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Comment Re:All or nothing approach is silly (Score 1) 131

There is App Ops in android >=4.3. Install App Ops Starter and disable the permissions you don't want to grant to an app.

I have that installed (first Nexus 7, Android 4.3) - it looks like there are some permissions that can't be disabled (internet access for example). Otherwise it is quite nice (it also says the last time the app used the permission, and if it has used it)

Comment Re:Great for CC scammers (Score 1) 222

I don't know where people get this idea that you have to have a chip-and-pin CC to get by in Europe. It's just not true.

I live in the UK, so examples of things you wouldn't be able to buy with a card include:
- train tickets (you'll need cash, or else a long queue if there's a human option)
- car parking (sometimes cash won't be an option, though that's rare)
- occasional smaller businesses (shops, restaurants) who will want cash instead due to the fraud risk
- any other ticket machine (e.g. cinema)

OK, it's more of an inconvenience than a necessity. It's ridiculous that the US has barely started to use the system though -- it's almost 10 years old.

(I don't think Brno is much to brag about...)

I live in the UK and almost always get train tickets using a card, both at the counter and using the machines. This is from train stations an hour or so away from London, so maybe they don't have them further away.

I have seen some smaller businesses in the village near me only accept cash, however that was mainly because there was an ATM across the road and it would cost them to process cards themselves.

Comment Re:Greg Palast (Score 4, Informative) 94

P.S. Why is it that the best American investigative journalists work for British publications? Do British investigative journalists work for American publications?

The Private Eye (UK publication) seems to do a lot of the investigations into British affairs that a lot of the rest of the British media avoid.

Comment Re:Reference Newspapers (Score 2) 239

Dear slashdotters, The Guardian is quickly becoming one of my preferred references. Can you help me broaden my horizons by naming other good newspapers? (English/French/Spanish language only sorry)

Not sure if it counts as a newspaper (it comes out fortnightly), but in the UK there is the Private Eye. A lot of the content is satire, but they also report on topics not covered by other papers.

As an example, when the Leveson report was being released, they covered the bits that the other papers were not reporting on (namely the bits that made them look bad), and also recently have reported on some of the big the tax evasion techniques being used by big companies (again, some of the other newspapers either use these techniques or are owned by someone who do, so miss out on this reporting)

Comment Re:JIT Education (Score 2) 745

"Any idiot can solve 100-(20/(37-5)*100) especially if they have a calculator."

What are these slash and star things? How do I do parentheses on my calculator?

I selected the equation text, right clicked and went "Search Google for..." and it told me the answer - no typing or calculator needed.

Comment Re:BBC's most effective copyright strategy in effe (Score 1) 216

Episodes from Tom Baker's era onwards exist in their entirety. The catalogue of stories from before this is rather patchy, and I've put a list of what exists and what doesn't on my website (though you'll need to make sure Javascript is running to see the what the key of icons represents.)

There is the Tom Baker episode Shada which wasn't completed as opposed to being wiped.

Comment Re:Why I moderate the way I do (Score 1) 115

Moderators shouldn't have complete freedom in choosing which comments to moderate. In each discussion, they should be given a random sampling of comments from which to choose, and not just those high enough to pass the browsing threshold. Then every comment would have an equal chance.

That might be interesting. I always browse at a fairly high level even when moderating because I don't have enough time to read everything (this usually means I don't use up all my mod points because a lot of things are already scored correctly). Actually having two settings of comment thresholds ("General" and "Moderating") would be useful to make it easier to change quickly.

Comment Re:the taxi services have a right to be pissed (Score 1) 184

they will tend to refuse short trips, trying to hold out for the more profitable longer ones, so taxi availability gets worse.

They already do that. Routinely. Regularly. You simply CAN NOT get a taxi in many parts of San Francisco. They will refuse to come.

So if the monopoly solution is a failure, and you're saying the free market solution is also a failure, guess we need a third solution.

I would like to think that a self driving car would be a good third solution.

Comment Re:Stack Overflow (Score 2) 211

Well, I am going to defend Stack Overflow here, because I think it fills a very useful niche, which is "what is the best way to do X."

Most of the time I use Stack Overflow is after pasting an error message into Google and it coming up towards the top of the results. The responses are usually reliable, although I have found a couple of unanswered questions.

Comment Re:autocomplete as done in Borland C++ .. (Score 1) 214

Sure, but he was merely offering an example that most people here are likely at least somewhat familiar with. He never made any claims to its originality. I mean, if I was making a car analogy, I'd likely reference a car that people here know, rather than the earliest one that exhibited the traits I was referencing, just because the purpose of the statement is solely to supplement understanding of a separate topic.

Autocomplete is fairly common though. It would be like referencing a specific car when talking about something that is common to all or most cars - "driving using tires, as used on Fords" may as well be "driving using tires, as used on cars".

Comment Re:Teamwork and targets (Score 1) 509

Put him in a team with experienced programmers.
As a team you decide all code will be reviewed. All code. Comply.

The team I am in tried this for a little bit, but recently relaxed it slightly as we were spending time reviewing non-contentious code changes that we didn't need to (like renaming something, or minor refactoring). I think it was good to review all code changes for a while, just so we could find what did and didn't need reviewing, instead of just guessing.

Comment Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score 1) 180

A little while ago I was able to get all the emails addresses from Facebook, albeit in a somewhat convoluted way. I had to have a Yahoo email account, and link that to my Facebook account, and I was then able to import my Facebook contacts into the Yahoo account which, thankfully, had an option to just export that (to CSV I think). This was maybe a year or so ago, so I don't know if it will still work, but it was after they switched everyone to the @facebook thing.

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