Blockchain has been around as a technology for nearly two decades. If financial institutions thought it could help them you can bet they would be all-in on it by now. As it is, blockchain has no significant advantages over traditional financial ledger systems, so what incentive is there for them to use it.

It's not something new or cutting edge any more, just waiting for a bright spark to discover the technology and put it to use.

Looking at that screenshot, even though I've been a very happy KDE user for many years now, I do kinda miss the days when many Xfree86 desktop environments were influenced more by NeXTStep than Windows.

Hopefully you didn't, because it's supposed to go off at 3pm today (Sunday)

We've seen this happen before, and it always ends in failure. A small number of Labour Party members leave the party in disgust, an even fewer number are angry enough and motivated enough to form a new party. It either fizzles out due to burnout, or gets invaded by Trots and destroyed from the inside.

The one example I can think of that's survived for many years is Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, formed in very similar circumstances to now: a decaying, corrupt, widely-hated Tory government almost certain to lose the next election but the leader of the Labour Party (i.e. Blair) was in no way left wing or promising any socialist policies.

The SLP was set up in 1996 and is still going. After nearly 30 years, how much electoral success has it had? How many people other than ultra-committed political obsessives (such as us!) even know of its existence?

Despite the K in its name, KiCad is nothing to do with the KDE project. It's an independent program started (iirc) at a French university. I agree it's awesome, though.

Maybe a controversial one but I much prefer the US version of Shameless to the British one.

You keep talking about "safely" running these programs. What is the threat that you are trying to protect yourself against? Are you concerned that your unofficial copy of the program may contain malware, are you worried that the copyright owners may try to find you (via IP address perhaps?) and prosecute, or what.

Well like it says in the sidebar, we're the Meh Generation so, I suppose, meh!

Seriously though, I'm not bothered. If anything it's to our credit that we've never done anything bad enough to make us despised by the young'uns.

That "assuming nothing else changes" is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting.

Something that I heard a few years ago really demonstrated people's rightward political shift as they age like nothing else.

Imagine a child born shortly after the end of the Second World War, say 1948-1950. That child would have been a young adult, 18-20, in 1968. That was both the year that the hippie movement gained greatest prominence as well as the year of radical protest where young people around the world organised and fought back against corruption and repression.

Now fast forwards to 2016. Those very same post-war children are now aged 66-68. That's the demographic that more than any other voted in favour of Brexit. I bet if you'd gone back to those young radicals of '68 and told them they were going to become bigoted, narrow-minded xenophobes they'd have laughed in your face. But it happened.

Ooh thank you for this. Hannah Fry is an excellent presenter and brings enthusiasm and clear explanations even to complex subjects. I'm looking forward to this new series.

Edit: for those who can't be bothered clicking through to the Grauniad article, the programme's called "The Secret Genius of Modern Life" and it's on BBC2 at 8pm.

I see what you did there.

You do realise that Greggs is the McDonalds of bakeries? Their goal is to sell mass-produced food at a very low price. It's tasty but if you're comparing it to any kind of small independent bakers it's not even in the same ballpark.

And for the love of gods please don't think too hard about how they get baby oil the next time you're in the toiletries aisle.

If it has cheese or ham then it's not a cucumber sandwich. It's a cheese sandwich, or a ham sandwich.

Yes and no to all of those reasons, and many others.

There isn't a right or wrong way to install/use Linux. As the saying goes "you do you". If going through the Arch learning curve doesn't appeal to you, don't do it. If you're the sort of person whose curiosity sometimes leads them to do silly things that aren't necessarily logical but that you find enormously fun and satisfying, then maybe go for it.

I think I agree. The actual main building of Liverpool Street Station has been so hidden by all the other developments in that part of the City over the decades that it's largely invisible anyway.

Nothing changed. I'm not sure what you were expecting would change - the only difference was that instead of driving to Dover, putting your car on a ferry and then getting off in France, you'd drive to Dover, put your car on a train and then get off in France.

The Eurostar passenger services started a year or so later iirc, but again although it was fun to be able to take the train to Paris rather than taking the plane or boat, it didn't really affect anyone who wasn't travelling to Paris anyway.

TAKE MY MONEY!!!

Christmas is officially over.

Looks like they're already rotated daily.

Anyway by my understanding it wasn't the logs that caused the problem, they just demonstrate the extent of the sudden increase in requests by bots/scrapers.