Posts by iainr 50 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Nov 2010
For a couple of years I was employed to go into C programming tutorials and say "have you tried putting a semicolon at the end of that line" at students when the Borland C compiler barfed with a "missing semicolon at line...." error because they'd missed out the semicolon. One week I covered for a mate that was doing ML tutorials, the first three students were really confused.
That was the last time it was done at Brigade strength, for about the last 60 years 3Cdo Brigade have been tasked with securing Northern Norway which is an amphibious role. We haven't used the parachute regiment in an airborne operation since WWII and we've used armour properly in anger what twice? but we still need the capability and we still need to train with it.
As for Bluff cove, the major causes of that were:
1. 5 Brigade being shipped down and opening up a second, unnecessary front, with no logistical backup and being unable to yomp similar distances to the marines and paras.
2. A para officer comandeering 4 LCUs at gunpoint that were allocated to move the welsh guards, meaning half the battallion then had to go via LSL
3. Army officers refusing to accept the advice of RN and RM officers to offload the welsh guards first and when finally ordered to do so by 5 brigade HQ insisting that an Ambulance unit (including vehicles) be unloaded have priority.
If it had been Marines onboard they'd have been off the LSLs before the air raids came in.
Back when I was a kid in the 1970s gas was coal gas made in the gasworks opposite our house. Coal gas was, i think, not as explosive as natural gas or else I don't think they could have got away with what happened: We had a gas leak in our kitchen, you could smell coal gas miles away, gas engineer arrives and agrees he can smell gas. Proceeds to crawl about under the sink in search of the leak. My dad had been a plumbers mate at times asked him if he'd need soapy water "och no I think we'll be fine" and lights a match. there was a pop, a small explosion and a jet of flame coming out of the pipe where the leak was. Having resoldered the joint a second match was liberally applied to the joint to ensure it was now gas tight.
10Base-T? In the 1980s I'd have thought 10Base2 or thick ethernet would be more likely. Back in those heady days of t pieces and 50ohm terminators I would fairly regularly lose it with phd students who would decide to add a computer to the network using whatever coaxial cable would fit and without thought to what happens when you get over the magic "around" 200m. you would get added debuging fun when they either put a length of coax between the NIC and the T- piece or saved on the price of a t-piece by just removing the resistor end piece and replacing it with a length of coax directly into a NIC.
I was in better humour dealing with the fallout of the student that going, on a 12 month exchange to a university in Holland wanted to know how to forward email. He followed the instructions failry well but whilst he didn't make the mistake of forwarding mail from Holland back to his account in Edinburgh he did forward the Dutch account to hist home account in New York as hew was going home for a couple of weeks. of course he'd forgotten that his home email forwarded to his account in Edinburgh. I think he had about 30 or 40Mb of mail orbiting over the north sea, across the atlantic and back every 3 or 4 miniutes.
My dad had a montego van at one point which I boorowed on occasion I asked him why he had four paving slabs in the back and he explained that the only way to get the rear brakes to pass the MOT was to load the rear axle. The collective conclusion of everyone that drove it was that the best way to do a three point turn was to find another montego van pointed in the opposite directions and offer to swap with the other driver. I always wonder if Herbert Austin's ghost haunted them until they took the austin badge off the later versions.
Had the same issue on a much smaller scale in a former job. I was asked by one of the academics why I always bought 6 months worth of toner and paper for the labs in the last two weeks of the financial year. I explained that I'd run the budget down until there was a small amount to cover emegencies and then blow that on stationary at the last minute to clear the account. Stationary was an internal order so you could order it up to two weeks before the end of the year, external orders would take about 6 weeks to be processed and although you could run these into the next financial year it caused much gnashing of teeth and screaming from the accounts folk. He started doing the same and I got a thank you from the accounts person as he had up till then been the worst offender in the "fuck I need to spend my budget today" stakes.
Many moons ago I was a sysadmin at a university department and a Phd student asked me about mail forwarding. He was going to be working at a dutch university for a month or so. I explained how forwarding worked and cautioned him to not to forward email back to his account in the UK from his Dutch account whilst that forward was in place otherwise the mail would loop.
It seemed he then went on a 2 week visit to the states and arranged for his email to be forwarded on to the states. At some piint someone didn't warn him about mail looping and when he left the states he forwaded his email back to the UK. I was alerted to this state of affairs by the mail server (as was typical in academia at the time it was a sun workstation) going "thrumm" every 30 seconds or so. a little investigation found about 20M and inreasing of mail looping from the UK, through holland, to the west coast in the states and then back to the UK. it wasn't an issue for our mail server but it did provoke an "oh shit" from the student when his plane landed
If you want to revert a file, it's a lot quicker and easier to use a version control system to see when it was changed and see what the differences are than pulling stuff off tape. At work we use a configuration management system called LCFG (www.lcfg.org) that allows us to configure large numbers of unix boxes via configuration files that are under version control. If I want to add software to a lab full of machines I can do it by editing a file, in a months time if someone wants to know who installed the software and why it was installed they can check the configuration log files. If they want to remove the software they know what to remove from the config file and if they want to revert the labs software set back to what it was before the start of the term it's a matter of reverting the configuration file in the version control system.
Equally anyone who has any sense must have known that given how the EU works a staged, managed withdrawal was never going to happen. The two phrases that I've always seen waved around any major political decision within the EU are "nothings agreed until everythings agreed" and "it all gets agreed at the last minute".
Yes, I hated those belkin KVMs, we had a cluster of 40 odd linux desktops desktops with 5 kvms daisy chained together. THe choice of scroll lock as a hotkey for linux was bad, and not being able to change it to something else was worse. Pressing scroll lock whilst the kernel starts to boot pauses the whole process. so unwary colleagues would reboot a hung node, wait until is was starting to boot and then switch to work on another node, leaving the first one paused mid boot.
BTDT, including the 5-10% overspend in a previous job . I didn't like being peniless in the two moonths in between the "last" order date on the old budget and when the new budgets were approved so I'd generally hold back ~£1k for emergencies, Outside orders took 6 weeks to come off the budget but consumables would cycle in a day or so, so I'd agree with the department admin to hold back 1K for emergecies until the last possible date at chick point an order for $1ks worth of toner and paper would be squrited into the purchasing system.
Then there was the year that the Uni's coffers were very low and ALL IT purchases had to be countersigned by the HOD, Head of University Information services and a Vice Principal. At which point the CPU fan on our main router died (it was a linux box we were cheapskates). I still have somewhere in my attic a purchase order for a £2.50 CPU fan countersigned by £300k+ salaries which took 3 weeks to be processed, even with me walking it to the relevant offices. At the same time a very similar looking PO for a very similar looking part but marked as "office cooling fan"*, costing £5 and coming from a more generic supplier sailed through the system without a question.
*it's a cooling fan and the router was in my office....
"So, in the Windrush example, they would have been registered in the ID system soon after their arrival, and they would have not depended on unrelated record to demonstrate their status as legitimate UK citizens."
Well no it wouldn't because whey they arrived they were not uk citizens and unless they've applied for UK citizenship they're still not UK citizens. They arrived as Commonwealth citizens which gave them certain rights to remain. Depending on where they came from they lost that citizenship when the countries they came from got their independence and became citizens of that country. Their right to remain then hung on the fact that they had it when the arrived and they had not lost it in the meantime (by leaving the country for more than 3 months for example) so an ID card would show when they arrived In the UK but not that they had been continuously resident for the intervening period. A dirving license issued the same year would provide the same proof of arrival.
"The death certificate was already submitted - I used my ID card to obtain it at the city office - should they issue it to the any person who comes up to ask for it?"
Well in the UK if you want a copy of a birth, death or marriage certificate you can go to any Registrar and buy one for about £30, see https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/registration/how-to-order-an-official-extract-from-the-registers, or you can get them online at https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/r for ~£2. If you want a copy of my dads his name was James William Rae he was 80 and he died in Lanark. What you're going to do with it I don't know, all it does is prove that he's dead.
ID requriements for UK internal flights is interesting, legally you only need to provide Photo-ID if you're checking a bag in, if you're just walking on then it's down to whatever the airline wants, these days that's some kind of photo id but I know people who'v emanaged to talk their way onto EDI-LHR shuttles with a credit card. Going to Ireland currently all you need is photo ID, passport or driving license is best but they'll accept a bunch of other things including a university staff card.
The problem is they didn't become ctizens on arrival, they didn't need to because at the time they were Commonwelth citizens with indefinite right to remain in the UK, because that's the way the old Empire worked, there was total freedom of movement for all. Since arriving however their situation changed as the various colonies became independent countries and they lost their Commonwealth citizenship and as uk immigration law became more restrictive and finally had to align with EEC law when we joined in 1973.
So all that having ID cards would have done was help the Home office identify who to deport as their indefinite right to remain evaporated.
wrt your fathers estate, didn't you need some kind of death certificate to wave at the notary to prove he's dead. That's all I needed to wave at my mums life insurance company to get them to release funds (actually I just had to read bits of it to them over the phone).
Given that my modern and newly updated gps, unaware of the queensferry crossing. urges me to drive through a concrete divider and down an 45% embanking in a desperate attempt to get to the Forth Road bridge every time I drive to Edinburgh I'd personally pass on relying on gps/mapping solutions, Along the same stretch of road it frequently thinks I'm driving on parallel non-motorway roads and there are so many cases of fleshware drivers blindly following out of date directions to drive the wrong way up one way streets etc that I'd be factoring in a hefty amount of scepticism of GPS in any AI I was building.
I suspect procedurally that's not possible, he's been in front of a judge and promised to appear when summonsed and then basically raised two fingers to the judge. Judges tend not to take that sort of action lightly as the people who put up his bail found out when they put forward the, quite possibly honest, defence that they had no idea that Assange was going to drop them in the shit. there's no judge going to set up a court hearing on a bail jumper and then not have the satisfaction of having the jumper stood in the dock whilst they tear strips off them.
No they are very specifically saying that, and have been clear about it since day one
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said that ...
"Westminster Magistrates' Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange following him failing to surrender to the court on the 29 June 2012," a statement said.
"The Metropolitan Police Service is obliged to execute that warrant should he leave the Embassy."http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/julian-assange-arrest-leave-ecuador-embassy-metropolitan-police-london-wikileaks-sweden-drop-a7744231.html
It's already the case
http://www.nvidia.com/object/manufacturer_warranty.html
select titan/geforce etc...
Warranted Product is intended for consumer end user purposes only, and is not intended for datacenter use and/or GPU cluster commercial deployments ("Enterprise Use"). Any use of Warranted Product for Enterprise Use shall void this warranty.
You're muddling accuracy and precision which are two different concepts. In this case precision refers to the size of target you are aiming to hit, accuracy refers to how close you come to hitting the target. Blowing up a single building in a city is a precision strike, blowing up the wrong building is still a precision strike, just not an accurate one and carpet bombing a city to blow up a building would not be a precision strike but if all the bombs fall within the target zone it would be an accurate attack.
and I'd have thought that decoys would render "the 'Precision Guided 500lb Bomb' less" EFFECTIVE, unless the defending forces are particularly suicidal.
strictly no, the US (actually NATO) agreed that the UK could use sidewinders that were part of the uk's inventory but were committed to NATO.
I think any satellite intel would have been available anyway because we have an agreement to share stuff like that.
in terms of materiel technically we got most help from the kiwis who lent a frigate to take over from one of ours in the indian ocean.
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