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dominiconnor

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  • Mar 04, 2025 @ 07:37am

    Greetings from Agnostic London

    In the UK it is in effect compulsory to teach religion, there is even a National Curriculum for it, complete with exams etc. This has been true since 1948 and since then Christian observance has fallen off a cliff. On any given Sunday going to Church is about as common as listening to the Pet Shop Boys, remember them ? We have a state religion, the Church of England which defines it's "worshipping community" as anyone who goes to church once a month, it would do if they were not sick, old, working or busy. That's long fallen below the million mark. out of a population of 68 million. The leader of the right Conservative Party (subtle name huh?) is a black woman who defines herself as 'agnostic' with a party platform that provides legal, safe and free, abortions to any woman that wants one. Of course correlation is not causation, but I strongly suspect that those Christians pushing for the 10 Commandments and other compulsory religious observance, really ain't going to get what they hope for.

  • May 07, 2015 @ 11:38am

    It's worse than that Jim...

    It's not just about encryption. As a developer I sometimes create a new file format, a good (bad) % of my professional life has being trying to work out how to read/write data formats that were *supposed* be be read/writable, but often took sweat to access.

    How many different formats are there to store still images ?
    1,000, 2000 ?
    "different" here means if my code tries to render it do I get the image, junk or a crash ?

    Ditto text, every game saves in a different format, there are 15 different incompatible versions of Excel files, not encrypted but harsh to figure out.

    This can be figured out, but it's a chunk of work per application and there are a *lot* of apps these days.

    Also, what is a .XLS file ?
    Yeah I think it's Excel too, but you can't rely on that, I can choose to save my data with any filename extension I like.

    How do you search Excel files for "interesting" content ?
    Or my own .xls format that I use for sharing IMs ?

    By hand, really ?

    This can only be done by hiring a *lot* of programmers and they will never fully catch up.