....they installed it under the radar.

#sorrynotsorry

And tangle with @BorderRockall and NATO Article 5 at your own peril!!

https://twitter.com/BorderRock...

Not technically true. Any enquiries about Sealand are referred to the UK's Foreign And Commonwealth Office.

Sealand declared UDI before the UK extended its territorial waters from 3 to 12 nautical miles in 1987, so at the time of UDI it was in international waters.

OK so no states formally recognise it as a sovereign state, but the UK does not assert legal jurisdiction over Sealand.

Yes people really are.

I registered the domain {myfirstname}.net in 1996.

I get several hundred emails a year where people have used {myfirstname}@{myfirstname}.net to sign up to things. It's annoying, yes

Luckily I registered the domain {mylastname}.net in 1997 and now have a different mailbox that {myfirstname}@{mylastname}.net goes to. This one does not suffer in that way.

I used to try resetting passwords and cancelling accounts, but recently I've been signed up for online access to health records(!) using my address. Firstly, it would be unprofessional of me to attempt to access the actual data (since I work in Govt Security). Secondly, the "password reset" functions want a DOB and Postcode (Zip code for those on the left of the Big Pond) to perform a reset.

So I just ignore them, other than marking new ones as spam.

I think it's partly due to the invasive & nosey nature of SO many webs(h)ites - every single one seems to want your email address, so I can't really blame people for providing "throwaway" addresses. I just wish they were not my ACTUAL address.

--
There are two sorts of people: those who can extrapo

32F = 0C
35F = 1.667C

20C = 68F

Oops.

> They call it "mugging" over in India (and no, not mugging as in attacking someone and stealing their cash - I have no idea how the term came to be).
> You memorize. You don't deviate. You do not think for yourself. You do not understand a concept and come up with a solution;
> you only follow the solution that's been provided.

It's from the English "mug up" (http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/mug-up), meaning to quickly learn something.

(English is difficult, but can be understood through thorough thought though :-)

FTS,
"The moral of this story seems to be that it is a bad idea to buy a game just before a major holiday."

Um, no the moral of this story is that DRM is beyond USELESS and only punishes the honest customers. I am sure that as usual the "pirates" are playing the game just fine.

Another moral to take away is don't give your money to people that want to treat you like a thief EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE ALREADY GIVEN THEM MONEY.

That's because the average reflects the lowering of standards. Average CS student 15-20 years ago was expected to do Pascal/Ada, C, a full-course on assembly (and not just a few weeks), Lisp/Prolog, create multi-threaded/multi-tasked applications from scratch (and if lucky to be at a good university, create a bootloader or mini-os or an embedded app from scratch as well) by the time of graduation. Some even were lucky to learn how to create primitive calculators with hardware in their computer org classes.

Average CS student now is expected to know how to create a dynamic web site in Java or whatever without ever having to learn how all of this shit works from the moment they press the "power on" button on their computers. Mind you, I do Java for a living, so it's not like I'm a C-enamored freshman bashing Java development for the heck of it.

So to say that the learning curve is too great for the average developer is just a reflection of the averages TODAY (and an indictment of our CS education nowadays.)

I'm a veteran Linux user but have moved to OSX some time ago, since it gives me the UNIX I need, and the GUI I so sorely crave.

BUT recently, I was trying to get someone's computer up and running, and Linux was the only thing that would install due to some bug or other, so I temporarily put an Ubuntu install on their computer. Decided it would be a nice experiment for a non power user, to see how well they could cope.

He hated it. He couldn't get flash going, so it wouldn't work with certain sites. He was having trouble doing basic navigation of the OS, and had no idea which programs really did what beyond the basic.

There were a host of other issues I can't really remember now, but it was a very frustrating experience for him, and he was very happy when he got his Windows 7 back.

I sat him down with my macbook and he seemed to figure out OSX handily.

The Kernel works well. The OS handles many things very well internally, but the overall user experience, while MUCH MUCH improved over how things used to be, just is not as easy to use as a Mac or Windows computer.

The real work needs to be done by UI designers with coders to support them. Even connecting to a wireless network can be a chore. God forbid a driver doesn't work or something along those lines and you need to open a terminal.

While you'd think the 'many eyeballs' thing would take care of something like that, it seems all these eyeballs and the heads behind them just want their OS to work, and for a non power user right now, I wouldn't call it ready.

Sir, your youth is showing ;-)

"Standalone" (ie single function) Cheque Guarantee Cards were common back in the 1980's.

--
They're from Mars. You do the English.

It's like "plug and play" - that worked 50% too. As in, "plug" always worked, it was just the "play" bit that had problems...

The reason for that should be fairly obvious.

Only those who can see the reason can see the profile ;-)

Do you know how your text editor behaves when the file system is full?

Having witnessed an entire .ac.uk DNS zone being wiped from the Internet by an editor whose authors had NOT considered such things, and which happily wrote out a zero-length file over the original (which then merrily propagated), I would strongly suggest that you stick to truly reliable editors when editing critical files.

And that means vi.

So when a major world event happens, 100+ people will see an out-of-date page and submit an edit.

Which one will be chosen? The first? The best? How do you reconcile conflicting edits made to the article?

Sounds like an UGLY mess to me.....