Recent Posts

3751

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on July 24, 2013, 12:30 AM »

^^ @Renegade: Uh, thanks. I hadn't seen your post of that.
Regarding the other silliness you mention, it is amusing yes, but I suspect that you are just pointing out the emerging progressivism in the US. Is there a "progressive" party in US politics? (I have no idea.) "Progressive" in politics seems to be a de facto and inarguably "good thing", though apparently to the stupid and unenlightened it may often seem to be a euphemism for "going backwards".

Some people (not me you understand) might suggest that students of modern history could look at what you were pointing out and compare it to a potential parallel in the form of the original and self-described "progressive" party - the National Socialist German Workers' Party, but I couldn't possibly comment - though I have met a lot of people whose parents/grandparents had apparently all been staunch members of that party, so it must have been pretty popular at one time.

3752

General Software Discussion / Re: General brainstorming for Note-taking software

« Last post by IainB on July 23, 2013, 11:49 PM »

2013-07-24: Just got a reply email from the WizNote website.

dear，
       i'm so exciting for receiving your mail， sorry i took so long to reply.
       I also think wiz is very interesting,more and more users taking wiz. we have over 2 million users by now. They love wiz, using wiz and discussing wiz eveyday. if you are also interested in wiz , we can take a discunssion for it, and also you can mail us some using experiences . we'll show them on our "weibo" and website, also if you need ,we can give you the others helps.
       thx!
[email protected]

Would it be a good idea to create an EN forum for wiznote?
It's a deep program... just found that alt + drag shows a tiny formatting floating window.

-urlwolf (May 20, 2013, 09:43 AM)

@urlwolf: Good idea about the forum. Would you like to set one up? In light of the interest expressed in the above email, I reckon that (a forum) could be a useful/collaborative thing to do.

3753

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on July 23, 2013, 10:23 PM »

Priceless. I actually did LOL when I read this at arstechnica:

NSA says it can’t search its own e-mails
The NSA's system is “a little antiquated and archaic."
by Justin Elliott, ProPublica - July 24 2013, 5:13am NZST
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a "supercomputing powerhouse" with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' e-mail? The agency says it doesn't have the technology.

"There's no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is "a little antiquated and archaic," she added. ...

3754

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on July 23, 2013, 09:52 PM »

Don't click if you can't take a joke.

-Renegade (July 23, 2013, 11:02 AM)

I think that's unnecessarily offensive and equivalent to my post of Pierre's photo of Germany taking an all-classes win of the 1940 Tour de France at Re: bicycling suddenly a British speciality?!.
In short, it's LOL funny.    

Those sorts of jokes act as reminders of the French's inability to win wars or to resist capitulation to an enemy or to having to be rescued from enemy occupation by the Brits/Yanks. They are not only always good for a laugh, but also they probably inject a healthy dose of realism into what might otherwise tend to be a forgetful and overly prideful national paradigm. That is, it takes off the rosy spectacles when viewing France's colourful history.

Lest we forget.

As a student of religion and modern history, my daughter Lily (now 11½ y/o) thought it was rather funny too.

@tomos might object to it though, as he objected to the Tour de France photo.

3755

General Software Discussion / Re: The Non-Notepad(MS) Thread!

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 11:44 PM »

I'm slightly surprised not to see any love for EditPad Lite here, given how popular EditPad Pro has historically been.  Maybe "Free for Personal Use" is too much limitation?

-rjbull (July 15, 2013, 02:25 PM)

+1 Yes, EditPad Lite is a superb tabbed text editor.

3756

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Find FOLDER (not files) with Duplicate Content

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 11:32 PM »

@shayne.micchia: To understand more about your opening post, I have some questions please:
Q1. How exactly would you define a "duplicate folder"?
Q2: How might these "duplicate folders" have been created in the first place?
Q3. How might you distinguish/differentiate between the "original" and a duplicate/copy?
Q4. What rules might you need to apply to ensure that you consistently delete only a duplicate folder (as opposed to deleting the original)?
Q5: Do you have a real life use-case example of where you need to detect/locate and delete duplicate folders defined as above?

3757

Post New Requests Here / Re: Remember where I got the Download

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 11:06 PM »

As a data hoarder, the approach I would generally recommend is to always automate creating/maintaining a record of downloaded files, by automatically capturing the data and logging it at the time of the download.
For example:

• The download software GetRight (which works nicely by picking up download links with IE, Chrome and Firefox) can be set by the user to maintain a consolidated download log (.txt file) of all files downloaded. I have used GetRight since 1997 - it is a seriously good piece of software. I think it is freeware now, but I bought a licence. I start a new log every year, and usually delete the old logs after they are about 2 years old, but they are not deleted from my backup archives, so I could probably go back many years if I ever needed to.
• On those occasions where I might have to use the built-in download manager in a web browser, I use their "native" download log. Most browsers give you the download source URL if you right-click on them in the downloads page, so to keep a "log" of sorts, don't clear the contents of the downloads page!

This approach does not work too well for video (e.g., YouTube) downloads though, as the filename is often just a generic string (e.g., filename "videoplayback", with no file extension). What I have started doing with those is copying the video title in .rtf from the download website, and saving that in MS OneNote, which also automatically copies the metadata (e.g., URL link and date/time of copying/pasting).
For copy/paste, I always use CHS (Clipboard Help & Spell)    - and I would like to use CHS to maintain a de facto download log for downloads such as this. You could (say) concatenate all the CHS clips of this type to make a consolidated log for a period, if you wanted. In any event, it would make it a one-step clip-and-save process, rather than the above constipated two-step process of getting it into OneNote.
I have made a request for a feature to capture and retain that kind of data/metadata in CHS, but until that is available, then I shall probably continue using OneNote, as above.

There could be a way to get this kind of data into GetRight as a comment with (say) AHK, but I haven't sat down to think about how to automate that yet.
The useful thing about OneNote is that anything saved into OneNote is indexed, and searchable/findable - so you won't lose it.
I have been contemplating saving my GetRight download logs into OneNote as well - you can use it rather like a SharePoint database.

3758

Living Room / Re: Gadget WEEKENDS

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 09:25 PM »

...They've been made a restricted import in Australia due to the mentally deficient pointing them at aircraft approaching Sydney International. ...

-4wd (July 07, 2013, 08:49 PM)

Really? Had they been shown to be mentally deficient?   
Are these people also allowed to vote and drive cars?

3759

Living Room / Re: Take back control of YouTube and STOP it downloading.

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 08:59 PM »

...The computer can make better choices than 99% of users....

-vlastimil (July 22, 2013, 03:22 PM)

Well, that may be true, I don't know, but in this case it is not so much the computer that is making the choices, but Google's algorithms.

"Google knows what's best for you."

Yeah, right.

Forgive my skepticism.    

3760

General Software Discussion / Re: OCR - comparisons of different software/capability

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 10:32 AM »

Cross-link to post here: Re: PDF-XChange Viewer ($FREE version) - Mini-Review

PDF-XChange Viewer now gets a 5  x  from me (was 4½).
No issues re OCR, now - it all seems to work just fine. I see that it currently caters for English, French, German, Spanish, but I have only used the English OCR functionality so far.

-IainB (June 20, 2013, 12:56 AM)

I agree that PDF-XChange Viewer is excellent. I used the free version for years, and recently have upgraded to PRO.

Regarding OCR, it is generally fine for most purposes. Where it begins to have problems is with poorly scanned texts. For those situations I use ABBYY FineReader, and there can be a big difference: where PDF-XChange Viewer might have a 60-70% success rate in recognising text (which is basically unusable, as you can't understand a sentence where a third of the words are unintelligible), FineReader produces a 99.99% correct OCR. But these are marginal cases I'm talking about (book pages scanned at a low resolution).

-dr_andus (July 22, 2013, 07:09 AM)

3761

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: PDF-XChange Viewer ($FREE version) - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 10:29 AM »

...Regarding OCR, it is generally fine for most purposes. Where it begins to have problems is with poorly scanned texts. For those situations I use ABBYY FineReader, and there can be a big difference: where PDF-XChange Viewer might have a 60-70% success rate in recognising text (which is basically unusable, as you can't understand a sentence where a third of the words are unintelligible), FineReader produces a 99.99% correct OCR. But these are marginal cases I'm talking about (book pages scanned at a low resolution).

-dr_andus (July 22, 2013, 07:09 AM)

Yes, there are discernible differences in OCR output quality/accuracy depending on what tool you use, and even the colours of the text being scanned - for example, see notes OCR - comparisons of different software/capability

3762

Living Room / Take back control of YouTube and STOP it downloading.

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 06:16 AM »

I was unimpressed when Google unilaterally made a mandatory change to YouTube so that the user could not control it and stop it downloading.
Good news via Instant Fundas:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Add the ‘Stop Download’ Option Back to YouTube
Posted on Monday, July 22, 2013 by Kaushik | No comments

About a month ago, Google removed the ‘Stop Download’ option from YouTube that allowed users to instantly stop download and buffering of a video. This option was available in the context menu when a user right-clicked over the YouTube video player. You may have noticed it or you may have not, depending on whether you used that option. Many did, and it was sorely missed.

Google removed it in favor of the Pause button that is already present in the video player. When you pause a video, it buffers partially and then stops buffering until you play the video again. This is different from the ‘stop download’ option that used to stop video buffering instantly. With the pause button, video buffering will continue for some time after you have clicked the button. This is a problem for those users with slow internet connection, when more important downloads are in progress.

The workaround to the missing ‘stop download’ feature will be to close the page entirely to prevent the video player from sucking on valuable bandwidth. However, you may not want to close the page because you want to watch the video later.

Now a userscript has been created that beings back the removed feature.
How to Stop Downloading YouTube Video

Method 1 – Using a Bookmarklet. This is the easiest way because the bookmarklet works with all browsers. To use it, simply drag and drop the linked bookmarklet to your Bookmarks toolbar. To stop a YouTube video while watching, just click on the bookmarklet and your video will stop right there.

Method 2 – Using a Userscript. The userscript adds a Stop Video button on the YouTube interface. Unlike the original ‘stop download’ button on the right-click menu, the ‘Stop Video’ button appears next to the Subscribe button under the video player. Clicking on it stops the video from downloading.

stop-youtube-video

Firefox users, install the Greasemonkey add-on and then install the userscript.

Chrome users, install the TamperMonkey extension and then install the userscript. TamperMonkey improves Chrome's userscript compatibility allowing you to use Greasemonkey userscripts on Chrome.

Opera users, install ViolentMonkey extension and then the userscript. ViolentMonkey improves Greasemonkey scripts compatibility in the browser allowing users install scripts from UserScripts.org using the install button.

via Webtrickz

So far as I have tested it, the script seems to work just fine in Firefox and Chromium.

3763

Mini-Reviews by Members / Does Adobe reader support PDF text extraction or not?

« Last post by IainB on July 22, 2013, 02:30 AM »

Very interesting comments from the xplorer² blog about Adobe apparently playing unethical tricks on us for their own benefit (also mentions PDF-XChange Viewer in a positive way at the end).
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)

Does Adobe reader support PDF text extraction or not?

I can understand the frustration of the guys who run Adobe, having introduced the most popular portable document format (PDF) and being unable to make money out of it — or at least making much less than they feel they're due. With the release of adobe reader X (version 10) they started castrating their PDF shell integration and in particular the text extraction filter that allows PDFs to be searchable for keywords.

The other day I installed the latest adobe PDF reader version 11 on a windows 8 machine to see how things fare nowadays. Intriguingly, adobe have reintroduced the text filter (IFilter) functionality but somehow it only worked for windows search (!) and not for other IFilter aware programs like xplorer². How did they manage that? I was not alone wondering about this duality but there was no solution forthcoming.

Technically speaking adobe supplied and correctly registered the PDF text extraction filter DLL (ACRORDIF.DLL) but it wouldn't be instantiated by any common means, that is either using LoadIFilter API or using direct COM object creation after looking up the filter object CLSID in the registry. Was it broken? No, because somehow windows search could use it!? Some people argued that the filter was dropped in STA threading mode (like it did in the old v6 days) but that isn't corroborated by the ThreadingModel of the filter DLL. Some talked about running it only through a Job object. Adobe support kept themselves tight lipped and were claiming that the restriction was there for our security — ahem.

Anyway, here's a spoiler for Adobe, I present to you the way to obtain the IFilter object in C++ for use in your program (after adding some error corrections). Instead of LoadIFilter, you must obtain a stream interface on the PDF file, then create the filter COM object and use its IPersistStream interface to pass the file to be extracted. Also note that the whole process has to be running as a job or you receive E_FAIL.

Spoiler

HANDLE hJob = CreateJobObject(0,"filterProc");
AssignProcessToJobObject(hJob, GetCurrentProcess());

// get PDF file as stream
CComPtr< IStream > iStream;
hr = SHCreateStreamOnFile("file.pdf", STGM_READ, &iStream);

// directly create adobe PDF Filter {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}
CComPtr< IFilter > pdf;
CLSID fixed = {0xE8978DA6, 0x047F, 0x4E3D, {0x9C, 0x78, 0xCD, 0xBE, 0x46, 0x04, 0x16, 0x03}};
hr = pdf.CoCreateInstance(fixed, 0);
// creation fails unless within a job object!

// pass the file to the filter
CComQIPtr< IPersistStream > pdfStream = pdf;
hr = pdfStream->Load(iStream);
// from now on proceed as usual with Init()ializing the filter

This approach works for version 11 of the adobe filter. However that's not the end of the story.

The plot thickens: PDF reader v10
Version XI isn't available on windows XP, the last supported version there is X, so I run a quick check on XP to confirm that the above code for initializing the PDF IFilter works... but it didn't!! As usual windows search had no problems finding text so the handler worked, and so did all microsoft filter test tools. Back to head-scratching.

At first I thought that they could be playing on the job object trick and use some particular name for it, that only FILTDUMP.EXE used. So I wasted a few hours hunting the job name using process explorer, but it looks like FILTDUMP doesn't register a job object at all. Can you guess how the trick works? They hard coded the names of MS tools like FILTDUMP in the PDF filter ACRORDIF.DLL!!! So when the PDF IFilter object is being instantiated, it checks the calling process name, and if it is one in the "whitelist" it works, otherwise it fakes a problem and E_FAILs. Scandalous. For proof, rename your program to "filtdump.exe" and as if by magic everything works, even plain LoadIFilter without job objects.

So it wasn't really sandboxing or security Adobe were after, but a callous attempt to stop 3rd party tools extracting PDF text. Interestingly, FILTDUMP.EXE is still hard coded in the version 11 DLL but they must have turned off the hack. Adobe naughty <g> I say dump Adobe reader altogether (who needs 100MB installs just to read documents?) and go with a better solution like PDF-XChange Viewer. All the shell integration features work (for free), both for 32 and 64 bit windows. That's the best plugin for use with xplorer² too.

Some pretty good points there. I dumped Adobe Reader some time ago, and avoid using anything sourced from Adobe if I can help it. After reading the above, I think I shall shun Adobe products from hereon.

3764

Living Room / Re: VPN Gate - Univ. of Tsukuba launches Academic Experimental [Crowd] Project.

« Last post by IainB on July 21, 2013, 09:33 PM »

Found an informative website here: https://www.grc.com/default.htm (it's the SpinRite home page)
 - it does a "reverse DNS" check on your IP address, and can inspect characteristics of your router (e.g., if is has UPnP enabled). However, if you are operating via a VPN, then all it sees is the VPN node and its characteristics.
These things could be important to the cyber criminals out there (cough, cough).
(By the way, this is not an endorsement of SpinRite, which some pundits on this forum and elsewhere seem to think has a rather dubious history.)

3765

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on July 17, 2013, 11:46 PM »

Here's a photo of me in the shower.

-Deozaan (July 17, 2013, 07:01 PM)

- and here's a rather clever comedy skit by Armstrong & Miller on "showers" (click on link).
This short BBC sketch is chock full of oblique references to science, social trends, big government, buggery in prisons, and the British attitude to the weather.

3766

Living Room / MS Excel Power Map (was “GeoFlow”) - 3D cartographically distributed data maps.

« Last post by IainB on July 17, 2013, 10:27 PM »

MS Excel Power Map (was “GeoFlow”) - 3D cartographically distributed data maps.
Here are the latest (2013-07-04) docs on this Excel add-in:

• Microsoft Power Map Preview for Excel - Getting Started Guide (53 pages. Very informative.)
• Microsoft Power Query for Excel - Release Notes (3 pages. Power Query seems to be issued in sync with/alongside Power Map)

(The above are links to Google Drive/Docs views of the original docx files. The embedded links in the files do not work.)

I have only just now installed the updated versions of these two Excel add-ins, and have not had time to play with them yet, so cannot make any user comment about them.

Links to info for download and use of the add-ins:

• Download Power Query and Power Map Preview for Excel 2013
• Microsoft Power Query for Excel Help

3767

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: OpenDNS + DNSCrypt - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on July 16, 2013, 03:34 AM »

You may have missed the advent of DNSCrypt because, almost immediately after it was announced/released, OpenDNS seemed to stop talking about it. It was kinda buried away. I suspect that they may have been asked to do that, as the implications of using DNSCrypt are that government snooping (NSA) is frustrated to some extent...

I can't answer "What is going on with that?", but here is a screenshot capture of the relevant OpenDNSCrypt connections on a laptop, as viewed in Process Hacker:



It rather looks as though DNSCrypt may be automatically dynamically making as many connections - and polling the relevant ports - as it needs at any given point.

I was not sure what the OpenDNS Updater was as I don't use it and I don't get any messages from anything by that name.
I looked it up and found it referred to at https://www.opendns....ort/dynamic_ip_tech/
Windows IP Updater

This is the officially supported OpenDNS Windows client, which sends your network's new IP Address to OpenDNS whenever it should change.

I have the Primary and Secondary DNS nodes (IP addresses) set in my router as being the OpenDNS addresses, so when I restart the router or my ISP assigns a new dynamically allocated IP address, it doesn't stop the connection going to the OpenDNS nodes.

3768

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on July 15, 2013, 11:16 AM »

My daughter sent me this link. TV News reporting FAIL (Asiana Flight 214 pilots' names):
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=L1JYHNX8pdo
(DC Forum YouTube window artefact not working?)

3769

Living Room / Re: Secure Cloud backup -e.g., Digital Lifeboat - what alternatives are there?

« Last post by IainB on July 15, 2013, 02:40 AM »

...I would like to know why the service had to be killed.

-IainB (June 25, 2013, 11:58 PM)

   I guessed that the reason was probably a financially non-viable business model, or infeasibility, or police/SS pressure that led to this "cryptographically unbreakable" data backup service being closed down. I suppose another reason could be a mixture of all three reasons.
   Because the Digital Lifeboat system was redolent of BitTorrent functionality, today I did a search of BitTorrent-related comments in the DC Forum, and then I realised why Digital Lifeboat may have been shut down - viz: it is an application concept that seems to be already being worked on and moved into the public domain.
   For example, including:

• The 2013-01-25 post by @Paul Keith: BitTorrent Sync Sign-up Link.
  
  
• The 2013-04-23 post by @superboyac: Finally! A private, non-cloud file-sharing service.
  

   I suspect that such a P2P "cryptographically unbreakable" data backup service would be anathema to the police/SS/NSA from a surveillance prospect.
   The thing about Cloud storage and Cloud-based services is that (as we now know thanks to the Snowden leaks) the "Big Data" and "Social Network" providers  - including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, for example - have been obliged to act as data suppliers to the NSA, for NSA (and other) surveillance agency purposes. So you categorically cannot expect the common "Big Data" and "Social Network" providers to be not breaching your privacy/security/confidentiality.
   Since Them are bigger than Us, I suspect that it may be only a matter of time before operating such P2P "cryptographically unbreakable" data backup services in what could effectively be a virtual "Dark Net" could become illegal, or at least "showing a suspicious intent".

Note: This might be handy as a BitTorrent summary: 4 Things You Didn’t Know About BitTorrent

3770

Living Room / Re: Computers Outlawed in Florida

« Last post by IainB on July 15, 2013, 02:32 AM »

On second thoughts, maybe this Florida fiasco is no accident of incompetence.
Just sit back and watch how complex and time-consuming it may have to become before it gets fixed and the bad bits undone - if they ever are, in entirety.

"I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel." - Blackadder.

3771

Living Room / Re: Computers Outlawed in Florida

« Last post by IainB on July 15, 2013, 12:36 AM »

The points above mostly all make sense, given that:

• The police/SS seem obliged to deem cash business to be implicitly/potentially illegal, because you cannot trace the source of the money being used in the transaction to establish:
  (a) proof/certainty as to whether it was used for bona fide legal/legitimate purposes (e.g., it might be operating an unlicensed casino), or
  (b) whether the cash came from a "legitimate" or criminal source (e.g., as in money laundering).
  
  
• There seems to be a necessary drive by police/SS to exercise State control over all financial transactions so as to be able to "prove" them at the POS (Point Of Sale), as the police/SS are otherwise unable to effectively police various areas of crime engaged in money exchange/laundering.
  

Fans of the Breaking Bad series will recall the problems with having all that illegally-obtained cash (millions) stashed away in the wall linings of your garage or wherever...

@sword may well be right though:

See, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", by Lewis Carroll

-sword (July 13, 2013, 11:09 PM)

(Which I thought was a very droll comment.)    

   But there is at least one other important aspect to this that I can think of - banking transaction "tollgate" fees - which are a huge real/potential source of revenue.
We have witnessed that payments intermediaries/agents (e.g., PayPal, Visa, Mastercard) can pick and choose at their whim which of their commercial accounts can use their services - e.g., withdrawing access to their payments service and freezing accounts for "pirating" organisations frowned on by the **AA or by the State (e.g., Wikileaks).
   There will undoubtedly be a financial benefit for this "self policing", probably in terms of some kind of a fee from the **AA or the State, and/or from the use-of money interest by effectively sequestering the funds (assets) in any frozen or "unclaimed" or "unclaimable" accounts.
   The precedent for this form of highly lucrative and legitimised piracy bonanza was set in the case of the thousands of secretive anonymous Swiss Bank accounts of wealthy Jews killed in the Holocaust, and of the hundreds (or more) of Nazi/SS generals who had squirrelled away their humungus stolen assets - the spoils of war. Sitting on that sea of "gifted wealth" after WW2 was what made the corrupt (QED) Swiss banks even more secretive (lest they be discovered and were asked to pay the legitimate account monies to the descendants/heirs of the "untraceable" account-holders) and is apparently the main reason for Switzerland's strong economy today and their pride of place in the respectable (ho, ho) banking community.

   So that represents a  view of the population providing lucrative revenue from the accounts that you have as a banking/financial intermediary. But what about the accounts that you do not have? They could be potentially very lucrative.
   Well, every cash transaction is a missed tollgate fee, and there are likely to be billions of them, and once you have established your bank as the tollgate financial intermediary for those accounts, you can collect a fee on every transaction. It's a tax levied by nominated financial barons, for an ephemeral service, and which is authorised by governments and their Agencies (which collectively are otherwise the authorised thieves tax-gatherers). The government cannot function without a well-subsidised banking system creating the magical "trust" money (debt) that government necessarily feeds upon for its projects. For example, to conduct its philanthropic "peace-making" wars on a global scale, or to conduct philanthropic global mass surveillance...
   Some people (not me, you understand) might say that this issue (fees and commissions to feed the banks) - and not crime - might be the main reason that cash transactions must be discouraged in favour of EFT-POS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point-Of-Sale), or similar - all operated by/through the banking system - but I couldn't possibly comment.
(By the way, this may indicate that Bitcoin or similar must be verboten.)

3772

Living Room / Why you should avoid using social media

« Last post by IainB on July 14, 2013, 10:33 PM »

I posted this as, though it is not a comprehensive list of reasons by any means, it does rather seem to sum up some pertinent points: How Thieves Use Social Media To Rob You

There may be some useful pointers there for those who might be interested in protecting/maintaining/improving the privacy, security and confidentiality of their data.
This would be in addition to protecting data from the now acknowledged gross breach of privacy and security by apparently increasingly data-totalitarian governments - including the USA and other countries (e.g., in Europe, Canada, NZ, Australia), as has irrefutably been revealed by the UK Guardian's publication of the Snowden leaks regarding the US NSA/PRISM mass internet surveillance.

3773

Living Room / I'm sooo EXCITED with the overhyping of everything.

« Last post by IainB on July 14, 2013, 10:12 PM »

 

3774

Living Room / Re: Must...stop...playing...that addictive game!

« Last post by IainB on July 12, 2013, 05:05 AM »

My just-turned 3 y/o son accidentally discovered these games and a whole stack more. I shall post them up here.
Some are really rather good, some are poorly-made, some are addictive.
I have to help him play a lot of them as he hasn't yet developed the knowledge or co-ordination to use the keyboard/mouse game controls properly.
He likes what he calls the "bamming" games where you shoot zombies or other monsters or enemy hordes with a gun or bow and arrows. Now when I chase after him pretending that I'm a cookie-eating monster and he's a cookie, he doesn't run away anymore, just points a finger at me and goes "BAM!" and I'm dead.

3775

Living Room / Need...more...brains...yummy...

« Last post by IainB on July 11, 2013, 02:26 AM »

It gets quite tricky!  http://www.kongregat...ll-we-need-is-brain#