alpine

I don't think you are factoring in the spin to be expected from any CEO, never mind the Director General of the BBC, who has to admit that his charge is less than innocent. The accusation of bias against the BBC is common enough, indeed it is a national joke amongst most people with a smidgen of political nouse.

To deny, via a second- to third-hand source that the BBC is currently a left-wing, propagandist instrument is to belittle everything George Orwell warned us about via 1984.

'... is now more technocratic' !? Does this not send a shiver down your spine? It should do. I suppose if you are a Blairite it could be a cosy affirmation of intention, so there would be no need for alarm.

You could offer to pay ~£8k in licence fees for life time access to UK TV. Of course, if you watch and don't pay, you will live in fear of a prison sentence. Luckily, extradition from the US to the UK is less likely than the reverse, so you needn't lose as much sleep as eg Garry McKinnon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon)

Yep, we are in 2012, yet just because some things are possible (like access to TV from every source across the globe), doesn't mean to say those things are permissible.

Yes, I have been paying attention. Trading is all about timing.

Time to short Apple. Somehow, I don't think this would have happened under Steve.

It is a big statement, isn't it? I do believe it to be true, however. What I'm positing is that the technological pieces can all be deployed relatively easily. What is required is the 'spark of genius' that triggers mass adoption. The hook into the new system has to be easy; it has to be cool; it has to smart; it has to be desirable. Possibly even irrational.

It's fairly obvious to me that an open system, that incorporates Twitter-like functionality as a subset of a greater whole, could take over this space in less than 12 months, leaving Twitter/Facebook/* as AOL-like also rans. Winer appears to have functional solutions for many of the parts needed to deploy this ecosystem. What is missing is a spark of genius to fire people's imagination, such that they flock to the new tool(s) with an eagerness not seen since early days of the www when Mosaic hinted at what could be done. I can't believe that all that is missing is a healthy dose of Mad Men marketing. Maybe that is the missing ingredient?

Parliament make the laws.

She's asking that the people who caused the problem (Parliament), investigate with a view to determining why there is a problem.

His local MP, Louise Mensch apparently tweeted 'It is for Parliament to investigate actions here'. Talk about missing the point! This man was convicted because he fell foul of the nannying, micromanaging, politically correct, busy-body society that Parliament has allowed and facilitated to evolve. We need less political interference in our lives if we are to stop absurd prosecutions like this one.

I haven't tried any possible solutions. Building an inhouse monitor is a possibility, but I would pay for a service if it was only $25 pm. Particularly if it included the option of buying Sys Admin/DBA support, charged hourly as required, with the aim being the effective outsource of day to day monitoring and tech support of a site.

Smart monitoring tool that would automatically check:

- Front end web site availability

- APIs available

- Back end processes are running

- Database up

- Disk space available

- Error logs for important issues

The database checks would include referencal integrity and sanity checks on volumes to warn of potential issues eg a failed module or abuse by a user.

Daily and weekly reports by Email, RSS, Twitter, web tool. SMS for emergencies requiring immediate action.

Option to have support from a Sys Admin/DBA automatically trigger to fix minor issues.

The BBC is anything but unbiased. From the horse's mouth: http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/09/lecture-thom...

Can you name a source of unbiased news?

Drudge, FT, Telegraph, HN, BBC

Like fusion or a cure for cancer the break through is always 'a few decades away'. Which is a promise that conveniently meets the dual criteria a) soon enough to continue to attract funding b) far enough in the future to allow the current cohort of scientists to reach retirement.

Lord Kelvin has to be a contender http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelv...

It didn't end well and he made some poor business decisions along the way, but Tesla still deserves consideration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

There is a solution that requires you to use a semicircle line to join two of the straight lines. You could argue it meets the rule 'just four straight lines', and you would be all the more 'creative' for proposing it. However it is unlikely to be suggested because the convention is to draw lines that directly connect dots.

Seems to me you are extrapolating an unknown and arriving at the worse case scenario ie they are so underwhelmed by your solution that they think it is ok to treat you in a shoddy manner by not following through on their promise.

That's one possibility. Another is life got in the way - for example your contact has taken leave for a family emergency or has even been hit by a bus.

Your argument is completely rational. Isn't the point, though, that these feelings are irrational? I don't think telling yourself to stop being irrational is the best way to address the problem. Once you have debugged the cause of the irrational belief/behaviour then it might be easy to tell yourself you can now take the desired, rational step, no?

I've often experienced what I like to call 'déjà-vous at scale'. Many times while re-watching a film or re-reading a book, I recognise that my mind, triggered by some apparently inconsequential detail, has spawned a series of thoughts identical to those I had first time around at that very point in the narrative. This has happened months, sometimes years apart. I'd be interested to know if this effect has been studied and what the conventional term for it is. Occam's razor would posit that I am simply experiencing déjà-vous from a moment ago, but the qualitive feeling is very different from the déjà-vous I am obviously familiar with.

I have tricked myself into achieving ambitious goals by breaking down the next few days' objectives into small, doable tasks. I will even go as granular as 'make cup of tea and fix typo while kettle boils'. I've found that if I can get into an automatic mode where I'm constantly checking off tasks, repriotising and refining what is still to be done then success creeps up on me. At some point during most days I realise I have made significant progress; at some point during the project it occurs to me that I am done.

I don't think limiting your reading to The Atlantic and Economist is a good idea. I would advise reading fewer stories from a wider selection of sources then applying point 6. "Why" to the text. Why was the story written? Why was the story published? Why in this source and not others? You want to dig beneath the surface to uncover the agenda. There is always an agenda.

Understanding how others try to steer your thinking and actions is as important to a renaissance man as the ability to sketch the valves of the heart or conceive a flying machine inspired by nature.

Can you minimise the number of things that require your distraction each day? If so, you might still be able to make progress against your main project, although not as quickly as you would like. Try to cycle through your distractions back to your main task several times a day. Aim to increase the time on your main task and reduce the time on the others with each week.

If it is multiple ideas/projects that are keeping you from focusing on one, then maybe you have to accept that the only way to make progress is to work on all in parallel. Be warned this will likely increase project completion time an order of magnitude, and you run the danger that nothing is finished in the end.

Assuming we had all taken a wrong turn technologically ie the Internet concept had not occurred to someone, then Rocket Mail would be fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail

Or a medieval strongbox?

I would love to see a traffic analysis to tpb during these last few weeks compared with theoretical models, that have presumably been developed, to predict how robust the Internet is in general with regard to self-healing/route-around properties.

When coding, I also have to stop and think about:

- website vs web site - setup vs set up

That is just two examples that come to mind in as many seconds.

You are absolutely right, he was talking about words that were important to the Party. Words that facilitated criticism, dissent etc. However, my point still stands. If you consider a child with a good vocabulary in two languages versus an excellent vocabulary in one language, which supports the superior reasoning?