It transpires that TH Huxley put it much better than I did in 1892... though to be fair, in 1892 I put it like this: "Sorry; I've not been born yet."
I like the bit about securing or averting the intervention of supernatural beings; the Romans could form legal contracts with their gods in return for favours. And if the god didn't come through, you didn't sacrifice the lamb.
Sounds like a sure way to piss off the religious and atheists alike:]
Well, speaking as an atheist, it doesn't annoy me in the slightest. The reason why humans always seem to create a religion, regardless of where they live or which society they are from is an interesting subject; I fail to see why it should be offensive.
It's like asking why humans walk upright, or why all humans developed language. A fascinating subject, in short, and well worthy of examination, I'd say. Science is only ever offensive if you know you are likely to disagree with its findings in advance:)
It comforts humans "knowing" that there is something bigger than them out there, it comforts them "knowing" that when one dies, they just go up to heaven to live a better life.
That would be a good argument if all human religions were like Judaism, Christianity or Islam. But the Greeks and Romans believed that it was their lot to suffer eternal suffering, wandering in the Underworld for all eternity after they died. Your argument is probably the reason that Christiany replaced the older religions so succesfully, but it doesn't explain why the Greeks and Romans, who were very religous (the Romans even resorting to human sacrifice on occasion), believed in gods who were cruel, playful, and sometimes vindictive..
It's all in Homer, you know - perfectly scandalous!
I'd believe it if similar gene pools showed the same breakdown - here in NZ it's more 50-50 - so maybe there are different 'evolutionary pressures'....
I think that's a change in society and culture. Go back 500 years, and I doubt many of the New Zealander's ancestors would be atheists. And 500 years is zip in terms of evolution.
Before the first result, is says "Search the Web with Yahoo!" and gives me a second search box. I'm using Firefox on Linux.
Yup, I see it. "Altavista" doesn't do that. "Jeeves" returns ask.com as the first link, but "ask.com" has the repeated input box.
A small test later.. the phrases I found which DO give you that extra "You can use yahoo" input box:
google
ask.com
Searches which DON'T ("+ com" indicates that I searched both with X and X.com):
alltheweb (+.com)
hotbot (+.com)
teoma
altavista (+.com)
lycos (+.com)
search engines
My exhaustive (ahem) data was taken from here, which I found with a google search for "search engines".
Not only is a lot of history lost and destroyed, a lot of it was flat out fabricated... The mind boggles at what history professors would consider a "primary" source of information.
Hmm.. I wonder if, along with Wikipedia, we ought to ban Herodotus as a cited reference? After all, he is known both as the Father of Histroy and the Father of Lies.
But that's what makes him interesting, in a way. He reported everything he was told, sometimes stately flatly that he thought it was total lies (and, curiously, sometimes giving evidence which mean we NOW know it wasn't, such as the first people to circumnavigate Africa).
But this reporting method of Herodotus - of ALL stories, fanciful or otherwise - does give us a wonderful insight into the world in which he lived.
I wonder if the same will be said of Wikipedia in future times, providing they keep the history of all edits made?
If I live long enough, I look forward to a socialogical and historical analysis!
Between 1980 and 2000 the number of people in state prison for violent crimes went from 200,000 to 600,000 -- a 150% increase. I can tell you with certainly the US population has not increased that much over the same period of time, so we can assume the prison rate per capita is increasing despite the idea of "making an example".
No you can't.. you can assume that the number of people in prison compared to the population has risen. That may mean better police techniques, juries being more likely to deliver guilty verdicts, harsher sentencing (jail terms when there used to be fines or something else), or that more crimes have been committed. Any or all of these may be factors in those statistics.
The chart you link to (which says nothing of proof, by the way) says it is mostly down to violent crime. Is domestic violence being targetted when it used to be a low priority?
We can tell nothing from the graph, I'm afraid. Not one thing. Other than more people have been convicted of violent crimes than before.
So if we like put up a frickin huge mirror out in the space, would we be able to see our reflections back in time?
Yes. In the same way that if you go into a valley and shout "echo", you will hear, in a second or two, a sound from the past coming back at you.
Sound goes out from you. Hits wall. Comes back. You hear it.
Light does the same thing; just a little bit quicker, so you'd better make the mirror a long way off if you want to get a noticable echo.
Or just watch the news when they are linking live by satellite to somebody who pauses for a couple of seconds after the presenter has stopped speaking.
What do you mean by "a fraction?" That's an incredibly vague term that tells absolutely nothing about how fast the light is traveling. 999/1000 is a fraction, as is 1/1000, yet there's a lot of variance in between (especially when dealing with the speed of light.
Sorry, it just bugs me when people use the word "fraction" that way.
Parent poster was correct, in this case. The fraction of c which light will travel at through air is *different* to the fraction of c that light will travel through water, mist, heavy cloud, or hamsters. Without knowing the medium through which light is travelling, "a fraction" is an accurate description; it will never *exceed* c, but you cannot tell how how fast it *will* be going.
When you read Slashdot, you are looking back in time approx. 1.7e-9 seconds*, assuming you sit about 50cm from your screen.
What are you, a creationist? You haven't factored in the time it takes for the packets to travel from the server to my PC! That increases the timescale orders of magnitude! You can get, TCP/IP fossils in that time, no problem!
$8000 for a bug report seems like a lot but I wonder if Microsoft's QA folks don't end up earning at least as much for any serious bugs they manage to uncover towards the end of development (salary:bugs ratio, that is). And at this point, it should take a very serious amount of effort to uncover a big vulnerability (well, hopefully), perhaps such that $8000 isn't even worth the time for some.
I think that there WILL be a very serious amount of effort devoted to finding the vulns, actually. A HUGE effort. IANAMT (I am not a Microsoft Tester).. but the vulnerability flaws will always be there in any complex product. On the one hand, you have a finite number of MS coders (and there are always those late, late nights) and MS testers, and on the other hand you have a finite (but much larger) number of l33t l33t skr1pt k1dd13s L0L pwnd, who are all running vuln tests against every conceivable part of the software. That's like a huge distributed network of testers; something that not even MS can afford to do. And these kiddies do it for fun! And profit!
I'm sure that MS have covered their bases much better than in the past. But even if you got the ten best white-hats in for a year (10 man years), you've still got several thousands boy-years of crackers out there, waiting in the wings. One or two will get lucky.
Potential. Hard to judge in a recent grad, but I want people who strive to accomplish more than their current position.
I think you are confusing potential with ambition. The ambitious want (sometimes desperately) to accomplish more. The ones with potential, however, do demonstrate an ability which is beyond what you are hiring for.
An example: You own a car wash. The guy with ambition wants to own a car wash one day, but has no clue how he'll do it. The lass with ambition says: "You just wash the cars? Couldn't you offer to vacuum inside too?" That lass is going to own a better car wash than you, one day.
As for maths; I gave up on the A-level. Calculus was just beyond me, and I never grasped those damned curvy graphs. Today, I understand how interest rate swaps work - and how to calculate if they will be profitable. All I need is a Business Analyst who knows *her* maths to explain the business logic and give me an equation to implement. Basic alegbra and logic have served me well enough. That and a love of hex, of course;)
I don't need to derive the algorithms myself - just to implement them.
Seeing that unauthorised distribution of copyrighted material is illegal in most, if not all, the western world, I think it's good to see the law being enforced. Sadly it's being enforced by corporate lawyers and not governments.
That'll be because Copyright infringement is a Civil, not a Crimminal offence in most of the western world.
Governments can't prosecute it.
Funny, that, because they do prosecute people who sell pirated DVDs.. anyone care to explain the difference for me? Damned if I can spot it..
Things Tony Blair can do to reduce the risk of terrorism in the UK: [snip]
Sorry. Been meaning to reply to this for AGES, so this is for the benefit of the parent poster, and nobody else:)
"Absolutely".
Nail. Head. Direct hit.
I'd only add: "stop being a nice little puppy for Mr Bush, and do the right thing for a change, rather than the right thing to get Mr Bush re-elected".
I'll often turn on "sticky keys" by pressing shift 5 times, just because when I'm thinking I tend to tap the shift key
Thank you for letting me know that I am not alone in my wierder habits.
I can't help it. When I coded 68000 assembly, I used to delete all unnecessary whitespace characters so the compilation would be faster on my little 8MHz processor.
Price is a signal of quality, and $10 software is "crud" whereas $25 software which accomplishes what you are setting out to do is worth actually getting out ye olde credit card.
I disagree. In my experience, the quality of software bares little relation to the price. I've seen video editing software going for hundreds of dollars which has an abysmal, non-standard interface which is a pain to navigate, and very buggy.
I've also seen freeware apps which do exactly what they say they will do.
On the other hand, I have been on the dev team of some software which was very, very good at what it did, and would cost you a heck of a lot to use. Per Annum, as well.
As far as shareware is concerned, sure I'll download the demo version and try it out. But for $25, it better be doing something that I'd pick off the shelf in a shop for $25. And Notepad would definately stay put.
You ought to consider competition, too. If it really only takes as long as you describe to write the software, and there's also the demand you describe, then sooner or later, somebody else will make the effort. And charge $5, or $2, or (if they're like me) issue it as freeware. And all of a sudden, your sales will drop to zero, because another product which does the same thing at the same level of quality is available at a fraction of the price.
I made sure to talk to everyone on the QA team, apologize and try to work something else out that they could work on so they weren't pissing money away. The point is my boss came in and saw me trying to do SOMETHING, instead of FUCKING NOTHING. I'm sure if he had of come in and saw me playing golf, he would have given me that big shiny promotion.
Bad analogy. You could do something pro-active. You were meant to be at work during your shift. You did exactly what you were supposed to do. Now if it was your day off, and there was a powercut that brought down every computer in the company, you have no UPS, and there was nothing> you could do about it until the power company get their shit together again, would your boss insist that you come in and do something? What, exactly? Read the magnetic disks with a special magic microscoope, and reconstruct people's Word documents byte by byte, using lookup-tables?
In John Prescott's case, there really wasn't anything he could do at the time he was playing golf. So he played golf. There was no need for him to be in the office 24 hours a day just because there was a crisis somewhere, about which he could no nothing at that point in time anyway.
Maybe you forgot he's the President of an entire fucking country.
Well, ambitous though he is, even I don't think John Prescott would claim to be President of an entire country.
Is there different golf scandal, of which I am unaware?
The PM had already postponed his holidays due to the Middle East crisis. Why would it have been suspicious to postpone it for another few days?
Because the crisis in the Middle East was no longer worth postponing his trip for. Maybe a few more days would have been fine, but I agree with another poster in this thread that we can't possibly know what triggered the police action today.
And claiming that the PM has no input into operational decisions in a matter like this is transparent nonsense. Why do you think COBRA exists? Certainly not to be involved in operational matters. They don't meet up and draw up the plans for the arrests, or the trailing of suspects. That's operational. They can draw up plans and guidelines; that is their job. Operational matters are for the specialists involved in the operation.
That's common sense.
Politicians interfering with operational matters are usually a recipe for disaster.
The link you gave to Cobra mentions it met to discuss Bird Flu, as well as the bombs in July last year. They exist to find ways to counter emergencies. They can set up bodies, contingency plans and they can develop guidlines.
This is being claimed as an "imminent threat" of "mass murder". Air travel in the UK is almost completely frozen at the moment. If this is a "minor emergency" then what does a "major emergency" look like?
What would it take for the PM to give up his holidays?
Mass murder.
There is an imminent threat. Multiple arrests have been made. They haven't closed down the airports down yet and sent the passengers home. So they must think that the threat has been mostly averted. It was an operational matter. Arrests have been made. Flights were cancelled as a precautionary measure. I don't think this is classed as a major emergency. A major police operation, yes. A major disaster *averted*, yes. But not in itself a major disaster.
That's not what the Home Office think:
" The Home Office confirmed there had been meetings overnight and on Thursday morning of the Cabinet's emergency committee, Cobra, chaired by Home Secretary John Reid, to discuss the terror alert"
From the same article as your quote: A spokesman for Number 10 said Tony Blair had briefed US President George Bush on the situation during the night So the PM is, in fact, involved, and probably fully informed.
But what can he actually do right now? Kick down a suspect's door? Radically change all the rules and guidelines for this sort of situation? No. He can inform the US President of what has happened, and await full details from the operational forces that conducted the raids, to find out what's been going on. He can then start off procedures for looking into the operation, to see if it acheived its aims.
What he will probably want to do is to make a statement to the press, as well, because it always makes a leader look strong when his police have staged a nice big raid. But some people may argue that is more the responsibility of the Home Secretary, for example. Who, by the way, I notice was at the CORBA meeting.
If Mr Blair came home - what, exactly, would you have him do?
I've always been under the opinion that if you are the leader of a nation, you should be forbidden to take vacations because of your extremely important responsibility.
Some people can work without vacations, but their judgement is impared over time. Everyone needs a break. I think leaders ought to be forced to take vacations. In some cases, very, very long vacations (say about four years):)
If there was a critical threat to the UK, how come the PM flew out on holiday two days ago?
I can only assume that Tony Blair at least wasn't particularly concerned about this "imminent threat".
I'm seeing this argument all over this threat. I've replied elsewhere, but will do so again here.
You would like him to cancel his pre-announced holiday, so he can be in the country to oversee an operation over which he has no jurisdiction nor direct involvement, while at the same time tipping off any terrorist (or potential terrorist) groups that something big enough (such as their imminent arrest) has come up to cause him to cancel his holiday?
If the PM cancels going abroad (for holiday or business) whenever there's going to be an anti-terrorist action, then terrorist groups will quickly learn to always plan their attacks for when the PM is meant to be away. If he cancels his holidays, you pack up, go underground, or act immediately, on the (fairly good) grounds that you're rumbled, and if you wait, you're going down Paddington nick in the back of a heavily guarded police van, and not coming out again for a long, long time.
The logic simply doesn't hold up when you think about it. It's like Churchill's decision not to increase defences in or around Coventry, despite having advance knowledge of a very heavy raid being due. He acted like he knew nothing. The raid went ahead. There were heavy casualties, which could have been prevented. But the German military remained unaware that many of their most important communications were being intercepted, decoded and read by British intelligence.
I'm not likening Blair to Churchill, or terrorist attacks to The Blitz; but the military strategy is sound; if you know about something, then act normal. Your intelligence and surprise remain intact, and they are two essential advantages in any conflict.
Slashdot Mirror
It transpires that TH Huxley put it much better than I did in 1892... though to be fair, in 1892 I put it like this: "Sorry; I've not been born yet."
I like the bit about securing or averting the intervention of supernatural beings; the Romans could form legal contracts with their gods in return for favours. And if the god didn't come through, you didn't sacrifice the lamb.
Gods, eh?
Religion evolved?
:]
:)
Sounds like a sure way to piss off the religious and atheists alike
Well, speaking as an atheist, it doesn't annoy me in the slightest. The reason why humans always seem to create a religion, regardless of where they live or which society they are from is an interesting subject; I fail to see why it should be offensive.
It's like asking why humans walk upright, or why all humans developed language. A fascinating subject, in short, and well worthy of examination, I'd say. Science is only ever offensive if you know you are likely to disagree with its findings in advance
It comforts humans "knowing" that there is something bigger than them out there, it comforts them "knowing" that when one dies, they just go up to heaven to live a better life.
That would be a good argument if all human religions were like Judaism, Christianity or Islam. But the Greeks and Romans believed that it was their lot to suffer eternal suffering, wandering in the Underworld for all eternity after they died. Your argument is probably the reason that Christiany replaced the older religions so succesfully, but it doesn't explain why the Greeks and Romans, who were very religous (the Romans even resorting to human sacrifice on occasion), believed in gods who were cruel, playful, and sometimes vindictive..
It's all in Homer, you know - perfectly scandalous!
I'd believe it if similar gene pools showed the same breakdown - here in NZ it's more 50-50 - so maybe there are different 'evolutionary pressures' ....
I think that's a change in society and culture. Go back 500 years, and I doubt many of the New Zealander's ancestors would be atheists. And 500 years is zip in terms of evolution.
Before the first result, is says "Search the Web with Yahoo!" and gives me a second search box. I'm using Firefox on Linux.
Yup, I see it. "Altavista" doesn't do that. "Jeeves" returns ask.com as the first link, but "ask.com" has the repeated input box.
A small test later.. the phrases I found which DO give you that extra "You can use yahoo" input box:
google
ask.com
Searches which DON'T ("+ com" indicates that I searched both with X and X.com):
alltheweb (+.com)
hotbot (+.com)
teoma
altavista (+.com)
lycos (+.com)
search engines
My exhaustive (ahem) data was taken from here, which I found with a google search for "search engines".
Not only is a lot of history lost and destroyed, a lot of it was flat out fabricated... The mind boggles at what history professors would consider a "primary" source of information.
Hmm.. I wonder if, along with Wikipedia, we ought to ban Herodotus as a cited reference? After all, he is known both as the Father of Histroy and the Father of Lies.
But that's what makes him interesting, in a way. He reported everything he was told, sometimes stately flatly that he thought it was total lies (and, curiously, sometimes giving evidence which mean we NOW know it wasn't, such as the first people to circumnavigate Africa).
But this reporting method of Herodotus - of ALL stories, fanciful or otherwise - does give us a wonderful insight into the world in which he lived.
I wonder if the same will be said of Wikipedia in future times, providing they keep the history of all edits made?
If I live long enough, I look forward to a socialogical and historical analysis!
I rember back in my Amiga days
I had an Atari ST. Should I flame you now, or later?
OS should be in the ROM, gosh-darn it!
Between 1980 and 2000 the number of people in state prison for violent crimes went from 200,000 to 600,000 -- a 150% increase. I can tell you with certainly the US population has not increased that much over the same period of time, so we can assume the prison rate per capita is increasing despite the idea of "making an example".
No you can't.. you can assume that the number of people in prison compared to the population has risen. That may mean better police techniques, juries being more likely to deliver guilty verdicts, harsher sentencing (jail terms when there used to be fines or something else), or that more crimes have been committed. Any or all of these may be factors in those statistics.
The chart you link to (which says nothing of proof, by the way) says it is mostly down to violent crime. Is domestic violence being targetted when it used to be a low priority?
We can tell nothing from the graph, I'm afraid. Not one thing. Other than more people have been convicted of violent crimes than before.
So if we like put up a frickin huge mirror out in the space, would we be able to see our reflections back in time?
Yes. In the same way that if you go into a valley and shout "echo", you will hear, in a second or two, a sound from the past coming back at you.
Sound goes out from you. Hits wall. Comes back. You hear it.
Light does the same thing; just a little bit quicker, so you'd better make the mirror a long way off if you want to get a noticable echo.
Or just watch the news when they are linking live by satellite to somebody who pauses for a couple of seconds after the presenter has stopped speaking.
What do you mean by "a fraction?" That's an incredibly vague term that tells absolutely nothing about how fast the light is traveling. 999/1000 is a fraction, as is 1/1000, yet there's a lot of variance in between (especially when dealing with the speed of light.
Sorry, it just bugs me when people use the word "fraction" that way.
Parent poster was correct, in this case. The fraction of c which light will travel at through air is *different* to the fraction of c that light will travel through water, mist, heavy cloud, or hamsters. Without knowing the medium through which light is travelling, "a fraction" is an accurate description; it will never *exceed* c, but you cannot tell how how fast it *will* be going.
...in a vacuum. When not in a vacuum, light can travel at a fraction of the speed of light.
When not in a vacuum, light can travel at a fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum.
Thank you, fans, I shall collect my analanity award later.
When you read Slashdot, you are looking back in time approx. 1.7e-9 seconds*, assuming you sit about 50cm from your screen.
What are you, a creationist? You haven't factored in the time it takes for the packets to travel from the server to my PC! That increases the timescale orders of magnitude! You can get, TCP/IP fossils in that time, no problem!
$8000 for a bug report seems like a lot but I wonder if Microsoft's QA folks don't end up earning at least as much for any serious bugs they manage to uncover towards the end of development (salary:bugs ratio, that is). And at this point, it should take a very serious amount of effort to uncover a big vulnerability (well, hopefully), perhaps such that $8000 isn't even worth the time for some.
I think that there WILL be a very serious amount of effort devoted to finding the vulns, actually. A HUGE effort. IANAMT (I am not a Microsoft Tester).. but the vulnerability flaws will always be there in any complex product. On the one hand, you have a finite number of MS coders (and there are always those late, late nights) and MS testers, and on the other hand you have a finite (but much larger) number of l33t l33t skr1pt k1dd13s L0L pwnd, who are all running vuln tests against every conceivable part of the software. That's like a huge distributed network of testers; something that not even MS can afford to do. And these kiddies do it for fun! And profit!
I'm sure that MS have covered their bases much better than in the past. But even if you got the ten best white-hats in for a year (10 man years), you've still got several thousands boy-years of crackers out there, waiting in the wings. One or two will get lucky.
I, for one, welcome our new Verisign overlords.
Firefox site prefeared
:)
I do hope that wasn't meant. It's the best Freudian slip I've ever seen
What about the other 23%?
I would remind the honourable gentleman that 86.543% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Potential. Hard to judge in a recent grad, but I want people who strive to accomplish more than their current position.
;)
I think you are confusing potential with ambition. The ambitious want (sometimes desperately) to accomplish more. The ones with potential, however, do demonstrate an ability which is beyond what you are hiring for.
An example: You own a car wash. The guy with ambition wants to own a car wash one day, but has no clue how he'll do it. The lass with ambition says: "You just wash the cars? Couldn't you offer to vacuum inside too?" That lass is going to own a better car wash than you, one day.
As for maths; I gave up on the A-level. Calculus was just beyond me, and I never grasped those damned curvy graphs. Today, I understand how interest rate swaps work - and how to calculate if they will be profitable. All I need is a Business Analyst who knows *her* maths to explain the business logic and give me an equation to implement. Basic alegbra and logic have served me well enough. That and a love of hex, of course
I don't need to derive the algorithms myself - just to implement them.
Seeing that unauthorised distribution of copyrighted material is illegal in most, if not all, the western world, I think it's good to see the law being enforced. Sadly it's being enforced by corporate lawyers and not governments.
That'll be because Copyright infringement is a Civil, not a Crimminal offence in most of the western world.
Governments can't prosecute it.
Funny, that, because they do prosecute people who sell pirated DVDs.. anyone care to explain the difference for me? Damned if I can spot it..
Things Tony Blair can do to reduce the risk of terrorism in the UK:
:)
[snip]
Sorry. Been meaning to reply to this for AGES, so this is for the benefit of the parent poster, and nobody else
"Absolutely".
Nail. Head. Direct hit.
I'd only add: "stop being a nice little puppy for Mr Bush, and do the right thing for a change, rather than the right thing to get Mr Bush re-elected".
I'll often turn on "sticky keys" by pressing shift 5 times, just because when I'm thinking I tend to tap the shift key
Thank you for letting me know that I am not alone in my wierder habits.
I can't help it. When I coded 68000 assembly, I used to delete all unnecessary whitespace characters so the compilation would be faster on my little 8MHz processor.
My name is James, and I am a geekaholic.
And who exactly do you think lives in those buring trees in the Amazon? Pirates.
Which is exactly WHY they must be protected!
Price is a signal of quality, and $10 software is "crud" whereas $25 software which accomplishes what you are setting out to do is worth actually getting out ye olde credit card.
:-)
I disagree. In my experience, the quality of software bares little relation to the price. I've seen video editing software going for hundreds of dollars which has an abysmal, non-standard interface which is a pain to navigate, and very buggy.
I've also seen freeware apps which do exactly what they say they will do.
On the other hand, I have been on the dev team of some software which was very, very good at what it did, and would cost you a heck of a lot to use. Per Annum, as well.
As far as shareware is concerned, sure I'll download the demo version and try it out. But for $25, it better be doing something that I'd pick off the shelf in a shop for $25. And Notepad would definately stay put.
You ought to consider competition, too. If it really only takes as long as you describe to write the software, and there's also the demand you describe, then sooner or later, somebody else will make the effort. And charge $5, or $2, or (if they're like me) issue it as freeware. And all of a sudden, your sales will drop to zero, because another product which does the same thing at the same level of quality is available at a fraction of the price.
A case of Caveat Vendor, perhaps?
I made sure to talk to everyone on the QA team, apologize and try to work something else out that they could work on so they weren't pissing money away. The point is my boss came in and saw me trying to do SOMETHING, instead of FUCKING NOTHING. I'm sure if he had of come in and saw me playing golf, he would have given me that big shiny promotion.
Bad analogy. You could do something pro-active. You were meant to be at work during your shift. You did exactly what you were supposed to do. Now if it was your day off, and there was a powercut that brought down every computer in the company, you have no UPS, and there was nothing> you could do about it until the power company get their shit together again, would your boss insist that you come in and do something? What, exactly? Read the magnetic disks with a special magic microscoope, and reconstruct people's Word documents byte by byte, using lookup-tables?
In John Prescott's case, there really wasn't anything he could do at the time he was playing golf. So he played golf. There was no need for him to be in the office 24 hours a day just because there was a crisis somewhere, about which he could no nothing at that point in time anyway.
Maybe you forgot he's the President of an entire fucking country.
Well, ambitous though he is, even I don't think John Prescott would claim to be President of an entire country.
Is there different golf scandal, of which I am unaware?
The PM had already postponed his holidays due to the Middle East crisis. Why would it have been suspicious to postpone it for another few days?
Because the crisis in the Middle East was no longer worth postponing his trip for. Maybe a few more days would have been fine, but I agree with another poster in this thread that we can't possibly know what triggered the police action today.
And claiming that the PM has no input into operational decisions in a matter like this is transparent nonsense. Why do you think COBRA exists?
Certainly not to be involved in operational matters. They don't meet up and draw up the plans for the arrests, or the trailing of suspects. That's operational. They can draw up plans and guidelines; that is their job. Operational matters are for the specialists involved in the operation.
That's common sense.
Politicians interfering with operational matters are usually a recipe for disaster.
The link you gave to Cobra mentions it met to discuss Bird Flu, as well as the bombs in July last year. They exist to find ways to counter emergencies. They can set up bodies, contingency plans and they can develop guidlines.
This is being claimed as an "imminent threat" of "mass murder". Air travel in the UK is almost completely frozen at the moment. If this is a "minor emergency" then what does a "major emergency" look like?
What would it take for the PM to give up his holidays?
Mass murder.
There is an imminent threat. Multiple arrests have been made. They haven't closed down the airports down yet and sent the passengers home. So they must think that the threat has been mostly averted. It was an operational matter. Arrests have been made. Flights were cancelled as a precautionary measure. I don't think this is classed as a major emergency. A major police operation, yes. A major disaster *averted*, yes. But not in itself a major disaster.
That's not what the Home Office think:
" The Home Office confirmed there had been meetings overnight and on Thursday morning of the Cabinet's emergency committee, Cobra, chaired by Home Secretary John Reid, to discuss the terror alert"
From the same article as your quote:
A spokesman for Number 10 said Tony Blair had briefed US President George Bush on the situation during the night
So the PM is, in fact, involved, and probably fully informed.
But what can he actually do right now? Kick down a suspect's door? Radically change all the rules and guidelines for this sort of situation? No. He can inform the US President of what has happened, and await full details from the operational forces that conducted the raids, to find out what's been going on. He can then start off procedures for looking into the operation, to see if it acheived its aims.
What he will probably want to do is to make a statement to the press, as well, because it always makes a leader look strong when his police have staged a nice big raid. But some people may argue that is more the responsibility of the Home Secretary, for example. Who, by the way, I notice was at the CORBA meeting.
If Mr Blair came home - what, exactly, would you have him do?
I've always been under the opinion that if you are the leader of a nation, you should be forbidden to take vacations because of your extremely important responsibility.
:)
Some people can work without vacations, but their judgement is impared over time. Everyone needs a break. I think leaders ought to be forced to take vacations. In some cases, very, very long vacations (say about four years)
If there was a critical threat to the UK, how come the PM flew out on holiday two days ago?
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I can only assume that Tony Blair at least wasn't particularly concerned about this "imminent threat"
I'm seeing this argument all over this threat. I've replied elsewhere, but will do so again here.
You would like him to cancel his pre-announced holiday, so he can be in the country to oversee an operation over which he has no jurisdiction nor direct involvement, while at the same time tipping off any terrorist (or potential terrorist) groups that something big enough (such as their imminent arrest) has come up to cause him to cancel his holiday?
If the PM cancels going abroad (for holiday or business) whenever there's going to be an anti-terrorist action, then terrorist groups will quickly learn to always plan their attacks for when the PM is meant to be away. If he cancels his holidays, you pack up, go underground, or act immediately, on the (fairly good) grounds that you're rumbled, and if you wait, you're going down Paddington nick in the back of a heavily guarded police van, and not coming out again for a long, long time.
The logic simply doesn't hold up when you think about it. It's like Churchill's decision not to increase defences in or around Coventry, despite having advance knowledge of a very heavy raid being due. He acted like he knew nothing. The raid went ahead. There were heavy casualties, which could have been prevented. But the German military remained unaware that many of their most important communications were being intercepted, decoded and read by British intelligence.
I'm not likening Blair to Churchill, or terrorist attacks to The Blitz; but the military strategy is sound; if you know about something, then act normal. Your intelligence and surprise remain intact, and they are two essential advantages in any conflict.