[Ed P]

I hate the ‘Get Brexit done’ slogan. It would have been ‘done’ if Johnson had not pulled the plug.

However, even over the Johnson definition of Brexit (God knows what that is!), unless we are to give away everything including the NHS to the untrustworthy Americans, we will need to negotiate with the EU in order to protect our car, aviation and farming industries, let alone the Financial Interface.

Anyone who thinks that Brexit will ‘protect’ things like fishing are living in a dream world as these too will be on the EU negotiating table.

Under Johnson Brexit will moulder on for years.

[Ed P]

The academic problems caused by Brexit feature large in Brunel’s prospectus, and in consequence the views that will be imparted to students. A ‘Stop Brexit’ by ensuring that Duplicitous Boris does not get a majority will feature large in the fare that they get. Yes a small number may be juvenile enough to vote for a funny name, but the Student Union rag has a quite different message – in fact their banner headline says ‘Your Vote Matters!’

[edit] While I agree that some ‘degrees’ are in previously HND subjects (e.g Hair dressing management), the more demanding courses at Brunel vastly outweigh those I would categorize as lightweight.  Based on hiring Brunel graduate Engineers in the past, although they tended to be more mature students, their degrees were of value and they generally had significant work experience built into them. I would not lump them in with the general mill of students.

[Ed P]

Wheels-Of-Fire wrote:

avoids an earth loop problem. The PC and the Amp are both plugged into the same power strip so they share a common earth but you don’t usually get a buzz on line level inputs anyway.

+1

[Ed P]

Bertie’s (King Edward VII) Parisian whoring had a LOT to do with 1903 Royal pressure on the Government to enter into an Entente Cordiale without which we would probably have been more sympathetic to the German/Russian position and never got into the situation where Helmuth von Moltke could precipitate the whole bloody mess by implementing the Schlieffen Plan. Following the war the French greed for reparations led almost inevitably to rampant German nationalism and all the evils that caused.

So if you want to find a ‘root’ cause for both World Wars blame it on Bertie’s zipper problem!

[Ed P]

I reread your second post. Your problem was using .text as the file descriptor. Just rename them all to .txt instead as .text is not a valid descriptor.

[Ed P]

It was interesting that the comment was made that the only winners of last night’s debate were the audience. Their homing in on ‘How on earth can we trust you’ and his response of ‘Well look at my track record’ brought howls of derision. Corbyn equally well failed to give a good record of how the country will pay for all his grandiose schemes and their viability.

Frankly I trust Boris as far as I can dribble, he does not even rate a good hack! Equally Corbyn is too wedded to the Socialist party of the 1950s. It looks like it will have to be a Lib Dem vote for me; at least their policies are nowhere near as loony as they have been in the past.

[Ed P]

I use Notepad2 instead of notepad. Same as Notepad but does a little more.

[Ed P]

The big difference is that the young are starting to weaponise the polling booth. In my generation the young marched and made a loud noise, but did not bother to vote as soon as they were 21. The drop in voting age and politicisation of the Universities is making a big difference e.g. Canterbury, and now Brunel (which latter used to be just mature students and those going on after an HND.)

[Ed P]

There is a strong possibility that all those who vote Conservative to back Boris will finish up with Raab or even Mogg!

Against Conservative Central Office advice Johnson has decided to defend his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency even though the chances of his retaining the seat are 50:50 at best. This result may happen because this is a constituency where the young now outnumber the old by 2:1 and the young have at last become organised to use their political clout. Brunel University is mobilising its students to get young people to vote and remove Johnson.

[Ed P]

If you know someone who is versed in Python, BeautifulSoup and pandas it might be possible to parse the index file and download the messages in bulk. I’m sorry I have other commitments (and I’m afraid absolutely  zero interest in Indiana English). All I can suggest is that if you have contact with group members or the moderator that you ask them for ideas on who might be able to help — maybe a contact at Indiana University?

[Ed P]

‘Police investigating illegal Conservative election bribes.

With friends like Farage, and Johnson telling so many lies that he can’t help contradicting them – who needs enemies? All we need now is the Mid-West polar vortex to stay with us over the  election day to make this an election to remember!

[Ed P]

In our part of the world there is a slight whiff of corruption in the PO with free foreign holidays at someone’s foreign pad being rumoured.

[Ed P]

If you have Mint then Menu->Administration->Update Manager->Edit->Preferences->Only show a tray icon….

If it is checked then uncheck it, if not cycle it.

[Ed P]

This link gives some reasons why certain USB formats are better than others for different jobs.

[Ed P]

johnbarry wrote:

as x normally stands for old

Not sure where you got that impression, as all the Ad Agencies think X stands for eXcellent, eXtreme eXcel, XP, XR4i etc.

[Ed P]

Just for clarity, Synaptic is NOT the Update Manager, it is a better implementation of the apt package manager.

Incidentally Les can you launch the Mint? Update Manager via the Menu? If so look in preferences, I suspect in this case that you have for some unknown reason ticked the box that says not to show the shield unless there is an update.

[Ed P]

At one time there was talk that M$ would drop NTFS in favour of exFat for disk drives as well as USB sticks. Apparently it is much more flexible and faster than NTFS and  although out of the box, exFat does not support journaling there are a bunch of unsupported optional extras including TexFat which is a transactional filing system.

[Ed P]

Despite Dave’s comment I suspect it has something to do with core optimisation i.e. splitting cores to carry our specific core intensive tasks. I make this speculation based on the fact that AMD Ryzen features in the opening credits.

[Ed P]

I have no idea why your Update Manager is missing, you probably screwed up dpkg or something. If you can now use it, then use Synaptic and search for ‘Broken Packages’ and fix that if is an issue. Then all I can suggest then is that you use Synaptic and search for an  ‘Update Manager’ that has a green box showing it is installed and mark it down for reinstallation.

If you cannot use synaptic, use the command:

sudo apt-get –fix-broken install

If that does not work then use the following:

sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get install -f
sudo dpkg –configure -a
sudo apt-get update

Hopefully that will mend your install, after that I’m clueless and would just have to play with your system to get a lead.

[Ed P]

Slight switch of subjects – assuming that Brexit goes ahead in some way; what are the plans for the Isle of Man? Do you just sit back and take the best of both like Northern Ireland?

[Author]

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