Posts by Dr Paul Taylor 392 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jul 2009
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.
"Fog in Channel -- Continent cut off".
The is a difference between shutting down Internet access in Iran, Egypt and Kashmir and doing so in the country that controls it.
I said before that we need a European Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Looks like we need a European Internet root node too. (Someone better informed may tell me that already exists.)
(This seems to be the only comment that is pertinent to the article.)
My previous "tenant" (actually a local businessman who sub-let my house to his labourers) registered his vehicle at my house and drove through the Dartford Tunnel without paying. When I took the house back, I told Dart Charge exactly where to find him. They persisted in sending threatening letters, with exponentially increasing amounts owing until eventually bailiffs turned up, after new tenants had moved it. When I complained, they demanded proof that he wasn't there any more.
Most features of the Internet [Protocol] can work their way around obstacles because it was designed to be de-centralised and dynamic. The problem is that the root node is necessarily a singularity in this design. It's like the feudal system, where the king owns everything and everyone else is just a tenant, albeit with intermediate landlords too. King ICANN can charge whatever rent it likes.
Having a new domain doesn't solve it. Companies and people who have built a reputation based in an established place in cyberspace can't move any more easily than when they have built factories and houses on land.
Maybe we need a Magna Carta for the Internet.
Best for Britain polling by constituency, November 2018. Try any of the polling companies for national figures.
In the event that was mentioned, involving the collision of two neutron stars, the three gravitational wave detectors triangulated its position and triggered the radio telescopes. So the gravitational and electromagnetic waves travelled the same distance in the same time.
The bit that I find implausible in all of this is the estimation of intergalactic distances - way beyond what can be done with parallax.
While I was studying Italian, we had to make a presentation about something. I chose Galileo, because it would be easy. I now have seven books on my shelf by or about Galileo, most of them in Italian, which I struggled through. One of them was chiefly concerned with arguing that Galileo was not an atheist; it was obvious that the author was a nutter before I bought the book, but I did so because it contained the vocabulary that I needed. I still don't understand why Galileo was condemned by the Inquistion. The most likely reason is that he was clumsy with academic politics. I can relate to that.
200 years ago, he said, people had more privacy than anyone does today.
Yes, 200 years ago the State had very little idea of what was going on anywhere.
But your neighbours knew absolutely every detail of your life and most people had no way of getting away from them, and even if you did you would have become an outsided wherever else you went.
Fine if you conform. Not so good if you don't, for example if you're gay,
My group at the U of Birmingham has three, in successive weeks after B-day. My colleague from Slovenia said he was coming on 30 March, so I urged him to get here by 28th and stay in my house, but he said he'd prefer to be stuck in Frankfurt [airport] than in Birmingham [with his mates].
This quotation is attributed to George Mallory, regarding climbing Everest, not long before his death trying t climb it.
I haven't seen any proper usage of .eu in the UK so I can't see whom it will affect.
As I told you the previous time this came up, this affects me.
So cut the stupid comments, please, and tell me where is the serious complaint from the UK IT industry?
Yes, I do and I have every intention of keeping it, come what may.
Having the fourth most common English surname and what I think may have been the most popular boys' given name when I was born, I couldn't get a reasonable .uk domain name, so I went for .eu.
It wasn't a political statement in 2007, but now it is.
Fortunately I have friends and colleagues in proper European countries who are willing to re-register it for me.
Generally speaking I have fully supported what the EU side has been doing over brexit, but this is a piece of gratuitous nastiness. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the bureaucrats in question that British people with .eu domain names are likely to be pro-European and in no way responsible for this catastrophe.
Is someone (an ISP) organising a protest about this?
I was looking for the Linux angle on this story, but this comment does not supply it.
To install Linux I have to disable UEFI "security". Am I more vulnerable to this malware because I have done that, or less because I never run Microsoft?
Please excuse my naivety. It would be very useful if someone could give a link to an explanation of what one is supposed to do about UEFI when installing Linux, either single- or dual-boot. Thanks.
Why did we ever allow this cr@p on our webpages in the first place.
I was just checking out the "more computing power than Apollo 11" adage. In fact your bluetooth devices have more computing power than Apollo 11 had. This seems to be the best account.
So, FIFY, it now takes more computing power to load one poxy webpage than the whole world had when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon.
Big thanks to Jamie for setting this site up on his server, where it is now live.
The rude AC appears not to have looked beyond the front page to the site itself. That front page was edited from something else in a considerable hurry in the half hour before I gave a demo. It was subsequently replaced with something cleaner. The program-generated main pages have no CSS, Javascript or cookies, but maybe (Jamie or) I will get round to writing some CSS to smarten it up later.
The campaign is desperately short of IT competent people.
It would be great if someone could offer me a Virtual Private Server with LAMP for this site,
To Loyal Commenter: of course I agree with everything you say, but I think you might be overestimating the numbers. A bit over a week ago I attended a presentation by a BfE person originally from Bristol that 50,000 had signed up on the PV website, FB, Eventbrite etc. Received wisdom is that you multiply such numbers by 10 to get the actual turnout.
The angry, stupid children have smashed up the house: and they are precisely the wrong people to fix it.
Agree with you completely, except that the angry stupid grandma and grandpa smashed up the house, leaving the children to fix it.
I have been of the opinion since Gordon Brown was in no 10 that we have no competent politicians in any of the parties.
no one said "well planned"
My comment stands nevertheless. There has been no "planning" at all, even bad planning.
Equally, brexit will not just fail to bring net benefits, it will not benefit anybody in any way at all, except perhaps American billionaires, and I now doubt that it will even benefit them.
Thank you for the first journalistic article I have seen on this topic that says it honestly as it is: researchers do all the work in producing journals, publishers do nothing. Researchers always did the (research and authorship, obviously, and) refereeing, but for the last 30 years (thanks to LaTeX) they have done the typesetting too. In fact Springer mangled the typesetting of the last paper of mine that they published, despite repeated assurances from the editor of the volume that they wouldn't touch it.
If this weekend was the first time that you heard this story about Cambridge Analytica then I urge you to read Carole Cadwalladr's coverage of it over about a year:
If you read what I wrote, you will see that I have nothing to do with "social media". What is needed, simply to make the anti-brexit movement work as well as any company (I am not saying that is "well") is some basic IT competence to do its internal management.
As to whether it is going anywhere, when protests happen, politicians slip quietly out of meetings to whisper in the organisers' ears to thank them for not letting the matter rest quietly. For example, when we had a little demo outside the Tory Party Conference in Birmingham in October 2016, people tiptoed out to say "there are people in there trying to stop this madness".
So please offer to help instead of complaining.
The entire anti-brexit movement is run on Facebook. There at least 700 closed FB groups, most apparently with very few members, which will therefore have little impact on the campaign. But besides this, the national organisations run their entire operations through FB groups. I have had most contact with Britain for Europe, which represents the grass roots groups.
Despite telling people essentially what hit the news this weekend, other activists will not take no for an answer when I refuse to join FB (these are people who who not pressurise a vegetarian to eat meat). The solution to every problem is yet another FB page, whilst the websites are hosted on "free" services such as Google and Wix, giving out edit privileges liberally. None of the activists has a clue about information management.
To put it the other way round, it seems that IT-competent people are not willing to volunteer for the campaign. You can see from my comments elsewhere on this site that I am not really an IT person: I am a mathematician in a CS department. But I have taken to calling myself "the only geek in the village", since noone else has any programming skills at all.
If you'd like to help, please contact me at pt@euinbrum.org
And if you hear somebody dismiss Y2K as nothing, remind them it turned out that way because of the how the tech community prepared for it.
You might imagine that the CEO of Birmingham Chamber of Commerce might have a bit of a clue about (a) IT and (b) the business implications of erasing 45 years of trade legislation.
Said CEO, Paul Faulkner, was a speaker at a recent event about brexit at Birmingham City University. He breezily dismissed concerns about whether planes could fly on 30 March 2019. "It's scaremongering," he said, "just like Y2K, nothing will happen."
In the audience time I took the opportunity to point out that "nothing had happened at Y2K" because thousands, if not millions, of programmers had put in the overtime to fix it. David Davis, on the other hand, had just admitted that he hadn't done his homework and didn't have a clue what the "impact" of brexit might be on 57 industries. I don't know what the legal basis is for flying a plane across the Channel, but so far as I can gather, it will be illegal when we pull the plug on 45 years of legislation.
On a point of information, the tu quoque (you too) defence was found to be valid at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and got Doenitz off: see here.
That does not deflect from my view that, despite my one-time sympathy for him, it's time Assange faced his Swedish trial for alleged attempted rape and before that his British one for jumping bail. I don't think I need to say what I think of the Orange Snowflake.
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