DoubleGlazing

London Stansted and Manchester (same owners) recently had "upgrades" where you have to walk along a street to get to the seating area and gates beyond.

That street is narrow, long and forces you to pass every single shop in the departures area. It's blatantly hostile design.

Back in the late 90s when Ireland was starting to think about digital terrestrial TV a system called DVB-RCT was considered. Basically your receiver could also transmit back to the television transmitter. The system could handle thousands of concurrent connections, albeit each one had very low bandwidth - around 1Kbp/s in peak time.That was considered good enough for very basic interactivity and for authorising PPV purchases etc.In quieter hours or in areas were there were fewer receivers that bandwidth would be much higher, but in reality that would be rare.

In the end the company that the governement selected to start the rollout of DTT went bust and I don't think the system was used anywhere else. The developer of the technology abandoned it in 2006 as other connection methods (broadband/mobile data) were preferred.

On a similar note one of my childrens friends absolutely loves the taste of Nintendo Switch cartridges and licks them untill the bitter coating wears off.

His tastebuds must be wired different.

Unfortunately the GDPR is largely toothless if a company without an EU presence chooses to ignore it.

I live in Ireland and my data is in the databases of several US data brokers. Thise conpanies can't be forced to to comply with the GDPR because they simply do not have an EU presence. You don't have to search far to find stories from people people who made complaints to their local Data Protection office about such issues only to be told there's nothing that can be done.

That's a ridiculous sum of money that could be better spent on much more worthy things.

If it weren't for homeschooling my autistic daughter would be spending her day in the headteachers office shaking and crying due to her cripping anxiety.

We are homeschooling our two teenagers. We live in Ireland which has a pretty decent education system and has a high percentage of students going on to third level education.

The problem is that it is really bad at handling children who are neurodivergent. My daughter is autistic and my son has ADHD and they just stuggled to fit in at school. They were filled with anxiety and the supports for them just weren't there. Spending on special needs supports is pitifully low despite Ireland being so cash rich right now.

So now we homeschool them and they are doing grand learning at their own pace.

But it's not just that that makes me favour home schooling. For me one of the biggest issues with state education pretty much everywhere the world over is the idea that at a certain age a child should have reached a certain academic standard and if they haven't then that is seen as a failure or at the very least a problem. This is complete and utter nonsense. We all learn at different speeds, some pick up knowledge early, some pick it up later. What matters is that by the time they leave school they are in possession of most of the life skills they need.

I also have issue with what is taught and how it is taught. Most subjects are taught with a focus on rote. Children are told to learn things, but aren't really told WHY they should learn things. That why bit is so important to help a childs mind develop.

For me there is also a bit of a morality issue. If you go an look at a school curriculum there will nearly always be something that you as a parent do not agree with. For me its the idea of teaching children that there only option in life after education is to get a job, be a good worker and keep going until retirement. I don't subscribe to that idea, I believe there are alternative life pathways. The problem is that if I send my children to a state school they will be forced to learn and accept things I fundamentally disagree with and that to me is morally dubious.

I'm willing to stand corrected, but I can't think of a single smartphone on the market from a reputable manufacturer that is sold with root access. If I want a smartphone I have to accept that the manufacturer will have the bootloader locked down, I don't have a choice.

My thinking is that if I have device that doesn't allow me root access, then what I have is more than likely a device designed to keep making money for the company that made it or wrote the software for it.

There's nothing wrong with wanting that, but as the author said those of us who want to opt-out should have the choice to do so.

If I buy an iPhone, I should have the option to completely disconnect it from Apple and be able to replace the OS with whatever I want. If I do not have the option to do that do I REALLY own the device? The answer is no bacause what I have is a device that I can only use the way Apple allows. When the phone is obsolete and Apple stops updates then all I can do is send it off for recycling since Apple won't allow me to repurpose it with new software.

You are putting a lot of trust in the manufacturers as well. For example, they have the technical capabilities to kill the second hand market in their devices if they simply decided to refuse to allow a new user to login to a device. Sure, you could still sell the hardware, but it wouldn't be much use if the manufacturer stopped it from connecting and autorizing. I know this is an extreme example and no sane manufacturer would implement it, but I think it demonstrates why having to option to disconnect is a good thing.

The same applies to all other devices that are locked down, things like smart TVs, IP cameras and appliances. Just look at how many early smart TVs are now dumb because the manufacturer stopped updating the on-board apps. There should be no reason why the owner of such devices should be allowed to do whatever they want with them to try and bring them back to life.

I agree, If I were an IT manager this sort of stuff would make me start looking at alternatives.

If an app/pluging/package is maintrained and published by X, I want to make sure no one else can interefere with it - even if they have good intentions.

What Automattic should have done is removed the plugin from distribution and told WP Engine to fix the problem. By doing what they did they have breached the trust of their users.

Being a savvy sports gambler will only get you banned though, the house always wins also applies to sports betting.

I live in Dublin where a lot of the tech developement centres for many online bookmaker and casinos are based. I have been approached by recruiters for some of them and even though they offer VERY generous packages I refuse to work for them on moral grounds.

The thing that bothers me the most is that they know a lot of poitential employees have issues with the whole sector, so they try to give it a false veneer of acceptability. A good example of that was that both Paddy Power and Boyle Sports referred to themselves as suppliers of "risk-based entertainment" in their recruitment literature, something I found to be very sleazy.

I also know people who work for some of these companies and they tell me that all their talk about caring for problem gamblers is complete nonsense and that they actively seek ways to lure back problem gamblers who were able to quit.

It's also very weird that as governments around the world are cracking down on alcohol poromotion at the same time they seem to be encouraging the promotion of gambling. I would say gambling can do as much harm to a family as alcohol addiction can. I'm frankly shocked at the amount of gambling adverts there are these days. And so many of them carry the subtle sub-text that if you don't bet on your team then you aren't a true fan.

The problem is that people will gamble no matter what, so providing a safe way to do so is better than banning it. I agree with you that it's all about to what degree you allow gambling. At the very least I would ban advertising as it's effectively normalising something that most definitely should not be normalised.

It was a sort of spin-off from an episode of the BBC pop-sci documentary strand QED. A few years before Threads they did an edition called "A Guide to Armageddon" in which they descibed in detail what would happen to London if a bomb was dropped over St Paul Cathederal. They also used make-up to show the sorts of injuries people would receive. A lot of the people involved in the documentary went on to work on Threads.

It's on YouTube if you want to check it out.

In the early 80s a couple of lads found the Derrynaflan hoarde. A collection of stunning religious artefacts dating from the 9th century.

This resulted in a whole legal mess where they were demanding a payment from the state of what would be arounf €25 million in todays money, after months of legal arguing they got a payout of what would be around €200k today. While this was ongoing there was an explosion in the number of people going out metal detecting for similar items and it's almost certain some items were found and not delcared to the state.

So to protect the nations heritage - and we have a lot of it - from being scavenged these strict laws were introduced.