Do The Tories Want To Privatise Universities ?

 Politics  No Responses »
May 102011
 

Today a Tory let slip that some in the Tory party may be thinking of letting Universities supplement their income by offering additional places over the current quota to UK students which would be charged at the same rate as non-EU students. Of course they very rapidly back-pedalled from this position, but was it a slip or something that the Tories are planning … in a year or five ?

First of all, a little background. UK Universities are free to charge non-EU students pretty much what they want to within the constraints of supply and demand – pretty much like a business. This can be pretty lucrative for many Universities, and there is a fairly active pursuit of foreign students.

There are benefits and disadvantages to this of course. Foreign students may not always have the best possible English language skills which can conceivably have a detrimental effect on teaching. However offering a limited number of places to foreign students does have advantages that counter this – first of all exposing “native” students to foreign students widens the experience of both groups, and recruiting foreign students adds to the possible pool of expertise to hire the best researchers from.

But allowing Universities to recruit UK students on the same fees as non-EU students ? Well it might sound ok – allow the Universities to recruit students from anywhere to supplement their quota of UK students, but it is an obviously slippery slope from that. Over time the Tories could slowly cut the student quota and leave UK students with eventually little choice other than to pay the “full price” with no support for their education.

Of course the Tories claim that there are no such plans, but do we believe them ?

Super Injunctions, Twitter, and Old Media

 General, Media  No Responses »
May 092011
 

Today there is a lot of fuss about the information on just who has obtained a super injunction to prevent the publication of details of their sordid private life being “published” via a Twitter post. It is probable that the relevant Twitter post is just wrong, but more interesting than that is the reaction of the old media. And an apparent misunderstanding of just what Twitter is.

The old media is complaining that there is effectively two rules – one for them and a quite different one for Twitter users. Well, no it isn’t quite like that. The relevant Twitter user – if he or she is within the jurisdiction of a UK court – is just as guilty of breaching the injunction as an old media company who published the story themselves. In practice, it is not possible to stop a Twitter user publishing before being prevented from doing so – there are just too many Twitter users out there from stopping them.

What will be the effect of this in the medium term? Basically it means that the old media will not be able to make any money at the old meaningless “three people in a bed” story – they will still be able to sell newspapers with real news, but meaningless exposés of someone’s private life with no real public interest will be a lot less likely. With any luck. And good. The news is not made any better by knowing that celebrity X slept with gold-digger Y unless that celebrity is genuinely in public life and making a moral stand on such issues.

The funny thing is that people somehow think that this is a new “problem”. I can remember the Spycatcher issue way back in the day where a publisher was prohibited from publishing the autobiography of a former MI5 agent in England, but the book was widely available elsewhere in the world (including unbelievably in Scotland!). Although the mechanisms were different, the basics are the same – one group of people are not allowed to tell the story, but another are.

Now onto the misunderstanding of Twitter itself. When someone “tweets” some item of news on Twitter, the company itself is not responsible – except to the extent that they are obligated to take it down given appropriate legal action. The person responsible for the content of the tweet is the tweeter themselves. The Twitter company themselves are no more responsible for the content than the newspaper delivery boy is responsible for what is in the newspaper.

Having said that, I believe that super injunctions are wrong. Injunctions to stop a story being published are all very fine, although they are relatively unobtainable for an ordinary person. And yes ordinary people do sometimes appear in news stories. But preventing the fact of an injunction stopping a story being published is wrong.

To The Eastern Road

 Photography  No Responses »
May 082011
 

Some pictures from the “other side” of Portsmouth this time :-

Old Metal 1, 2, &3

Old Metal 1

Old Metal 2

Old Metal 3

And something a little more accessible :-

Sailing

Sailing

Dog Inspects Memorial

Dog Inspects Memorial

Saving Space

 General  No Responses »
May 072011
 

Every so often I have an “episode” where I come up with an idea on how to save space in my flat (which is not overly large). Last time this happened in a serious way, I threw away all my DVD cases (yes it was that long ago) and put the DVDs into a folder. Now I have a stupidly large number of DVDs and BlueRay discs in a couple of those two hundred disc folders you can get. And I don’t have a living room packed with shelves holding nothing but DVDs.

After a week or so of looking at a large pile of recent (and in some cases not so recent – I cleaned my old CD storage unit last week which is currently a display case, and found quite a few oldies) CDs piled up on the stairs waiting to get boxed to go into the spare bedroom, I get another idea … related of course :-

56060

A CD spindle box of course! Or as otherwise known, a cake box. One of those tubular thingies which you could get large stacks of CD-R media in. I happened to still have one lying around, and packed in that large pile of CDs (and a few others). That huge pile is what is about to be thrown out, and that little thing next to it are the CDs themselves.

Now there are disadvantages to this of course – playing the CDs themselves is tricky as you have no easy way of finding a particular one. And looking at the artwork on the case is even trickier. But given I don’t play CDs anymore – they’re all ripped and stored online – and I look at the artwork never, those disadvantages don’t strike me as a reason not to do this.

Of course now I need more empty “cake boxes”! Lots of them.

Making A Core Dump Of A Running Process

 Linux  No Responses »
May 052011
 

For my own future reference …

Today I encountered an interesting little issue where I could not send an ABORT signal to a running process to kill it with a core dump because the process had a limit of 0 for the core dump size. Try as I might, I could not find a way to change that process’s core dump limit.

Turns out there is another way of tackling the problem, which is to use gdb to generate a core image :-

gdb
>attach PID
>gcore /var/tmp/core.PID

There is of course the gcore shell script wrapper for this, but that may not work if the working directory of the process no longer exists.

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