What "one filesystem"? Microsoft keeps trying to do WinFS and other experimental systems, NTFS keeps getting "revised", blah de blah blah. There is no "the" filesystem. There is the default filesystem on Windows 7, but there is bugger-all guarantee that will have any relationship with the default filesystem on Windows 8. Thumb drives that use NTFS are wasting space and there's a hell of a lot more thumb drives than there are hard drives. You may not be aware of this, but DVDs don't usually use NTFS either, but are probably more important candidates for compression than any other device.
So what is this mythical "the" filesystem of which you speak?
As I noted elsewhere, the risk of childhood leukemia in the Seascale region is 2000x the national average. Repeated investigations by Greenpeace (the university lent them boats + geiger counters and provided free radionuclide analysis), the BBC and several Universities in the Manchester/Lancashire region have shown that there is a sizable plutonium sludge in the estuary and that plutonium is migrating both round the coastlines and up rivers.
This isn't something to be hysterical about, but there's a difference between knowing the facts on the ground and imagining that nothing is there. I am not telling you or anyone to panic, I'm not the one who is outside the scope of reality. I AM telling you that levels that Universities themselves cannot legally handle are FAR too high for households to handle.
I am ALSO telling you that this is extremely manageable. The Original Article (the one you've not read, apparently) talks about filtering nuclear waste. Well, here we have an estuary full of the stuff. Pump the sludge up, filter it and pump the water back out. That's not hysteria, that's cleaning up the environment in a way that avoids the risks being touted for the old-fashioned clean-up. Where's YOUR bright idea?
Technically we don't have a =written= constitution but do have an unwritten one. The unwritten one is ultimately derived from the surviving laws as written by Alfred the Great (only King of England to be given the moniker), the two or three remaining clauses of the Magna Carta, the remaining clauses (not sure how many) of the Bill of Rights (the US based the idea of one on ours, bloody cheek! Should sue 'em for copyright infringement) and the various Acts governing the Constitutional Monarchy (which recently got amended).
Although these assorted Acts and Laws are written, the Constitution itself is not, just as Common Law derives also from the above but is also not documented as such.
The House of Commons' production of legislation is all that keeps the UK recycling industry profitable. (For USians interested in our relationship to elected politicians, there have been seven members of the Official Monster Raving Looney Party elected in local elections and the House of Lords overturned a Thatcher-era prohibition on more than four people walking together with a common purpose because of an appeal by the alleged reincarnation of King Arthur. The Lords regarded him as a more credible witness.)
That would work too. In the end, it doesn't matter if it's done through FUSE or a glibc extension - the fact is that it can be done and has been possible for a long time by one or both methods.
So what if it occurs naturally? It wasn't in the seaspray, wasn't on the beach and wasn't in people's homes.
The isotope ratios for uranium, plutonium and americium match the ratios produced by Windscale and Sellafield - which is as good as a fingerprint. Further, leukemia rates are 2000x the national level -- with considerably smaller spikes near other nuclear power plants but even those aren't as drastic.
And, yes, I've read the papers on what WAS found. This was research carried out starting 1979 through to 1994. I've done the background reading. I've read the court notes. (I was even periphially involved in the court case and the later research.) I was there. Where were you? Plugging your lugholes and crying lalalalala, like BNFL?
As a kindly reader, I'd even put in a note for the editors whilst it was in the firehose queue that this should be "Knot". Not really a major typo and the editors can't be blamed for not reading all the comments, but it'd be good if more people DID pre-screen the submissions and enter USEFUL corrections so that the quality can be improved.
They don't need to. Linux has the ability to read/write compressed files directly (zclib?) and doesn't need the filesystems to support this. Which is great because it means compressed files will work under ALL filesystems ALL of the time (if you have the library installed) and you don't have to wait for each filesystem maintainer to add it. You also have no risks of one FS maintainer deciding another's implementation sucks and not being compatible with it. Which is very likely under Windows.
The University of Manchester collected house dust from people living in the Seascale area. There was BLOODY PLUTONIUM in the sea spray contaminating nearby houses! So much of the damn stuff, they had to remove the house dust because it exceeded the University's limit for nuclear material.
Shove a telescope over the Irish Sea and you'd end up with a glowing telescope. That is how dangerous the blasted place is. It is so frigging dangerous that BNFL advised workers and local inhabitants not to have children. (Caused an outrage amongst the public at the time, as did Granada's documentary on the place "Fighting For Gemma", but nothing much was done. The workers lost their lawsuit against BNFL and the newspapers lost interest.)
I strolled along the beach with a geiger counter, just to see what regular alpha particle emitters I could find. The beach was littered in the damn things. 14x background was commonplace.
I'm shocked. You did all that analysis and did not ONCE offer to help in a backup in case of a fire, earthquake or terrorist attack! How would this person feel, if all that data was lost? That is so incredibly thoughtless of you! As a more civilized member of the Slashdot community, I think it only fair that we offer to help preserve this unique collection of alternative art in the event of disaster.
You're assuming every variant of RAID under the sun is identical. It is NOT. Different RAID schemes do different things. RAID 6 (which allows 2 drives to fail) cannot result in the entire RAID array being lost from a single error. You need at least 3, 2 of which you must have knowingly ignored. Mirror RAID can NEVER have a failure of the RAID array from errors because you aren't striping the data at all. The loss of 1 disk is the loss of 1 disk. The loss of 1 sector is the loss of 1 sector. That is all.
1 error can certainly shut down a striped array but only people needing extremely high-speed data transfers (think CERN) or damn fools (every other user) use striped arrays without either running them through a mirror (CERN can't afford them, damn fools don't want to afford them) or some other backup solution.
Google doesn't "backup" anything in the conventional sense - there is no master or slave concept in their system, it's completely emancipated. Data is duplicated, sure, but duplication != backing up, though all backing up is duplication.
So had CODA been continued, that couldn't have been used for increased redundancy as well as concurrent server access?
Seems to me that clustered file systems are INTENDED for concurrent server access and are OPTIMISED for that, but can be used for anything you damn well please especially if they've got the extra facility built-in.
From a purely technical perspective, what is the actual difference between shoving a mirror RAID copy of a drive into a rack of backups and shoving a mirror image copy of a drive into a rack of backups? Beyond the fact that the first is done in hardware and the second is done in software.
Ok, my apology for not understanding. I guess I'd got somewhat riled at some of the other posts which were rather hostile and hadn't expected a friendly one in there.
Yeeees, that is true, though I'd contend that the Law Lords were comparatively harder to bribe. Most of the UK's House of Commons apparently would settle for Murdoch's blessings and a favourable headline.
I'm not saying the House of Lords' hearings shouldn't have been replaced, merely that they shouldn't have been replaced with something worse. Replacing something that is broken and obsolete is a wonderful idea* but if you've a choice of engineering something new that's better or buying something just as broken and obsolete from the corner store, I'd have preferred them to do the first.
*But it does have to be broken. Russia's use of thermionic valves in aircraft and spacecraft is obsolete but works immeasurably better than anyone else's alternatives for certain types of problem. Valves are lots of things - bulky, fragile, heavy, power-hungry, etc - but they're immune to EMP, many ionising radiation problems and other such gremlins. That tells me that antiques, however old, aren't necessarily inferior for that reason alone. Newer is often better because it's selective at what it's better at. Newer, generically better solutions are the way to go, but special interest groups aren't interested in things that are better outside of their interests and are increasingly belligerent towards consensual solutions that ARE generically better.
I'm therefore not disputing what you say, my concern is that systems are dying a death of a thousand cuts where every "improvement" does indeed improve what is left - leaving you ultimately with the perfect solution for nothing. There has to be a better alternative. If not, then at least borrow from "bladed servers" and insert a "blade" that's designed to fill in the gap.
India and China do. Though given the shorter lifespans of their new range of reactors it might not be regarded as a problem.
However, there's plenty of spills that need cleaning. The Irish Sea is the most radioactive in the world because of contamination from nuclear power stations and recycling. Strathclyde is now considered "incurably" contaminated from Dounray power station, as conventional cleanup would likely stir up radioactive sediment that would be far more dangerous if mobile. Something that would clean up these locations would be of enormous interest to a LOT of people, especially the power station owners who are under enormous pressure to do something.
Celtic culture is of no interest to me. Culture in general is of no interest to me. The people haven't changed (the haplogroup ratios are no different at all now from what they were during the Black Death and are insignificantly altered from Neolithic times - long before Celtic culture even existed amongst Continental Europeans) and the attitudes haven't changed. What do I care for pottery designs or linguistic groups? I care about the people themselves, what they did, who they fought, why they fought, where they fought. Leave the labels for lesser studies. Conflicts don't become new when one side repaints their banner.
Ah, now I was careful not to assume that either side either wants or doesn't want to resolve anything. Just as you would use milk in tea or coffee to make it whiter and not bleach, I am careful to restrict myself to "achieving X implies achieving Y" and "the importance of X can be calculated directly from the importance of Y". It's not my problem as to whether X or Y is wanted or who wants them, just as it is not my problem if you decide to whiten coffee with bleach. I can tell you that it won't have the affect that is claimed to be desirable, I can even tell you that it's extremely unhealthy, but obviously I have no input beyond that point. It's not my choice to make.
The same is true of Israel and Palestine. I can tell you which statements are falsified by what is known about the present, I can tell you which statements are falsified by what is known about the past. I can tell you that, historically, solution A has always produced conflict and solution B has always produced mutual acceptance. I can even tell you some of what A and B imply, since solutions are never in isolation. What I cannot do is tell you which individuals or which groups actually want A, B or the implicit consequences, nor can I tell you the specifics of how A or B might be achieved beyond the basic constraints carried by the implications.
As much as I might sometimes want to have the power to do someone's thinking for them so they won't screw up the world quite so bad, the replies to my post are ample demonstration that people will not stomach me even so much as giving the outline of the parameters of the constraints of a solution. Even the most verifiable of facts (such as Ireland being inhabited continuously for 8,000 years by essentially the same people and forming a distinct island around 5,000 years ago and that Ireland and mainland Britain have been duking it out ever since) - facts that no geneticist, archaeologist or geologist would dream of questioning simply because they are so firmly established - becomes instantly challenged and mauled over by the majority of readers of it. Not because it's wrong, but because if X implies Y and Y is abhorred then X must be abhorred at all costs along with anyone who mentions the connection.
(Factor in the detail that my thought processes are somewhere between "unpopular" and "reviled" by the vast majority of people and it's clear that you'll even have a few who abhor both X and Y merely because I've mentioned the connection.)
The difference between either the Celtic Irish or the pre-Celtic Irish invading Britain (or vice versa) for the purpose of capturing or retaking land has no meaningful political or practical distinction with the modern Irish and modern British invading each other for the purpose of capturing or retaking land. There is absolutely bugger all difference, even at the genetic level (see: "Origins of the British", Oppenheimer, Stephen). The banners have been altered, but THAT IS IT. That is the SOLE difference.
What historians claim is of no interest to me. I am interested in what IS and not what is claimed -- especially by a bunch of nancies who cannot comprehend the picture of History beyond their tiny insignificant niche. It is the provincial views of historians that are causing problems.
MI6 handles international affairs. Since Assange is in the UK, that would be MI5's job. Or perhaps the mysterious MI21 that got a brief mention and no more at the time the CIA secret prison story broke. (There is absolutely no guarantee we know what intelligence divisions actually exist in the UK - MI5 and MI6 have been long known-about but officially weren't admitted to until relatively recently.)
Americans can't even figure out something as simple as the rules of Cricket, so of course they can't handle the geographic complexities. (Even most Brits can't identify all of the distinct regions, there's a good deal more than 3, or say what system applies in each.)
I would argue that the Law Lords were a better system as you didn't need a "wider basis" to appeal to them. This whole idea of a Supreme Court that can only hear Public Interest cases is extremely disturbing as it limits the checks and balances horribly. It is also severely problematic as the European Court of Human Rights can ONLY hear cases AFTER they have been appealed to the highest court in a nation and if the highest court in the nation isn't entitled to hear the case, it is extremely unclear if it can be appealed to the EU.
It depends on whether it's done for action or voter consumption. For the former, I'd far prefer it to be overestimated and dealt with. However, I despair of DHS or DoD actually being capable of countering anything more threatening than house flies.
For voter consumption, I'd far prefer there to be no estimate at all. The use of estimates to manipulate the population is very Humphrey Appleby. It is Psych Ops against the population the government is sworn to protect and serve, regardless of which way it is done. Even if it were 100% accurate, it would STILL be a Psych Ops attack against the populace.
I see nothing wrong with the government supplying useful information (eg: pressure companies to use OpenBSD or a hardened Linux for appliances and embedded systems, not Windows under any circumstance; don't use randomly-discarded USB thumb drives in nuclear reactors; keep confidential information offline or strongly encrypted). I also don't see anything wrong with the government being required to report large-scale DDoS attacks, so long as attribution of the attacks is provable and verifiable by some independent body (even if not by the public) and where it is either not provable or not verifiable, no attribution is given no matter how politically tempting.
I also see nothing wrong with the government actually taking cybersecurity seriously and mandating a rolling minimum standard of security for corporations. The main objection to minimum standards is that they are static and thus obsolete. So don't define it statically or in terms of specific technologies or specific threats. It's entirely possible to say that an incident involving any given compromised system will affect X number of people, given a total of Y people, by Z amount. You then mandate that companies cannot permit either X*Z or (X/Y)*Z to exceed certain totals for any given year. Compromises below those totals are fined at a modest rate but enough to create impetus to improve, compromises above those totals are fined to apocalyptic proportions. Let the companies take care of how to go about this.
You can also specify rolling standards in other ways. Instead of stating the number of bits in an encryption key, specify that operations critical to the security of the infrastructure and economy must be either FIPS-compliant OR use encryption classified as "minimal risk" (no known weaknesses, not subject to brute force attacks with available technology, that sort of thing) within some sensible window of time. Six months sound reasonable from the time of a security announcement of a potential hazard to the end of testing and full roll-out of replacement systems in mission-critical systems? Too long and you will be attacked. Too short and the consequences of a mistake will be worse than an attack.
In the case of systems where encryption is too difficult - for example, in automotive systems which currently use Ethernet for cabling between modules and which are starting to support wireless systems control - then specify things in terms of authentication and authority, under the same relative measure. (eg: A car should be X% certain, given known cyberthreats at the time of last maintenance, that it is the authorized user who is turning off the ignition or slamming on the brakes, where X is some well-published value that vendors and cybersecurity experts jointly agree is acceptable in terms of cost per unit mitigation). If a car isn't maintained for a year, then the vendor should be liable for any excessive exposure to risk known about at that time but not for risks discovered after then. Because there's no specific threat stated, only the permissible relative risk, no update is needed.
(We expect the same in other industries. We care if an airline took reasonable precautions in last maintenance to ensure everything was OK, we care that the regulations ensure that critical components are tested thoroughly enough, but do we care that much as to whether the regulations specified BY NAME every nut and bolt? Should we, or should we be entit
Slashdot Mirror
What "one filesystem"? Microsoft keeps trying to do WinFS and other experimental systems, NTFS keeps getting "revised", blah de blah blah. There is no "the" filesystem. There is the default filesystem on Windows 7, but there is bugger-all guarantee that will have any relationship with the default filesystem on Windows 8. Thumb drives that use NTFS are wasting space and there's a hell of a lot more thumb drives than there are hard drives. You may not be aware of this, but DVDs don't usually use NTFS either, but are probably more important candidates for compression than any other device.
So what is this mythical "the" filesystem of which you speak?
As I noted elsewhere, the risk of childhood leukemia in the Seascale region is 2000x the national average. Repeated investigations by Greenpeace (the university lent them boats + geiger counters and provided free radionuclide analysis), the BBC and several Universities in the Manchester/Lancashire region have shown that there is a sizable plutonium sludge in the estuary and that plutonium is migrating both round the coastlines and up rivers.
This isn't something to be hysterical about, but there's a difference between knowing the facts on the ground and imagining that nothing is there. I am not telling you or anyone to panic, I'm not the one who is outside the scope of reality. I AM telling you that levels that Universities themselves cannot legally handle are FAR too high for households to handle.
I am ALSO telling you that this is extremely manageable. The Original Article (the one you've not read, apparently) talks about filtering nuclear waste. Well, here we have an estuary full of the stuff. Pump the sludge up, filter it and pump the water back out. That's not hysteria, that's cleaning up the environment in a way that avoids the risks being touted for the old-fashioned clean-up. Where's YOUR bright idea?
Technically we don't have a =written= constitution but do have an unwritten one. The unwritten one is ultimately derived from the surviving laws as written by Alfred the Great (only King of England to be given the moniker), the two or three remaining clauses of the Magna Carta, the remaining clauses (not sure how many) of the Bill of Rights (the US based the idea of one on ours, bloody cheek! Should sue 'em for copyright infringement) and the various Acts governing the Constitutional Monarchy (which recently got amended).
Although these assorted Acts and Laws are written, the Constitution itself is not, just as Common Law derives also from the above but is also not documented as such.
The House of Commons' production of legislation is all that keeps the UK recycling industry profitable. (For USians interested in our relationship to elected politicians, there have been seven members of the Official Monster Raving Looney Party elected in local elections and the House of Lords overturned a Thatcher-era prohibition on more than four people walking together with a common purpose because of an appeal by the alleged reincarnation of King Arthur. The Lords regarded him as a more credible witness.)
That would work too. In the end, it doesn't matter if it's done through FUSE or a glibc extension - the fact is that it can be done and has been possible for a long time by one or both methods.
So what if it occurs naturally? It wasn't in the seaspray, wasn't on the beach and wasn't in people's homes.
The isotope ratios for uranium, plutonium and americium match the ratios produced by Windscale and Sellafield - which is as good as a fingerprint. Further, leukemia rates are 2000x the national level -- with considerably smaller spikes near other nuclear power plants but even those aren't as drastic.
And, yes, I've read the papers on what WAS found. This was research carried out starting 1979 through to 1994. I've done the background reading. I've read the court notes. (I was even periphially involved in the court case and the later research.) I was there. Where were you? Plugging your lugholes and crying lalalalala, like BNFL?
As a kindly reader, I'd even put in a note for the editors whilst it was in the firehose queue that this should be "Knot". Not really a major typo and the editors can't be blamed for not reading all the comments, but it'd be good if more people DID pre-screen the submissions and enter USEFUL corrections so that the quality can be improved.
They don't need to. Linux has the ability to read/write compressed files directly (zclib?) and doesn't need the filesystems to support this. Which is great because it means compressed files will work under ALL filesystems ALL of the time (if you have the library installed) and you don't have to wait for each filesystem maintainer to add it. You also have no risks of one FS maintainer deciding another's implementation sucks and not being compatible with it. Which is very likely under Windows.
The University of Manchester collected house dust from people living in the Seascale area. There was BLOODY PLUTONIUM in the sea spray contaminating nearby houses! So much of the damn stuff, they had to remove the house dust because it exceeded the University's limit for nuclear material.
Shove a telescope over the Irish Sea and you'd end up with a glowing telescope. That is how dangerous the blasted place is. It is so frigging dangerous that BNFL advised workers and local inhabitants not to have children. (Caused an outrage amongst the public at the time, as did Granada's documentary on the place "Fighting For Gemma", but nothing much was done. The workers lost their lawsuit against BNFL and the newspapers lost interest.)
I strolled along the beach with a geiger counter, just to see what regular alpha particle emitters I could find. The beach was littered in the damn things. 14x background was commonplace.
I'm shocked. You did all that analysis and did not ONCE offer to help in a backup in case of a fire, earthquake or terrorist attack! How would this person feel, if all that data was lost? That is so incredibly thoughtless of you! As a more civilized member of the Slashdot community, I think it only fair that we offer to help preserve this unique collection of alternative art in the event of disaster.
You're assuming every variant of RAID under the sun is identical. It is NOT. Different RAID schemes do different things. RAID 6 (which allows 2 drives to fail) cannot result in the entire RAID array being lost from a single error. You need at least 3, 2 of which you must have knowingly ignored. Mirror RAID can NEVER have a failure of the RAID array from errors because you aren't striping the data at all. The loss of 1 disk is the loss of 1 disk. The loss of 1 sector is the loss of 1 sector. That is all.
1 error can certainly shut down a striped array but only people needing extremely high-speed data transfers (think CERN) or damn fools (every other user) use striped arrays without either running them through a mirror (CERN can't afford them, damn fools don't want to afford them) or some other backup solution.
Google doesn't "backup" anything in the conventional sense - there is no master or slave concept in their system, it's completely emancipated. Data is duplicated, sure, but duplication != backing up, though all backing up is duplication.
So had CODA been continued, that couldn't have been used for increased redundancy as well as concurrent server access?
Seems to me that clustered file systems are INTENDED for concurrent server access and are OPTIMISED for that, but can be used for anything you damn well please especially if they've got the extra facility built-in.
From a purely technical perspective, what is the actual difference between shoving a mirror RAID copy of a drive into a rack of backups and shoving a mirror image copy of a drive into a rack of backups? Beyond the fact that the first is done in hardware and the second is done in software.
Maybe they would if the managers stopped moderating it +5 insightful at board meetings.
Ok, my apology for not understanding. I guess I'd got somewhat riled at some of the other posts which were rather hostile and hadn't expected a friendly one in there.
Yeeees, that is true, though I'd contend that the Law Lords were comparatively harder to bribe. Most of the UK's House of Commons apparently would settle for Murdoch's blessings and a favourable headline.
I'm not saying the House of Lords' hearings shouldn't have been replaced, merely that they shouldn't have been replaced with something worse. Replacing something that is broken and obsolete is a wonderful idea* but if you've a choice of engineering something new that's better or buying something just as broken and obsolete from the corner store, I'd have preferred them to do the first.
*But it does have to be broken. Russia's use of thermionic valves in aircraft and spacecraft is obsolete but works immeasurably better than anyone else's alternatives for certain types of problem. Valves are lots of things - bulky, fragile, heavy, power-hungry, etc - but they're immune to EMP, many ionising radiation problems and other such gremlins. That tells me that antiques, however old, aren't necessarily inferior for that reason alone. Newer is often better because it's selective at what it's better at. Newer, generically better solutions are the way to go, but special interest groups aren't interested in things that are better outside of their interests and are increasingly belligerent towards consensual solutions that ARE generically better.
I'm therefore not disputing what you say, my concern is that systems are dying a death of a thousand cuts where every "improvement" does indeed improve what is left - leaving you ultimately with the perfect solution for nothing. There has to be a better alternative. If not, then at least borrow from "bladed servers" and insert a "blade" that's designed to fill in the gap.
India and China do. Though given the shorter lifespans of their new range of reactors it might not be regarded as a problem.
However, there's plenty of spills that need cleaning. The Irish Sea is the most radioactive in the world because of contamination from nuclear power stations and recycling. Strathclyde is now considered "incurably" contaminated from Dounray power station, as conventional cleanup would likely stir up radioactive sediment that would be far more dangerous if mobile. Something that would clean up these locations would be of enormous interest to a LOT of people, especially the power station owners who are under enormous pressure to do something.
Celtic culture is of no interest to me. Culture in general is of no interest to me. The people haven't changed (the haplogroup ratios are no different at all now from what they were during the Black Death and are insignificantly altered from Neolithic times - long before Celtic culture even existed amongst Continental Europeans) and the attitudes haven't changed. What do I care for pottery designs or linguistic groups? I care about the people themselves, what they did, who they fought, why they fought, where they fought. Leave the labels for lesser studies. Conflicts don't become new when one side repaints their banner.
Ah, now I was careful not to assume that either side either wants or doesn't want to resolve anything. Just as you would use milk in tea or coffee to make it whiter and not bleach, I am careful to restrict myself to "achieving X implies achieving Y" and "the importance of X can be calculated directly from the importance of Y". It's not my problem as to whether X or Y is wanted or who wants them, just as it is not my problem if you decide to whiten coffee with bleach. I can tell you that it won't have the affect that is claimed to be desirable, I can even tell you that it's extremely unhealthy, but obviously I have no input beyond that point. It's not my choice to make.
The same is true of Israel and Palestine. I can tell you which statements are falsified by what is known about the present, I can tell you which statements are falsified by what is known about the past. I can tell you that, historically, solution A has always produced conflict and solution B has always produced mutual acceptance. I can even tell you some of what A and B imply, since solutions are never in isolation. What I cannot do is tell you which individuals or which groups actually want A, B or the implicit consequences, nor can I tell you the specifics of how A or B might be achieved beyond the basic constraints carried by the implications.
As much as I might sometimes want to have the power to do someone's thinking for them so they won't screw up the world quite so bad, the replies to my post are ample demonstration that people will not stomach me even so much as giving the outline of the parameters of the constraints of a solution. Even the most verifiable of facts (such as Ireland being inhabited continuously for 8,000 years by essentially the same people and forming a distinct island around 5,000 years ago and that Ireland and mainland Britain have been duking it out ever since) - facts that no geneticist, archaeologist or geologist would dream of questioning simply because they are so firmly established - becomes instantly challenged and mauled over by the majority of readers of it. Not because it's wrong, but because if X implies Y and Y is abhorred then X must be abhorred at all costs along with anyone who mentions the connection.
(Factor in the detail that my thought processes are somewhere between "unpopular" and "reviled" by the vast majority of people and it's clear that you'll even have a few who abhor both X and Y merely because I've mentioned the connection.)
The difference between either the Celtic Irish or the pre-Celtic Irish invading Britain (or vice versa) for the purpose of capturing or retaking land has no meaningful political or practical distinction with the modern Irish and modern British invading each other for the purpose of capturing or retaking land. There is absolutely bugger all difference, even at the genetic level (see: "Origins of the British", Oppenheimer, Stephen). The banners have been altered, but THAT IS IT. That is the SOLE difference.
What historians claim is of no interest to me. I am interested in what IS and not what is claimed -- especially by a bunch of nancies who cannot comprehend the picture of History beyond their tiny insignificant niche. It is the provincial views of historians that are causing problems.
MI6 handles international affairs. Since Assange is in the UK, that would be MI5's job. Or perhaps the mysterious MI21 that got a brief mention and no more at the time the CIA secret prison story broke. (There is absolutely no guarantee we know what intelligence divisions actually exist in the UK - MI5 and MI6 have been long known-about but officially weren't admitted to until relatively recently.)
Americans can't even figure out something as simple as the rules of Cricket, so of course they can't handle the geographic complexities. (Even most Brits can't identify all of the distinct regions, there's a good deal more than 3, or say what system applies in each.)
I would argue that the Law Lords were a better system as you didn't need a "wider basis" to appeal to them. This whole idea of a Supreme Court that can only hear Public Interest cases is extremely disturbing as it limits the checks and balances horribly. It is also severely problematic as the European Court of Human Rights can ONLY hear cases AFTER they have been appealed to the highest court in a nation and if the highest court in the nation isn't entitled to hear the case, it is extremely unclear if it can be appealed to the EU.
Mod Insightful or "To Be Implemented" please.
It depends on whether it's done for action or voter consumption. For the former, I'd far prefer it to be overestimated and dealt with. However, I despair of DHS or DoD actually being capable of countering anything more threatening than house flies.
For voter consumption, I'd far prefer there to be no estimate at all. The use of estimates to manipulate the population is very Humphrey Appleby. It is Psych Ops against the population the government is sworn to protect and serve, regardless of which way it is done. Even if it were 100% accurate, it would STILL be a Psych Ops attack against the populace.
I see nothing wrong with the government supplying useful information (eg: pressure companies to use OpenBSD or a hardened Linux for appliances and embedded systems, not Windows under any circumstance; don't use randomly-discarded USB thumb drives in nuclear reactors; keep confidential information offline or strongly encrypted). I also don't see anything wrong with the government being required to report large-scale DDoS attacks, so long as attribution of the attacks is provable and verifiable by some independent body (even if not by the public) and where it is either not provable or not verifiable, no attribution is given no matter how politically tempting.
I also see nothing wrong with the government actually taking cybersecurity seriously and mandating a rolling minimum standard of security for corporations. The main objection to minimum standards is that they are static and thus obsolete. So don't define it statically or in terms of specific technologies or specific threats. It's entirely possible to say that an incident involving any given compromised system will affect X number of people, given a total of Y people, by Z amount. You then mandate that companies cannot permit either X*Z or (X/Y)*Z to exceed certain totals for any given year. Compromises below those totals are fined at a modest rate but enough to create impetus to improve, compromises above those totals are fined to apocalyptic proportions. Let the companies take care of how to go about this.
You can also specify rolling standards in other ways. Instead of stating the number of bits in an encryption key, specify that operations critical to the security of the infrastructure and economy must be either FIPS-compliant OR use encryption classified as "minimal risk" (no known weaknesses, not subject to brute force attacks with available technology, that sort of thing) within some sensible window of time. Six months sound reasonable from the time of a security announcement of a potential hazard to the end of testing and full roll-out of replacement systems in mission-critical systems? Too long and you will be attacked. Too short and the consequences of a mistake will be worse than an attack.
In the case of systems where encryption is too difficult - for example, in automotive systems which currently use Ethernet for cabling between modules and which are starting to support wireless systems control - then specify things in terms of authentication and authority, under the same relative measure. (eg: A car should be X% certain, given known cyberthreats at the time of last maintenance, that it is the authorized user who is turning off the ignition or slamming on the brakes, where X is some well-published value that vendors and cybersecurity experts jointly agree is acceptable in terms of cost per unit mitigation). If a car isn't maintained for a year, then the vendor should be liable for any excessive exposure to risk known about at that time but not for risks discovered after then. Because there's no specific threat stated, only the permissible relative risk, no update is needed.
(We expect the same in other industries. We care if an airline took reasonable precautions in last maintenance to ensure everything was OK, we care that the regulations ensure that critical components are tested thoroughly enough, but do we care that much as to whether the regulations specified BY NAME every nut and bolt? Should we, or should we be entit
That's only OK if China's national anthom is "Close to the Edit".