Retsdon

OK, thanks. Let me look into it.

That's absolutely standard. And in fact, if you want to marry a Muslim you have to at least nominally convert and take a Muslim name. And have the snip,

And the device has a UK IP address? And then you just log into it remotely?

This must have been to dealers?

As in like bulk buy them??

???? I must be dense.

Sorry, can you explain the hosted server bit again? Do you mean it runs in parallel to his own BT stuff?

OK, Graham and Bob, thanks very much for the suggestions. I'll speak to my BiL and see what we can arrange. Watch this space...!

I used to get gout about 4 to 5 times a year. It first appeared when I was in my late 40s and but stopped when I started taking alluprinol regularly when I was in my early 50s. In the interim I had used colchicine when I got attacks (which works very well btw although you have to be careful of the dosage).Anyway, I kept with the allupurinol until about 4 years ago I ran out of it one day (you're supposed to take it every day)and never got around to getting more,. And I've never had gout since (touch wood!!!). The only thing that I can think of that's changed is that I'm several kgs lighter and quite a lot fitter than I used to be. So perhaps weight loss and regular hard exercise is worth trying along with the drugs. Good luck! Gout's a pain (figuratively as well as literally) when you get it regularly.

January, with the No Deal Brexit.

Gosh, now you're all talking Greek again! Here at the university we have proxy server that lets us log into sensitive university stuff from anywhere in the world. You click the link, it takes you to a login page, you put in your username and password and confirm with an authenticator number from an app on your phone, And hey presto, you're back inside the university system in good old KSA. Now, something like THAT would be ideal. I can get my brother in law to set up the hardware. Although on that point someone told him that if he set up a proxy server on his BT line it would slow his connection speed down because he'd be constantly having to upload to Thailand and upload is far slower than download. Something like that... Anyway, thanks very much for all the ideas and for taking the time to offer advice. I'm still listening and if I can get a consensus I'll try and run with it.

So, according to his biography, did Pol Pot. But sometimes people don't get what they want, especially when their method involves tearing everything down first. Anyway, I'm not bothered anymore. Politically Johnson is a dead man walking, and Cummings has become a figure of national ridicule. What's a little bit sweet though is that they've done it to themselves. * Make that international ridicule.

https://a.disquscdn.com/get?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.guim.co.uk%2Fimg%2Fmedia%2F37caac5b971cf284b31ba1d73584cb889b21dcb4%2F835_0_3371_3045%2Fmaster%2F3371.jpg%3Fwidth%3D620%26quality%3D85%26auto%3Dformat%26fit%3Dmax%26s%3D9dd0f65839004296cb4e9f9b3fb0e05a&key=bByK2soupFXr9npv6fEVkQ&w=800&h=560

For anyone who might know the original..... 'We were somewhere around Barnham on the edge of Durham when the virus began to take hold. I remember saying something like ``I feel a bit shortsighted; maybe I should drive....''

Of course. Cummings driving to stay with his parents is hardly a matter of State. So why from the rose garden of Number 10? What affords his personal affairs that kind of status? They're all against us! And they're all in it together! As I pointed out yesterday, once the bunker mentality has set in there's only ever one outcome.

He's in the Tory party? 😮

Well, I agree they've always been around. But I think Cummings has moved the job. In the past, people like those you mention were almost wholly political strategists whose influence on policy was mostly about giving advice on spinning appearances. Cummings is different. He's basically running the country and that's not the same thing at all. There you go. A SPAD engineering the resignation of the Chancellor, one of the Great Officers of State. What's that all about?

That's the issue really. The worry, for me anyway, isn't Cummings himself as a person, so much as that it has now become obvious that his influence and power far exceeds the influence and power that goes with the job of an advisor. It's not party political, it's constitutional. Britain's constitutional rules are a bit of a dog's breakfast - a mix of tradition and convention with a veneer of parliamentary legislation grafted on the top. But they're full of holes and rely on people within the political system having a higher loyalty to this unwritten system than they do to their own political ambitions or aims. In other words the absence of a properly codified system leaves it open to abuse and the only thing that makes the system work is old fashioned honor and duty. And here' my beef with Cummings and this government. Although I don't agree with their policies, it makes no difference - I'd have the same concerns if it were a Labour SPAD addressing the country on national TV like some sort of Tsar. This isn't how the system is supposed to work in Britain. The kind of power the Cummings obviously wields belongs to Crown ministers. Ministers have privileges but they also have responsibility and personal accountability to Parliament. And i'ts this accountability that keeps the system working and it's this accountability that distinguishes the United Kingdom from places like Zimbabwe. Take it away and you're on a very slippery slope. Cummings, despite his obvious political power, apparently has no such accountability to Parliament. And that's dangerous because Britain is meant to be a parliamentary democracy. Yet at the moment it almost seems like ALL power has been concentrated in the hands of a very small clique who have very little regard, in fact contempt, for the constitutional traditions of the country. There, my political rant over....

I've just looked at them and I'm pretty sure I'll have the same problem I have with my Avast VPN, namely that it'll be recognizable. What I'm trying to do is to get the kids access to BBC Bitesize. I really don't understand why the Beeb doesn't open some kind of subscription service for it because it would make them a lot of money. I'd happily pay for a start. Anyway, they don't and in order to watch it you have to be in the UK. And the problem is that although I can opt to use a UK server with Avast that displays a UK IP address the BBC is obviously pretty sophisticated and picks up that the IP is a VPN service and blocks us (although on the weekends they seem to allow occasional access for some reason). The thing is I"m not altogether sure of the legality of it,k but to be honest as they won't even LET us pay I don't feel too bad about trying to get my two kids into it to do the online lessons. At the moment they're having to do online lessons in Thailand and the material is quite simply appalling. So if we could get into Bitesize they'd at least have access to proper materials, I'm not working at the moment, so I would be able to help them with stuff from here, they could do the tasks, etc and we could check them together. Like a sort of long distance home learning! Anyway, I thought I'd throw it out on here to see if anyone could either me some ideas (which you have) or else knows someone who could set up some kind of access for us. I'd happily pay.

To be honest, he could have driven to Caithness and back for all I care personally. But, he apparently made use of what was in effect an emergency provision in the guidelines/rules whatever they are. So did he NEED to drive to Durham or was it just his favoured choice? And to know that, you'd have to know the alternatives. And it's very relevant because immediate need is what underpins the exemption that he used to justify his trip. This isn't going to go away though. It seems now there are some quite major differences between the account that Cummings gave yesterday and one his wife published in the Spectator. Plus there are the casual lies about the stuff that he said he'd written last year which were in fact later revisions. Etc, etc, etc, It's a drip, drip, drip of small revelations that erode his credibility. One of the rules pertaining to SPADs is that they must maintain the trust of those with whom they work. So if someone in his position gets repeatedly exposed as an habitual dissembler it will eventually become impossible to maintain the fiction that he can fulfull the requirements of his task. And he can't front it out like an elected politician who only has to answer to the electorate. It will be interesting to see how this thing plays out. And? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/special-advisers-code-of-conduct

Really, the question that none of the press asked was what he would have done if he hadn't had a family with a farm and a holiday cottage to go to. Presumably he would have had to get childcare in London.

Thanks for the suggestions. The main problem of course is that I don't know the first thing about this stuff. sounds ideal IF I knew anyone to set a Raspberry PI. I followed the link and it might as well have been written in German! The virtual hosting sounds OK too. I don't mind paying for access if it'll work. But as I said, the commercial VPN gets picked up and blocked for what I want it for. Need to get around that...

So the EU will give a bit if the UK gives a bit? Hardly blood. Just normal give and take. "The Commission could ease its demands during the next round of negotiations, which begin on June 1, if British officials also consider a compromise. An EU official said: “There have been hints of a possible reconciliation of approaches. “We would be looking to shift on demands to keep everything as is now, a somewhat maximalist opening position, if the UK also moved from its position of coastal attachment."

"During that press conference on Monday, Dominic Cummings claimed that he had been worried about a pandemic for some time and that last year he had written about the possible threat of coronaviruses and the urgent need for planning.However, Jens Wiechers, a data scientist, put Cummings’ blogpost mentioning coronaviruses through the Wayback Machine – a digital archive – and found that the relevant paragraphs had been added on 14 April – the day Cummings returned to work after the trip to Durham." https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/26/dominic-cummings-faces-questions-over-claim-he-warned-last-year-of-virus-threat Why am I not surprised. I had a feeling that most of it was just a story. He told it well though. But I suppose when you deal constantly in a world of untruths it must be hard to keep track.

No it's not. But its the first government to have one of its aides make personal statements from the garden of Number 10 Downing Street. It's quite plain now that Cummings considers himself untouchable. The real questions to ask do not lie in the minutiae of his trip to Durham (and his exhaustive, mocking elaboration of those details yesterday bears this out) but in the bigger question of WHY he is untouchable. Why has the entire cabinet been instructed to back him up unequivocally? Why has public health policy been retrospectively reoriented to protect one man's position? What is the nature of the power he wields? This isn't a party political issue. It's a constitutional one.