Posts by Nick Kew

@ Pen-y-gors - of course it's a bubble, and could burst. But some bubbles can outlive us all. Most obvoiusly, gold, whose financial value has far exceeded any intrinsic value for millennia.

@ratfox - social experiment. Hmmm, well it's not without precedent (as has been pointed out). But a new concept with zero intrinsic value? This is most interestingly a commentary on fiat currency. Viewed like that, it's an intrinsically better store of value than something the Emperor[1] can just print more of whenever it's expedient.

[1] A reference, if you like, to the sub-plot in Goethe's Faust where Mephistopheles invents Fiat currency just when the Emperor is desperate, causing a devastating bubble.

Re: let me guess

The whole "doctor" thing is way overblown, mostly by overblown people. [...] but no one I know of refers to themselves as "doctor"

Methinks you miss the point. People don't call themselves Doctor (unless perhaps in a CV situation), but it's really useful for addressing a stranger in formal or semi-formal correspondence. Works equally for both sexes where there's any uncertainty, and is unlikely to offend even if it's not technically correct.

Re: Why are they worried?

North Korea got there first with the isolation, and with not subjecting itself to international oversight.

Not everyone in the UK cabinet wants a NK solution. Only some of them.

Re: sort of confused ?

To google, I am a datum. They don't care about my identity. They have the power to direct information and advertising towards me, which I can take or leave according to my usage and privacy settings.

The government also collects data: that's not new (the idea of a census goes back to antiquity). What's controversial is when it's tied to my identity. The (agents of) government do have the power to lock me up, to deprive me of my worldly goods, to ban me doing things. And I can't opt out.

Occam's razor suggests that failing to see the difference looks like being deliberately obtuse.

Re: Did he do it or not?

Aha, someone else noticed the mention of thumbnails.

How many pornographic thumbnails appear in your cache when you click a single link that happens to take you to a Daily Mail story? Maybe thirty-ish in that column down the right hand side. An MP would have legitimate reason to read a lot of newspaper stories and other such contents.

@Commswonk

Actually company drivers are one area where employer liability should be very firmly enforced. Otherwise you have a race to the bottom where companies put impossible-to-meet pressures on employees who drive on business, who then take risks to try and meet expectations.

Can you make a good anecdote of that? Perhaps you should submit it as a story for the Friday "On Call" column?

Re: Really useful article.

You merely suspect? Haven't you been following the whole systemd debate?

Re: Overtime falsification in the timesheet. How quaint. And how familiar.

Yep. Get folks into the habit early. In my case, my first job after graduating made it abundantly clear that working whatever hours it takes for no extra pay was all part of being a professional person, as opposed to a unionised blue-collar worker. So that's the norm.

Re: What is really needed...

ISTR having been looking for something like that for about 20 years.

Real prize would be to get it in a laptop. Proper laptop, not some horrible keyboard-less device.

No you didn't ...

The story wasn't about someone getting confused. It was about failing to figure it out, and escalating to a helpdesk.

Upvote anyway, for the chuckle.

Re: Why must democracy be digitised?

You trust a system that makes no attempt whatsoever to verify that people walking into a polling station are who they say they are?

@John Smith 19

Is that related to Catch 22?

Re: Learning languages from a book

Sometime in the 1980s I first needed to learn C. I picked up the C book, K&R.

After reading the whole thing, it told me little of any value. Most memorably, I came out puzzled: surely C does dynamic memory allocation? Yet I had to ask "what's the C equivalent of Pascal's new"? Yes, it's true, there is not a single mention of malloc in the whole of K&R[1]!

In fact, the most informative learning resource I could find was a Microsoft VC++ manual. Despite the fact that I wasn't even working on an MS operating system, let alone with their compiler. It just happened to be something I could find.

Towards the end of the '80s, I read Stroustrup on C++ and found him a lot more informative. Though when I wanted to get to grips with STL in the 1990s, I found again a great gap in available documentation.

Perl was so much easier, with all the docs built in. Never looked at a Perl book, though.

[1] I understand that may have changed in later editions of K&R.

I can envisage a case in point.

I have a friend in her 80s, who had to go into hospital for something about a year ago. She lives alone, and normally needs no help. But when she had just been operated, they didn't want to let her out unless there was someone around just in case she needed it.

If I had a suitable spare room (and known about it at the time), I'd've been happy to offer it. If the NHS were paying, it could go a long way towards making it acceptable to a patient who doesn't want to be any trouble.

It's just one more step to do the same with strangers.

Re: other parts of the article:

Seems particularly ill-considered: how many drivers will want to hang around a petrol station while the chariot gets recharged? Fortunately in the real world, people are installing them more sensibly in car parks: for example, at retail outlets such as supermarkets, city centres and park-and-ride, leisure venues such as theatre/music/cinema, etc.

Eventually it'll be depots for summon-a-car fleets. Recharging along with cleaning and other maintenance.

@Baldrickk

If ever there was a time and a place for Windows bashing ...

This is government doing the Right Thing, and not getting in the way of industry and society. They're looking at the story of the FBI and the Iphone, and pooling expertise as and when such cases arise and the maker can't or won't help law-enforcement.