http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sc732uzUkw4
Penn and Teller's Bullshit on Mother Teresa. Not suggesting you take it as God's honest truth without some critical thought, but interesting nonetheless.

People don't buy the 360, PS3 or BluRay to stream from Netflix. They buy them to play games, play games and play BluRay Discs respectively. The Netflix thing is just a value add, and people are willing to put up with a big of sluggish behaviour from a value add. If you bought a dedicated Netflix player and it was sluggish, you'd be pissed off.

When I ran a Linux laptop, I used to use SCPM to deal with those problems. Well, I didn't deal with the power management issue at all but it should be possible.

Create a new profile, configure the network settings once, then use scpm to switch to that profile when necessary.

See: <a href="http://linux.eregion.de/tag/scpm/">this guy's blog</a> for an explanation.

I don't know if SCPM was only a SUSE thing, but it was fantastically useful.

I thought it was the 15th Wednesday After Pentecost

I didn't make any decision based on the news either. I've recently fitted a cheap SSD to my laptop, but it was completely unrelated to this. The difference in performance, even using a relatively cheap V+100 made it worth losing the extra storage space.

"We are in the process of blowing the whistle on ourselves to the ICO over the matter."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4 (Nyan Cat) has proved an excellent distraction technique for my littlest when she is upset. Very useful for when we're waiting for her bottle to cool, or similar.

(ps, how the bloody hell do you post links on this godawful new AJAX abomination of a comment system? <a href= didn't work!)

If you give a child a phone that is only useful for calling Mummy and Daddy, then they won't bother to keep it on them, they won't care where it is, they won't bother charging it and they'll lose it/break it in very short order, because it's just not an object they will care about protecting.

The way to make sure a child keeps their phone charged and about their person is to let them USE it.

and that's where confiscation (and, for persistent offenders, detention) comes into play :)

My children's school has a hand-it-in-at-reception-on-arrival policy. They hand it in when they arrive, they retrieve it when they leave. This seems entirely reasonable to me, since many of the year 6 pupils walk to and from school by themselves, and thus might legitimately need to carry a phone.

Re the cut and paste thing. It's a bit complicated, like many aspects of Linux, but it's certainly not random. There are two separate and independent copy/paste mechanisms at work. See this extract from http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html.

===
Copy and Paste:

        Contrary to what you may have come to believe, copying and pasting text under X11 works pretty much exactly the same way it does under MacOS and Windows. Really. It works like this:

                Select the text to copy;
                Pull down the ``Edit'' menu and select ``Copy.''
                This causes the text to become the Clipboard Selection.
                In another window, pull down the ``Edit'' menu and select ``Paste.''
                This causes the current value of the Clipboard selection to be inserted.

But what about the middle mouse button?

        It happens that X11 programs have a second way of copying and pasting text that is orthogonal to the Edit/Copy way described above. This causes confusion, because some people mix the two up. Here's how the other way works:

                Select the text to copy.
                This causes the text to become the Primary Selection.
                In another window, click the middle mouse button.
                This causes the current value of the Primary selection to be inserted.
===

Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and Ctrl-Insert/Shift-Insert are functionally identical, just different keybindings for the same thing. And they map to Edit>Copy and Edit>Paste.

I agree it's a snag ...

Let's bring this in line with what Moz are actually proposing:

Caller: "My computer will not boot into Windows"
Support: "Are you running the most recent version of Windows?"
Caller: "I have no idea"
Support: "Please go to Help > About Windows. Does it say 'Your version of Windows is up to date?'"
Caller: "No, it says I need to update"
Support: "OK, please relaunch Windows and let the automatic updater run. The update is free and will be installed automatically. Then if the problem persists please call back and we'll go from there. If for any reason you have trouble running the updater, please call back and we'll assist".

That's a scenario I can live with to be honest.

Thanks, the ricochet option hadn't occurred to me. It's certainly a possibility.

I doubt he managed to load his gun with police standard ammunition. It's a converted starter pistol. I highly doubt those rounds would even fit in its chamber (although I'm not a firearms expert by any means).

And maybe I have an over-romanticised idea of what competent policing should be like, gleaned by watching too many films, or reading too many books, but honestly, if there's more than one of you, you are heavily armed, wearing protective gear, and you're facing down a drug dealer with a gun, I honestly believe you should be able to apprehend that man without shooting him dead. If firearms officers are allowed to unload on anyone when they "believe" there is a thread to life, that basically equates on them unloading on anyone. Such as <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/may/13/ukguns.hughmuir">Men carrying table legs</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes">Brazillian electricians</a>.

One day that could be me, or someone important to me.

In addition to that self serving reasoning, I also think the interests of justice and the public are better served by trying that man, in court, and sending him to prison.

about:support