I really should stop idly web surfing and get on with some housekeeping. But before I do I should make a note of something that I encountered on another site that i waste a lot of time on, Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/news
Heard on the radio that the police in the UK have issued a warning and guidance to teachers regarding sextortion of teenagers.
[quote]‘It can happen to any child’: parents of sextortion victim send out warning
Ros and Mark Dowey, whose son Murray took his life after being duped by criminals online, are calling for greater awareness and social media regulation
Teachers warned to be on lookout for victims of sextortion [/quote] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/29/it-can-happen-to-any-child-parents-of-sextortion-victim-fight-for-justice
I don't want to minimize the impact that sextortion can have, it's plainly devastating for the victims and their families. But how does anyone get into such a state. As far as I can tell the pictures concerned are merely, or mostly merely, nudes. So why would anyone feel suicidal over the fear of being exposed? Of course it's seriously embarrassing but surely not the end of the world?
Or is the explanation that sextortion attempts are actually much more widespread than even the people investigating it think and that many of the intended victims just realize that they have been duped and just treat it as an embarrassment but nothing more. But if it's so widespread then just by chance some of the victims will be a little more fragile, less self assured.
I think that children, people in general really, need to be taught how to spot scams and also to be helped to build greater self confidence. Perhaps then the scammers would just be laughed out of existence.
I haven't heard of this being such a big problem in other countries and I wonder why. Is it simply that English is a language available to the scammers whereas Norwegian is not or is it that teenagers in other countries are less likely to fall for it. If so why?
@ArishMell [quote] that cultural difference. I wonder why it happens?[/quote] Norwegian children are taken seriously, treated as people with opinions that should be listened to. Most children here go to barnehage from a very early age (usually at the age of about two) where socialisation and cooperative behaviour is the whole point. There are no lessons but lots of outdoors activity including getting wet, muddy, and cold plus indoor activities that include being read to, helping lay tables, etc. They learn how to keep the indoor spaces clean even though the playground might look like a recreation of the Somme after a few months of winter rain and snow.
I live less than a hundred metres from a primary school and the junior high school is just another hundred metres beyond that. A few hundred children walk past my front garden every day yet I hardly ever hear any noise above normal conversation.
I'm not sure I would want to live so close to two schools in the UK even if only because of the noise and traffic..
@ninalanyon I live near three schools from Infants to Secondary, and the only noise is from the Primary School playground at play-time and dinner-time. Some shouting between the upper school pupils, especially the boys, on their way home. Not really that much of a problem. Rather that than unnatural hush.
The traffic though... yes you have a point there.
A few years ago some woman from London bought a cottage in a West Dorset village then went running to complain when the local Infants' School introduced some strange practice of letting the little darlings have ten minutes or so of noisy letting off steam at the start of the school day.
What was this woman's work?
Being noisy: standing on a stage and singing Very Loudly and Incomprehensibly.... as an opera-singer.
Excellent work, all the more so considering the situation.
Bradley and his fellow prisoners must have been treated relatively well, perhaps because the artificial limbs were presumably for injured Japanese servicemen. If so they were fortunate when you consider how the Japanese treated most of their prisoners,
I wonder if the lathe still exists? I hope so - and hope its history is known along with it.
The article is Item no. 89 on the Hacker site, and its source is credited to the 'lathes.co.uk' web-site, a British, very comprehensive archive of machine-tools by a huge range of makers. The full article ends with a reference to a description of it in a 1983 edition of the British hobby magazine [i]Model Engineer[/i]. (The [i]Engineer[/i] magazine cited seems to be an American trade publication.)
@ArishMell The rank of a submission to Hacker News depends on people voting for the article and writing and voting comments on it. So the rank varies over time but eventually sinks down the list when people move on to comment on a new submission.
@ArishMell It's because the point of the site i not the articles themselves but the discussions that occur. The formula for the rank is something like votes/(time since submission raised to some power). So submissions drift down the list if people don't keep voting up either the article itself or the comments on it. As people run out of things to say about a topic it naturally drifts down the list.
Click on the [i]discuss [/i]link to see the discussion.
Within a discussion you can vote on the comments and highly ranked comments float to the top.
