There's no doubt that technology has made it easier to communicate. It's also easier to shut someone out when we are confronted with online discourse. Why bother to understand strangers--or even acquaintances--when you can troll them, block them, or just click "Unfriend" and never look back? This is a mish-mash of essays which never quite comes to a conclusion. Virtual Reality experiences might increase empathy. But they might not. And that's what we thought would happen with TV. Empathy …
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Facebook has an interesting feature. It will let you see which companies have associated your off-Facebook activity with your Facebook account. If you visit: https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/ you'll see what companies are snitching on you to Facebook. Alice St⭕️llmeyer@StollmeyerEU#AirBnB shares your activity with #Facebook ?!Delete that @Airbnb app, folks! Mine didn't even allow me to change its Facebook connection 😡 isn't that against GDPR, @vestager & @dreynders?And delete yo…
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I recently went to a university hackathon, where students were trying to invent novel ways to help prevent pandemics. This was purely an academic exercise - they were not developing a fully-fledged app, nor were they creating official policies. I spent some time with one group discussing the privacy implications of what they had built. Thesis By monitoring nearby Bluetooth devices, we can tell who has come in to contact with an infectious person. We can warn people that they may have been…
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There are many sectarian divides in computer. "Little-Endians" and "Big-Endians" wage bitter war against each other over the order of bits. Should line in text files end with \r\n or just \n? And both vi and emacs users fight betwixt themselves while ignoring the superior foe - nano. Perhaps the most contentious of these is the battle between URI and URL. Should we refer to links on the web as Uniform Resource Identifiers or Locators? Obviously there is a correct answer - and anyone who…
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I don't understand the world of academic publishing. Incredibly niche books, some barely longer than a novella, are sold for ridiculously high prices. Or, worse than that, they're not sold at all. Let me explain. A friend of mine recommended an obscure book, published a couple of years ago. The blurb made it look right up my alley, so I tried to buy it. I only read eBooks, but I couldn't find it anywhere for sale in the UK. Amazon had a listing for a paper copy, but it was permanently out…
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Problem: I have a multiline string - not a file - and I want to remove the first few lines from it and keep the rest. I found this surprisingly unintuitive. So these are notes in case I want to do it again. Feel free to suggest a better way! Example Given this input: $str = "Once upon\nA Time\nLived a big\nDragon\nCalled Cuthbert."; I want the output to be: "Dragon\nCalled Cuthbert." That is, remove the first X lines in a string. Exploding kittens Using explode()…
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Hello fam! I've identified all of the mobile phones used in every single episode of Doctor Who! This post looks at S12 - but feel free to rummage in the archives. Spyfall - part 1 Straight out of the credits, and The Doctor is yapping away on this gorgeous retro flipper. It isn't the 2020 Moto Razr with folding screen - it's literally the original Razr V3i! Hello Moto! We haven't seen a Razr since Series 4's "The End Of Time". Vor CEO - and 7% alien - Daniel Barton has a SRS BZNS phone. …
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