EU: The Money Question

 Politics  No Responses »
Apr 282016
 

How much money do we pay into the EU? Well according to Full Fact, it’s quite a bit less than the Brexit campaigners would have us believe (who would have thought it? Politicians lying!). It’s actually around 13 billion a year (inclusive of the rebate), and the EU directly spends about 4 billion in the UK. To which can be added other figures such as grants for research, etc.

Now that’s still quite a bit of money, and the Brexit campaigners are busy claiming all sorts of benefits that could come about if we spent it ourselves rather than send it to the EU.

Really? Have they not checked the colour of the Prime Minister’s underpants? The current Tory government is not in the business of spending money; they are more interested in cutting taxes for their rich cronies.

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There Are Transgender People In Public Toilets!

 General, Politics, Religion  1 Response »
Apr 242016
 

The interwebs are vibrating with apoplexy at the issue of transgender people in public toilets – those who insist they should tie a knot in it and not use a toilet (or use some other toilet), and those who oppose them. North Carolina has recently passed a law requiring transgender people to use the toilet suited to the gender of their birth, and other states are set to follow. To USians who are puzzled by my use of the word “toilet” – in the UK it refers to both the room itself and the appliance.

In some ways I would more naturally fit into the first camp – I don’t understand transgender issues, and I don’t understand why anyone would want to go down the route of gender re-assignment. To me the gender of the meatspace body my mind wears is immutable.

But here’s the thing: if someone decides to go down the route of gender re-assignment, it’s none of my business. And this law is just plain stupid not to mention malicious.

And so to toilets. In IT there is a principle called the Principle of Least Astonishment which in a sense is quite relevant here. If I go to a public toilet, I normally expect to find myself alongside (figuratively and literally in the case of the urinal) people who look like men; if there’s someone in there who looks like a woman (and it has happened – women sometimes use the men’s facilities) then for a moment I wonder if I’ve wandered through the wrong door.

So it stands to reason that people who look like men should use the men’s toilets and people who look like women should use the women’s toilets. Nothing to do with right and wrong, it’s just simple logic and that principle I mentioned in the last paragraph. Of course it is also the right thing to do.

Now we all know there are perverts out there – there are male perverts, and female perverts, and it stands to reason that there are a few transgender perverts too, and yes some of them are interested in children too (but not all; most perverts are probably as horrified by paedophilia as normal people are). So? What does this have to do with toilets?

Unless what goes on in public women’s toilets is a good deal more exciting than what goes on in the men’s facilities, there’s really nothing for someone to get excited about (and men do share a urinal!).

And frankly even if perverts are weird enough to get excited in public toilets, there’s better strategies than picking on a minority group. Such as concentrating on making those doors and walls for toilet stalls floor to ceiling.

Now I’m going to go for a pee in peace.

(Obviously stolen from Sarah)

When Backups Aren’t Backups But Are Still Useful

 Computing  No Responses »
Apr 232016
 

In the week, I got acquainted with the OSX Time Machine’s “Local Snapshots” which get created when your normal Time Machine volume is not available. When digging around for more information on it, I came across the trainee backup-nazi’s standard line that a backup on the same hard disk as the original data is no backup at all, and is completely useless. Well they were half-right.

To over simplify, backups perform two basic functions – they provide a copy of your data that you can use in the event of a disaster (your laptop gets stolen, your house burns down, etc.), and they allow you to recover from those “Oh! I didn’t mean to delete that file” moments. And the later use case is by far the most common – particularly in an organisation where you can ask someone else to recover a file for you.

But of course local snapshots that get created when the backup media is not available are not true backups. Any disaster that occurs is very unlikely to destroy the original data but leave the local snapshot unharmed; if it does leave it unharmed then fine. But backups are for the worst possible scenario – I did not mention your house burning down by accident.

But local snapshots are useful by themselves; whilst they are certainly not backups, they can be very useful for the most common variety of restoration job. And because they are so available, it is possible to use them for purposes we would not have thought of before.

Such as looking at what that document you are working on looked like yesterday. That paragraph you re-worked; does it really read better today than the original version yesterday? In a more technical sense, I have been using file system snapshots for years – to look back in time.

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Panama Papers: Where’s The Surprise?

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Apr 112016
 

Let’s be honest – we know that many of the rich were stashing piles of loot into offshore banks before the Panama Papers leaked, and we know that many of the rich are stashing piles of loot into offshore banks after the Panama Papers leaked. So what did we really learn?

Names.

Of course none of those names from the UK are guilty of anything – they all had some “good” reason to have an offshore bank account or company. Varying from needing to get around currency export regulations (that sounds a bit dodgy to me) to buying houses – because of course it is not possible to buy houses in the UK without using an offshore company.

Ninety-five per cent of our work coincidentally consists in selling vehicles to avoid taxes.

Partner of Mossack Fonseca

Hmm … I wonder which statement is more to be trusted – people making public statements that they were not attempting to avoid taxes, or a private statement about their real motives?

There have been suggestions that the ICIJ have been carefully selective about their revelations; specifically to avoid embarrassing “special people”. Well they are right in one sense – the ICIJ is being selective but there is probably no sinister motive involved. They are just digesting 2.6Tbytes of leaked documents which you can be sure takes considerable time to process without undergoing a severe case of digital indigestion.

And of course maximising the impact of the stories to come over possibly months.

As to the source of the data, at this stage it is not clear how the data was leaked. There are several claims :-

  • The company email server was “hacked”. Whilst some of the leaked documents were emails, many were not and whilst some more normal document formats are often found “attached” to emails, database files are very rarely attached to emails. Plus leaking 2.6Tbytes of data from an email server is not entirely stealthy.
  • Various web-based services (WordPress and Drupal have been mentioned) have been claimed to have vulnerabilities which were supposedly used to break in and ex-filtrate the documents. To be honest it seems a bit unlikely that a web-based application would have direct access to all those documents, but perhaps the company didn’t believe in data security (a law firm? with ultra-rich clients including very successful criminals?). Again leaking 2.6Tbytes of data from a web server isn’t exactly the stealthiest of methods.
  • The next method is probably the most boring method. Someone from inside the firm simply drops a backup tape into their jacket on the way out of the building. By far the easiest way of ex-filtrating the data considering the size.

We will probably never know exactly how the data was obtained as the source is doing everything in their power to remain anonymous.

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The Linguistic Divide: The USA And Britain

 General, Humour  No Responses »
Apr 102016
 

Every so often, my view of youtube shows up videos about Americans visiting the UK, and when I’m really bored I’ll try one out.

There are a number of differences between the USA and Britain, but I’m going to concentrate on the differences in language. Some words have entirely different meanings in the UK. But first, just for your own safety, here are the different words for different parts of the UK :-

Name Description
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland The formal name of the country. Usually shortened to UK or Britain.
Northern Ireland The 6 counties of Ireland that refused to become part of an independent Ireland.
Wales  A country to the west of Britain that was conquered by the English in the mists of time. The Welsh have refused to be called English ever since; don’t start as it won’t make you popular.
Scotland A country to the north of Britain that was conquered by the English in the mists of time. Don’t call them English; they’ll be as Scottish as possible when trying to correct you, and you probably won’t understand them.
England The largest part of Britain. The English are polite but not necessarily nice (you don’t take over the countries of the Welsh and Scottish by being nice).

The key fact to remember from that table above is that England is not Britain as a whole. We might be polite about it, but we won’t forgive you.

Now there’s plenty of spelling differences between what you Americans call English and real English, but I’m going to concentrate on the spoken differences. Just about the only serious point is this: As soon as you start speaking, we know you’re American (or Canadian) so we know you don’t speak English properly (it’s English not American). So when you make the occasional gaff (that’s a mistake BTW), we’re going to know you don’t really mean what you said. We might make fun of you, but usually we’ll be polite about it.

To give an example, way back in the mists of time when the film “Shag” (that word means sex in the UK) was launched in the UK, we may have made a few jokes but we were not expecting to see pornography when we went to see the film.

gas: In the US, you stick gas into your petrol-driven cars; in the UK we put petrol in instead. Gas is of course either what happens when you heat up a liquid so it enters a gaseous state, or what happens when you eat too many beans.

fags and faggots. In the US these two words are derogatory terms for those of a homosexual persuasion. In the UK the first refers to a cigarette, and the second is a meat dish whose sole purpose in life is to appear on menus to horrify American tourists.

pants: In the US this is outer clothing; in the UK they are underwear. Don’t talk about pant stains; there’s just too many opportunities for off-colour jokes.

fall: In the US this is the season between summer and winter. In the UK if someone trips you over, you have a fall; the season is called autumn.

bathroom: In the US this is used for the room that contains a toilet; in the UK we get clean in the bathroom and name the room with the toilet after the porcelain found within it.

sweets and candy: In the US, stuff with lots of sugar is called candy; in the UK they’re called sweets. Although frankly you would have to work quite hard to get confused about this – whether it’s a candy store, or a sweet shop, the contents of the window are self-explanatory.

mailbox: In the US this is where you find the stuff printed on dead trees that people have sent you. In the UK we call this a postbox, or frankly more commonly a letter box. In the UK, we use mailbox to refer to where our electronic mail is kept.

fanny: Refers to a different body part in the UK than in the UK. Without getting too explicit, in the UK a fanny-pack would be a good alternative name for a tampon.  Not a good area to get confused!

There’s a whole lot more, and I’ll add to this list when I feel the urge.

 

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