QED.

It may be a bit more expensive, but you could get any android phone and run sipdroid through a SIP provider of your choice, then forward your mobile number to your SIP line. Then you have the advantage that you can seamlessly switch to a mobile network when you go off-campus.

But isn't there a risk with this whole USB-virus-scanner thing that if a computer is infected, you can't be sure that your scanner is being read and executed correctly? If the OS you're scanning is infected, the malware could be monitoring for clamwin.exe etc and running its own version, or intercepting the important IO calls. I know if I was writing a virus and wanted to take control of as many computers as possible, one of the first things I'd do would be to make it look like my virus wasn't there.

Surely the only way to really scan a computer is by booting into a guaranteed-clean OS? And even then, isn't there a risk that firmware could be compromised? Or am I just being way too paranoid?

Exactly. If you start developing for and/or specifying a browser, let alone ridiculous point versions, you're doing it wrong. Just look at what has happened with organisations needing to keep IE6 running so they can continue to access their intranet. No. Just don't do it.

If you absolutely have to control how it looks when you're printing, get your server-side application to spit out an image or a PDF.

But something about this sounds like you're doing it wrong on a more fundamental level. It sounds like this is for a closed corporate network? If that is the case, and you're trying to build something that looks like a desktop application, that feels like a desktop application, and which prints like a desktop application, maybe you should actually be building a desktop application?

Yeah, I'd have thought this was pretty trival. A lot of files have some kind of signature that identifies what type of file they are, often in plain text at the start of the file. This would presumably make basic filtering based on file contents pretty easy - ie if it starts with 'PK' and has binary content, I'd be guessing it's a zip. And if it starts with GIF, PNG or JFIF I'll be forwarding it to my special private server.

The only excuse for a file filtering program not to do this would be that the mail server was under too much load to MIME-decode and examine each attachment - but then most corporate mail servers will be running virus scanners which will need to do this anyway, so that's a pretty weak argument.

No, you're an oxymoron! Haha that one never gets old.

But seriously, you're still going on about the locked room. I specifically said it didn't need to be a locked room. The parent post didn't say it needed to be locked - just a "computer room". A corner of a living room.

Ultimately you just have to trust your children to use the computer under your rules, and thereby use your parenting powers to enforce using the computers in communal areas.

After all, if - as you suggest - a child is determined enough to get onto facebook after hours that they'll learn how to pick a lock and then stay awake until everyone has gone to bed and fallen asleep, before creeping down and breaking into the computer room, I'm pretty sure they'll be determined enough to figure out a way around your DNS settings.

Ultimately you can't keep control over your children forever, and at some point you just have to trust that you have trained them well and let go of the bike and see if they fall over. Take sensible precautions; while they get used to the internet on their own computers, make sure they're somewhere you can keep an eye on them - not spy on their every move, just make sure they're not stripping off on their webcam for a 54 year old man in his underwear.

Technology is not a replacement for parenting.

The point is that technical solutions aren't always the answer.

He didn't say a locked room, just a common area designated as a "computer room". Putting the computers in a common area (be it a locked computer room or the corner of a living room) so you can keep a general eye on what they're doing, and you solve all of the content issues.

Tell your children that they can use the computer from 6am to 10pm. You don't need to lock them away in a room - if they obey, that's their sleep cycles protected. Punish them if you catch them sneaking off to use chat rooms at 2am. Hell, unplug the router and hide it in your bedroom if you don't think you can trust them.

Installing a complicated access and content filter costs more money and time to set up, and more to keep running. Just sit down with the children, explain the rules, and use your usual parenting skills to impose them.

That's not what he's asking - he likes to put his debug print statements at the start of a line to make it obvious where to pull them out when debugging later. Automatic indentation is not a solution to his problem.

@Unequivocal: Exactly, it sucks. I do exactly the same thing in other languages, but you can't do it in Python. I resort to dropping a debug() function into my code, and then:

Function here()
        line 1 does some stuff
        line 2 if statement
                inside the if
                debug(debug info to console)
        line 3 more stuff

It's not ideal, but at least that way you can search for it afterwards. It does have the added bonus feature of being able to change debug() to return without doing anything when you make your code live, just in case you left a debug statement somewhere.

Re-read his example - he was saying in languages with braces it's obvious that you want e() if (c), and the compiler can check that; without braces in python it's one keystroke's difference, or a dodgy copy/paste.

Explicit braces does help code clarity. Also it annoys me when people argue the significant whitespace is good for beginners because it enforces good coding style, because it does not. Not only that, but it often gets in the way for non-beginners.

For example, long().chained().method().calls() can only be split inside brackets unless you use the god-awful \, which makes the code harder to read and/or harder to refactor.

Not to mention that you can make multiple();statements();on();one();line() - again, python thinks it's fine, but that's not good code style. You can't do brace matching to jump to the top/bottom of a code block, and you have to use "pass" to show you really did mean to leave that placeholder method empty for now, rather than just typing {} to come back to later.

About 75% of my work is in python at the moment, and there are many things I like about it, but saying that it enforces good coding style simply isn't true - in every language there will always be a way for bad programmers to write bad code. At least if you hand me a horrifically-formatted piece of perl, c# or javascript, you can just send it through a reformatter, which will be able to change indentation based on brackets and give you code which is laid out perfectly, without needing to worry that the whitespace it just added has broken the functionality.

It's not as if python saves us from that problem - not all indentation is equal. I frequently run into code that uses two spaces or a tab character for indentation, whereas I use 4 spaces. If I'm copy/pasting a snippet from documentation or a snippet site, I need to make sure its indentation is the same as mine. Not to mention what happens if you copy it from or paste it into a source where leading whitespace is lost. Trying to paste a few lines of python code in a chat client is frustrating at best.

Now, if you'd said that the lack of braces makes code more concise vertically, that it makes it look "cleaner" then I may agree, but if you want to teach people to write good code, teach them re-usable language-independent style guidelines at the same time you teach them algorithm design etc - the compiler is the wrong place to learn good code layout.

Well I apologise, those last 4 words weren't intended as Apple-hating bile, merely highlighting the obviously inaccurate conclusion of the original article which I can only assume comes from bias on the part of the author.

I was simply agreeing with the parent that the only reason that there's no technical reason that Apple should block Adobe from providing Flash for the iPhone or iPad, so therefore there must be another reason: money, and control of the software that runs on their platform.

Wait, what? No, that's not what I said. Your argument is like saying "A sausage is made out of meat, therefore all meat is sausages".

My post implies that the prerequisite of consciousness (or self-awareness) is a computer capable of the necessary level of thought. Provided it can be programmed to (or evolve a program able to) line up the appropriate logical statements that lead to self-awareness, it could be made out of nuts, twigs and bits of string. It just so happens that our brain computers are made out of meat and electricity.

As far as I'm aware, the electrical activity of power poles, thunderstorms and the sun are not organised in such a way that they can be programmed to reliably perform basic mathematical operations, let alone represent the complex logic that would be required for a self-aware brain, so no, they are not intelligent. A bit like your argument.

And no, if my consciousness is a program running in my brain, raising children would be akin to piping output to a new process, and writing books would be the same as dumping data to a file or printer. In no sense of the word could they be classed as "running".

Granted, my plan for immortality does involve terminating the program on one computer and restarting it on a new one, but I'd far rather that than for it to delete itself when it is finished.

Well yes, totally, but it's still nice to be able to access flash websites on the go if I want to find out information about ie a restaurant etc.

Well, I'm not a Macromedia/Adobe apologist/fanboy - for me their overpriced bloated products are up there with Apple and Microsoft, and rival the latter for the bug-ridden-code crown - but I do think that this lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad is all on Apple, because it is.

Flash absolutely has a world of problems of its own, and the fact that Apple ban it delights me because it will hopefully mean that people will move even further away from it than they already have over the past few years.

But it does work well enough on the desktop, so Apple don't need to do anything to fix it - they just need to let Adobe provide an installation package. If something written in Flash doesn't work, that's down to the developer. If something is broken about the Flash implementation, that's down to Adobe. Apple could just stand back and say "It's not our problem".

As I said, there isn't a question of whether Flash can run on an iphone or ipad - as it quite clearly can - the only reason is because Apple want to retain absolute control over the software on their platform so that they get a cut of all sales. Fair enough, but articles saying that "Apple won't let it run because hover will not work" miss the point by such a wide margin that you have to wonder whether they're written by an idiot or a shill.

As an aside, considering how Microsoft have been hammered by IE anti-trust cases, I do wonder how much worse the reaction would have been if they'd blocked any other browser from running on Windows. I know it's a different situation, mostly because Apple don't control enough of the phone market for it to have a monopoly, but it's still an interesting comparison.

I never understand this line of reasoning. The evidence is quite compelling that consciousness is just a brain state based on electrical signals. As the electrical activity of the brain changes so does consciousness, ie mind-altering drugs, exhaustion or sleep; as the brain physically deteriorates, so does consciousness, ie dementia, head injury etc. Believing that there is some magical spiritual element to our existence which will persist after our physical bodies fail seems nothing more than wishful thinking.

I'm sure that if nanobots and genetherapy can keep us going for long enough, we will eventually come up with a way to upload the information in our physical brains to artificial brains that don't require sleep, that don't degrade, and which can be backed up and reloaded in case of hardware failure. We can build systems that allow us to live in virtual worlds, where we are no longer constrained by the difficulty of acquiring raw materials. Once we accept that we're just bags of meat and electricity, then we can come to terms with the true nature of our existence and begin a new chapter in our evolution, where we can be whatever we want to be, and live a life that is truly without limits.

I really wish I had mod points, you're exactly right there.

The reason that inability to hover "never gets talked about" is that everybody competent knows that if something is important, don't hide it behind hover - it's almost always bad for usability and accessibility. Any website or web application that relies on hover effects is, quite frankly, broken. Sure, it may look nice and be convenient, but there should always be an alternative accessible way to navigate through an application.

If my 3 year old N95 runs Flash and can display content reasonably, there's no technical reason that the iphone/ipad can't too. Apple's decision to miss out Flash has nothing to do with performance or usability, and everything to do with money. Anyone who claims differently is a deluded apologist Apple fanboy.

My understanding is that they've got a special censoring proxy. A more reasonable option would seem to me to be a multiple choice question in the settings:

    - "Use Opera's proxy for users outside China"
    - "Use Opera's proxy for users inside China"
    - "Use a different proxy"
    - "Don't use Opera's proxy at all"

China can block the external proxy, and the browser can then auto-sense which Opera proxy to use, or let you bypass it altogether and go straight to the great firewall. That way everyone's happy.

Personally I'd prefer it if I didn't have to go through Opera's proxy; it may make things faster, but I always see it as another point in the chain where things can go wrong (security, privacy etc), and seems redundant when my phone's on a LAN. Do any recent versions let you turn it off?