A related El Reg story - court rules there was discrimination: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/25/computer_based_exam_discriminated_against_blind_candidate/

Internationally the first celebrated case was the Sydney Olympics website, whose operators had to pay up for gratuitously excluding a blind reader.

The web is accessible by design. In general it takes a lot more work to break that design and make a site inaccessible than to get it right, though there are a few cases where the laziest approach is not the best (alt being the most obvious).

There are tools to help web developers evaluate accessibility (I've written some of them, as well as served with W3C as Invited Expert on the subject). What's lacking is any kind of budget for them: I had to abandon that work when the money ran out, so my tools are looking a bit dated in the era of HTML5.

Don't knock the old phone boxes!

When your landline dies, how are you going to get in contact with BT to get them to come and fix it? It's a bootstrap problem: dialing 100 on a mobile won't get you BT's operator; from a phone box it will. As I discovered a couple of years back, there are still things for which a phone box is best!

And they don't even stink of smoke any more!

Oh dear

Apple quality must've taken a turn for the worse since a friend fell in the (saltwater) harbour in Amsterdam while carrying his macbook, and got it back to working after carefully drying it out.

Power Cables

So, will they now replace old-style power cables that fray away over time, as in the US?

Power Consumption

Serious question here.

If symbian is being orphaned, is there any smartphone OS around with comparable battery life to what I get on the E71? I'd dismiss iphone/android for a phone[1] on grounds of having to recharge every bloomin' day. No idea about windows.

[1] as opposed to pocket-puter.

And?

Surely the materials cost is very marginal, and 'cheaper to produce' depends more on a state-of-the-art efficient factory?

Are they suggesting that thinness/flexibility will bring solar panels to altogether new applications? If so, great, but if not they're in a marketplace already suffering overcapacity and fierce competition.

Not just maturity ...

The Apache web server is in the fortunate position of not having a marketing department breathing down its back for new Big Releases every six months. So no pressure to whack up the version numbers. As indeed is common amongst the best projects: the Linux kernel has been at 2.x even longer than apache, despite all the evolution in the hardware under it.

But this doesn't mean things stayed the same for six years. Apache's modular framework makes it straightforward to add new goodness outside the core, or in core with only a delta-version bump. The only absolute rule of delta releases is that we don't break API or ABI back-compatibility within a stable branch such as 2.4.x.

Fix the power consumption / battery life!

So who's going to be first to market with a laptop (of any screen size) with an E-Ink screen, ARM processor, and enough battery life to take backpacking away from regular recharges?

I smell strawman

There are only three bodies of ice on Earth that contain enough water to have a material effect on sea levels. The East and West Antarctic, and Greenland. Everything else is trivial noise.

Move away from sea levels and consider other issues like water supplies to certain regions, and suddenly some lesser glaciers do matter. But that's a different issue altogether

Still, a bit of realism never stopped Denialists who can't (or won't) admit responsibility for anything that matters. And the argument isn't helped by talking of a complex *effect* of pollution as if it were a *cause* of other complex effects associated with pollution.

Controlled trial

I have two devices connected through O2. One is my regular 'phone, and its number is public, easy to find, and known by many. The other is my pocket-puter, whose number I make no attempt to remember, and never give to anyone, but which gets used for almost all my web access on the move (with the exception of railtrack, whose website works much better on the smaller phone).

Observation: the phone whose number is public gets all the spam.

Inference: spammers aren't abusing the information formerly sent to them by O2. I expect they hadn't discovered it.

Ozymandias

A reminder of what Nokia once was!

(and even that what remains of Nokia's good side still produces some good stuff)!

Kindle?

The £149 3G+keyboard Kindle is surely the ideal gadget in this size. If only it were an open platform for the apps!

Infrabook

Ultrabook's an Intel spec, innit? I want an ARM in my next laptop-alias!

£25k is bloomin' good pay ...

... for an 11-year-old, which is probably round about peak age for codebreaking.

Isn't it also the going rate for an elite techie in UK PLC? After all, if you're still doing that kind of work past about your mid 20s, you're obviously some kind of freakish loser who can't hack it in a Real Job[tm] with powerpoint and a suit.

It's 20 years since my last job in UK industry. Fortunately in a global marketplace I'm not limited to it.

merkin market!

If your store was shifting lots of apples, I expect your demographic was an affluent one. Those things were expensive!

That was around the time when the UK market was a veritable Tower of Babel, full of competing not-yet-PC-clone models. We remember just a few of them: IBM and Apple for obvious reasons, BBC micro 'cos it was in many ways so far ahead of its time, Atari the leading name in games, Commodore, Sinclair, ... But who remembers, say, the Dragon or the Lynx?

Pre-dates Pratchett

No disrespect to one of the best authors of our time, but you should review earlier literature before crediting him. Google "infinite improbability drive" for an earlier though still modern example.

Move along. Nothing to see.

What's less than honest is that our chattering classes claim that, from where we are, it could be otherwise.

We've had a credit binge. Now we've overeaten of the Demand cake so much that it's gone. And without demand, what's the use of supply? Jobs are all about supply, which is in surplus.

Today's jobs were robbed. In the UK, from the time Gordon divorced Prudence in 2000 through to the bust. Elsewhere due to various causes including banking folly and economic imbalances.

Open Proxy

The scenario described may actually be a little far-fetched as a security hole. The configuration directives that open it are the kind of thing far more likely to be used in a 'loose' configuration - for example a mass virtual hosting situation - than in a high-security situation where wildcards would flag a warning.

The other version of the risk is that you inadvertently make the server capable of being used as an open proxy. Not a proxy that could be used by a regular browser, but rather a browser hacked to send HTTP requests crafted to include routing information to an arbitrary destination.

US judge backs Wikileaks, Pirate Bay, et al!

"... prohibits the secret interception ..."

Um, if the owner has installed this anti-theft software, doesn't that mean the owner has consented to what it does?

If the thief is allowed to argue "noone told me, so it was secret", doesn't that open a Three Wise Monkeys defence not only to unlimited trading in stolen laptops, but also to all kinds of intellectual property, secret information, etc that might be on them as unencumbered?

All of which (almost) gives official backing to Wikileaks and other sites we thought were thorns in its side!