Easier:

Combine with Kinect-like scanning to make a 3D photocopier.

Then Games Workshop would go bust in a year...

I'm a Dyn.com customer of old so I got an email to tell me that the promise to be "always free" back then holds for me, even if not for newer customers.

But when I was looking for a more modern replacement, I was expecting to be able to set up a Dyn-compatible service for my old domains using an external Linux server. There doesn't seem to be anything easy for that.

What I'd like is a Linux package which you can install on a server, and have it provide Dyn-like updating, without me having to play with BIND and all sorts (I don't do nameserving, so it's no particular fuss to install a nameserver JUST for this purpose). I thought DNSMasq might do it, as it's so powerful it tends to do everything, but that doesn't seem to offer it.

And if it's Dyn.com compatible in the protocol it uses to accept reports from clients, it's just a matter of hacking in your IP instead of Dyn.com's. But I couldn't find anything that wasn't a case of "install this series of Perl scripts in such a way that they play with the internals of your existing, perfectly working BIND setup, and basically get called from web-requests with permissions enough to do just that".

Anyone know of some software that works like the server-side of Dyn.com so I could host my own DynDNS service for my home accounts using a static, external server?

Your friends tells you about this thing which he believes in and tries to convince you. But you're not sure.

Do you:

a) Go along with them, get absorbed, spend hours listening to their arguments, ask around a circle of friends that you share with him about their opinion? (i.e. imagine pre-Internet generations where if you didn't know someone personally, or were a part of a group, you didn't even get to meet them, let alone communicate extensively)

b) Go to your social network online, look up vast resources, have the arguments for and against in front of you, find out all the dirty secrets, cliques, etc. hear tell from friends-of-friends-of-friends about things they do and believe in?

It's just a product of information availability. And it works both for and against us now. It's now harder to quash rumours started by a random person with no basis from spreading but it's much easier for such rumours to reach the ears of the interested - even if subject to court order in some cases!

And it's not just religion. It's products, services, celebrities, charities, you name it. Before, you didn't have a source of information likely to know both sides and the in and outs of everything that you could consult confidentially and extensively and get THOUSANDS of peoples opinions in a matter of minutes. Now it's a click away and you're taught to use it for school research before you're able to write.

On a personal note, I'm agnostic, so it's no great surprise to me that the more facts people have available to consult, the less seriously religion is taken. "Faith" is something I see as laziness - "I don't want to check this fact, I'll just trust it's true" isn't the best principle to live by. In fact, it's that exact principle that is being eroded by the simplicity of fact-checking nowadays (even if not perfect, there are still good sources of actual fact rather than common belief out there).

Religion has been on a bit of a death-spiral for years. My country is pretty much turning churches into nothing more than pretty historical buildings that you visit and feel obliged to drop a coin in the box to pay for your nice photos of the stained-glass. My father-in-law is religious and bemoans the complete lack of religion in his local area - he visited dozens of churches before he found one with any kind of active services, and they didn't suit his preference.

By contrast, he says that the US is a much more faithful country and you can still draw crowds of tens of thousands at certain churches.

But I think that's more about celebrity, and the older generation, than anything to do with religion itself.

Religion is dying a little, but to be honest we were in a kind of renaissance of religion the last couple of hundred years anyway.

Feel free to demonstrate how the theories and models do not match reality, and provide a better theory and model. In the meantime, your opinion is worth squat.

Just over a kilobyte, I think.

But that can be compressed as it doesn't NEED to be human-readable any more. So you can easily fit in a few Kb of useful data, I should think.

And as data density rises, so does the error correction but if the QR code reads (you have a device that reads them directly, why bother to snap a shot then process the image separately?) then it was a success. Hover and hold until you get the beep, on almost any smartphone made this decade.

But, no, you won't get CORRUPT data. The QR code either works or doesn't, like barcodes either scan or don't. You don't scan a book and get sold a DVD. Same principle.

What you might have is trouble getting a decent QR read on a crappy low-res camera but that's - again - no worse than the prior situation where I've seen kernel-panic screenshots you can't even read, let alone decode.

You lose nothing.

Anything that could have been logged to disk will have been.

Anything that couldn't is probably FAR TOO LONG to even start taking down any other way and almost certainly will cut through the screen buffer limit anyway (every kernel panic I've had - which is about a dozen I think - was like that).

Let's compare and contrast to, say, Windows. Bluescreen with minidump and error code that has 7 million potential causes.

At least with a QR code, for those totally undumpable errors, you stand half a chance of snapping it and providing several kiloybytes of useful information for someone to work from - that they know hasn't been transcribed wrongly. And can be taken from even a completely hung machine.

It's a good idea. Someone needs to make a patch for it. The biggest problem - as always - will be making sure you can get to the point that you can write to the video memory and do so with enough processing / storage to be able to write something useful into the QR code.

It's not.

The problem is the overlap between basic consumer rights ("statutory rights"? Heard the phrase anywhere? Like every contract ever "not affecting them"? Actually, they can't be affected by contracts whether the contract says or not!) and contract law.

Yes, you can sign away an awful lot. But you cannot be expected to be held to a contract held as "unfair" (which this one almost certainly would be). The problem is proving that can be expensive.

Never forget that what you sign is only one part of what you've got on your side. You can sign, for example, that you would become a slave that your employer can whip. Your employer CANNOT enforce that though. Some rights, including your consumer rights, cannot be signed away and automatically make such things null and void.

If you took this to even small claims court, it would be found to be unfair, it would be made void, and you would not pay anything.

If, however, they took reasonable steps to inform you of the change, and got consent (even implied, but that's tricky), and gave you time to disagree (usually by termination of said contract), then it would be binding on you. Then it would be considered "fair" as it's not asking you to do anything illegal or drastic.

For future reference, this applies to ALL KINDS of contracts. The law is in place to override your ability to do this to your customers in an unfair way and take priority over ANYTHING they've signed. It just might take a customer taking it through small claims (or larger) courts in order to prove that. And, chances are, unless a lot of them do, they will not retract the policy in the company unless the court orders them to. So you might win, but no other customer (who probably won't bother to take it to court) would, and things like that.

I've used 123-Reg in the past. They were atrocious. But you can be sure that if I were a customer, there'd be a letter winging it's way to head office to state the above. Given the track record I have (and I'm no lawyer), they might tie up any domain I had for a few weeks but in the end they've been transferring my domains for free. I don't care enough to make them do it for other customers, that's those customers problem.

And the problem is that 99% of consumers think, like you, that this is "legal" just because it's on paper. And when you get the first letter in reply saying that they don't agree with your interpretation, etc. etc. etc. and basically saying "Fuck off" in legalese, you'll accept it grudgingly and just pay the £12. It's only the pedantic fuckers like me who actually enjoy being proven right that will go through the system and bug the shit out of them until they admit it.

It's not legal.
Your consumer rights ride straight over it.
But that doesn't mean it'll be easy to "convince" them (they know, their lawyers know, but they'll fight you all the way until you cause them more hassle than you're worth).

But take it to court and it'll be laughed out, if you even get that far. But it will cost you money (which you *can* get back from them) but most importantly an awful lot of time to sort out. And that's exactly what they rely on.

Okay, smartarse.

You have a lab microscope that costs £100,000. It's been working for 10 years and does exactly what you need. Attached to it is a PC to do image processing. That PC is supplied as part of the machine and includes one-off software to operate the microscope.

Now you say, of course, just ask how much it costs to get the equivalent software for 7, eh? Simple. But the microscope manufacturer hasn't sold anything to you in ten years. So they'll sell you a Windows 7 version. They'll charge you £90,000 for it. Or for £95,000 they'll sell you it attached to a new microscope worth £90,000 on it's own.

What do you do?

Well, actually you work for the NHS. Which had fuck-all money as it pisses it away on management consultants. So instead of either option, you get fuck-all. Now when the attached PC dies, you need to hope your IT guys have an image. When your IT guys move to Windows 7 for the central system, you better hope it can connect to it to store the images. You can't virtualise it because the DRM on the interface cost the manufacturer at least £10,000 to implement to stop you doing precisely that.

Now you're screwed. You can't put your lab slides into the national health system without a lot of manual pissing about. You can't justify buying just the Windows 7 version of the software / drivers (because you might as well just buy a new microscope, and that would come under buildings budget or medical equipment, not IT upgrades). You can't negotiate them down anywhere near sense. You can't replace the machine and - eventually - it's going to die.

And every year the microscope manufacturer puts up their prices by £10,000.

Now multiply by every hospital in the country.
Now multiply by every piece of large equipment (genetics machines, blood samplers, X-Ray machines, ECG's, MRI's, etc.).

Soon, it just becomes better to leave it the fuck alone and wait until you NEED to do something. Then you can justify it, now that it's broken and you need it. And then you can get the government to step in and negotiate a deal. That's what's happened. And the government have said "For fuck's sake!" and gone to MICROSOFT rather than the multitude of equipment manufacturers.

Think I'm exaggerating? My girlfriend is a geneticist in an NHS hospital. The machine she works on is 15 years old, dog-slow compared to the state of the art, and runs off Windows XP embedded. When it dies, the IT team has to track down an old IDE hard drive to fit into it and image it back. And she has to manually transfer images to the "real" integrated system to put them on patient records.

And the NHS haven't even BEGUN to get off Windows XP on the desktop where she works. Precisely because of, and a contributing factor to, this shit.

Great. So what's it like as a fucking fire alarm? Because the point of this article is that they are near damn useless.

Personally, anything that is even capable of throwing up a 404 when it should be waking me the fuck up is not something I'd spend any kind of money on. And that's basically the problem behind the recall - wave your arms (e.g. yawning when going to bed) and it just turns itself off and stops detecting for a while. There's no evidence at all that this thing has been designed to life-critical standards (which I would accept for a complex electronic device because, well, air-bags, commercial airplanes, etc. already have that stuff but it's DAMN expensive to do that). As such, it's a pretty toy that you're betting your life on.

Sorry, but there's a reason that some things are just simple. Fuses. Earth cables. Emergency Exit signs. Door handles (at least when trying to exit). Fire alarms.

I put batteries in you. You beep like fuck when you think there's a fire (where the decision is simple and consistent and physical, not an actual "decision" at all - either optical obscurement from smoke or voltage detection in the difference in radiation or however the Americium ones work).

If you want to get REALLY advanced, give me a button to shut you up for 5 minutes for, say, when I've burnt toast and know it and manually activate that mode voluntarily. And you beep like mad and piss me off when your battery is running out so I can't miss the fact (and, no, I don't want them to be mains-wired necessarily as in my country that means I won't buy extra smoke alarms as they would cost a bomb to legally install, plus then you never know that the battery in the thing is actually dead through being charged for ten years constantly).

I'm a geek. I'm very techy. But not everything is improved by adding more technology to it. In fact, quite often the opposite.

Let's not even get into the fact that you basically have a Google-controlled device connected to your internal network with remotely-flashable firmware that you have no control over and no interface in which you can see what it's doing sitting above your head in the living room and able to monitor your body movements. I'm not a conspiracy theorist paranoiac but, fuck, you do have to wonder quite how long it would take for a company that WAS evil to misuse that shit. It just reminds of me of the I, Robot movie (not true to the books, I know) with the sensor-strips.

You can replace "cloud service" with "service".

Just about any business, service, or product you use you have to consider what happens if the company goes bankrupt. "But they'll never go bankrupt" is not an answer. You need to know what you'll do if they just go offline, now, today, and you never get your data back ever.

If you haven't been working like that in your business since day one, you really need to consider your options. Whether it's a mobile phone provider, some VoIP service, your operating system vendor, your cloud services or - hell - your cleaners, your electrician or anything else, you owe it to yourself and your customers to have enough information to just carry on. Maybe with a blip. Maybe not 100% smooth and instant. But at least for business continuity purposes.

Cloud is no different in this regard. I know of a bursar at a private school who questioned even things like in-house library services, window-cleaning companies (with long-term contracts) and IT support contracts on the basis of "What if you go bankrupt today?" It's a sensible question to ask - of them and of yourself - and vital for business continuity in anything the smaller of outfits.

They will not tell you if they are going bankrupt until it's too late. Hell, we had an AV vendor go into administration. They didn't say a word and we only found out when it had been a while since our last signature update and went to their website.

Never got it to work anyway.

I opened every port, changed every setting, fiddled with everything I could, never got even a lobby or anything going at all on the Gamespy games I have installed.

Really weird because ANYTHING non-Gamespy just worked - whether Steam, Windows Live, some company-specific online lobby or - indeed - any TCP/IP based service whatsoever.

Never got to the bottom of it, so just treated all Gamespy-based games as being offline games.

Really wanted to play silly things like Age of Booty online but just never got the chance. It won't be missed.

Since you clearly never took logic 101: an appeal to authority is only wrong when your appeal to authority does not involve an actual authority. Which the two people referred to, are. In which case an appeal to authority is actually the right course of action.

Asimov said it best: our greatest failing is that we believe that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.

Because too often, Americans are ignorant of what the Constitution says, how it came about, the philosophical ideas that its writers tried to cement in law and are thin-skinned, whiny idiots.

No, seriously. I've had this discussion with people since the mid-nineties, and it's because they were the above. Some people do get it, but a frightening amount of people have no idea what Freedom of Speech actually means, why it exists, and why it is important.

It's not a dangerous road, it's how societies operate. As a matter of fact, it's the only way to actually build a society. Anything short of that is just pie-in-the-sky anarchism. As for your reverse example, that is exactly what's taking place in the US right now. They're free to do that, and I'm free to organize a counter boycott.

The alternative that you propose either requires an incredible restriction on speech and action, or requires a complete lack of interaction between any individuals. One is terrible, the other untenable.

And where does my free speech start to vociferously disagree with someone else's use of free speech? Let me clue you in: it starts the instant I open my mouth, the same way that Eich's did.

Free speech means exactly one thing: the government can't put you in jail for what you say, and even that comes with (very specific and spelled out, but nevertheless) limits.

What you're failing to understand is that free speech protection has nothing to do with protecting someone from others who he/she pissed off through his/her speech. And that speech extends to organizing a boycott. Because without action, speech is just.... well, speech. Eich supported his speech with money, and others threatened to do the same. Eich just found out that his right to speech and action cuts both ways. To his credit, he resigned. He would not have been able to properly run Mozilla after this kerfuffle.

  Living in a society means that you do follow local standards. Otherwise, they WILL kick you out. Eich just found out that he joined a society that disagreed with his stance on gay marriage. What you're advocating is nothing but anarchy. And that gets quickly eaten up by warlords.