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ginger_lizard

Listed below are comments made by ginger_lizard between Friday, 13th June 2008 and Monday, 15th June 2009.

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Piracy: Did someone blink? 1:03pm on 15 Jun 2009 Even if Virgin implement this, it will be a brief window in which they're able to act against copyrighted downloads.

Before long users would react, and a fully encrypted and anonymised approach to file sharing would appear.
Does Wolfram work? 11:05am on 18 May 2009 WA was unable to understand the name of my nearest town "Kings Lynn" no matter what syntax I used.

If it falls down on trivial test queries, I'm not likely to bother going back with anything tricky.
Bletchley Park - the Fry effect 7:07pm on 12 May 2009 I'd agree about the lack of government funding for Bletchley Park being shortsighted.

At the moment, my impression is the greater proportion of visitors are in their "senior years" - and yes, it does take some intellectual effort to fully appreciate the work of the museum - *but* it's the very essence of what will inspire the next generation of talented mathematicians and engineers. You know - those people that create things that people actually need, want and buy - rather than the illusory riches of financial speculation.

Places like this also act as contact point where professionals in the field tend to meet and chat - and *that's* where the really great new ideas have their birth.
Bletchley Park - the Fry effect 1:05pm on 12 May 2009 I can confirm the outstanding quality of the (free) tours, having been there on my first visit 2 weeks ago.

A demo of a real enigma machine (my GF got to play code reader) from one volunteer, a tour of the site lasting over an hour from another volunteer (a truly excellent speaker of the Mr Gormsby school - "Try and keep up at the back there!"), a *personal* tour of the history of computing exhibits during a quieter moment at the end of the day (I offered them my pre-production Psion Netbook if they want it for the collection), and finally a "most enlightening" conversation with a retired MI6 employee regarding the evolution of the Typex machine in service.

Your admission ticket is "all areas", "all tours" and "as many repeat visits as you want, for 12 months".

Part of the charm is the ongoing restoration - see it now, see the huts unchanged and unrestored, be part of the process - I heard several accounts of visitors that walked in and spotted the piece of kit on which they had unrivaled expertise.
Can we block child abuse sites? 3:06pm on 23 Feb 2009 Whenever I hear anther call for internet censorship, I'm hearing from someone that doesn't have a clue how the internet actually works.

And "every little bit" does not help.

It helps drive the development of easy-to-use ways around such controls.

The IWF is doing that right now, and so does every other new bit of intrusive legislation and regulation.

Should the government get their heart's desire with the ability to record every URL accessed by every user - then they will greatly accelerate the use of these methods of avoiding detection - pretty soon it will be built into every freeware web browser.
Wikipedia is censored 11:04am on 08 Dec 2008 The Wikipedia entry on the Internet Watch Foundation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation

"A staff of 7 people are responsible for this work..."

"The IWF makes available to supporting ISPs a blocklist of URLs which must be blocked, as part of the contract to obtain the list, the blocklist must not be reviewed by any human being, posing questions regarding accuracy and transparency."

So a group of 7 people make a decision between themselves - a decision that cannot be questioned or reviewed - or even the most basic of checks made.
Can Stephen Fry kill a gadget? 8:48pm on 27 Nov 2008 I worked for Psion around the time of the launch of the Series 5.

We used to LOVE those reviewers that would say it like it is.

Too many reviewers are in the pockets f the manufacturers, trying to be as nice as possible - so they're favoured with the next device in the pipeline for an early review sample.

At Psion we went to immense pains to weed out the smallest defects - in fact the company culture was centred around the highest attainable engineering excellence.

And it needs reviewers that can recognise the difference between *everything works* and *glitzy, but of no real use to anyone*.
Momentous Monday 10:45am on 13 Oct 2008 Banks - should we have driven a harder bargain?

The government has effectively nationalised the high street banks.

Possibly no bad thing.

When and business collapses or is near collapse, there's an opportunity to buy it at fire-sale prices.

(but with a bank you need deep pockets to get the business working again)

So how much should the government pay?

Hey - you're the government - you don't have to pay anything, you just say "this is ours now".

You still have to put money in to make it work again, but you can simply say the government has taken control on the cusp of disaster - and that "sorry, all shares in this bank are now worthless".

Only the government could rescue the banks - you're not bidding against anyone else - and the bank has nowhere else to go.

I think we should have got 100% of any bank rescued.

Once recovered, the government decides whether to sell-off the bank and help the public coffers - or if retail banking is too important to be trusted to the private sector.

I wonder if we might come to the latter conclusion - that retail banking so underpins our country, that it represents too much power and responsibility to entrust to a few private sector companies.
A divisive Davis? 1:31pm on 13 Jun 2008 Nick Robinson's Weak in Politics. But never mind, so are the newspapers.

Journalists have been presented with a novel situation. And it really shows - they don't know which way to jump.

So they're pretending to sound all authoritative, when in fact they really don't have a clue.

That's why we have Nick's 10 clueless comments that amount to nothing much.

You would be wiser dear chap to say "I don't honestly know". Maybe stick to analysing the possibilities. Or just read a few of your reader's comments for a far better analysis

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