Posts by Julian Bradfield 226 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jul 2008
I grew up on MVS, as filtered and made manageable by Cambridge Computer Lab. If other old farts haven't yet noticed, you can now sign up to IBM Zxplore, and get to learn the real thing on real z/OS systems! Of course, these days, you can do it under Linux if you don't want to use proper MVS.
Despite the patent fact that he had committed (high) treason by compassing the death of the Sovereign, he was not actually charged with treason. He was charged with the lesser offence of attempting to injure or alarm the Sovereign, from the Treason Act 1842. Whether the motivation for introducing this offence was as you say, I don't know - but it appears the policy you describe is still being followed. Had he been charged with treason, he'd have been liable for life imprisonment.
Cav - psychopaths have distinctive brain characteristics. So do taxi-drivers (at least in places where they have to have the Knowledge). Detecting differences in brain structures tells you nothing about whether the difference should be called a mental disturbance - that's a social judgement.
Depends how much you like using your resources to slow people down. Me, I blacklist (with DROP) the IP address on one failed login to my mail server, for 24 hours. I typically have 8k banned addresses at any one time; that's quite a lot of log-in attempts being blocked (and not filling up my log file). And with a bit of luck, they spend some time trying to establish a connection before giving up.
I'm fascinated by what you mean by "do some actual research". Could you explain?
Yes, of course the world has been much warmer in the past. There's a difference between temperature shifts taking millions of years (or even thousands of years), and those taking a few decades.
You used to be right, but over time we've slowly abandoned more and more of the in-house stuff and moved to using central university systems. It makes sense, really, provided the central systems have most of the functionality of in-house and the increased workload is not too high.
As for advising the centre on how to procure and install a large complex system...they don't want to know.
Payroll *was* run in parallel for three months, and there haven't (as far as I know) been problems with staff pay.
However, our PhD students are not staff - they are, god help us, "suppliers" of their research, and their stipends are paid under the procurement part of the system, which is the one that has gone catastrophically wrong (as opposed to the HR part, which merely went infuriatingly and wastefully wrong).
As far as I understand it, yes. The old system (which also had our 2021/2 P60s on it!) was switched off in July, and we started (supposedly) being able to use the new system some time in September (I forget when, it's all a blur, and thankfully I don't buy things). In the interim there was a manual process for urgent purchases.
Not only have lab suppliers and stationers stopped supplying us, we can't even order pizza for student welcome parties, because no pizza company in Edinburgh will deal with us.
The "internet" doesn't see or think anything. A small number of *people* think about it, the vast majority of *people* read the content, whether it's in British, American, Indian, Canadian or international (which used to be mainly British in spelling outside South America, and is now a random hodge-podge depending on the country and even individual school of the E2L speaker).
I remember a friend's (parents') number from the 1980s, whom I only called once, I think. I remember it because it was the old days when we used to say the number on picking up, and for some reason "Aberystwyth tri pedwar chwech pedwar" stuck firmly in my brain ... (I speak no Welsh, but know a little about it.)
Depends what you mean by validate. From what I see in my logs, this usually means (a) seeing if a RCPT command passes (luckily they seem to be ok with 4xx replies, since I greylist), and (b) checking that a RCPT with random local-part is rejected. That is some form of validation.
Not all academic research is Popperian science. This was computer science, and it's well known that any subject whose name is two words one of which is "science", isn't.
More seriously, there are many scientific statements that can be proved (beyond reasonable doubt, because after all we might be in a simulation). The existence of white swans, for example. What's difficult is proving universal statements. This article is about an existential statement.
You don't wait. You decide *before* performing the experiment that you'll do twenty tosses, and the probability of error you're happy with. You get 20 heads - the probability of a distribution that unbalanced is 1 in half a million; if that's less than your suspicion threshold, you declare the coin biased.
The professionals class this as a "maybe". One suggestion is that the IE root of "fuck" is 'to strike' (as in Latin pugnus 'fist'). German ficken 'to rub' may or may not be related. My emeritus colleague Roger Lass wrote on this: R. Lass ‘Four letters in search of an etymology’ in Diachronica 12 (1995) 99–111. Unfortunately we don't subscribe to old issues online, so I can't read it.
In the UK, most employers, especially those who do employ people on visas, will ask to see your passport (or other proof of citizenship/residence). Do they have to? No. But it's the only sure defence they can plead if they do employ somebody who turns out not to have the right to work: "I checked the documents, here's the copy of them with my signature and date".
the message error is "Interwoven alignment preambles are not allowed." and D. Knuth comment is "If you have been so devious as to get this message, you will understand it, and you will deserve no sympathy." (TeXbook, page 299) - from Google.
I have never managed to provoke it, but then I've never tried to interweave alignments.
Apparently \halign{\valign#\cr\cr suffices.
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