Posts by Dr Paul Taylor 462 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2009
You had your opportunity for that in 1861: the barbarian half of the country want to leave, but the civilised half fought a war to make them stay.
Slavery was not the original reason; if the South had been allowed to secede, economic sanctions could then have been used to force it to abandon slavery.
Now you (and we) are paying for that decision. Problem is, it set the principle that there was no right to leave, which the civilised states might want to exercise now.
s/random/ransom/
I was asking two separate questions about copper cables: (2a) why can't I keep using my modern one, that works absolutely fine and (2b) why don't they put their effort instead into replacing the ancient ones on telegraph poles that serve Victorian terraced houses?
My ISP (ICUK/CIX) has told me about this but, whilst I have nothing but praise for that company, I am livid with OpenReach, for two reasons:
(1) If I do as they want, ie end my POTS/ADSL service, they will charge me a "cease" fee, as if I were the one in breach of contract. If I don't do it, they will breach the contact.
Oftel should ban such random demands. But OpenReach is an unaccountable private monopoly.
(2) I am less than 500m from the exchange, to which I have a perfectly good copper wire that has never had any trouble.
My previous house, on the other hand, was 5km from the exchange and served by a crummy old wire that had faults at least three times.
What is OpenReach doing to replace these ancient cables? Why can't I continue having my Internet service over the copper wire that is perfectly good enough?
Since customers are not allowed to challenge OpenReach about this, please would UK Reg staff do so.
Meanwhile BCC has plans to flatten at least two districts: Ladywood and Druid's Heath. Ladywood was flattened in the 1960s, when 19th century slums were replaced with 20th century slums, that they have failed to maintain, warranting the building of 21st century slums. They plan to pay for this by judicial robbery / no-fault eviction of owner-occupiers, on the grounds that they "formally" own the land, when probably they formerly owned it and then sold it, ie they are illiterate as well as incompetent and arrogant.
They spent years and untold millions re-paving the two main squares, making it very difficult to walk through them. Now they've dug up New Street, the principal shopping street.
Oh, and I have a year's recycling piled up in my garden (being fortunate to have the space for it). Even though they can't resolve the bin strike, they have decided to give everybody four bins, supposedly for different kinds of recycling.
I'm currently investigating a topic in the history of mathematics and I have been playing with Perplexity.AI. It formats bibtex items very usefully, filling in details. It has given me some interesting explanations and connections.
But it also hallucinates! (In my case, that's inventing journal papers.) When a human tells you something that's wrong (accidentally or intentionally), after some prodding, the story falls apart. But AI not only doubles down on its errors, but invents considerable detail to back them up! (In my case, inventing the arguments in the fictitious papers.) Only when you go to some trouble to prove that it is incorrect will it back down.
Things like this will become rather serious when people are giving "evidence" to Courts or Parliament.
So what the balance is between conveniently formatted bibtex and useful suggestions, versus refuting hallucinations, I don't know.
It's also sycophantic when I tell it about my own work, which would be great if it came from a senior colleague, but is meaningless from a computer.
The danger of this is encouraging teenagers to take their own lives or join extremist political or religious organisations.
It also uses my own website to answer my own questions, when I want to check or extend my own work.
I confess that I lost interest in Chemistry early in my A-level, but I somehow doubt that Lithium comes out of this in any other way than as an ion (or salt if solid). Magnesium metal was pretty spectacular as a teacher's demo - I rather doubt whether Lithium could be found in a school chemistry lab.
Dutch (cyber) security is fscked and if it's like that in a country that sometimes does sensible things, imagine how bad it is in Britain!
You do not see any similarity between a fixed length binary code and a fixed length binary code?
In that case it goes back to Jean-Marie Jacquard in 1801 or who knows? maybe Archimedes.
The article is about digital formats, not physical ones. Baudot's code was five bits, with some versions designed to use fewer holes for the most common letters (cf Morse code, but also cf absolutely not qwerty), whereas ASCII goes sequentially through the alphabet.
The connection between EBCDIC and Hollerith cards is rather more obvious.
Then I suppose we might investigate the history of the alphabet and its order.
ASCII itself is in fact nothing else than an extended Baudot code
I don't see any similarity between Baudot code and ASCII
Worse still, they take word processed documents (in whatever format, but fundamentally with ASCII-encoded characters), print them on a crappy inkjet printer and scan them at low resolution, so that even good OCR can't read them.
Then they send 40MB emails 20 mins before a court hearing and conveniently lose evidence that has been "served" on them so that the judge disallows it.
Court system is just as bad. They have "statements of truth" that of course don't make anything true and "certificates of service" that don't certify anything, because their IT systems don't provide meaningful receipts for "served" documents.
Do I need to go on?
Except that the tech giants that have hijacked email hide website addresses behind their own so-called "safe links". These are nothing of the kind, because they are third parties, whereas the target may be trustworthy. They just want to log everything we do on the Web. I see this whenever I send someone a link to the /private/ section of my website, which is of course forbidden in my robots.txt, but nevertheless some robot promptly comes it to read something confidential that was supposed to be for just one person.
It was supposed to be exactly what we needed to protect us (or at least those who have not had their European citizenship stolen from them) from the Trumpistani tech bros, but I have never heard of its being used to do that.
Instead it's just used to frighten people who run small websites and email lists,
This word, with the obvious innocent meaning in western Europe, is my answer to those who claim that certain words are intrinsically offensive, for example as racial slurs.
I was once on a train (in England) surrounded by a bunch of (white) guys chatting loudly in some language that I couldn't identify, fuelled by plenty of beer. This word was used rather frequently and I was about to ask what it meant, when I realised that it was probably an expletive.
When I got home I looked it up in Wiktionary to try to find out what language it was. (With various spellings) it is not only in every Slavic language but also in Greek, Hungarian and Lithuanian.
After Douglas Adams, all I can say is Belgium!
Indeed, you would be installing code that can remotely wipe your device, at least according to this El Reg story and this M$ documentation.
Thanks for sharing your professional view, which is why we read the comments on El Reg, albeit usually about IT things. But I'm guessing that you're not a native English speaker, because "facile" nowadays has a derogatory meaning rather than the original one from Latin. "Proficient" might be a better word.
He has to scrape by on a measly trillion dollars (a year? the story didn't make that clear). We can't afford to spend good money on these scientific fripperies (which the great Robert Kennedy Jr has told us are all nonsense anyway - just read the Good Book!), else Musk and his makes (Zuck, Bezos etc) will starve!
I have been a happy residential customer of ICUK/CIX since 2007.
At first they had my broadband while BT Retail had my phone. In 2009 there was a fault on my phone line that BT Retail was clearly structurally incapable of diagnosing. This went on for more than four months. Then the manifestation of the fault changed and it only affected my broadband, so ICUK stepped in. They got it fixed in a couple of hours: apparently a card at the exchange had been knocked out of place. They also helped me prepare my complaint against BT Retail, except that the "Ombudsman" is in the pocket of BT and whitewashed the complaint. Of course I switched my phone to ICUK.
(On Monday I lost my broadband for an hour or so but it came back without any intervention.)
As the article mentions, as well as this software fiasco, BCC declared itself bankrupt two years ago.
It also lost a gender pay dispute because it allowed its dustMEN to knock off after finishing their rounds, whereas WOMEN admin staff had to work 9--5. But now the dustMEN have been on strike since January and intend to stay out until well into next year.
After a few months some company started collecting the non-recyclable rubbish from properties with individual wheelie bins. (Why we have such things in Britain instead of communal ones like Continental cities, I have no idea.)
Meanwhile, outside the flats that have communal bins, there are huge piles of rubbish bags that the stand-in binmen just ignore.
There have been no collections of recyclables, so BCC will have destroyed the environmentally friendly habits of most residents. I decline to send mine to land-fill, so I have my own huge pile.
On top of all this, BCC now wants to steal my house off me (as I reported before). It was built in 1991, as the third generation of housing on the site. BCC wants to give it to a developer to pay for "re-generating" the disaster that was done to my district in the 1960s and BCC's failure to maintain its social housing since then.
This puts the kibosh on academic collaboration. This is typically done in a much more informal way than in the industries envisaged in this article and comments. One might arrange with a colleague for their research grant to pay for a week in a hotel, maybe following a nearby conference.
I have learned that everyone encounters a donkey-hole of an American immigration officer sooner or later.
Mine was after a conference in Vancouver, when I was trying to get on a plane to San Francisco to "visit" and "work with" a colleague at Stanford. I didn't allow for the fact that academics use these words differently from other people. The only "work" I would do was to give a seminar and talk with my colleague and his grad students. My only "payment" would be for my hotel. Fortunately I managed to contact my colleague and get him to send a fax saying this and I could get on the plane. This was long before The Orange One.
Now people are afraid to go to Trumpistan and I have seen postings on academic mailing lists urging relocation of conferences from there. This $100k H1B thing represents yet another risk. People whose total research grants are only this much will just not be able to take the risk of short visits to their American collaborators, maybe even of going to conferences.
How computers work has always been smoke and mirrors, but it has got far more so. SSDs do all sorts of "clever" things to balance load and so stop re-writing particular cells. If you tell it to "delete everything" then, so far as I know, it just sets a bit somewhere to say that. Somebody with more knowledge of how SSDs work could easiy get round that.
So what can the "ordinary user" -- ie anyone short of an SSD specialist -- do to be sure that the data have really gone?
Especially in the case where (from the ordinary user's point of view) the unit has failed?
A few years ago I bought a laptop from "PC Specialist" but the SSD failed after a few months, ie within warranty. The company refused to replace it unless I returned the faulty one. I refused to do this because it contained my digitial life.
Like everyone else, I have this and other defunct kit lying around. I would like to get rid of it, but have no idea how to do so securely.
Wrong, As I explained, my email does not go out from Linode.
The problem is sysadmins who make decision prejudicial to strangers' interests with **no transparency**.
There are numerous blacklists that one can search for one's own address and get it removed. Primexeon and ICUK/CIX aren't on any of them.
M$ and Google use their own blacklists that cannot be searched and don't respond to enquiries. Besides that, M$ has always undermined Internet standards.
Added to this is the problem is manglement of universities and other organisations who know no better than to use M$. Universities are particularly culpable because they employ people to be "professors of computer security" but don't consult them about such decisions.
Practically all the traffic we received from Digital Ocean and Linode was garbage, so we blocked all their networks.
It is likely because some moron at M$ thinks like this that my email to places that have been overrun by M$ (significantly including many universities) doesn't get through.
I regard it as my Civil Right in as a citizen of Cyberspace to have my emails handled independently of the tech giants.
It is sufficient for my level of usage to use shared hosting for my email and website. That is done by Primexeon in Cambridge, whose delighted customer I have been for 18 years.
They in turn use the cloud services of Linode.
However, M$ scrambles the standard email headers and replaces them with hundreds of lines of their own garbage. In some inscrutable way they they judge a large fraction of the legitimate email that passes through them as spam.
I had the same problem with Google/gmail, which I apparently solved by routing my outgoing email though my phone/broadband provider, ICUK/CIX, of whom I am also a longstanding happy customer.
Neither Primexeon nor ICUK/CIX have any idea how to fix this. If I say "debugging" and "M$" in the same breath, I can't keep a straight face.
On what basis M$ judges my email to be spam I have no idea. If it's not the IP address then it's presumably the domain name of the From: address.
But the most likely explanation is that some j*rk at M$ thinks it's a good idea to block everything that has a Linode MX record, even though it hasn't come from there and they're not sending anything there.
results are always presented authoritatively, confidently and often convincingly.
Same happens with every advance in technology.
Student essays that are word-processed probably get better marks than those produced on a typewriter, which probably got better marks than handwritten ones.
We have the word "scripture" meaning religious stuff. It somehow acquired authority, even though the word only means "written".
Socrates famously hated books, because you can't argue with them face-to-face.
That the Great Unwashed don't know what the Internet is (like presumably in the past they didn't know what "air" was) just shows you what a brilliant invention it is. Anyone who attempted to use Janet X.25 certainly appreciates how the Internet "just works" (of course, except when it doesn't).
PS to my previous post, it was c1978 when I was doing CS A-level.
I did Computer Science A-level at the local technical college, partly to get out of Games lessons at my proper school. We connected to the Open University's computers using dial-up modems where the telephone handset was put in a cradle. I suppose it might have been nominally 300baud, but I don't know for sure. Each student, or at least each terminal, had to have their own connection. Then there was the clacketty printer, which of course had to be connected in the same way, not to mention the punched tape readers and punches. (In those days, "telephone handsets" were real "telephone handsets", not fondleslabs. Kids don't know they're born... well, they weren't.)
My recollection (as a non-driver, btw) was that it was when the price of petrol went above one pound per gallon that it started being quoted by the litre instead. NB the British gallon is 4.546 litres, whereas the yankie one is a mere 3.785 litres, whilst petrol(eum) is a liquid, not a gas.
There were plenty of webpages generated by programs that contain no actual information, long before the present AI craze.
For example if I see a personal name or a phone number that I've never seen before, I put them into a web search to try to find out where they come from, But most of the sites that purport to offer this information actually just give garbage about astrology or "similar number that people have searched". I as a human can see that these pages are garbage and I wish I could never see them, but AI picking them up could well believe that they contain actual knowledge.
On the other hand, if you arbitrarily say that only stuff before 2022 is valid, you are effectively ending further genuine research.
The problem with the Library of Alexandria and similar collections was that they collected what was in many cases the only copy of a document, so this was lost when there was a fire or an invasion. (The advantage of clay tablets was that they were improved by fire!)
With digital documents there are many versions, so they should be more durable. Unless (1) the original website owner set permissions that were unfriendly to web crawlers (I've made that mistake) or (2) the entire Web gets commandeered by some Billionnaire, who reduces it to a single copy.
I don't understand why you post as AC and haven't already got far more up-votes.
Britain has been handing over its computing achievements ever since there were any computing machines, particularly in the time of Turing and then in the 1980s when Cambridge (I was there then) was the Wild West of personal computers.
(Even though my EU citizenship has been stolen from me, I cannot think of the UK as being separate from the EU.)
Now we are in the situation where (1) the NHS is handing over my personal health data to Thiel's Palantir --- a mate of the Orange one, (2) many universities and other organisation are handing over my email to M$, which frequently marks it as spam so doesn't delliver it and (3) we are all under relentless pressure to get "smart" phones owned by Google and Apple that spy on their users relentlessly.
So, to pick up your analogies with Covid and Ukraine, (1) instead of lockdown we have "eat out to help out" to ensure that the virus has maximum opportunity to spread as widely as possible and (2) we have asked Путин хуйло to take care of all of our tanks and drones.
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