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Comment Re:Formatting. (Score 1) 308

Surprisingly good, thou its worth bearing in mind he is using the same techniques as the people who he says are telling us how to think but to push back in th opposite direction.

He does come out with some really stupid stuff like don't vote as a revolt against the system, which really means be apathetic and just be a sheep. It doesn't matter how many protests you participate in, the only way to change things is to change the people who are doing the things you don't like.

Politics is largely sterile partys have a rock solid majority on most of them. In the UK the lowest majority was held by 92 votes, just 93 people getting of their backsides and voting would have been enough to change that seat. Of the 50 most marginal seats less than 200,000 people could change the government of the day by voting in the right seats around half have less than a 2000 vote majority.
Of course without PR its a case of voting for the lesser evil however when your vote is crucial there is a slim chance of change. No chance at all if you don't vote.
 

Comment Re:Doesn't look like much (Score 2) 313

As long as Apple is not then storing that randomMailHost.com is associated with a particular user - then there's no issue at all.

As a NSA agent for example. it wouldnt be useful to check with apple all the internet searches person of interest has conducted and while it might be disapointing that apple does not have his email on file and contacts they do at least know his email account with another provider and may be able to give login credentials for that service even if its outside of us juristiction.

sounds paranoid until you consider what edward snowden has said already.

Comment well how would you like it if... (Score 1) 489

no reread it

Grayling cited the case of Chloe Madeley, the daughter of television presenters Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, who was trolled after she defended her motherâ(TM)s remarks about the convicted rapist Ched Evans.

Finnigan said Evans, who was released from prison last week after serving half of a five-year sentence for raping a 19-year-old woman, should be allowed to resume his career as a footballer because his rape had not been violent and he had not caused âoeany bodily harmâ. Chloe Madeley faced rape threats on social media after she defended her motherâ(TM)s remarks.

So basically her mother said it wasn't a bad rape as rapes go
So Chloe supported her mother (supporting the convicted rapist)
so then some "troll" says so would you like it if you were raped, nonviolently and without bodily harm? in reply to her tweets.

Obviously in 142 charactors or less, it becomes necessary to reduce the tweet to the bare minimum.

So we have the strange situation of an actual rapist serving 2 and a half years in prison for rape and a troll suggesting Chloe put herself in the victims shoes for a minute possibly serving 2 years for a hypothetical rape! I guess chloe and her mother will be all in favour of the troll returning to his former employment too.

At the heart of this is a real woman who was raped, she is the genuine victim. Not the minor celebs who wish to gossip about her rape over morning coffee on daytime tv, such as chloe's mother.
           

Comment Re:If you want results from the web (Score 4, Insightful) 313

um no.
you didn't read the link the string was sent to duck duck go and also sent to apple there is no need for the search string to go to both.

if the user was using apple to search then of course the search string should go to apple but if its sent to google then it shouldn't go to apple as well.

Comment no, its not good thou (Score 1, Insightful) 313

Seems Apples picking up searches from safari, even when told not too.
microsoft decided to log all your key strokes. Both experiences are negative but the later situation seems worse although niether are acceptable why should safari be sending "where to bury the body" back to apple, perhaps they have been "asked" for this information.

Comment double standards (Score 1) 622

it's a strange society we live in, we generally have no objections to looking at nudity but then we are embarassed to be photographed nude ourselves. we seem to have this world wide morality police saying its a terrible thing to be seen naked. The naked selfie makers seem to be comfortable with being seen naked at least by a limited audience but lose their confidence when the audience is not as restricted as intended.

From googling i see one of the people who's images got published to the world is the blue woman in X-men. Judging by the publicity shots from x-men i have a reasonable imagination as to how she would look naked. To be fair we can probably take a fair guess at what anyone looks like naked we don't need nude photographs.

Society evolves slowly in victorian times barely any nudity was acceptable, yet for many years women have been sunbathing topless on beaches in the south of france. The USA i guess has its morality police set at somewhere inbetween. I guess it'll take a few more years before society is relaxed enough to be accepting of most nudity.

As for the blue one she looks great now ,in 30 years she will not be looking so great and after 60 well we all age don't we. I can sympathise with these people as most people do not have nude images of themselves publically available would it help if we all had naked selfies on the net, after all it might break down a few more hangups both our own and other peoples.

Comment Re:Hopefully the Steambox will Help (Score 1) 80

Got some old tulip cards which don't have drivers for current versions of linux, but there is no driver for windows 7 either. They are only 10/100 anyway. Some of the old systems have the integrated nic fail and a card keeps them useful a little while longer. PSU failure is the main issue as the fans fail and then cook themselves.

Comment Re:Outrage burnout (Score 1) 150

Go on do it pick a pdf that has anything more complicated than a single column of text and try to convert it to epub. Try and make sentences flow correctly try a few lists for fun and any table you like. after wasting half a day or more trying to wrestle it into submission. find an interesting web page and convert it into epub don't spend more than 15 minutes with it. Compare and contrast with the still some what messed up pdf version.

Once you have done this you will hate pdf because its really not that portable it really is designed as an end format Epub is just so much nicer.

Comment Re:Outrage burnout (Score 1) 150

Pdf is a terrible format for anything really, let alone ebooks its an end format not easily converted into something else. each line of text on the page is a line it doesn't have a concept of a paragraph. It only seems to know the order that text was added to it. e.g if you had 4 bullet points added as 1,2,3,4 and later edited to read 1,4, 2, 3.
translating to another format becomes 1,2,3,4 again.

Having more than 1 column of text converting becomes a block of text where the first line of column 1 is followed by the first line of column 2 followed by the second column of column 1. in other words an unreadable mess. Sloping text is even worse as it will be read at 90 degrees and so the highest word on the page becomes the first word and again a jumbled mess.

epub on the otherhand uses xml which is pretty close if not identical to html and so can be reflowed to fit the screen fairly naturally, it also supports css, it knows the difference between bolded text and a chapter heading the main difference between reading in a web browser is that an epub will be laid out as a screen full of information at a time instead of scrolling down. Because of the h tags a page can be broken easily into sections and a heading can be placed at the top of the next page. you don't get a heading at the bottom of a screen and the body of the section on the next page.

One nice feature is that converting a html web page to an epub becomes incredibly easy. You can save a web page complete and then load it into sigil and most of the work is done for you or you can bring it in to libre office save as an odt and then save as html and then bring it into sigil. The reason for doing this is to localise the hrefs for images. Otherwise the images would be linked to the website they came from rather than local to the page. Now instead of having a pdf designed for A4 paper you have a document which is easy to read be it on a phone or tablet or computer monitor, good luck trying to read a pdf on a phone on a bus or train or on your lunch break.

Another great thing is the ability to display svg graphics. Students will be able to relate to this you are in a lecture and you write like crazy making notes but they are paper notes, which you have to collate into ring binders you could type but then you need to sketch a diagram or a graph. and then annotate it.

There is a cool little program called write (cross platform windows linux osx) it lets you write on a graphics tablet and creates webpages of your notes. with svg files or top files you can convert handwriting to text with some success or just leave them as svg. The thing is they are ripe for bringing into an epub and instead of carrying a ton of notes around you can have a small collection of epubs for each class that you carry around instead.

The thing is you generally can write faster than you can type, it takes a little practice to get used to writing with a tablet stylus instead of a pen but once you have it you don't need paper any more.

There are some pdf's you can copy and paste from and recover a working document but it is more complicated than you would like. XML is much nicer to work with. Once you have figured out a workflow you will find its a lot better to use epub rather than print to pdf.

Sigil 0.8.0 was released last week, it's major change is it now supports python plugins which have great potential for extending the functionality of the program. The main development is done on osx with ports to other operating systems. There is a slight snag as apple doesn't let source be compiled for older versions of osx which means official builds are targeted for osx 10.8.x upwards, I made a 10.7.x build which is available through the sigil forum on mobileread.com as are versions for xp debian ubuntu and other platforms.

Comment Re: A fool and their money (Score 4, Informative) 266

once you get below the level of the water table you find water.
similar story just outside blarney apart from no douser involved just a big drill that went down until water was found. Ireland has no shortage of water. Outside the cities septic tanks are usual and wells are fairly common place. With water charges coming in for domestic water, there may be a little boom in well digging.

Comment Re:Disengenous (Score 3, Insightful) 306

cheaper books , good for me, but i also like going out to book stores to find something interesting.
in the long term, the book stores go out of business now its harder to find interesting books.

long term the prices will tend to rise as competition has been eliminated to a large extent.

Amazon is winning too much, it seems as if kindle is becoming synonomous with ebook reader. Thats not a good thing, no additional storage, no pdf support , no library support. Trouble is they do sell ebooks cheaper. I've jist picked up a sony their store has gone and the kobo book store app says i'm not living in a supported region. It runs a locked version of android, which could support the kindle app.
Which might be better for sony and me.
 

Comment People should look where they are going (Score 4, Interesting) 128

The one that seems to catch people out is the link which they click on in a mail in gmail.
that takes them to gmail.google.com.myphishingsite.info/sessionexpired
which presents them with a message like session expired please login to your gmail account and the top line already has their email address all they need do is enter their password.

Most people don't question why would that happen a few seconds after clicking on the link
quite possibly because Google and facebook don't take you straight to a link they log it first by an intermediate page and then redirect you to the destination (i see it all the time on my slow connection).
The page looks authentic and they tend not to look at the address bar and see the bolded address myphishingsite.info.
often its a site like fgjfjhki23d.info a random jumble of characters just like the ones a site like google and facebook use all the time. People are used to seeing this sort of thing
e.g http://it.slashdot.org/comment... of this address (taken from the address on this page) only it.slashdot.org make any sense to most people and thier eyes glaze over beyond the initial it.slashdot.org

Thats a problem without any training in website design then its pretty hard to tell the real from the fake.
Thing is once an email account has been harvested it immediately sends out a 100 emails to the address book of that user and the same thing happens again.

Most people think they had thier email hacked not realising they gave away thier password.
kind of hard to stop people for falling for this sort of thing. The emails are even clever enough to redirect to an alternative page once the fake webmail page has been brought up once.

People here would say its because people are stupid, but most people just don't have enough knowledge or interest in this area to know when something is fake or genuine.

It is probably impossible to fix especially when the sites we use everyday use random looking charactor sequences as part of the url.

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