How about "the ease of distribution of Slackware 2.1" (ie. came on 73 floppy disks you had to download each one via FTP over ~64K lines) ?

My main bank account was set up online. I didn't just pull down "Mr." from the list of titles - I picked one of the others. Now, any time they call me, I ask them "Can you tell me my title, please?". Often it's met with some confusion, but at least it offers a modicum of assurance they really are $BANK. Every once in a while they call from one of their published phone numbers, which adds another layer of assurance, I guess.

They once called me to verify a transaction. For whatever reason, they felt the need to ask me countless security questions - after a few, I just said "Okay, please send me a secure message on the website with your phone number, and we'll continue this conversation there". Again, much confusion, but it all happened.

I'm not saying this is "secure", but forcing someone to send you a message on a website is a whole lot more difficult than having them just war-dial you and try their luck. I reckon I weeded out 99% of the 'bad guys' that time. GCHQ/MI5/MI6/NSA/CIA etc probably would have defeated me, but maybe not in the time it took them to do it.

I'm inclined to agree, however, sometimes those blunders can be helpful. Not so long ago, Obama was talking about some sort of military deployment into Syria. For such things, it's generally considered that us Brits will go along with whatever the yanks want, so we'd have had to go too (just like Iraq, which wasn't even legal).

Cameron put forth a motion, which needed a vote. However, he did it with such a short time scale (because he's "eager to help"), that he was defeated and thus, the UK could not participate in the Syria plans.

We can argue about whether the US/UK should or should have not gone into Syria at that time. Had it happened though, it would have been another illegal war with undefined objectives, and a huge expense for the UK (which was very contra the 'austerity' of the time). As such, keeping out of it seems like a wise thing to have done. Of course, it wasn't followed with a proper, UN based plan or anything which is arguably why Syria is in the shit state it is now, but that's another problem.

As for this one though - it's pretty obvious he's been leant on by the Americans again. If it gets through, then the NSA gets a whole new avenue of data collection, and if it doesn't, then the NSA/Obama/etc don't lose any political capital in the attempt. I suspect the latter as it's unworkable. For example, I'll make sure my servers all talk gibberish to each other constantly, should any laws against encryption be passed. Who's to know if it's data or cyphertext?

Duh! because they're supposed to be upholding national security, fighting terrorism etc. An NGO such as Amnesty is no threat to national security, is not a terrorist organisation, and is not a terrorist sympathiser. Thus, it should be entirely off-limits to these government organisations.

Just like most citizens should be off-limits too - except none of us are - we're all on the "watch list" which runs a regular 'grep' of our online lives just to make sure we didn't do something we shouldn't. If we google the 'anarchists handbook' or whatever, then we get onto the next level up in the watchlist, and so it goes on until we reach the heady heights of "suspected terrorist" when miraculously, GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 suddenly decide to look the other way while we go ahead and bomb a city, chop up a soldier or shoot some sunbathers.

Venus has an excess of women, and Mars has an excess of men. Or so a book I once read seemed to make out.

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 :-(