Posts by Dr Paul Taylor 391 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2009
Until not so long ago, Turing was barely known to the population at large. That he has achieved seriously belated posthumous fame is a tribute to the massive amount of work done by Andrew Hodges and the late Barry Cooper. I don't know who led the campaign to get him on the fifty pound note. That the miserable brexiters abuse his legacy does not detract from it.
Ten years ago my father was in hospital with his terminal illness and my mother was in a care home with advanced Alzheimers.
One day I was on a bus that could have taken me to the hospital when I got a call with number withheld. I didn't take it because someone else was harrassing me and also withholding their number.
I subsequently worked out that it was the hospital telling me that my father was in danger for his life, although in fact he survived that particular incident.
So I very nearly missed seeing my father for the last time because of this stupid and unprofessional NHS policy.
Phyllis Pearsall compiled the original London A-Z maps (in part) by trudging the streets and copying down their names. Was this breach of the copyright of whoever made the street name signs? Probably not. If someone else reproduces her index, is that breach of copyright? Yes. The difference is the "added value" of her legwork.
Cecil Sharp collected folk songs from the west of England and published them. Was that breach of copyright? I think there was a case against him. Did he do a cultural service? Yes, because otherwise those songs would have been lost.
So, if this law firm were about to be flooded or burned down, would they deal with the problem by getting a court order against the water or fire?
On the other hand it is interesting legally if it sets a precedent that "papers" can be served by email.
In other news, apparently handing them to PC Plod guarding the respondent's home is not good enough.
I've seen this cycle too. I've even had cards posted through the door saying they came but I wasn't in -- even when I was in!
I don't tell them I don't have a TV, because it wouldn't save me any hassle. On the other hand, it would give them a name for a computer to generate a summons to a magistrate's court that couldn't attend because of covid.
Best just to ignore the threats.
No, Russell's Teapot orbits between Earth and Mars. This is Vulcan. which is actually more important in the history of science.
All these comments are based on recognising faces as humans do. But we are talking about an algorithm, which inputs some bits and outputs some bits. If the input bits really do encode a face, the algorithm might recognise it. But it's still just looking at patterns of bits, in a fundamentally undocumented way. Maybe it could be triggered by a "master" pattern that would not be recognised by a human as a face.
I agree with most of the sentiments of this project, but surely going back to sanitised HTML would be better.
I am finding it increasingly difficult to read small text, so a basic thing I do with web pages is to enlarge them. In basic HTML, the text gets re-wrapped. "Clever" web pages often have fixed line lengths, making this impossible. (I do also resize PDFs.)
In the 1980s, people advertised their academic preprints on email lists, telling readers how to get them using FTP over the Internet.
(Of course, since it was Not Invented Here, British universities weren't connected to the Internet until 1991(?). We had Janet, haha.)
Now we get things using the Web.
I know that there was Gopher in between FTP and the Web, but so far as I recall it was not The Thing for very long and I don't actually remember ever using it other than for a demo.
Did other people actually use Gopher?
You forgot to ask what "apartments" are.
Then there's taxis. Nowadays they could be any coloUr, but if there's one coloUr in particular that I'd associate with taxis, it would be black, not yellow.
It's all very well boycotting shopping sites that use these things, but this morning I needed to order repeat prescriptions, but the site forces me to enable Google's Javascript. For all I know, this could be shipping my medical records off to some American pharmaceutical company.
The ubiquity, lack of diversity and potential profitability of these things surely means that major hacker effort is being applied to breaking them.
On the other hand there are plenty of tasks that are simple to program and simple for humans to execute but beyond what it is reasonable to expect AI to do. Just pick a random question from a large collection of general knowledge things. It would take spectacular effort to parse such things.
What puzzled me about this story was advertising that it had been done by selling a compromised "encryption" system to the criminals.
The fact that the Nazi Enigma code had been broken at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing and was kept a Secret long after WWII. (1970s?)
I gather the reason for this was that were selling it to (both friendly and hostile) governments of "developing" countries around the World.
The only difference between your approach and having a larger program broken into strong, orthogonal modules is semantics.
I was about to upvote you for an insightful comment, until I realised that you were using the word "semantics" in the ignorant way that politicians do, rather than in its technical sense in theoretical computer science.
Can you name another counterexample besides Leave.EU?
Also, let's leave aside the "stop paying the club subscription" arguments - the "UK" "government" has never used .eu web addresses, so far as I am aware.
But lots of British people and companies who identified as Europeans and used to be European citizens, but have now had their citizenship stolen from them, chose to use .eu addresses.
I am one of those, but since I have plenty of friends in proper European countries, my .eu domain has been safely registered elsewhere.
Other top level domains don't require residence or citizenship. Or have I underestimated the COmmercial importance of COlumbia or how many TeleVision companies there are on the island of TiValu?
Generally Michel Barnier and the EU bigwigs behaved very well during the Brexit disaster. The monumental stupidity of invoking Clause 16 over the EU's failure over Covid vaccines was breathtaking, but probably isolated. But what some EU bureaucrat has decreed regarding British .eu domains is at the level of schoolboy spite.
I don't do "social media", so maybe I'm just a snowflake, but never before reading a page of comments on El Reg have I been so sickened by the views expressed. Judging by the votes, apparently these are the majority.
In civilised parts of the world, people don't get a constitutional right to carry guns.
Maybe I'll get a hundred down-votes for that. If so, I will revel in it.
A master's is typically a one year course that bolts onto an existing degree
Technically, yes you can't get a Master's degree unless you already have a Bachelor's degree in something. Classics, for example.
However, many universities offer "conversion" MScs (for graduates in other subjects), which compress three years of a computer science BSc into one year.
It is remarkable how graduates of apparently non-mathematical subjects sometimes turn out to be very able programmers.
If you look up the MX records of the addresses you write to, you will be astounded how many people allow Google to read and censor their incoming email.
Google has decided that my personal domain is all spam, but doesn't return any error messages, as a result of which my emails have been going into a black hole for months.
Anybody else had this issue? Any ideas what one has to do to persuade Google to accept one's emails.
People actually use Excel for things like modeling, tabulation, accounting and so forth.
then every problem looks like a nail.
If you have tabular data -- where the rows and columns have clearly established meanings as numbers or strings -- then ok use a spreadsheat.
Otherwise use an appropriate tool.
Much as I agree with the 24E6 eggs comments, the central point of the article is the reliance on phone numbers.
Increasingly, financial bodies (including HMRC) insist that you give them your (mobile) phone number "for security" --- exactly so that they can send you "codes" to do exactly this.
At least twice banks have refused my business because I wouldn't give them my phone number(s), even though I had provided plenty of evidence of solvency.
So, power to Seth Shapiro and Michael Terpin. I hope they win their cases against AT&T and that banks take notice!
Reg commentards often make very intelligent comments about IT issues, so I am surprised by the silly ones here.
Obviously a service like this isn't going to achieve anything if the emails have to be handled by humans.
However, if there's a dataset of a million alleged phishing attacks, at the very least the domain names and IP addresses can be harvested and counted from the bodies and Received: headers of the emails to highlight the ones that ought to get some human attention. Equally, anyone trying to defame legit sites would be found out to.
Indeed, isn't such a system known as a **honeypot**?
It would be nice if the article had gone into more detail to say whether this is actually what is being done, or whatever other tricks they have up their sleeves.
The Atlas of Finite Groups was published while Conway was still in Cambridge. Before then, it consisted of a huge scrap book that lived on a table in the DPMMS (Pure Maths) common room, containing the character tables of the groups.
I knew him well when I was a student in Cambridge from 1979 to 1986.
Conway's lectures were always lively, popular and full of insight.
But it was next to impossible to take notes from them. I remember attending one in a room with two parallel sets of blackboards that moved up and down on pulleys: he drew diagrams on one, with arrows across to the other one, and then moved the boards around.
In those days there were SIX student maths societies in Cambridge (the University one and five "college" societies, three of which have since folded). Every year the secretaries would fight for who got Conway to give a lecture to their society.
Although I did my PhD in category theory,
For Part III (equivalent to MSc) I was the only student who took the exam for Conway's course, which was about sphere packing, leading up to the 24D Leech Lattice and the monster group.
While I was a PhD student after that, I would be sitting minding my own business in the Pure Maths common room and Conway would come and sit beside me to describe his most recent construction of the Monster Group.
When I started using Unix (variants), /home/pt consisted of my files and a few dot files.
Now it's completely over-run with other programs' crap.
So my filespace is /paul and /home/pt has lots of symbolic links to it. When I upgrade, /home/pt goes out with the trash.
I don't want to take the trash with me when I move to a new Ubuntu version, any more than I do when I move house.
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