Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forSeptember, 2006 | back to home

14 September 2006

According to a new article by The Economist (subscription required to read), “bets in Britain have grown rapidly, from £7 billion in 2000 to £32 billion in 2004 and an estimated £50 billion or more this year.” Internet betting accounts for 15% of this, and half of the bets are placed by foreigners (leaving half to be placed by our own citizens). Regular readers of my blog will know that I am horrified by what amounts to a de facto voluntary tax on the poor and if you are in the UK I encourage you to sign a petition against super-casinos here.

13 September 2006

Just found out that the reason my wife’s PC wouldn’t connect to the Internet is that I had entered the WEP password wrongly. But Intel’s software reported a good connection to my router! Would it have been so hard to code in a “physical connection good but password is wrong please try again” dialog box? Billions of blue blistering barnacles!

Later And to compound the annoyance, I nearly thought my connection had broken again but then I realised that if you fix the password on one user account it doesn’t fix it on any of the others. Mightn’t it be a good idea to allow administrators to change all the passwords for wireless access to a given point at the same time?

The Avengers

I just found out that The Avengers was called in France Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir – bowler hat and leather boots. Which if you think about it is probably a more descriptive name. I know at least one person who probably only ever watched it for the leather boots…