Posts by Phil O'Sophical

UK science suffers as lawmakers continue to dither over Brexit negotiations

Remain: We contributed to the EU. That gave us the a voice in deciding how the EU science cake got sliced. We took an extra large portion.

Well, more exactly we were one of the largest contributors, and so were given a commensurately large portion.

Brexit: We will not contribute to the EU.

Did you even read the article? For example the bit where it says "the gross UK payments for Horizon Europe alone would come to £15bn for the period 2021 to 2027, "provided the UK formally associates with the programme""? The UK has already agreed to contribute to this programme, and has every right to be involved in the decisions. That isn't the issue here.

Reality has been trying to explain this to you for over five years Phil. As expected you still will not admit that this is precisely what you voted for.

Actually I never had the chance to vote for it. As a British citizen living in the EU I was disenfranchised when Tony Blair removed the right to vote from expats after 15 years, and David Cameron reneged on an election promise to give it back to us. All the same, having lived outside the UK, in the EU, for half my life I think I have a better grasp of the reality of the situation than many of the commenters here.

Do you have any substantive evidence to demonstrate bad faith on the EU's part?

I'm not the AC, but see my previous comment. The EU is intentionally blocking scienific co-operation which has already been agreed, as a way to add pressure to the discussions over the NI protocol.

We could have calmly announced our wish to leave, set about working out a constructive departure and left through the front door in a polite and mature manner.

That, I'm afraid, is bullshit.

The EU was extremely clear after the 2016 referendum, there would be no discussions on the UK departure until the UK had actually started the countdown by invoking Article 50. Brussels forbade all EU members from discussing the issue, or any post-leave situation. The only option the EU would entertain was for the UK to walk out the door and negotiatate while standing on the doorstep. Unsurprisingly given the resulting deadline, the UK response was to play hardball.

departure by throwing the coffee table through the patio doors before going outside to stand hopelessly in the rain wondering when dinner is going to be served.

If anyone's throwing tantrums, it's the EU. Instead of accepting the UK's unwelcome decision, and doing it's best to find a win-win solution, it has done everything it can to prevent Brexit working for the UK, even when that also makes life difficult for the EU. That's a childish response, although I suppose given the problems it's also having with Poland & others I can see why it feels the need to exert parental authority. It should perhaps remember that that approach always fails in the end.

Hilarious, if the UK negotiators had negotiated in good faith then we might be in a decent position but alas the UK government can no longer be trusted to keep it's word

The UK and NI governments have both said that the NI protocol isn't working as agreed, which is true, in many cases due to heavy-handed EU policing of it which is making it much more difficult than it need be. Both the UK and the EU are in negotiations to improve this, and both sides have said that those negotiations are proceeding well. That is precisely how international relations works, via discussions.

As what should be a wholly separate discussion, the UK is negotiating scientific co-operation with other European countries, and has agreed the terms. As this article we're commenting on says, though, "despite being given the nod for participation, the requirements to allow UK entities to bid have yet to be approved.

And that approval? It's tied to the outcome of the Northern Ireland protocol negotiations"

This is simply the EU politicians trying to block scientific agreement on unrelated issues, as a lever to get their way on the NI protocol. The poor faith involved is not that of the UK, these should be two separate discussions.

Re: British institutions are left high and dry

How come every other EU country managed to provide the correct paperwork? The French seem to have taken their usual attitude of "oh, it's just a silly rule, it won't apply to us". Now they're discovering that they have to follow what was agreed, and Macron is throwing his toys out of his pram. French fisherman are complaining that the French government isn't helping them, and even Brussels has stepped in to tell the French to back off & do it correctly.

Re: British institutions are left high and dry

The only threats seem to be coming from the French, who are threatening to cut off electricity if the UK won't overlook the French fishermens' lack of correct paperwork. The other EU countries have kept their side of the fishing agreement, and have their licences.

It would be nice to think that science could be funded in a way that would be to the benefit of all, without petty politics getting involved. We've managed to work with China, even with the "Soviets" in the past. Sadly the EU politicians seem unable to rise above their resentment of Brexit, and are willing to sacrifice the benefits of international scientific co-operation on the altar of control.

NASA sets a date to begin lunar tuning

Re: Massive Stack

"Artemis 1, this is Houston. Life support telemetry seems unusual today, is anything unusual happening? We seem to have lost video as well."

Orders wrong, resellers receiving wrong items? Must be a programming error and certainly not a rushing techie

Re: One of the very few regrets

Fortran66, Shirley.

Entirely possible. F66 was the standardized ANSI version of F IV, I don't think there was much between them.

This link might interest you :-)

Thanks for the reminder, I've not looked at that site for years. I didn't realise that I had a tape of a 'lost' version, I got it from Jack Pike in 1979 or maybe 1980. There were indeed two tapes, one with the source and one with the data file obfuscated by reversing each sequence of 4 characters, so that first line began something like:

UOY ERANATSGNID TA EHT DNEA FO etc.

(instead of YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.)

presumably so that messages & locations weren't immediately obvious. I should still have both tapes, and have sometimes thought about hacking a tape reader together. Should make a good Arduino or RPi project for the winter evenings. I'll drop Mike Arnautov a note.

Safer than paper tape chads, which being round and slightly domed could stick to a damp eyeball & require hospital attention to remove without causing damage.

Re: One of the very few regrets

When tidying I recently found some paper tape from the 1980s that contains Fortran IV sources to the "Jack Pike" version of Adventure. I knew I had it somewhere, and I can't read it (yet, it's a project for later...), but I don't plan to lose it.

A checksum card at the end would also have helped, at least in flagging the deck as corrupt and preventing the incorrect shipments.

BOFH: So you want to have your computer switched out for something faster? It's time to learn from the master

Re: not by a long shot!

Adrenaline is apparently a good meat tenderiser, getting your prey suitably scared makes it tastier.

Nobody cares about DAB radio – so let's force it onto smart speakers, suggests UK govt review

ok, they are going to force Smartspeaker manufactures to add DAB+ functionality, and then boast that 100,000+ DAB receivers are being sold a year.

Nothing of the sort. They are proposing to make sure that the stations which are available via DAB are also available as streamed stations, so that people don't need a DAB radio to listen.

Re: Sorry, why is this about DAB?

That was my reaction. This article just seems to be a way for the writer to throw an anti-DAB rant into a discussion which has nothing to do with DAB. The report merely points out that because DAB never took off, and many people prefer to stream 'radio' stations rather than listen to them off-air, it would be good if smart speakers also carried them.

If anything, this report recognises that DAB has never really taken off, and that people prefer FM and streaming. Its not promoting DAB, rather the reverse. It's promoting the stations which aren't getting enough listeners via DAB.

Not just deprecated, but deleted: Google finally strips File Transfer Protocol code from Chrome browser

Re: You can't sell Advertising

You probably can. Put it in the README file in the FTP directory, and it will be displayed to a client on connection...

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Re: It doesn’t need a new name

He's tall, skinny and rather stiff, so if not c*nt, perhaps pr*ck?

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Re: Elephant in the room

e's just being irrational...

Re: So, Alice and Bob are "colonial structures" now

Isn't the Fitz- prefix an indication of illegitimacy, i.e. "Mac" = son of, "Fitz" = bastard son of?

Re: Gaelic?

The gaels were just a previous generation of colonists, succeeding the picts. It's all a bit blurry before that.

Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution

Re: Snap!

the interim solution was to exchange the wires

That would be the "interim" solution that was still in place, and probably documented, 20 years later, then? :-)

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

Re: Black Helicopters

RS232 signalling is unbalanced, and easy to sniff. Properly-terminated twisted pair carries balanced signals and should have minimal leakage from the cable itself, most of the limited leakage with be from connectors or the patch panel.

Intel's €80bn European chip plant investment plan not bound for UK because Brexit

Re: What a surprise

We are the only people with critical shortages, it's not even just the UK, it's just Britain

Simply not true, on either count. The major part of the UK that isn't Britain is N. Ireland, and thanks to the NI protocol there are also some shortages there, even of goods that are freely available in GB. There are shortages across Europe, due to many factors including COVID. Just as the UK is complaining about the lack of cheap EU labour to exploit for manual work, so is France (lack of grape pickers), Germany and Spain.

We have no shortages on the shelves, no queues at our ports

Not due to of Brexit, though. Fundamentally it's down to a shortage of haulage drivers Europe-wide. According to the International Road Transport Organisation (IRU), in 2019 24% of driver positions were unfilled in the U.K., 22% were unfilled in Poland, 21% In the Czech Republic, 20% in Spain. I've shopped in UK & French supermarkets recently, both have gaps on the shelves with apologetic notices about "supply problems". The queues of shipping at Felixstowe are because the port is overfull of containers which aren't being removed by lorry, they have over 1000 unused daily slots for haulage collection due to the driver shortage. There are similar queues at ports in California, due in part to COVID-related delays working through.

The unicorn stables are full and there's no british unemployment any more...

You seem better-informed on unicorns than I am, but the number of people in employment in the UK is at an all-time high, and unemployment as a %age is well below EU levels, as it always has been.

You can claim that project reality was fear mongering, but you might want to look at what is actually happening.

It was fear mongering, and the facts bear that out.

Re: What a surprise

A referendum by definition is an opinion poll, nothing more

Rubbish, they are completely different things, which is why anyone can carry out an opinion poll, but only governments can hold a referendum (which requires an act of parliament).

The dictionary definition of a referendum is "a general vote by the electorate on a single political question which has been referred to them for a direct decision". Note that key word decision, not "opinion" or "idea" or "view".

surely we should have the chance after 5 years of Brexit to revisit it and see if we still want it?

5 years, no, that's too few to really see the effects. 25 maybe, these things tend to be "once in a generation". We had a vote on staying in the common market in 1973, and we should have had one on creating the EU in 1992 but John Major knew that he'd lose (from the opinion polls!) so refused to give us one.

Oh and while you're at it, list the benefits of brexit. You've had 5 years to think of some.

I've had almost 30, that's how long I've lived in the EU outside the UK. Plenty of time to see the problems it caused, which I've listed here on multiple occasions.

Before 1992 we had a European Community, a group of co-operating independent nations in a free trade zone. It worked pretty well, despite some problems with things like the CAP. The great strength of the EC was the independence of the members, we did things differently and could learn from each other, while all still sharing the common aims of peaceful growth in a common market. We should have stopped there.

Unfortunately empire-building politicians think that we'd be better off in a single political, fiscal (and now military) bloc, with them in charge of course. The result is a one-size-fits-nobody fiasco, staggering from one financial and political crisis to another, with stagnation and no growth while the rest of the world leaves it behind. With no credible political parties offering a moderate alternative we're seeing the growth of left- and right-wing extremism as people look for any way to tell their leaders "slow down, and think about this for a bit". The whole thing is heading for disaster. Look at France where the extreme extreme right is pulling ahead of the extreme right against super-EU Macron, or Poland where the courts have illegally ruled that Polish law supersedes EU law, or the Czech Republic where one major party has made its participation in a coalition conditional on there being a "Czechxit" referendum.

I was not so much "for" Brexit as "against" the EU, which is really bad for Europe. I'm sorry that Brexit was seen as the only way out, I'd much rather that a less abrupt solution could have been found. A clearer referendum result would also have been better, but there isn't any alternative. Even a 60:40 result would probably not have stopped the arguments. At least the extremes like the BNP never got a hold on power in the UK, and while Farage was a useful idiot to focus the arguments, there was fortunately never any chance of him being PM, his electoral support evaporated as soon as the referendum was won. We're out now, and we have to make that work, while the EU stumbles along its own, failing, path.

Re: What a surprise

I simply pointed out that given the fragile state of some republican and loyalist minds then any excuse for a return to the Troubles would be seized on.

Indeed it would, but that's not a reason to make a poor decision out of fear that it might otherwise be that "any excuse". Once you start letting fear of the extremists control the decision making process, they have won, and you might as well admit defeat in advance (hence "defeatist").

Re: What a surprise

Most countries run a referendum multiple times to make sure that people understand what they are being asked to opine about.

Nonsense.

Most countries see a referendum for what it is; an opinion poll, not a binding vote.

Oh, that's a new one. I doubt the Swiss would agree with you there.

Still, let's assume it were true. If the vote had been 51% to remain, and the government had decided to leave anyway, would you have been happy to say "Ah well, it was just an opinion poll"? Somehow I think not.

I suppose we could extend that model, though, maybe consider elections to be just expressions of opinion as well? I'm sure Trump & Putin would agree with you. Democracy, such a nuisance.

Re: What a surprise

Just blue tape?

Re: What a surprise

UK government readily opted out of the single market and the customs union to satisfy the ERG and the hardcore Brexiteer

There was no way to stay in either of them while actually implementing Brexit, the EU would never have conceded that, so it wasn't just to satisfy the hardcore, it was to implement what had been voted for.

sticking the boot into the EU for not "negotiating"

Well, this evening's news seems to be that it has worked, the EU has backed down and will allow chilled meat imports into NI (which remains in the EU customs union), and it is also willing to do a custom deal on other rules. It remains to be seen what that deal can be, but at least it's a start, and an end to the dogmatic "EU says no" approach.

Re: What a surprise

Yes the armed lunatics will use this as an excuse for more mayhem if it is implemented.

That's a defeatist attitude, and is effectively conceding victory to the lunatics in advance. They rarely need an excuse, and not doing something in case they use it as one is cowardice, pure and simple. Note also that exactly the same issue applies in the reverse direction, the other lot of armed lunatics are threatening mayhem if the border remains in the Irish Sea, so the whole attitude of "mustn't upset the crazies" is doomed to fail whatever you do.

The solution is to find a workable compromise that upsets & satisfies all the reasonable people equally, which the current one clearly doesn't. It's something the EU should be good at since the whole structure of the Union is based on fudge and compromise to keep everyone on board. Unfortunately they only seem willing to compromise when it's their own situation at risk.

It isnt the EU stirring anything up, its the EU applying 3rd country rules to a 3rd party country.

Not quite, they are zealously applying those rules in a far more draconian way than they do to other 3rd parties, which is the fundamental problem.

Get over it.

Given that it's my family in NI that will be caught in the crossfire then no, I will not be taking your so arrogant advice.

Re: What a surprise

The EU does understand that

Well, based on Macron's recent comments about the status of NI he clearly doesn't.

but what exactly do you expect them to do here? Allow goods to freely cross the border into the EU without tariffs or checks?

Of course not, but it would be nice to see a level playing field, and some less-vindictive actions. At the moment the EU applies far more checks in that little bit of Irish Sea than it does for all the other 66,000km of EU coastline. This includes, for example, banning a UK supermarket from shipping own-brand goods to sell in its Belfast branches, on the pretext that they might be illegally transported across the border. This completely ignores the obvious fact that the supermarket in question has no branches in the RoI, so would have nowhere to sell such smuggled goods, even were it stupid enough to want to. It's far easier to bring bulk contraband into and out of the EU via places like Greek and Italian islands than it would be to take it across the Irish border.

Free movement of people between the UK and Ireland still works much as it has for the past 100 years, because Ireland is an island. Anyone who did cross into the RoI would be unable to get to the rest of the EU without papers, because that would be detected at the Irish border. It should be possible to apply similar principles to shipping commercial goods (no-one is is likely to care about the odd personal item any more than they did before). Any company caught faking paperwork to cheat could, and should, be crucified in the EU courts, few if any would risk it.

The reality is that the EU needs Brexit to fail, not least in order to head off the current challenges in Poland and the Czech Republic. Finding a common-sense win-win solution to the border issue simply isn't in the EU's own interest.

Re: What a surprise

second referendum (which apparently was evil, you know, people being asked are you sure? like every other country that runs a referendum).

And if they had said "Hmm, no, maybe we don't want to go", would there have been a third referendum the year after to see if they were still OK with that? And another the year after in case they'd changed their mind again? Or would you have required that the government stop asking as soon as they get the "right" answer, as defined by you?

Re: Deal done

How dare they propose a nationalised railway system that means we actually pay money to keep our railways running rather than pay shareholders?

I can only assume that you're not old enough to remember just how bad railways and phones were when they were state-owned. Shareholders are a great deal more effective at ensuring that the businesses they invest in are well-run than are governments backed by taxpayers cash.

Re: What a surprise

Brexit with full access to the single market was never on the table, the EU wouldn't have offered it without conditions that the UK would never have accepted.

Re: What a surprise

I lived through the troubles, and there are people on both sides who will use any excuse to create instability to further their own criminal aims. A hard border would give one lot the excuse, the current border in the Irish sea panders to them, but gives the others an excuse to make trouble.

Politicians on all sides need to take both risks into account, but with the EU happy to use the situation to stir up Brexit difficulties, and supposedly sensible folks like Varadkar throwing oil on the fire during the negotiations, it's not clear whether they understand that.

The majority in NI still want to remain in the UK, and Boris has an obligation to find a solution that will respect that choice. The EU seems unwilling to recognise that.

Get real: Say what you like about your app but don't be surprised if I trollsplain

Re: Seen any Red Bull drinkers with wings?

At least he didn't try the Hotel de Police, their rooms are a bit small.

Nearly 140 nations – from US and UK to EU, China and India – back 15% minimum corporate tax rate

Re: Double Irish Dutch Sandwich

They'll be taxing that soon as well.

Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media

Quantum 105MB disks in early SPARCstations were notorious for that. They'd run for years non-stop, but once they'd stopped spinning they wouldn't restart because the lubricant had thickened and become sticky. Lifting the front of the pizza box up 3-4 inches & letting it drop back to the desk was the usual effective solution. Best followed by an fsck, just in case.

Ireland signs up for plan to make Big Tech pay 15 per cent tax everywhere

Re: €750,000,000

The Maltese get very upset when people claim that Ireland is the only remaining anglophone EU member. Never mind that for most ex-eastern bloc countries, like Estonia, Czech Republic, etc. English is their main business language and they often speak it better than some native English or Irish speakers do.

Pretend starship captain to take trip in real space capsule

NS18

Not NS 1701?

Confusion at Gare de Rennes as Windows shuffles off for a Gauloise

Brest lurks on the sticky-out bit in the west of the country and has wonderful chicken

I fear you may be confusing it with Bresse, home of the admittedly very nice Poulet de Bresse.

In Brest I'd recommend a bracing walk along the beach, and perhaps lunch on galettes (savoury crepes) and local cider, or a fresh seafood platter if you're so inclined.

What if Chrome broke features of the web and Google forgot to tell anyone? Oh wait, that's exactly what happened

I find myself increasingly turned off by sites that are so obviously overengineered. I've started to notice the beautiful simplicity of an HTML page.

How very true. I use NoScript to block some of the crap, and for most pages I find 4-6 sites listed including the almost-ubiquitous Google pair. Just occasionally it's a true joy to find a website with at most a couple of internal scripts, and no Google.

There's also the occasional horror site, where NoScript lists 20-30 sites pulling in all sorts of crap, most of it for no reason whatsoever. Those tabs just get closed, never to be revisited.

Internet Archive's 2046 Wayforward Machine says Google will cease to exist

Re: Fuck Google/YouTube

What's wrong with 1/1/1970? or maybe 29/2/1900?

UK.gov presents its National Space Strategy: Space is worth billions to us. Just don't mention Brexit, OK?

Space command

Well,somebodyhastotakecareofthespacesorwe'llhaveallsortsofproblems.

Cheeky chappy rides horse around London filling station, singing: 'I don't need petrol 'cos he runs on carrots'

Re: Do we blame Brexit or Amazon?

Hardly fair to blame Amazon then, surely the blame lies with the other haulage companies who were paying so little that Amazon wages are seen as a step up?

Re: Why now

A petrol station person was interviewed on the beeb this morning. She said that they are actually getting more fuel delivered than usual, but the panic-buying fools are still draining it faster than it can be topped up.

"Newspapers" like the 'i' are largely to blame, running headlines like "Petrol rationing", when no such thing was happening.

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Re: wiring oddities

There was dozens of volts between the grounds of the 2 buildings !

Often unnoticed in the past until Ethernet arrived, and someone ran a coax cable between the buildings. A few volts earth difference between network equipment cases, a nice low-resistance path along the sheath of the coax, and no fuses in the circuit. The result was spectacular melting of many power & network cables upon connection.

Don't touch that dial – the new guy just closed the application that no one is meant to close

Re: Critcal system

Yeah, like who uses KVMs in these days of virtiualization?

Parking is expensive. It can cost an arm, a leg, and a Windows licence

Re: Buy petrol as normal, says government minister

Grant Shapps telling me to buy petrol as normal makes me want to panic buy petrol. I don't even own a car

Same logic that led people to panic buy bog roll when there was no shortage. People can be amazingly stupid in groups.

Molotov cocktails in the subsequent riots. [Most dangerous Finnish invention after the sauna]

I think the Finns just gave it that name, in response to Russian bombing, but they didn't invent it.

due to a national CO2 shortage

So on the one hand we have too much of it in the air, but on the other we don't have enough to pack our food (and presumably release into the air later)? Is it really beyond our abilities to perhaps just extract it from the air & kill two birds with one (renewable) stone?

And Boris is at the UN dissing Kermit the Frog

Bit of a waste of time, Kermit's doing a fine job of it by himself.

Check your bits: What to do when Unix decides to make a hash of your bill printouts

Re: Not a Cossie, but...

We were only allowed to book Group 1, but some of the folks who travelled regularly to Glasgow soon learned that the only automatics available were luxurious (for the time) exec-spec Granadas. They would always book Group 1 automatics, rental company had no choice but to upgrade them.

One-size-fits-all chargers? What a great idea! Of course Apple would hate it

Re: Virtue signalling

The ultimate communist dream.

That's not communist, the communist solution would be to provide a central public charging point where everyone would take their phones for a free charge (during which the contents would be scanned to check for un-party data).

What you describe is bureaucratic paternalism, the government knows what's best for us and we should be pleased that it is spending our tax money to make these choices for us, so we don't have to make any decisions ourselves.

Navigating without GPS is one thing – so let's jam it and see what happens to our warship

Re: GPS.....It really depends where you are using it..................

I suppose this sort of thing could happen anywhere......say in the English Channel.....

If governments start trying to recoup fuel duty by road pricing I daresay we'll start seeing it on the M25, or the autoroutes & autobahns in Europe.