And this is not one of those situations where you want local authorities to use their best judgment and let slide just because it's a "good" organization.
No, it's one of those situations where you want local authorities to respect international treaties signed by the United States.
Or, you're claiming that the OSCE is a Klan cover, I'm not sure...
The problem is that, in France, there are serious cases of police misconduct that need to be reported, e.g. in responses to demonstrations, treatment of suspects, and handling of investigation evidence.
And at the same time, people are being dicks to police because they, well, are dicks.
The heart of the issue is that there's really not much of a middle ground anyone trusts - French police groups are terrified that dicks will be dicks, and the people who put their stock in sites like Copwatch IdF don't trust the police or government to adequately investigate and prosecute police misconduct.
Many companies, especially financial services providers, are required to record phone calls and maintain the records for several years, so back to the drawing board...
This will probably be brutally misinterpreted, so disclaimer, I'm not in favor of invading anyone, but:
The Soviets were rational actors, arguably as scared of the US as the US was of them.
North Korea and, to a lesser degree Iran (yes, think about it) are theocracies. I would be less afraid of Iran (as a global as opposed to a regional threat) as they are far more susceptible to conflicts among various interest groups, ranging from fanatical (Ahmadinejad) over pragmatic (Rafsanjani) to liberal (not up on my Iranian domestic politics right now, just as the US is. Theocracies are not rational actors (beyond being really really hard-core gamblers with opaque motivational structures and, especially in NK's case, little to lose.)
Drawing parallels between North Korea and the USSR is a stretch, to say the least.
As far as Israel's concerned, its neighbors will, barring a major geopolitical change, not invade them again (see where it got them the last few times.) Being invaded by an NBC-capable enemy is the one scenario under which I can see the Israelis hitting first with nukes. Beyond that, they're not stupid. Any strike from them would be a response to a nuclear attack, assuming there's anything left of the country after they were hit.
1. Turn off the TV 2. Pick up a book (preferably in public domain, consider having a peek at Project Gutenberg or your local public library 3...... 4. Profit!
The answer is: "neither". This is why you have a project manager (I hope.) Someone neutral who tracks progress and assigns tasks to dev/IT/whatever.
At least I hope you have a project manager. If not, assign one who's capable of working outside his normal role, either dev or IT, but they'd better know what they're doing (cost tracking, that sort of thing.)
The key words that come up very often whenever the topic of cell phone jammers is raised are "theaters", "schools", "hospitals", etc. I hate some idiot's phone next to me ringing as much as anyone, but there is a pretty serious problem beyond the obvious "doctors and emergency staff have to be reachable" argument (in this case you can say "carry a pager", but pagers can be just as loud and annoying or quiet and discreet as cell phones ringing.)
Specifically, many of the larger outbursts of civil disobedience in the 1990s were organized by individuals with cell phones. The most recent specific example that comes to mind is the series of anti-Syrian rallies in Lebanon last year. In smaller countries without much competition, it's still comparatively easy for the police to just shut down providers, as the government of Nepal has done. However, in a country like the US it's just bound to be a frickin nightmare for local law enforcement to impose a blanket shutdown on cell phone communications.
It's one of those things, like gun ownership or implementation of a national ID card where the usual response is "but what do you have to fear? You are paranoid." However, I am worried about any more by my government to reduce my ability to organize, assemble and protest.
...is called Postbutler, and costs a damn sight more (CHF 162.- per month, CHF 486.- for up to 12 months, divide by 1.25 per dollar) but they email it to you.
I think I trust the Swiss post office a lot more than a private US company in terms of privacy, but to be honest, being able to check your mail on a website is way more practical than getting a bunch of PDFs -- I'm thinking about using this while I'm spending 3 months travelling around South America next year and don't relish the thought about grabbing massive loads of marketing mail attachments over Bolivian dial-up.
They aren't going to put it on "CAUGHT ON CCTV: MAN PICKS NOSE, LOSES JOB"
Actually, they do. The number of people caught doing embarrassing things on "XYZ country's stupidest CCTV videos" shows with cops laughing at them is pretty staggering. You've got to have a pretty short memory to forget about numerous incidents of police using various databases to stalk women they fancy, accidental "cross-pollination" of datasets containing sensitive information (one incident of AIDS patient info being fed to health insurers comes to mind) and general police abuse of surveillance powers to disregard this very real possibility.
Furthermore, define "crime". Who says what's a crime? Take a close look at what's covered by RIP, ASBOs and the PTA. As an American, I have a hard time right now lecturing anyone about concepts like habeas corpus and oversight of government agencies to ensure they only use their powers responsibly. Nonetheless, once the mechanisms for universal supervision and enforcement are in place, there's little to stop a government, even a well-meaning one, from incrementally selling totalitarianism to its people under the guise of protecting them for their own good.
The thing that bothers me about this discussion, if you read the article, is Graham Gerrard's quote at the end, which basically amounts to "well, it's legitimate because if it weren't we'd never do it." Trust us. Honest.
Tell me you're kidding. The US effort in Afghanistan was and is a complete clusterfuck.
Is, not was. The initial bits, like the Iraq invasion were brilliantly, quickly and efficiently executed. They had the bastards reeling and a good shot at pacifying the joint, severely curtailing opium production and installing a working government.
In Afghanistan, if you want "clusterfuck" you can start by talking about things like underfunding/understaffing the occupation force, letting warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar run rampant in the Southwest, mollycoddling the Pakistanis while they're unable or unwilling to keep the Southeast frontier open, and playing games with allies like the UK (like in the Pentagon memo blaming them for the failure of opium eradication.) In Iraq, start with disbanding the army, firing every trained administrator in sight under the guise of "de-baathization" and basically letting the monkeys run wild in the madhouse.
I'll be the first to agree that the Iraq war, as opposed to Afghanistan (except for the fact that it's one murdering shitbag less in the world, but that's unfortunately not a good reason to start wars, nor was it the premise under which this one was begun) was "a bit weak on justification". But you might want to be more selective on what you describe as a "clusterfuck."
...I already did. With the bureaucratic machinery in place that creates this sort of abomination, it's not even likely that an electoral landslide in favor of the less worse alternative next week would help.
Many business associates of mine are already avoiding all unnecessary travel to and interaction with the US for this sort of reason, so wa-hey, go ahead, shoot-in-foot-and-reload.
The issue isn't that Microsoft would not provide something for these guys if they followed "proper procedure". It's that (a) they wouldn't follow proper procedure and (b) they don't care. In this particular case, people pay far too much attention to conventional workstation deployments of XP, without allowing for all the crack-smoking other roles it is used in. You're talking about people who develop on a purely functionality-oriented level (i.e. it has to do xyz, and devil-may-care how we get there.) End effect? If it doesn't do what they want it to do, they don't care why it's not doing it, and find something else that does.
Furthermore it's a question of principle; even when business customer do get some sort of "special treatment", it's a PITA for a large company to deal with this sort of thing. Calculate the cost of a support man-hour in, say, a bank. Multiply by the number of times it'd be necessary to employ already stretched resources for Microsoft-mandated administrative rigmarole, multiply by 30,000 workstations. Add cost of developing, training for and implementing subsidiary processes, etc. etc. etc. -- you start getting the idea.
I foresee patience starting to wear thin about the time this comes out. Many of us have dealt with senior management who don't want to hear about why Linux/FreeBSD/whatever don't do xyz the way they're used to, and just cut it short with "use Windows, everyone else does, I don't have time for this." That cuts both ways; every time a new MS-related problem pops up at several of my clients, I already hear CIO-types mutter things like "wait a second, aren't these the guys who're costing us a gajillion in patch-related expenses?"
Your arguments are absolutely correct, but in practice only time will tell how large outfits react to this. Swami predicts: "not happily."
I'm 100% with you on this one. I am involved (I don't really "run" it, nobody does, we're just a bunch of little anarchists, aren't we) in an IT consulting group that does fairly high-value projects for large corporate customers. So far, we've limited Windows usage to OEM licenses on laptops we bought, and to workstations we use at customer sites. However, I've already moved all my own stuff to FreeBSD and Mac, and am in the process of convincing my associates to do the same (many of them are on Linux anyway.) All our infrastructure is already on open source OS boxes, and laptops will most likely follow once Apple gets over the stupidity of having canned the 12" Powrbook which all my colleagues want.
Many of our customers are already under pressure from Microsoft's idiot moves, which include patching & compatibility headaches, OS vulnerabilities, poor privilege separation for sensitive apps, and MS legalistic evasion of support and damage-control responsibilities. To add to this, here are dozens of (dare I say) respected consultants running around whispering "ditch it! Ditch it!" in their ear for various reasons--privacy & security, operational cost, etc. etc. etc. In one particular case, one of my client uses XP (don't gag, it wasn't our call) in device controller elements at customer laboratory sites--and has field service staff frequently update and exchange hardware. I can't really see this flying well with them, can you?
No, neither I, nor the above poster matter in the grand scheme of things, but when a client comes to me and says "help me figure out a long-term IT strategy that Just Works (tm)" I daresay that I and others like me exert a disproportionate amount of influence on who buys what. Especially if we're talking about multiple clients with 10,000+ seats who, in turn, influence the direction of what smaller partner and supplier organizations' IT strategy.
So no, we don't matter. But ya know what? Piss off enough people and soon enough you may forget that some of them actually wield a pretty big club. Microsoft was very smart around 2004 when it essentially came to one of my clients, hat in hand, apologizing for neglecting security support & development, and promising to do better--they did, and built a lot of goodwill that way. Maybe they ought to learn from that experience.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying, "we aren't quite clear yet on what we'll do with it, but we had some cash lying around and it seemed like a more sensible investment than buying a nuclear submarine for Larry & Sergei. Plus it's an economical location for planned new datacenter." It is not yet clear what Google intends to do with its recent acquisition of North Korea; industry experts speculate that it may use nookle.google.com to turn into a glazed over parking lot regardless
The new Google Mars, which is expected to be released from beta in mid-2017, will allow users to navigate between any massive red dusty wasteland to any other massive red dusty wasteland. Insider rumors also claim that Google plans on selling text advertisements around the Martian poles. A Google source who declined to be named also describes plans by Google to move its complaints department to three major land masses on its new real estate, and to display its motto in three mile high illuminated letters at the new site.
It's not. In a place like Zurich, if you can get your foot in the door with a major company, you're pretty much set--I have a number of friends who've done this. College degree or equivalent is almost indispensable though. I wouldn't honestly aim for a small district/community regardless. Quotas are a pain but irrelevant if you can make yourself wanted enough--we've gotten about 8-10 good people in that way who've settled. These are the kind of immigrants they want; educated, taxpaying, intending to settle. But yes, EU does have a far easier time.
I'd check the British recruiting boards--they seem to have a lock on a lot of European IT position for some reason.
1) Switzerland. It's clean, tidy, cosmopolitan, safe, has low taxes, great restaurants, beautiful countryside, a reasonabl educated population, a strong economy, 20% foreigners so fairly limited xenophobia in the parts that matter compared to many other European countries, isn't part of the EU, and is a few hours from Paris, Milan, Venice, Munich and other cool spots.
2) What's keeping me from moving there? Well, nothing--I already did. I've lived on 3 continents, and it's by far the nicest country I've been to (barring Canada, but brrrr.)
I moved for personal reasons (girlfriend), but I can see 100% where people frustrated with the way the US is moving are coming from. I have two remaining, ageing family members in the US whom I visit whenever possible, and every time I come here I notice what seems like a general decline in civility and reason. From the whiny nasal-voiced stewardesses on every US air carrier (and the $5 drinks charge on international flights--WTF?!?) to the screechy populist media, intrusive laws and lowbrow politics, it all gets a bit tiresome.
I often catch myself feeling guilty about having such an arrogant attitude, but to be honest I'd rather enjoy the good bits from afar whenever I can, for at least as long as the US is "staying the course."
Friends of mine have also moved to Ireland, Japan, Australia and various other countries--they all like wherever it is they moved. The most important part is doing your research and, if possible, spending some time there--I know plenty of expats who are miserable because they just didn't check their new home country out before going.
The game itself is, meh, average, but the fact that the introduction was so hilariously bad as to spark an Internet phaenomenon....well, all your bad game are belong to us.
I bought the Illuminatus! trilogy in college, and it gave me many hours of pleasure--not just from reading the book, but from games, references, in-jokes, cultural bits and bobs and whatnot.
I don't care what he spends his money on, or why he's in trouble, but this is just one of those little bits of culture, like Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Iain Banks' Culture series and any number of other miscellaneous books that contribute to letting me look at life in a more fun way.
I agree with the guy who said "if a bum asks for money, buy him a sandwich". Where this differs is that here's someone who's actually done something cool and worthwhile and inherently nifty.
The information asked is about what is believed to be about information published inside Brazil: "it is not relevant that the data are stored in the United States, since all the photographs and messages being investigated were published by Brazilians, through Internet connection in national territory."
Then they should be taking Brazilian ISPs to task and requiring them to intercept the traffic inside the country, or block Google, whatever. That's not Google's business. I live in Switzerland; racist and neo-nazi content is illegal here. However, if I access this stuff on a server in, say, Japan, yes the Swiss police may prosecute me but there's basically fuck-all they can legally do against the Japanese server owner, and that's a Good Thing. I'm a US citizen, but I definitely wouldn't want the US government (or any government) to go ham-handedly trying to enforce its own laws in foreign sovereign countries any more than they already do...
And regarding your Saudi ATT example, that's exactly what I'd be saying. "Piss off and look up 'territorial sovereignty'".
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It trivializes a gross invasion of privacy.
And this is not one of those situations where you want local authorities to use their best judgment and let slide just because it's a "good" organization.
No, it's one of those situations where you want local authorities to respect international treaties signed by the United States.
Or, you're claiming that the OSCE is a Klan cover, I'm not sure...
The problem is that, in France, there are serious cases of police misconduct that need to be reported, e.g. in responses to demonstrations, treatment of suspects, and handling of investigation evidence.
And at the same time, people are being dicks to police because they, well, are dicks.
The heart of the issue is that there's really not much of a middle ground anyone trusts - French police groups are terrified that dicks will be dicks, and the people who put their stock in sites like Copwatch IdF don't trust the police or government to adequately investigate and prosecute police misconduct.
Many companies, especially financial services providers, are required to record phone calls and maintain the records for several years, so back to the drawing board...
This will probably be brutally misinterpreted, so disclaimer, I'm not in favor of invading anyone, but:
The Soviets were rational actors, arguably as scared of the US as the US was of them.
North Korea and, to a lesser degree Iran (yes, think about it) are theocracies. I would be less afraid of Iran (as a global as opposed to a regional threat) as they are far more susceptible to conflicts among various interest groups, ranging from fanatical (Ahmadinejad) over pragmatic (Rafsanjani) to liberal (not up on my Iranian domestic politics right now, just as the US is. Theocracies are not rational actors (beyond being really really hard-core gamblers with opaque motivational structures and, especially in NK's case, little to lose.)
Drawing parallels between North Korea and the USSR is a stretch, to say the least.
As far as Israel's concerned, its neighbors will, barring a major geopolitical change, not invade them again (see where it got them the last few times.) Being invaded by an NBC-capable enemy is the one scenario under which I can see the Israelis hitting first with nukes. Beyond that, they're not stupid. Any strike from them would be a response to a nuclear attack, assuming there's anything left of the country after they were hit.
Four easy steps:
1. Turn off the TV
2. Pick up a book (preferably in public domain, consider having a peek at Project Gutenberg or your local public library
3......
4. Profit!
No, really -- it's a nice day outside.
You can pick up a reasonably fast box that sort-of runs Windows at any podunk corner shop reseller. For a few hundred bucks.
Also, getting spares, service, whatever for a Mac (outside US/CA/UK/much of Western Europe) can be a bitch and a half.
I bought my first Powerbook two years ago and I am totally utterly convinced and addicted, and even I have trouble with the cost.
...we do have a guardian angel.
The answer is: "neither". This is why you have a project manager (I hope.) Someone neutral who tracks progress and assigns tasks to dev/IT/whatever.
At least I hope you have a project manager. If not, assign one who's capable of working outside his normal role, either dev or IT, but they'd better know what they're doing (cost tracking, that sort of thing.)
The key words that come up very often whenever the topic of cell phone jammers is raised are "theaters", "schools", "hospitals", etc. I hate some idiot's phone next to me ringing as much as anyone, but there is a pretty serious problem beyond the obvious "doctors and emergency staff have to be reachable" argument (in this case you can say "carry a pager", but pagers can be just as loud and annoying or quiet and discreet as cell phones ringing.)
Specifically, many of the larger outbursts of civil disobedience in the 1990s were organized by individuals with cell phones. The most recent specific example that comes to mind is the series of anti-Syrian rallies in Lebanon last year. In smaller countries without much competition, it's still comparatively easy for the police to just shut down providers, as the government of Nepal has done. However, in a country like the US it's just bound to be a frickin nightmare for local law enforcement to impose a blanket shutdown on cell phone communications.
It's one of those things, like gun ownership or implementation of a national ID card where the usual response is "but what do you have to fear? You are paranoid." However, I am worried about any more by my government to reduce my ability to organize, assemble and protest.
Just have all your legitimate mail sent to Remote Control Mail, and don't publish your physical MX to any of the junk mai....uh...
Okay, just have all your legitimate mail sent to RCM and buy a big red "DECEASED, RETURN TO SENDER" rubber stamp for all the rest.
Or keep a hungry ferret in your mail box, that works for me.
...is called Postbutler, and costs a damn sight more (CHF 162.- per month, CHF 486.- for up to 12 months, divide by 1.25 per dollar) but they email it to you.
I think I trust the Swiss post office a lot more than a private US company in terms of privacy, but to be honest, being able to check your mail on a website is way more practical than getting a bunch of PDFs -- I'm thinking about using this while I'm spending 3 months travelling around South America next year and don't relish the thought about grabbing massive loads of marketing mail attachments over Bolivian dial-up.
I guess I'll just use GMail or something.
They aren't going to put it on "CAUGHT ON CCTV: MAN PICKS NOSE, LOSES JOB"
Actually, they do. The number of people caught doing embarrassing things on "XYZ country's stupidest CCTV videos" shows with cops laughing at them is pretty staggering. You've got to have a pretty short memory to forget about numerous incidents of police using various databases to stalk women they fancy, accidental "cross-pollination" of datasets containing sensitive information (one incident of AIDS patient info being fed to health insurers comes to mind) and general police abuse of surveillance powers to disregard this very real possibility.
Furthermore, define "crime". Who says what's a crime? Take a close look at what's covered by RIP, ASBOs and the PTA. As an American, I have a hard time right now lecturing anyone about concepts like habeas corpus and oversight of government agencies to ensure they only use their powers responsibly. Nonetheless, once the mechanisms for universal supervision and enforcement are in place, there's little to stop a government, even a well-meaning one, from incrementally selling totalitarianism to its people under the guise of protecting them for their own good.
The thing that bothers me about this discussion, if you read the article, is Graham Gerrard's quote at the end, which basically amounts to "well, it's legitimate because if it weren't we'd never do it." Trust us. Honest.
Is, not was. The initial bits, like the Iraq invasion were brilliantly, quickly and efficiently executed. They had the bastards reeling and a good shot at pacifying the joint, severely curtailing opium production and installing a working government.
In Afghanistan, if you want "clusterfuck" you can start by talking about things like underfunding/understaffing the occupation force, letting warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar run rampant in the Southwest, mollycoddling the Pakistanis while they're unable or unwilling to keep the Southeast frontier open, and playing games with allies like the UK (like in the Pentagon memo blaming them for the failure of opium eradication.) In Iraq, start with disbanding the army, firing every trained administrator in sight under the guise of "de-baathization" and basically letting the monkeys run wild in the madhouse.
I'll be the first to agree that the Iraq war, as opposed to Afghanistan (except for the fact that it's one murdering shitbag less in the world, but that's unfortunately not a good reason to start wars, nor was it the premise under which this one was begun) was "a bit weak on justification". But you might want to be more selective on what you describe as a "clusterfuck."
...I already did. With the bureaucratic machinery in place that creates this sort of abomination, it's not even likely that an electoral landslide in favor of the less worse alternative next week would help.
Many business associates of mine are already avoiding all unnecessary travel to and interaction with the US for this sort of reason, so wa-hey, go ahead, shoot-in-foot-and-reload.
The issue isn't that Microsoft would not provide something for these guys if they followed "proper procedure". It's that (a) they wouldn't follow proper procedure and (b) they don't care. In this particular case, people pay far too much attention to conventional workstation deployments of XP, without allowing for all the crack-smoking other roles it is used in. You're talking about people who develop on a purely functionality-oriented level (i.e. it has to do xyz, and devil-may-care how we get there.) End effect? If it doesn't do what they want it to do, they don't care why it's not doing it, and find something else that does.
Furthermore it's a question of principle; even when business customer do get some sort of "special treatment", it's a PITA for a large company to deal with this sort of thing. Calculate the cost of a support man-hour in, say, a bank. Multiply by the number of times it'd be necessary to employ already stretched resources for Microsoft-mandated administrative rigmarole, multiply by 30,000 workstations. Add cost of developing, training for and implementing subsidiary processes, etc. etc. etc. -- you start getting the idea.
I foresee patience starting to wear thin about the time this comes out. Many of us have dealt with senior management who don't want to hear about why Linux/FreeBSD/whatever don't do xyz the way they're used to, and just cut it short with "use Windows, everyone else does, I don't have time for this." That cuts both ways; every time a new MS-related problem pops up at several of my clients, I already hear CIO-types mutter things like "wait a second, aren't these the guys who're costing us a gajillion in patch-related expenses?"
Your arguments are absolutely correct, but in practice only time will tell how large outfits react to this. Swami predicts: "not happily."
I'm 100% with you on this one. I am involved (I don't really "run" it, nobody does, we're just a bunch of little anarchists, aren't we) in an IT consulting group that does fairly high-value projects for large corporate customers. So far, we've limited Windows usage to OEM licenses on laptops we bought, and to workstations we use at customer sites. However, I've already moved all my own stuff to FreeBSD and Mac, and am in the process of convincing my associates to do the same (many of them are on Linux anyway.) All our infrastructure is already on open source OS boxes, and laptops will most likely follow once Apple gets over the stupidity of having canned the 12" Powrbook which all my colleagues want.
Many of our customers are already under pressure from Microsoft's idiot moves, which include patching & compatibility headaches, OS vulnerabilities, poor privilege separation for sensitive apps, and MS legalistic evasion of support and damage-control responsibilities. To add to this, here are dozens of (dare I say) respected consultants running around whispering "ditch it! Ditch it!" in their ear for various reasons--privacy & security, operational cost, etc. etc. etc. In one particular case, one of my client uses XP (don't gag, it wasn't our call) in device controller elements at customer laboratory sites--and has field service staff frequently update and exchange hardware. I can't really see this flying well with them, can you?
No, neither I, nor the above poster matter in the grand scheme of things, but when a client comes to me and says "help me figure out a long-term IT strategy that Just Works (tm)" I daresay that I and others like me exert a disproportionate amount of influence on who buys what. Especially if we're talking about multiple clients with 10,000+ seats who, in turn, influence the direction of what smaller partner and supplier organizations' IT strategy.
So no, we don't matter. But ya know what? Piss off enough people and soon enough you may forget that some of them actually wield a pretty big club. Microsoft was very smart around 2004 when it essentially came to one of my clients, hat in hand, apologizing for neglecting security support & development, and promising to do better--they did, and built a lot of goodwill that way. Maybe they ought to learn from that experience.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying, "we aren't quite clear yet on what we'll do with it, but we had some cash lying around and it seemed like a more sensible investment than buying a nuclear submarine for Larry & Sergei. Plus it's an economical location for planned new datacenter." It is not yet clear what Google intends to do with its recent acquisition of North Korea; industry experts speculate that it may use nookle.google.com to turn into a glazed over parking lot regardless
The new Google Mars, which is expected to be released from beta in mid-2017, will allow users to navigate between any massive red dusty wasteland to any other massive red dusty wasteland. Insider rumors also claim that Google plans on selling text advertisements around the Martian poles. A Google source who declined to be named also describes plans by Google to move its complaints department to three major land masses on its new real estate, and to display its motto in three mile high illuminated letters at the new site.
...but on the flip side, you have to work with people who tell you every morning about the ferret shitting on their brand new Mercedes.
:-)
Arsch!
It's not. In a place like Zurich, if you can get your foot in the door with a major company, you're pretty much set--I have a number of friends who've done this. College degree or equivalent is almost indispensable though. I wouldn't honestly aim for a small district/community regardless. Quotas are a pain but irrelevant if you can make yourself wanted enough--we've gotten about 8-10 good people in that way who've settled. These are the kind of immigrants they want; educated, taxpaying, intending to settle. But yes, EU does have a far easier time.
I'd check the British recruiting boards--they seem to have a lock on a lot of European IT position for some reason.
1) Switzerland. It's clean, tidy, cosmopolitan, safe, has low taxes, great restaurants, beautiful countryside, a reasonabl educated population, a strong economy, 20% foreigners so fairly limited xenophobia in the parts that matter compared to many other European countries, isn't part of the EU, and is a few hours from Paris, Milan, Venice, Munich and other cool spots.
2) What's keeping me from moving there? Well, nothing--I already did. I've lived on 3 continents, and it's by far the nicest country I've been to (barring Canada, but brrrr.)
I moved for personal reasons (girlfriend), but I can see 100% where people frustrated with the way the US is moving are coming from. I have two remaining, ageing family members in the US whom I visit whenever possible, and every time I come here I notice what seems like a general decline in civility and reason. From the whiny nasal-voiced stewardesses on every US air carrier (and the $5 drinks charge on international flights--WTF?!?) to the screechy populist media, intrusive laws and lowbrow politics, it all gets a bit tiresome.
I often catch myself feeling guilty about having such an arrogant attitude, but to be honest I'd rather enjoy the good bits from afar whenever I can, for at least as long as the US is "staying the course."
Friends of mine have also moved to Ireland, Japan, Australia and various other countries--they all like wherever it is they moved. The most important part is doing your research and, if possible, spending some time there--I know plenty of expats who are miserable because they just didn't check their new home country out before going.
So start handing out submachine guns and hip flasks to pedestrians. Problem solved.
Can't believe nobody's brought up this classic.
The game itself is, meh, average, but the fact that the introduction was so hilariously bad as to spark an Internet phaenomenon....well, all your bad game are belong to us.
I bought the Illuminatus! trilogy in college, and it gave me many hours of pleasure--not just from reading the book, but from games, references, in-jokes, cultural bits and bobs and whatnot.
I don't care what he spends his money on, or why he's in trouble, but this is just one of those little bits of culture, like Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Iain Banks' Culture series and any number of other miscellaneous books that contribute to letting me look at life in a more fun way.
I agree with the guy who said "if a bum asks for money, buy him a sandwich". Where this differs is that here's someone who's actually done something cool and worthwhile and inherently nifty.
The information asked is about what is believed to be about information published inside Brazil:
"it is not relevant that the data are stored in the United States, since all the photographs and messages being investigated were published by Brazilians, through Internet connection in national territory."
Then they should be taking Brazilian ISPs to task and requiring them to intercept the traffic inside the country, or block Google, whatever. That's not Google's business. I live in Switzerland; racist and neo-nazi content is illegal here. However, if I access this stuff on a server in, say, Japan, yes the Swiss police may prosecute me but there's basically fuck-all they can legally do against the Japanese server owner, and that's a Good Thing. I'm a US citizen, but I definitely wouldn't want the US government (or any government) to go ham-handedly trying to enforce its own laws in foreign sovereign countries any more than they already do...
And regarding your Saudi ATT example, that's exactly what I'd be saying. "Piss off and look up 'territorial sovereignty'".