A student who called a mounted policeman’s horse ‘gay’ will not be prosecuted, it has been revealed.
His remarks were deemed likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
To who!?
An obvious case of a failure of sense of humour on the part of the police, there. The guy was a drunken student out after his final exams!
As of last Thursday it is now illegal (in the US) to anonymously annoy people online. Stop and think about that for a moment. If you do something that someone else regards as an annoyance, and you don’t disclose your true identity, you can be liable for a fine or a maximum two years imprisonment.
This can only be seen as a real erosion of First Amendment rights in the US: there are often good reasons for anonymity or pseudonymity, and by demanding that people identify themselves it will dramatically reduce willingness to publish opinion.
Continue reading ““Create an e-annoyance, go to jail” — CNET”
Found via jwz’s LiveJournal.
The other day I got this strange text message on my phone saying I’d been sent a video message, from a phone number I didn’t recognise, pointing me to Orange‘s MMS site. Thinking it was spam I forgot about it for a few days, but then as I was sending a text message today I noticed it again.
On checking it out, I found it was a short and grainy video of Chalky, my father’s new greyhound. It must have been taken by his partner’s son, which was why I didn’t recognise the number.
It just makes me wish I had a greyhound as well now. Especially with the Adopting the Racing Greyhound book I got for Christmas.
Galloway joins Big Brother house, thus quashing any promise that he was ever a serious politician. Seriously what is a member of parliament of Great Britain doing in a reality TV show? Does he not have more important things to get on with? Should he not be busy working for his constituents like he is paid to do? I sincerely hope that anyone who made the mistake of voting for this self-serving egotistical joker will not be making the mistake twice.
The last two days I’ve been getting the following breakage email from the daily updates script on one of my etch Xen domains:
/etc/cron.daily/local-apt:
W: GPG error: http://admin.curacao.strugglers.net etch
Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified
because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY
010908312D230C5F
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
On further investigaton it seems to be because etch’s APT is now checking signatures against a GPG key I do not have configured. Thanks to JackieBrown’s post at DebCentral (and Google), a solution is found. Read more on the wiki.
Do initrds have any use at all apart from:
I personally fucking hate initrds. The process to generate them seems so fiddly, it is fraught with potential pitfalls, and that’s exactly the kind of lottery I do not need when we’re talking about rebooting machines I rely on.
There seems to be something slightly broken with my feed URLs at the moment, the ones at the bottom of the page. For some reason they have ‘feed:’ prepended to them which of course confuses the browsers and aggregators because they try to use ‘feed’ as a protocol.
I’m looking into this and don’t know whether it’s a problem with my WordPress setup or my theme or what, but for now if you want to subscribe just use http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/feed/ or http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/comments/feed/ as the URLs. Thanks!
Update: I fixed it. It was something strange in the theme. I found the timing and database query stats commented out as well, so uncommented them just for the sake of it.
So I’ve installed my first ever blog. What has this accomplished so far? Not a lot, however I am impressed by:
Yes, WordPress is very impressive. And Free! For the very briefest of moments I considered just signing up at blogspot or something, but I quickly came to my senses – if this is worth doing then it’s worth doing well!