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The BBC has a story about children being abused, having been accused of witchcraft, in the UK in 2015.

It would appear that there are significant numbers of people who really believe in witches, witchcraft, black magic and evil spirits here in 2015.

An NSPCC spokesman said: "While the number of child abuse cases involving witchcraft is relatively small, they often include horrifying levels of cruelty.

Small children have been thrown out of their homes by ignorant, hysterical parents, and in some cases murdered.

Of course, money is involved.

...within churches there was often a financial motivation behind accusations.

"The pastor says there's a witch in this church today; looks around and points to a child.

"That means public humiliation for the family. The next step is exorcism which is not done for free. It's a money-making scam."

The Witchcraft Act 1735 appears to have been written by learned people who took the opinion that Witchcraft was an impossible crime and so it outlawed the pretence of witchcraft. The law was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951. Finally, this was replaced in 2008 by Consumer Protection Regulations.

So there you have it.

Right-thinking Tory Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Freudian-Slip has announced today that the decent, honest, noble, compassionate Conservative Party would like to encourage the poor to work as hard as the Chinese and Americans.

How they'll achieve this is novel and exciting.

A previous Labour government introduced a system of Tax Credits for people in work with families (i.e. children to feed) but on low incomes which, without the tax credits, would mean that they were in poverty. So, the idea is it pays to work hard.

Note that we are talking about tax credits - a rebate of some of your Income Tax (a tax discount) - not a hand-out for "scroungers."

This is the good part. Those intellectual giants of the Conservative Party reason that, if they abolish Tax Credits (which are only paid to those on a gross annual income of under £16,500 or $25,000) those people will be so motivated and empowered that they will move into better-paid jobs!

“There’s a pretty difficult question that we have to answer, which is essentially: are we going to be a country which is prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard, in the way that Americans are prepared to work hard? And that is about creating a culture where work is at the heart of our success.”

Hunt also suggested in the interview that those reliant on tax credits and benefits lacked self-respect. “Dignity is not just about how much money you have got ... officially children are growing up in poverty if there is an income in that family of less than £16,500. What the Conservatives say is how that £16,500 is earned matters.

Meanwhile, in this brave, new, flexible and empowered labour market of short-term and zero-hours contracts, hard-working Britons are so scared of being off sick at places like Sports Direct that they're being taken away by emergency ambulance.

Work harder for your crumbs, plebs.

Disclaimer: I've never voted Labour (or Tory) in my life. But I do always vote.

The inexorable rise of property prices in the UK, especially London, due to a lack of supply of new builds, buy-to-let investments, the selling off of social housing and large numbers of new builds being bought by foreign speculators is finally causing the torches and pitchforks to come out.

In places like London, it's becoming nearly impossible for a "normal" person on an average income to live since renting even the smallest of properties (e.g. a studio flat or a room in a house share) is out of reach, Forget being a teacher, nurse, police officer or fire fighter and living there. It's just not going to happen. Social housing has mostly gone, so the poor renting privately are finding their monthly rents doubling over night and having to leave.

The good Christian Irritable Duncan Syndrome brought in cuts to housing benefit just to remind the poor, sick and disabled that they're a filthy burden on the rest of us. And they can jolly well cut back on food and heating to pay their rent.

So some "motivated" protesters have got out the torches and pitchforks and completely got it wrong.

You couldn't make it up.

What a miserable society it is that can't look after its poor, sick and disabled. Let the bleeding hearts amongst the Little People look out for them, we'll just take our money away and laugh.

Mind you, the other side have got a new leader and they're thinking about changing things.

The BBC has an article about ex-Muslim Britons who are being persecuted for becoming atheists.

The persecution often comes from close family and friends.

Ayisha (not her real name) from Lancashire was just 14 when she began to question Islam after reading the Koran. She started rebelling over wearing the hijab, but eventually decided she wasn't a Muslim and the situation at home rapidly got worse.

"My dad threatened to kill me by getting a knife and holding it against my neck and saying: 'We might as well do it if you're going to bring this much shame to the family.'"

He used to beat her so badly that eventually she called the police and he was convicted of child cruelty. Ayisha hadn't anticipated the shock of being immediately cut off from her mother and siblings.

Many of the victims are young, vulnerable and powerless. The local authorities where the victims live are often wary of offending Muslim culture and belief which may have hindered efforts to help people in this situation.

While trying out where I would land if I typed in the soviet TLD (.su)[1], I found this neat collection of pictures from soviet era (+- a few years) calculators, computers and other electronic devices: The Soviet Digital Electronic Museum, a private collection of a guy named Sergei Frolov.
http://www.leningrad.su/museum/main.php?lang=0(english version)
Great stuff!

[1] After a bit of searching I learned that .su is still in use and adminstrated by the Russian Institute for Public Networks.

I'd like to take this oppurtunity to express my thanks to all the Hordes of Ultra Geeks, Groups of Rabid Barbarians, Teams of Overworked Monkeys, Cadres of Elite Robots, Barrels of Orange Soylents, Swarms of Psycho Ninjas and all the others I fail to remember now for working tirelessly on the generation of this wonderful page. Just for me!

This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Mongols for sudo rm -rf (2357).

I'm still using Firefox, and I have it on my (new) Android phone as well as my home Linux system.

A couple of days ago, Firefox updated itself on my phone, and now it renders pages differently, and less well, in my opinion. It may just be a coincidence. Maybe soylentews.org has changed?

Up until the upgrade, it used to render the main text area in stories and the comment threads below to fill the width of the screen automatically, and the text would wrap at the screen edges. I like this, because the (useful/interesting) text is automatically the most prominent and is given all the screen area. Also, zooming would make the text larger, and would still wrap it at the edges if the screen, so you could still read everything without scrolling left and right continually.

Now, the whole page takes the whole width of the screen, and you have to manually zoom to the text, and it doesn't wrap, because you're zooming the whole pages, borders, menus and all, not just the interesting stuff.

Have I missed something? Is there a setting in the browser?

In general in the last few years as shallow but wide screens have become the norm, we pages are generally designed to a certain fixed width. Gone are the days when you could resize your browser window and the text would reflow to fit your personal preference.

I read better in relatively narrow vertical columns. I was once told that this is most natural, and one of the reasons that traditional newspapers printed in columns. It's tiring and easy to get lost reading very long horizontal lines.

And those of us who like to use our window managers to have multiple windows tiled and overlapping on our multiple desktops do not like to have to maximise a browser window or to take up 80% of the screen just to render a fixed-width web page.

And web pages these days are all L A R G E F O N T S, W H I T E S P A C E , A N I M A T I O N S, V I D E O S A N D F L O A T I N G P O P O V E R M E N U S A N D C A N C E L B U T T O N S.

Bah!

Update: It appears that Firefox has an option to make the text larger which solves the immediate problem with rendering this site.

Disclaimer: I work as a PHP developer.
While browsing the upgrade notes of PHP 7 alpha 2, I found a few changes a bit concerning. (In order of appearance)

The func_get_arg() and func_get_args() functions will no longer return the original value that was passed to a parameter and will instead provide the current value (which might have been modified). For example

function foo($x) {
        $x++;
        var_dump(func_get_arg(0));
}
foo(1);

will now print "2" instead of "1".

While I never use func_get_args(), I know a lot of frameworks do, a quick search over an old project (symfony 1.4) results in 129 matches. Even worse, a few lines further down it says:

function foo($x) {
        $x = 42;
        throw new Exception;
}
foo("string");

    will now result in the stack trace

            Stack trace:
            #0 file.php(4): foo(42)
            #1 {main}

    while previously it was:

            Stack trace:
            #0 file.php(4): foo('string')
            #1 {main}

Why make debugging harder than it is already? I want to know what parameter was passed and caused the exception! Especially in long stack traces. Or am I completely misunderstanding something?
The next one should throw a warning at least:

Left bitwise shifts by a number of bits beyond the bit width of an integer will always result in 0:
var_dump(1 << 64); // int(0)

At least it is consistent for all CPU architectures.

There are now two exception classes: Exception and Error. Both classes implement a new interface Throwable. Type hints in exception handling code may need to be changed to account for this.

ARRGH!

Calling a method on a non-object no longer raises a fatal error; see also: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/catchable-call-to-member-of-non-object.

Really? I mean: WHAT? I hate that error like the next guy, but it *should* be fatal. I hate to see every little method call surrounded by a try-catch block.

Nevertheless, a lot of the other stuff that will change looks interesting to me, e.g. Added null coalesce operator (??). looks fun and can short-circuit functions!

function foo() {
        echo "executed!", PHP_EOL;
}
var_dump(true ?? foo());

// outputs bool(true), "executed!" does not appear as it short-circuited

The time has come to learn some Python. I have a rough idea what it is having read about it in the past and probably spent about half an hour playing with it many years ago.

I'm so busy these days (working long hours, family life) I find it hard to keep up with all the developments so I'd like to ask a couple of questions, since I believe the Python language changes significantly between each major release.

At my current place of work, we have development systems running ancient versions of Red Hat with Python 2.6.x. At home I have Slackware which has Python 2.7.5 by default. There are much newer versions of Python out in the wild these days, and I'm not scared to compile from source.

So, which version of Python should I start with? In a nutshell, what are the main differences? Which parts of the language are backwards-compatible?

A lot of times I get distracted by little details in comments, and through extensive link-hopping, I sometimes end up with things that are simply too offtopic to post on the stories.

So for today:
The bite force quotient.
Bite force quotient (BFQ) is the regression of the quotient of an animal's bite force divided by its body mass. (do.)
For example, the american black bear (Ursus americanus) has a BFQ as low as 64, only slightly higher than a domestic cat (Felis sylvestris catus) with BFQ of 58.
(Source: Bite club: comparative bite force in big biting mammals and the prediction of predatory behaviour in fossil taxa)