's because you hope to get a proper treatment at your registered doctor, who you know has finished a rigorous training, and that the hospitals you're treated are maintained to high standards?

There are good reasons for the licensing and registration systems that are in place for not only medical personnel, but also commercial transport services such as taxis. There may be room for improvement on the existing systems, but abolishing is certainly not going to be an improvement.

Not knowing the intricacies of UK rules, what you mention still means that not just anyone who happens to own a car may start offering rides for pay.

The key is "Licensed Hire Vehicles" - they're licensed, so there must be some requirements for those that do not apply for normal private cars. Probably extra driving course and insurance, that kind of things. And as soon as they're licensed, they're legal to drive people around.

The problem of most Uber drivers is that they are not licensed to carry paid passengers.

The problem if the randomness of the third party is that you don't know who it is - for many random third parties it indeed won't matter, but not for all random third parties. You never know where the image ends up.

Stroke order is indeed essential for proper software recognition.

Never seen pinyin in great use: too many homophones for that to work well. There are much better methods than pinyin.

However those methods only work well with a keyboard, while handwriting works better on small screens like mobile phones. Looking around me on the MTR I see most people use handwriting, some use other methods (such as "nine stroke" which basically uses the numerical phone keyboard for character input, advantage is that the soft keys on the screen are of reasonable size).

Handwriting input is routine for input of Chinese characters on mobile phones, and has been for many years already. The character recognition part works quite well there, and is certainly a lot harder than for the very limited Western alphabet. So unless I'm missing something, there doesn't seem to be anything innovative about it.

As long as you can be sure that this third party doesn't know you, you're fine.

But how can we be sure of that? Maybe this unknown third party uploads it with your name or other identifying information to some image site, Google finds and indexes it, and suddenly people that know you and that for fun search your name in Google, can find it. Same accounts for your future prospective employer, who receives lots of application letters, likes your resume, and a few Google queries later has your private parts in all their glory on his screen. As a result you never get a chance to even come for an interview. Not too far-fetched a scenario.

So that's how an unknown third party seeing them may hurt you.

If you happen to be a celebrity (if only as captain of your local school's football club) it's even more daunting.

In turn, helicopter parenting is made so much easier thanks to mobile phones. After all, now there's the option to call your kids every 10 mins, no matter where they are.

Banknotes are pretty anonymous, if someone steals a banknote from me, that sucks as I lose some money, however if he shows it to someone else there's no additional harm to me.

Now compare that to digital nude photos, especially the ones with the person's face in it.

Agreed with the "should not" part.

However "should not" and "not doing" are two different things - especially for exactly kids that age. It's the age of self-discovery, of rebellion, doing things they know they shouldn't do, without yet realising the consequences.

In my time (I was that age in the late 1980s), taking nude pics of oneself and sending it to school friends was just not an option. That's probably the only reason it didn't happen back then, or any time before the early 2000s - the time web cams became ubiquitous, and instant digital shots could be made from the privacy of one's bedroom, with little to no chance of parents finding out. Nowadays of course web cams have been replaced by mobile phones, making it even easier.

It is more reasonable to understand that there are always kids that actually do this, trying to stop them is futile. Instead teaching general computer security as part of modern day computer lessons would be the way to go. One major part should be to have all people understand that if you can see a picture, you can save that picture, period. No matter what the app proclaims. It may be hard, you may not be able to pull it off yourself, but it can be done, and as a result those pics and other data may end up where you don't want them to.

He's got the whole day to cover... just read GP.

That way the pool of potential candidates is pretty small. Especially as in this case they're talking about internships, which is typically for young people.

Close the windows and use the day for a Dr Who marathon or so.

Unfortunately last time I browsed without adblocker there are still those flashy animated gifs in use. Very distracting, very irritating, making it hard to read the text you want. That's why flashblock is not enough for me.

So true.

The problem is that Facebook et.al. are trying too hard, and the advertisers think that's the way to go. It's not.

It used to be much simpler. Tech ads go on Slashdot, motorcycle boot ads go on a motorcycling enthusiast site, hand bags go on a fashion accessories site. The mere fact that I'm reading Slashdot means I'm interested in tech. If I'd be reading a motorbike site, I'd likely be interested in motorbikes and related stuff. When visiting a baby site, guess what, good chance I'm expecting one or just got one, and would be interested in baby beds, baby clothes, baby toys and crap like that. What's so hard about that?

And then there are the rare moments that I'm actively looking at ads - those moments are typically when I'm searching Google in order to buy something, or to book a hotel somewhere, or something like that. As long as Google is smart and bases the ads on the keywords that I enter there and then, they often tend to be relevant to what I'm interested in. As a matter of fact I've used Google AdWords quite some time ago, and it did get me quite some business, it was money well spent. Nowadays in a different business the clicks are just too expensive to be worth it... (I have to offer USD 1.3-1.5 per click, even on what I thought are rather specific and uncommon search words).

I don't think there is really a need for advertisers to know my age, whether I'm married, or my current gender. My search terms, and the sites that I visit, should give plenty of clues about that. I know a few sites out there that actually have relevant ads (and where the ads are not blocked by the adblocker!) as they sell their ads themselves. Of course for most small sites that's not practical, so they buy wholesale from an ad network, and get crap. Luckily that's also the crap that's adblocked easiest.