Posts by Jonathan Richards 1 1454 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Yes, it should. Word Wrangler has a way with words, and with creative orthography. I will imagine that 'phiction' is intentional, but I think that WW should have noticed that El Reg gives the wiggly red underline of disapproval, quite understandably, to poeticly, discertations, consenent, dissiduous, anonimously, occaisonal, caravansari and acception. Perhaps this is partly why submissions to an editor come back with plenty of red ink!
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I think there are useful distinctions between terrorism, guerilla warfare, and declared state-on-state warfare simply in terms of discussing the history. Popes declared Crusades, and individual states signed up to join in. Their armies foraging and marauding their way to the Holy Land may or may not be regarded in modern terms as terrorists, cf Constantinople 1204.
If the terminology was used more judiciously, then the "War on Terror" would almost be a contradiction in terms.
> You did not elect the Queen
I did not, and personally I would rather have a monarch raised for the purpose as head-of-state-for-life, than some ambitious demagogue with a short-term approach to getting elected again (or failing that capturing the state for their own ends).
Interestingly [1], the Ministry of Defence makes an annual return to Parliament with a count of the number of persons under arms in the UK Armed Forces. Just to make sure that the Army etc. isn't being built up to be too big. As if...
[1] for certain values of 'Interesting'
Incorporate a weighbridge into the airbridge (or flight steps, if that is in use). I have seen people carry hand luggage onto a plane which weighs considerably more than a small child does (judging by the effort needed, often by more than one person, to get it into the overhead locker).
FTAOD: that's the carry-on case they're man-handling into the locker, not the small child...
Must have been about 1983 or '4. Working on a Citroen 2CV on the drive, and it gently tumbled off the jack - no drama, nobody underneath, no problem. Something in my weakened brain (yes, even then...) told me that I could put my hands under the sill and lift something that looks so much like a tin can as easily as, well, a tin can. It turns out that one cannot do that. Agony is a tough word, but I hope that is what I experienced, as I don't want to believe that there is anything too much worse.
> first email account, ... in 1995
Heh, I was clearing up some old papers the other day and came across the dot-matrix printout from my BIX registration. It finishes with
Off at Tue Sep 22 05:20:59 1987
...
DROPPED BY HOST
£50 a pop, and that for an electronic copy. I'm sorry to hear that, because when I was more closely involved with library services, admittedly a long time ago, it was much more affordable to get a photocopy of a printed journal article from the BL. One had to apply using a preprinted form, which BL sold to participating libraries in boxes of 25 or 50, IIRC, and sometimes the library didn't even pass on the charge. I suppose it's fair to say that UK public library funding has been cut to and through the bone since those days.
No, Dave, clearly you wouldn't expect your town library to have a copy of every journal in the world, but the British Library does. Have a copy, I mean, not the expectation.
The BL acquisition policy for their journal collection is to subscribe to every periodical publication worldwide, with very few exceptions.
The BL also operates an Inter-Library Loans scheme, and most UK municipal libraries do participate, although they may charge you for expenses.
...by the observation that "[T]he majority of links sent [were] not being accessed at all". This tells me that (i) most people dunned by SMS are already well aware that their Council Tax is in arrears, thank you, and (ii) that just maybe people are learning that clicking on the link in response to strident instruction is dangerous.
> oddities in the census data
My favourite was one I found when browsing the returns for a parish in Cornwall for the 1861 census, taken on the 7th of April. At first I thought I had found an early instance of civil disobedience, because the form clearly had the words "Census Crapp" on it. Closer inspection, though, showed that the entry was the last one for the family of John and Emma Crapp: "Tom Census Crapp; Son; Born this day; Cornwall, Ladock". So Tom Crapp was never going to forget that he was born on Census Day!
I think the abbreviated fo'c'sle is an attempt to have the orthography match a long-standing pronunciation, not the other way around. Consider the word "waistcoat" which was pronounced "weskit" for hundreds of years, until reading became widespread. Also "forehead". It's properly pronounced forrid, otherwise the rhyme of the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead simply does not work. Unless the last line is "when she was bad, she was whore-head". That ca'n't be right, can it.
I know I'm going to regret this... the correct line of descent is from first machine to earliest spun-up secondary instance, and only going back up the tree if necessary. So the machines would currently be Elizabeth, Charles, William, George, Charlotte, Louis, in that order, and only then Harry.
The form of words for UK classified documents is "This page is intentionally blank", with the same result of silicon paradox paralysis for any overly-literal AI reading it! The reason originally, of course, is that it caught errors with photocopying - if there was a truly blank page you knew there was something wrong. Photocopiers should have been set up to print "This page is unintentionally blank" on mis-feeds, I suppose.
+1
I could once derive the 3-D stress tensor for a non-Newtonian fluid from first principles. That's 'once' as in 'on the day of final exams' - couldn't do it before, haven't been able to do it since, and more importantly can't imagine the circumstances in which anyone would have to do so!
> that's a key skill
... and one that was simply required in the days when a slide rule was the calculating engine of choice. I attended physical chemistry seminars in which the problems had to be calculated to 9 s.f. with logarithm tables - not because the precision warranted it, but because the lecturer then knew that we hadn't used one of those subversive new-fangled 8-digit electronic calculators he'd heard about.
VASAviation [youtube.com]
As someone points out above, you can always shift something sideways (given sufficient room). My approach these days is to do something like
$ mv /opt/coolprogram /opt/was_coolprogram
The was_ prefix is sufficiently unusual that I can always find such "sidings" (backup is too strong a word) and remove them when I need the space, or I'm sure they're obsolete.
However, I'm not sure that would have worked on a running system with /usr. There's a lot of pretty essential stuff in that hierarchy.
> time & date can often be proven
I've thought of this off and on for years. One used to be able to get a document notarized, i.e. certified by a trusted professional as having been dated at a point in time. What we could do with is a digitally-signed time signal service which yields an encrypted stream that could be incorporated into e.g. surveillance video, which would (a) place it in time exactly, and even (b) prove that the image had not been tampered with.
Now someone will kindly reply that this is already A Thing, and I shall be grateful.
This is a repost of something I posted on 6 Oct to an earlier article about Nominet companies:
The active personal-corporate relationships within and between the five companies with 'Nominet' in their names are captured in a graph here, (PDF). The Graphviz source code is alongside it, here (plain text).
I'm thinking that all that has to happen is to capture the MAC address of any device mounted on the network - the OUI prefix gives you the manufacturer, and it could probably be narrowed down to a specific device instance with the assistance of the OEM. See, e.g., Wireshark OUI Lookup Tool
> it turned out to be only three [months]
Assuming this to be in the UK, then the actual deadline is three months less one day
Ref: How early conciliation works [acas.org.uk]
This story is not mine but belongs to a family member who was hon. sec. to a parish council.
At one meeting, a member of the council made several derogatory remarks about members of another sect which shared their parish hall facilities, remarks which were duly minuted.
On the minutes being read at the next meeting, the offending member was appalled, and required that the insults be deleted from the minutes. The minutes of that meeting then read something like "Mr Emdash requested that the minutes should not record that he called the -----------s a bunch of flaming.... "
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