How often is it the case that some official in government has an interest in Accenture, or whatever company, and it is in their interest for that company to win contracts, and then simply stretch those contracts out as long as possible, while the interested official continues their influence in retaining the contract? Or perhaps I'm overly cynical.
If the article was titled "Why you don't catch many fish", do you think the article would need extra clarification that it shouldn't apply to people who don't like fishing?
I do think it's worth adding, though, that from what I've heard (and given my own experiences), the culture in Oxford/Cambridge is not at all representative of University culture generally in British Universities.
True, yet they are some of the best universities not only in Britain, but in Europe and the world. So they are highly relevant in this discussion as we are talking about the top maths/physics education in each country for top students. E.g. when Russian universities/schools are mentioned here, it is usually Moscow State University or another top university or school that is assumed.
And in many ways, e.g. when it comes to drinking and partying, I would guess the culture in other British universities is even worse. In a top Russian university you simply would not have the time, and they would not hesitate to kick you out; graduating from university can be more difficult than getting into one.
The criticism, then, should be directed at Oxbridge, and not at [almost] all other British universities which don't do this.
I went to Imperial College. "Work hard, play hard" was some kind of motto. Most people followed the first part, the second part was optional. There was more "play" at weekends, and less during the week, compared with my friends at other universities. Mostly, it meant focussing on work during the week to leave time at the weekend.
I remember two mentions of sport: when a friend turned out to be on the hockey C team, and when the student newspaper announced that we'd lost some traditional cup [1]. You can see just how little attention was given to the game by the number of spectators [2].
(It would help the UK if the drinking age for beer and wine were reduced to 16. People can then get too drunk and do silly stuff with some oversight from their parents, and be a bit more mature about it at university. See Denmark for a similar Northern European country with this.)
The minimum purchasing/public drinking age is 18 (other than a single pint with a meal), but there's no practical restriction on parents letting their kids drink in private. My parents encouraged me once I was around 16 to join in with the adults whilst they had drinks. This led to me getting silly drunk a couple of times but with proper supervision. Same thing with going to some college house parties with 6th form friends - their parents knew that at the end of the night all the kids we're being picked up by their family.
The problem is if parents don't consider this and just ban drinking for kids up until they leave the house and aren't under their control any more. That's what causes people to go out of control at Uni since it might be literally their first experience with alcohol, or at least more than "1 glass with a meal" etc.
In MSU of early 00's most students drank a lot. I certainly did, mostly with other people from schools #2 and #57 already mentioned in this thread. But there was another company with a reputation of "real crazy drunkards". They were from another excellent high school, distinct from the Konstantinov lineage: the Kolmogorov's boarding school. Most of them left parents' house at age of 15.
My sister was at a private school in the UK and they were given drinks(a single glass of champagne) at certain events even before they turned 18, with permission from parents. Like you said, it's only illegal to buy alcohol under 18, but there's no problem with consumption itself.
I was given Buck's Fizz (Champagne and orange juice) when I was 5, at the birthday party of a super-posh boy who lived in the village. His grandfather didn't even ask my mum first. Upper class people apparently have different rules.
At Imperial, when the Google London office was new, the feedback from staff for why so few students hung around at their recruitment event was the lack of alcohol. Overturning this HQ-imposed very American policy apparently took significant effort.
In a top Russian university you simply would not have the time, and they would not hesitate to kick you out; graduating from university can be more difficult than getting into one.
Are you sure? I studied math in MSU in early 00's. Most of my coursemates drank a lot. I took some silly pride in drinking a lot and still learning enough to get good grades, but a lot of us just weren't bothered by getting worse grades. You had to be exceptionally and repeatedly bad at the exams to be kicked out.
Something weird going on with that page! The article number in the URL changes back and forward between 2 numbers as you scroll! Makes coming back to HN a bit tricky!
In my case it changes when the next article comes up. This is a really weird page format some online news magazines have adopted, where they simply add different articles at the bottom of your original page, infinite scrolling style. If you scroll back up though, it switches back.
Yes in 2012 GCHQ installed black boxes in every uk isp that all internet must be routed through[1]. While no one knows what these boxes do, it was thought that they decrypt https requests and log the request header, which seems to be confirmed by snowden[2]. In 2016 the investigatory powers act is what gives them the legal authority to do it[3].
They have never claimed they send fake ssl packets to drop the stream but they have done it to me and the uk governments stance is kind of against modern tls greater than 1.2 which fixes the drop stream packet bug [4].
There is plenty more detail about what they are doing out there, search snoopers charter and GCHQ snowden to see what they have been doing and are now trying to make legal.
I thought the point of SSL was that a MITM couldn’t decrypt it? Unless they have the private key(s). (Or the ability to substitute their own keys, but that seems to get noticed fairly quickly and the relevant certificate authority gets rapidly shunned).
Yea but as you point out SSL is only as safe as the public key infrastructure it runs on. Backwards compatibilty is also an issue, afaik default setups below tls 1.2 can be degraded to the point where its only ~70bit encryption which can be broken by state actors.
I was told they have intermediate keys for certificate authorities(probably done legally with the ca permission), generate a new key signed with the real intermediate. This would be detectable as the cert fingerprint would be different from the legit legit one, while SSH checks for this by default SSL does not.
I have tried to detect the above and as far as I can tell they are not doing it, but I believe the people I heard more than I believe my ability to detect it.
I was on vacation and got a notification that there was a firmware update for my Model 3 which was parked in my garage a thousand miles away. I remotely installed it and my car literally got 5% quicker.
No, it’s like buying an 1 GHz oscilloscope and buying the license to enable the 2 GHz version. The hardware has always been there.
The test equipment industry is notorious for this. I can buy a $15k Keysight Fieldfox spectrum analyzer and turn it into a $50k instrument with license that enable hardware that is already there.
