When my mates at school had the aero glass effect on the new Windows, my ancient hand-me-down laptop wouldn't even try to run it. It could however run Compiz somewhat if it was persuaded very hard!

That's basically the reason I learned Linux initially, and those hours debugging video driver issues would serve me well later on.

Using an inequality symbol to highlight inequality is elegant, I wish they'd gone with that!

> On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?

If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Politics and the English Language aimed at the language sins of attention economy era social media.

There's still one example of a working offshore radio ship, the Ross Revenge in southern England which you can go and visit. She's one of the former Radio Caroline ships, the studios are still fired up every month for a weekend of broadcasting and they run tours. Radio Caroline themselves are still alive and kicking as a legal station broadcasting 24/7 online and on 648 AM; ironically the latter transmission comes from a former BBC World Service site. She wasn't really a 'pirate radio' ship as she was a Panamanian-flagged vessel in international waters so not subject to the Wireless Telegraphy Act in theory, but British citizens specifically would have committed an offence working on her in her free radio days. What really did Radio Caroline in as an offshore broadcaster was the Anglo-Dutch action against the clandestine organisation which supplied the ship, that and the move from a 3-mile to a 12-mile limit which forced her into more exposed waters.

Other than the RNI ship she was probably the best-equipped radio ship that ever put to sea, and certainly the strongest. She was a long-range trawler built for Arctic conditions, and the engineering which went into the radio station was really impressive; Peter Chicago her engineer by all rights should be up there with the greats in hacker lore. Most radio ships were clapped-out old vessels at the end of their lives, they were essentially slapped with transmitters and sent to sea to die since you can never take a radio ship back into port once it's broadcast. The Ross Revenge on the other hand was a very strong ship who was left purposeless midway through her life due to the Cod Wars. The generating and transmitting facilities were really sophisticated for radio pirates, there were plenty of redundancies and the ship could radiate multiple medium and short wave services.

The broadcast studios and accommodation are still active but most of the machinery spaces and the hull itself aren't in good condition. They've raised half a million pounds for repairs, but that's not actually all that much in the maritime conservation game. Hopefully it will be enough to stabilise the immediate problems with the hull and open a door to lottery funding though. If you're in the area I'd go and see her while you've definitely got the chance!