I got presents for my nephews that arrived late (from a seller that only shipped in-country), so I was delayed shipping them on to where they live. Entirely my fault for not ordering earlier, and I fully warned my sister that they would likely arrive after xmas, and sent extras with my parents (they were tight on room for luggage, so could only send small presents that way). Estimated delivery window fell right around xmas.

As it turned out, they only took 4 working days to cross europe, and arrived on xmas eve. Very grateful, and thankful for the delivery guys working right up to xmas to get stuff there in time - and if it had arrived after, as I fully expected to, I certainly wouldn't have complained.

People bitching because stuff ordered xmas 23rd didn't arrive on the 24th across a country the size of the US? Blimey, talk about a sense of entitlement.

Of course the magnitude of the offence matters.

"The law does not concern itself with trifles" - usually referred to as 'de minimis' in laws. With most laws, you need to commit an offence of a significant enough seriousness to even be an offence. Once you get past that point, there is also the broad principle of proportionality, i.e. let the punishment fit the crime. Then you factor in intent, state of mind etc.

Speeding and parking illegally can lead to risk to others, so even relatively 'small' offences can have large consequences, and that's why they're taken somewhat seriously, beyond the actual consequences (which are usually, though not always, pretty much nil). Charging an electric car in a stationary parking spot? Not so much.

The correct response here was for the officer to inform the school, and then they could decide if they wanted to file a civil suit to get their 5c back. Invoking criminal theft just makes an ass of the police officer and the law.

Except the nexus 5 is likely to come in around half the price of the iPhone 5S (off contract) at $350. And quite a bit cheaper than the 5C, while blowing the latter away in performance terms.

It might only be the 2nd fastest overall, but at bang-per-buck, it's damned impressive. Personally, I'm hoping they bring back the very cheap nexus 4's; there's nothing even close to the quality/performance in that price range on android, and my wife is after a new android phone but doesn't want to spend too much.

Because it's a major article (it was near the top of the list of most-read articles on the telegraph site when I saw it yesterday) in a major serious newspaper read an awful lot by the right-wing management class in the UK. Ironically, it's also the paper read by many members of the (governing in coalition) Tory party, who are the ones who had the plan to revamp IT teaching to be more than 'this is how Microsoft Office works'.

It might be a troll article, but it IS how a lot of people think. So if you want insight into how British management think of coders, and IT guys in general, then there you are. We're a bunch of dull, weirdo tradesmen with a fungible skill. And that's why IT is being shat on from a great height in many companies, because we don't have some loudmouth 'ideas' guy, aka a suitable MBA type in their view, making us do useful stuff instead of muttering in a corner.

So if you're in IT, and you have a clueless dept head (some are good, some are crap, management has both types), then you need to basically become your own promoter and 'ideas' guy, in order to liaise with management and shape what they want (assuming they know what they want to achieve, which is not always the case) into something realistic and actually achievable, while making them think it was their idea.

Even enabling All Mail doesn't do the trick - from that tidbits article: (which has been doing the rounds quite a bit)

That is, I can read, move, delete, reply to, or otherwise operate on messages in my Inbox on the Gmail Web site, on my iPhone or iPad, or in another IMAP client, and they all sync up perfectly with each other — but even after several hours, my Inbox in the Mavericks version of Mail doesn’t reflect those changes. It seems not to matter how frequently I tell Mail to check for new messages. I also tried quitting and restarting Mail, rebuilding the Inbox, and forcing a synchronization — several times — but my Inbox stubbornly refused to reflect reality. Occasionally I’ll glance at Mail after having ignored it for hours and notice that the Inbox is closer to being up to date than it used to be, but I can’t figure out when, why, or how this happens. This is the behavior that makes me truly crazy — if I have to keep Gmail open in a Web browser to make sure I’m getting all my messages, I might as well not be running Mail at all.

My boss is a) an Apple fan, and b) a Mail fan. I've had to instruct him and a couple of other senior management not to go to Mavericks for the time being. Because we use Google Apps, and having mail notifications delayed for hours is going to be a problem. Switching to a decent email client would of course solve the problem, but he loves Mail to death, and he'd rather switch the whole company to another mail provider than give it up (seriously - he suggested it because of this). Not that having Mail cause problems is anything new; my personal favourite is the way Mail does embedded attachments, causing most other mail clients to struggle to handle his messages - usually, they end up with half an email, the attachment, and a second (and sometimes 3rd and 4th) set of attachments with the rest of the email message piecemeal. And then he complains that people can't read his bloody mail.

Showing that it's not just Gmail getting f***** up the IMAP by Maverick Mail will be quite useful to argue the real problem, as usual, is Mail.

They de-dupe disk storage, so 2 million copies of 71 emails take up no more room than the original 71. The index metafile *about* those duplicate messages, on the other hand...

Experienced IT Person: "After talking to the user, I realised they were not competent enough to operate a real computer, so replaced it with an etch-a-sketch. If they don't break that for a week, we can upgrade them to an iPad."

Very experienced IT Person: "I saved us all the trouble of dealing with future tickets from this user. In an unrelated question, who borrowed my shovel without asking?

I woke up with a hard pain in my right side. It got worse and worse, until it was clear it wasn't cramp, but something badly wrong.

I called an ambulance. I live in a rural area, so an hour away from the nearest hospital. Ambulance was there in 10 minutes. They assessed me, took me to hospital.

After blood tests, they put me on high dose antibiotics and painkillers, and onto the ward. They suspected a gallstone. A few hours later, I had an ultrasound; no sign of a gallstone, but the gallbladder was clearly inflamed and I had an infection. They decided to see if the antibiotics would tackle the infection, so I could have elective surgery more safely in a couple of weeks to remove the gallbladder.

I got worse over night, with a worsening fever. They booked me in for emergency surgery to investigate, and I was going under anaesthetic inside an hour. Turns out, my gallbladder had turned necrotic and had started to fall apart, and needed removing in a hurry - they had to switch from keyhole to open surgery, took it out on the spot.

I then spent a week in the hospital, recovering from the 6" abdominal hole from the surgery. When I was discharged, my total bill was... £0.

I was treated with huge professionalism and care, survived what could easily have been a fatal infection with rapid treatment, and I didn't spend a second worrying about what it would cost me. Ok, the food was airline quality, but I wasn't exactly hungry anyway.

The NHS is running out of money because there's more people, living longer, wanting the latest, best drugs that cost more, while funding levels are being cut in real terms by the Tory government. That's something that will have to be dealt with, but it's certainly not a reason to kill the NHS. It's one the best things about Britain, and if we have to up our contributions a few percent to pay for it, I for one am glad to do so.

it includes content such as fucking prostitutes in the back seat of a stolen vehicle and then murdering them to get your money back, ... Oh and fucking whores is a good way to make yourself healthy.

Ironically, that's one 'feature' they appear to have removed from this one. Now you have to go to the strip club and feel up a woman you're paying to graphically dance with her tits in your face, to get her to sleep with you, which is much more family friendly! Along with the graphic mass murder of ordinary civilians which is dismissed by the protagonists with jokes, the torture, the planning mass murder of cops as part of a robbery, lots of drug use, manufacture and selling, pretty much constant swearing...

It's a master example of that type of game, and fun to play, but you need a decent fully-formed reality/fantasy filter - and to be already pretty jaded about the full spectrum of the human condition. I wouldn't give it to my retired parents to play as it's not something they'd enjoy, and I think a co-worker is nuts for letting his 7 year old play it. 'I wish I could turn off the voice-overs, but he just wants to play the driving bits'. Where you run over people, who try to run away screaming, and the flying bodies and the blood...

'Ma'am, I just wanted to make you that this game is about as violent and bloody as the most graphic horror films, but here you're playing the sadistic killer who kidnaps and sells hitch-hikers to a cannibal cult, as well as graphic sex scenes with drug addicts.'

'Yes Ma'am, I can see your 10 year old son really wants to play it as he's played the previous one. Here you go.'

Myself and my wife have both switched to e-cigs full time - myself for 6 months, her a bit more reluctantly and recently. The tobacco analog flavours are pretty nasty, but then I neve actually liked the taste of tobacco anyway - it's the act of smoking and nicotine itself I'm addicted to. Now she smokes a menthol mix, and I'm a fan of fruit flavours.

I've tried to quit many, many times during a 23 year cigarette habit. Patches, gum, straight cold turkey, Allan Carr, you name it, I probably tried it. Longest time was a year before stress got me smoking again. The day I had an e-cig, I've not had a single tobacco cig since. My phlegmy cough is gone, my sense of taste is much better, I don't reek of smoke (going back and smelling an old coat that I wore while smoking just smells rank - when you smoke, you don't realise HOW stinky you are to non smokers). I also feel better.

Nicotine itself is highly addictive, but in stimulant terms isn't much different to caffeine. It's the tar, carbon monoxide, benzene and all the other carcinogens as byproducts of combustion that are really terrible for your health.

We're still on the hunt for the perfect clearomizer that gives the right combination of warmth, vapour quantity and reliability (some tanks crack very easily), but generally it's been a very easy transition for me. My wife struggled at first as the amount of vapour wasn't enough for her in comparison, but a dual-coil seems to have fixed that, and we hand-mix the liquid as we both prefer a different mix of PG to VG. I am slowly tapering my nicotine mix down (currently at 8%, which is already pretty low). I'm still hoping to quit outright at some point.

Are they 100% safe? Don't know. Most studies have shown no risk, and the worst impact has been some inflammation in those with existing breathing conditions. Given the components of the liquid are all individually safe for consumption in other products, as long as you get it from a reliable supplier that doesn't use cheap chinese contaminated liquid, it should be pretty safe. It's certainly a lot safer than the known highly dangerous tobacco cigs. I'd have no problem with goverments ensuring product purity by regulation and enforcing age restrictions - all the sellers I know insist on 18+ only, and are entirely upfront about the dangers of nicotine.

Yet European legislation is lining up to class them as medicines, and defacto ban e-cigs, as they obviously don't have a health benefit in and of themselves - only in relation to the alternative. It seems ludicrous to try and ban a product that is at worst far less dangerous than cigarettes, when cigarettes themselves don't have to clear the same proposed hurdles.

If you don't want to use B.C. because it stands for "Before Christ", and as an atheist that offends you, fine, you have the right to make whatever calendar you want. But be more original that simply removing the periods and adding the letter E, and calling your result "Before the Common Era". You are still saying the Common Era starts with the birth of Jesus, and your calendar starts with (or near) that event. You are agreeing to tie yourself to the church, while acting like you won't stand for it.

Except our best thought at the moment is that Jesus Christ was born in ~4 BC due to a cockup by Dionysius in 525 AD when he invented the whole BC/AD thing - the accepted range is 2 BC to 7 BC.

'Common Era' uses the same dates as the Gregorian Calendar because it was already in common use as a standard. We have two whole months added by the Romans, the whole calendar has been messed with something chronic repeatedly, and the days of the week are largely named after pagan Gods, yet that doesn't stop the Christians using them, nor does the fact that Jesus was already a small boy when Christ was 'born'. Our calendar is absolutely a mongrel of many different cultures and civilizations, and the Christians don't get to claim it as solely their own.

Some people just don't like putting 'in the year of our Lord, Jesus Christ' at the end of the date, given they may well not be Christians and Christ isn't actually their Lord. Thus Common Era - usage of which incidentally dates back to 1615 at least. Complaining about that seems about as worthwhile as complaining that people dare to use the Gregorian calendar without also personally celebrating Easter, given that's what the whole purpose of the many christian revisions of that calendar was for in the first place.

I am a Node webapp dev as a sideline with experience in a few languages over the years, and maybe it's because I'm not an 'ace' developer, but I don't think it's that incredibly revolutionary.

The main advantage of node - and mongodb - is that they're asynchronous through and through with a universal callback/event driven loop available. Which is obviously nice to work with if you're comfy with javascript already (mongodb uses javascript-style as its native syntax) and with the first class support of socket.io ala websockets means that you can largely treat the front-end browser land and server side as one large async program with a usual UI/backend split. Plus there's generally a npm module library to do whatever, though it's often wise to avoid ones that aren't maintained given the pace of change.

To be honest, I don't think there's anything really that couldn't be done with say, python twisted, or even rails. I think the universal async (and almost entirely non-blocking unless you cock it up) model is nice to work with once you grok using event handlers and/or a flow control lib like async to avoid nested callback hell, and it's obviously a good fit for web apps. But it's like any other language/toolset - pick your tools according to your needs.

Personally I've switched from mongo to couchdb as I find it easier and faster to work with, and mostly actually write code in coffeescript to get rid of the bracket cruft, but can switch back and forth to javascript as needed. It is FAR nicer to work with than PHP by any standard, but then I'm a linux/windows/esx sysadmin with an Apple-fan boss for my day job, so what do I know.

Or, you know, host his git repo inside his firewall so it's only accessible to company developers on-site or with vpn access unless the NSA are particularly interested, in which case he needs... some hosting software. Presumably his code is not currently under an open source licence as its in a private repo; for all we know, he's developing code for someone else.

The NSA general dragnet supposedly has a lot more tech companies in it than have currently been revealed. We also know the NSA wants to know about software holes early that it could exploit, presumably for spying purposes. There's also a lot of data leakage between the NSA and private contractors - what's the odds that the NSA has accidentially (or on purpose) given commercially sensitive information about software to a 'helpful' US company that gives them an advantage over their competitors?

So it's not all unreasonable to assume that the NSA may have secured access to github private repos which they can't tell us about, to run fuzzing tools on popular projects to look for exploitable holes, if nothing else - you don't have to think they're after you personally to be caught up in their mass dragnets. It's the same with all US-based hosting now - you have to assume the NSA has access to it at all times, and shares it with whoever they want - even if they don't, currently, they could do. Anything else is sticking your head in the sand. This is particularly relevant to the 95% of the world that is not american - like me - as the NSA has pretty much carte blanche to dragnet us en mass, and we're all 'the foreign enemy' to them. Obviously there's little we can do if they go after us directly, but we can withdraw as much of our private data as we can from US hosting as a precaution.

To answer the original question, i.e. what's a good hosting solution inside the firewall:

Gitorius is pretty good as a local clone of github with web-based code browsing etc; it's under the GPL. You can either install it yourself from source, or they do a commercial setup solution where you run a vm they provide with external support which I suspect would be too risky for you. Gitlab is also very good, and very much a github clone in UI. It's pretty much which one you prefer the look of, really, though gitlab is much more popular.

CLI wise, ssh + key-based access for each developer + a folder per repo + git on a linux server is plenty sufficient to act as a shared git repo setup, especially if you don't have that many in-house devs. Otherwise, gitolite uses pretty much the same setup with more advanced user and repo control - basically you setup a management repo, and then change files on that to add additional repos and access control so it's pretty simple to manage.

While I generally agree with you on windows vs linux for desktop use about the strong advantage of the halo effect - i.e. the software that runs on it and 3rd parties that support their stuff on it, rather than a straight comparison of the OS - I find it hilarious that you used VISTA as the point to demonstrate it. The driver model changed completely, so so many vendors were hugely delayed bringing out vista drivers, and a lot took the opportunity to obsolete hardware that was only a year or two old. The scanner and printer makers in particular had a field day in 'gotta buy a new one' because of vista.

Also 'Strange IE-only sites not being a issue' is an issue I haven't seen in years now, I think they largely remain in Korean banking and some corporate intranets, but in the EU/western europe, it's transformed into 'webkit-only tested' websites. Long as it looks good on the ipad, who cares about the rest, seems to be the thinking sometimes.

Finally while security essentials doesn't entirely suck from a nagware side of things, it does suck pretty hard as an actual anti-virus

I run windows where I must (gaming, vmware console, active directory management) now and switched to OSX on the desktop and linux on the server as a direct result of metro. It really does suck as a desktop OS without hacking in a start menu replacement (simple example - no folders in metro, so you're forever scrolling if you don't want to have keep going to all apps all the time which is a bugger to get to quickly) and I really can't be bothered any more.

Microsoft have clearly bet the farm on touch-based tablets, they're desperately afraid of the ipad. And just like google betting the farm on social networking with google+, they kinda suck at it as it's not what they grew wealthy doing. They're both juggernauts with a lot of inertia behind them, but then, so was Big Blue.

With the bonus that he'd never need be able to rewrite it again. Six months later:
"WTF does this do? Did I write this in Klingon?"