No, she doesn't *need* the DUP support - in theory the Queen gets to accept whichever proposal to form a government she wishes regardless of how many seats they have, and her strict non-political stance pretty much means that whoever has the largest number of seats and gets to make the request first isn't likely to get rebuffed. Still, having some form of coalition, or whatever the relationship with the DUP is going to be, that pushes them over the 326 seat line (or 322 if we exclude Sinn Fein's seven seats on the assumption they will continue not to take them) is an easier sell to the electorate and a small sop to her own party that they still, kinda, have a majority. It's also the least risky option on the numbers - Theresa May's proposed government may well be at risk of losing a no confidence vote or other major proposal with her slim minority, but the risk is surely vastly greater for a Corbyn led minority government who would need to find board cross party support for every single motion.
Still, at least we can be thankful that we don't yet have the levels of willful obstructionism between the major parties that current US politics does; the train wreck that would result from five years of that during Brexit and everything else doesn't even bear thinking about.
Plus you've got a risk of MPs voting against the party over key issues, especially things like May's comments on human rights vs. combatting terrorism should that now proceed into some form of proposed legislation. CON/DUP might have a majority, but it's not enough to provide the kind of mandate that Theresa May was hoping for and it certainly doesn't provide the cast iron guarantee that a given vote will go her way, even with a three line whip. I'm also wondering what kind of concessions the DUP might be after, given that perhaps the most obvious one is the border with Eire. No one on either side wants the checkpoints to come back and that's something the EU team has indicated might be a tactic they'll use, so at a stroke that might kill of any chance of a hard exit, or at the very least force some major concessions on freedom of movement in the deal. That's not going to mean Schengen - at best/worst depending on your perspective it'll be the status quo with retention of the EU/UK border arrangements - but even with a compromise, it's still likely to be the death knell for May's immigration targets and a failure to deliver one of the primary reasons many people wanted Brexit in the first place.
I have little doubt that we will come back - but next time, I hope the EU is a more ambitious union, not just a glorified market place with a few extra curls, but a full political union - a federal state or something like that.
Possibly, but once we're out (and that does seem to be the way things are headed, for whatever form of "out" we end up with - fatalism or not), we're not going to be coming back in any time soon because of the required concessions, at least some of which will probably be needed with the "cap in hand, abort Article 50" approach too for that matter. When the UK joined the EU, we got a whole bunch of concessions because our economy was fucked and we needed them, although the EU also wanted us because they thought the likely UK recovery would ultimately benefit the EU and saying "no" to anyone would scupper the "One Federal Europe" vision they were starting to aim for.
Since then membership requirements have changed - things like adoption of the Euro, Schengen, and other things we are currently exempt from have been mandatory for many of the countries of the current EU, and there's no way ALL of those countries - and membership requires it to be "all" - are going to let the UK back in without the same commitments. Not to mention anything else they might add once they UK's repeated vetoing of anything that moves them closer to a Federal State gets cut loose. 48% might have voted Remain in the referendum, but that was on the assumption of maintaining the status quo; I can't see anything like that percentage of the current population agreeing to adopting the Euro and Schengen to get back in, no matter how screwed the economy/Sterling might be and how secure the EU might become from Islamic fundamentalism, which obviously isn't happening soon. We're currently just too sentimental about Sterling (even as we march towards a cashless economy and it becomes mostly moot), and too fearful over the relatively miniscule risk of being a victim of terrorism for that to happen.
Actually, my bad. I thought the term was more specific than that, but a minority government is indeed *any* party that forms a government having won less than 50% of the seats, even if they have the most seats. Looks like May is off to the Queen at 12:30 based on support from the DUP though, so at least we appear to know the answer to that part of the question - so now we wait and see whether or not she'll be leading it.
That's not what a minority government is. A minority government would be when a party that didn't get the most seats (Labour in this case) successfully manages to form some kind of coalition that provides a combined total that *is* a majority, so even though they have less seats in the Commons than the Convservatives they would still get to select Corbyn as the Prime Minister.
Anyway, the chances of that happening are awfully slim. There are 650 seats, so the line is 326 for majority. With one seat left to declare, the Conservatives have 318 and the DUP in Northern Ireland have 10, which gives a combined total of 328, which is enough. The DUP has worked with the Conservatives in the past and has said that they are willing to do so again, so there's not a great deal of doubt over which party the next PM is going to come from. What might be in doubt is whether Theresa May is going to be able to hold on, and if not how that section of the electorate that doesn't understand they vote for a party to lead, not a person, will react to five whole years under someone they didn't vote for, or how those that do understand that might feel if it turns out to be Boris Johnson...
I'd disagree with Corbyn being good. Despite a few missteps, like fumbling for figures on his iPad during a live interview, he talked the talk on the campaign trail which was a big surprise for many, but his proposed policies for the UK are no less of a disaster area than those of the Conservatives. Given how the redistribution of the UKIP vote was split between the two parties, my take is that this was the equivalent of Trump vs. Clinton, with many people voting for their least worst choice rather than an clear preferred choice.
In my view, that split in UKIP is the real takeaway here, and is what the next government (in whatever form it eventually takes, although a Conversatives + DUP alliance looks most likely) really needs to take note of. Other policies aside, the Conversatives were promising a hard exit, Labour were promising a softer one, and the former UKIP voters (and many others) seem to have picked accordingly. Looking at the figures now it seems that on top of the 48% of the electorate that didn't want Brexit in the first place, about half of those who might be said to be the hardliners for it don't want a hard Brexit either - swinging from the political right of UKIP to the political left of Labour to do so. That's a clear rejection of the hard-Brexit strategy that Theresa May was working for, and absoutely demands that the next government take the softer stance that the ~50:50 referendum split should have made them take in the first place, and in doing so hopefully salvage a workable arrangement.
Slight correction, but the UK isn't home to the world's largest windfarm - that's actually Gansu in China - but it is home to no less than six of the world's largest off-shore farms, including the largest of those, The London Array.
Assuming that you are not going to get upset over a number of non-straight sex scenes, graphic violence, and some quite disturbing imagery, then Morgan's Ringil Eskiath books (Steel Remains, Cold Commands, Dark Defiles) contain an absolutely masterful mind-fuck over just where and when the books are set that plays out over the three books, taking it from traditional fantasy and firmly into SciFi. It's not specifically stated though, and occurs over several stages, so you'll need to be paying attention as you go from "generic fantasy world" to... somewhere else (and when).
His other works, "Black Man" (I think it's called "Thirteen" in the US) is an excellent cautionary tale on genetic enhancement and "Market Forces", a dystopian near-future look at Thatcher-style capitalism taken to extremes, are both worth a read as well. Don't expect particularly happy endings in any of them though...
She's 100% responsible for deciding to leak information to serve her agenda, sure - but that wasn't my point. Whether she'd currently be on the hook for it - or ever would be, for that matter - is entirely on The Intercept's sloppy handing of the data they were provided. Imagine if the situation were reversed and a document was provided to the US as evidence of a foreign power's activities and then released to the media with being properly sanitised for some reason. Whoops! The US just lost an asset in a foreign government because of their incompetence, not to mention that others considering similar actions will probably think twice in future, but by your rationale that's entirely on the asset for becoming a US spy in the first place.
For better or worse, The Intercept screwed up here, and if they hope to be be a recipient of leaks in future, regardless of the subject matter and its origin, then they're going to have to be seen to be doing all they can to protect their now blown source.
While the means might be old news to some, it appears that neither Reality Winner nor The Intercept was sufficiently aware of hardcoded printer tracking techology, or just didn't think to check for it and take preventative steps. I can kind of understand that from Winner who might have just acted on the spur of an opportunistic moment, but The Intercept really ought to have known better and cleaned up the PDFs before publishing, and that may well deter people from leaking to The Intercept in future if they're not confident in their own ability to properly sanitise the data.
Going to be interesting to see how The Intercept tries to make up for their part in her now almost certainly ruined life...
It's any gear larger than a phone, which means all your expensive cameras and lenses as well. I was hoping to see a few ideas I might not have thought of from fellow photographers already given there's over 100 comments, but since I appear to be the first here's my thoughts for travelling with a backpack's worth of high-end camera gear:
Firstly, define "global". If we're just talking about any flights flying to/from the US/UK (or any other countries that start doing this), then the obvious initial step is to route around the problem by flying via airports that don't transit the US and UK. If one of your endpoints is in the US/UK, then that's tougher and depends on your location - driving over the Candian or Mexican border may be an option for the US, while for the UK CDG is only a Eurostar and change from London, and Dublin a short trip from Northern Ireland.
If we *really* mean "global" - e.g. every international flight, regardless of endpoints - or the above is unworkable for any reason, then it's going to have to be a Peli Case or similar, and rolling the dice with theft by airport staff and genuine loss in transit. Where practical, I'd hope to mitigate against that by shipping ahead of time as freight - there's better insurance cover anyway, and I'd expect international couriers to start exploring opportunities in this area to make things easier and more cost effective if the ban does go global. If I do have to travel with the gear, then I'm thinking of going for a padded Pelicase I can just put my regular backpack and a few other items in, which means it's going to be big and heavy and will need to be run though oversize baggage. Actually, I'm probably going to make sure that it does, because while that means special handling and more cost, it also means better tracking and in some instances to put the airline on the hook for the full value of the contents if it goes astray. I'll probably put couple of "Fragile" stickers and maybe some of those impact detection stickers on there as well.
Finally, and regardless of the above, screw the compromised TSA locks. I use proper padlocks and security gets confronted with an inventory of the case's contents should they decide to bolt-cutter it - good padlocks are not that expensive, and it's a much better deterant against opportunistic theft by anyone with the magic key.
Kind of favouring the hung parliament outcome myself, but I think it's a real roll of the dice. If it forces different political viewpoints into the negotiations then that's absolutely a good thing - not to mention restoring the part of the democratic process that seems to have been forgotten of late; ensuring *all* sides get a say and the best possible compromise is achieved - then great. If it turns into grandstanding politicians trying to micro-manage the civil servants on Sir Tim Barrow's team that will be doing the bulk of the work then it's going to turn into a pissing contest which will only help the EU's position, let alone if they decide to "revamp" the team because it wasn't appointed by the new leadership.
I was going to say the same thing - they did, and that apparently not only included close associates, but one of them was the Imam at his mosque who had also apparently banned him from attending because of his controversial views. If the security services can't pick up on such a blatent red flag as that, then what hope have they got of picking them out of petabytes of mostly random innocuous data being hoovered up through bulk surveillance?
The problem isn't lack of surveillance, or people failing to call tiplines, the problem is that the security services are unable to effectively process the data they have as often as they are expected to do - and *want* to do - without the terrorists getting that one chance they need. That's not something that can be fixed with broad dumb surveillance such as May is proposing here; it's something that has to be fixed though smarter and more targetted surveillance. They need fewer items of high-quality data they can focus on, not more items of low-quality data that they have to pick though and hope they are luckier than the terrorists.
Of course they use the Internet and phones, but, other than the really dumb ones that are most likely not part of any serious group or at the very bottom of the ladder, there's not a great deal of public evidence that shows they use them for much more than the rest of us do. In the case of the more organized groups like Daesh, it's often the opposite and it seems they now actively avoid using means that can easily be monitored for planning and carrying out their activities except where it doesn't matter anymore. Daesh's leadership appears to understand OpSec and PerSec pretty well, and you can be sure they're going to be hammering that into their more immediate subordinates, if only to try and protect themselves.
There may well be mountains of classified actionable intelligence data - *something* has to be enabling all those drone strikes - but that's not much use when it comes to a member of the public forming an opinion as to whether politicians are trying to pass over-reaching surveillance legislation or not, is it? Especially if the impression J.Q. Public is getting is that most of the time it's either essentially useless until after the fact because there's just so *much* of it, and/or it didn't contain the necessary data that would have enabled the attack to be prevented in the first place.
I wish we could, but at this point we're pretty much fucked whatever we do. Depending on how you interpret the election polls (which are probably no more reliable than the last ones anyway), there are really only two possible outcomes in the general election next week:
1. The electorate rallies around the Conservative Party (essentially "UKIP Lite" at this point), which results in at least five more years under Theresa May and a raft of 1984-style legislation as result, but at least *some* chance at getting a non-catastrophic outcome from the upcoming Brexit negotiations.
2. Enough of the electorate decides to vote for other parties that we end up with a hung parliament and all the main parties bickering and backstabbing to try and form a workable coalition which then has to run a government through what might be the most critical period of the UK's history since the Battle of Britain in WWII. That *might* rein in the Orwellian crap at least a few notches, and will almost certainly be the final curtain for Theresa May, but means we'll be going into the first round of Brexit negotiations (which is just one week after the vote, FFS!) like a headless chicken, and probably without much hope of things improving for subsequent rounds.
Never mind being careful what you wish for; the lesson here is that you need to be *really* careful what you vote for, because however this pans out it's going to be on the UK electorate just as much as it is on the politicians they voted for.
Say what you like about milking a legacy with copyright, you can't really accuse Christopher Tolkein of failing to earn his share of it or putting the time in - he's in his 90s and still going! Not only did he draw the original maps for Lord of the Rings (they are signed with his initials, C.J.R.T.) but he put in a huge amount of effort editing his father's writings to produce 12-volumes of The History of Middle-earth, on top of the effort to finish the various other posthumously published works by JRR Tolkein.
Probably next to none. BA certainly failed to learn any lessons from the various other organizations that have suffered similar problems when power was restored after a major outage, and even if the people responsible for other DCs that are susceptible take note of what went wrong for BA (I'm hoping they'll publish an incident report at some point), they've still got to consider whether it applies to their own systems and, if it does, convince bean counters that it's something that needs money to be spent on. As Archangel Michael notes in his reply to my post, "You can engineer for maximum efficiency/lowest cost or you can engineer for redundancy/max safety. Penny Pinchers always choose the former, and IT guys usually want the latter" which is perfectly true, because once it gets up to the bean counters it typically devolves into a simple case of risk:
What is the probability of this happening? (P)
What is the cost of impact (financial, reputation damage, compensation, etc.) if it does? (Ci)
What is the cost of preventing this from happening? (Cp)
If P*Ci < Cp then the IT guys are not getting their toys, but you can bet they'll get the blame if the gamble comes up short.
Still unclear, but that's what BA claimed in their previous statement - physical damage to some of their hardware - although it was never made very clear whether they meant to the actual IT hardware (which was generally assumed, given the outage), the power supply hardware, or something else entirely. Given the power supply is now a major part of the cause of failure it could be almost anything, but if I had to guess I'd probably go with a physical failure somewhere between the incoming HV supply from the National Grid and the power distribution rails in the DC.
Even before you consider the safety and procedural aspects of working on high-voltage electrical switch gear (permits to work, etc.), that's often hardware that cannot simply be swapped out on the fly, especially if a breaker or whatever has actually blown rather than tripped, which might also entail issues with actually getting a replacement to site in the first place or collateral damage to adjacent equipment. Plus, if they'd already determined they couldn't simply replace/reset the failed unit(s) and try to power-on again without ending up with another failure, they'd need to look into powering stuff back on in stages, and if they didn't properly understand which systems were dependant on which (lots of things can fail to start up cleanly if things like DNS and LDAP/AD. are absent, for instance) then they'll have to get that data from the admins - who they outsourced to India last year...
Apparently that was what led to the major outage turning into a prolonged major outage. It seems that the sequence of events is now that the contractor turned off the power (presumably killing one of more phases), obviously leading to a large scale hardware shutdown. Someone (the same contractor, most likely) tried to restore power, as you would, only to find that the power surge of all that hardware switching back on at the same time, which often means that they are close to maximum power draw, overloaded the system and caused physical damage to the hardware.
While a there's a lot of mocking of BA going on at the moment, that's actually a pretty easy situation to get into if you've expanded a DC - or even an regular equipment room - over several years without proper power managment, and BA is far from the first company to be caught out. So, if you are responsible for some IT equipment rooms, here's two things to consider; what's the combined total power draw of all the equipment in each room on power on (don't forget to include any UPS units topping up their batteries!), and what the maximum power load that can be supplied to each room? If you can't answer both of those, or at least be certain that the latter exceeds the former in each case, then you've potentially got exactly the same situation as BA.
None of which excuses BA from not having the ability to successfully failover between redundant DCs in the event of a catastrophic outage at one facility, of course.
Sure, but what it doesn't answer the question of what they are all going to *do*. It's all very well saying things like self-driving cars will save lives and create jobs, but I'm not hearing many suggestions as to what those jobs are going to be other than designing, building, and repairing self-driving cars, which is mostly covered by the current automotive industry. With more complex vehicles, there will presumably be more to do in the automotive industry and those that support it which means more jobs, but how much of that will itself be automated or just extend existing infrastructure? Fewer road traffic accidents also means less work for the health care industry, for emergency services, vehicle recovery services, body shops... not all of which is going to readily transition to other things, especially if you get situations like politicians seeing it as a way to cut policing costs through headcount reductions, rather than more cops available for tackling crime.
Like the biosphere, the job market is hugely complicated ecosystem with a lot of dependencies and symbiotic relationships that might not be immediately apparent. It might be capable of recovery should a certain species suddenly become extinct, but the process generally takes time, causes unexpected upheavals in what may have previously seemed unrelated species, and every now and again leads to a cascade like reaction resulting a great extinction. Despite Andresson's claims, there was actually massive upheaval and widespread poverty during the industrial revolution in Europe; a situation that didn't really start to improve until the great wars of the late 19thC and first half of the 20thC, and there's no reason why this couldn't trigger a similar cascade in the job market. Sure, it could all work out for the better on a reasonable short timescale, or it could trigger decades of turmoil - assuming either outcome is a given seems unwise, to say the least.
You're going to have to wait, and even if Trump starts the process today with an executive order he may not see it run to fruition as POTUS. Apparently there are two ways that Trump can actually do this; he can just withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which is a process that takes four years (a rule introduced immediately after Trump was elected but before he actually became POTUS), or he can take the nuclear option (or should that now be "coal option"?) and withdraw from the UN's climate body, the UNFCCC, which "only" takes a year. The latter might be a stretch though, given that the US membership of the UNFCCC was signed under Bush Snr. in 1992, is well supported in Congress and Senate, and has all sorts of other implications making it even more likely to see challenges like those applied to the Travel Bans than just withdrawing from the Paris Agreement will.
For the primary resident of each given tomb, certainly, but beside various treasures, there's also a lot of evidence that many pharoahs were accompanied to the afterlife with mumified servants and livestock (there are *many* examples of mummified cats in particular). As long as you are able to take DNA samples from a decent cross section of the available mummies in a given tomb, then you're going likely to get a much more representative sample of the population of a whole than just the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of the 1%. While that's not going to be a perfect cross section of the society, it should at least include a decent number of representatives from both the indigneous and immigrant labour pools.
FileZilla has its faults, but being adware is NOT one of them. It was one of many victims (GIMP and VLC were others) of third party mirror sites like SourceForge that decided to make some additional money by bundling crapware with downloads, often without the knowledge of the projects involved. Unless you've been sourcing your software from a particularly shady mirror site, this bundling was usually made pretty clear during the install process, such as the screenshot in the link.
Slashdot Mirror
No, she doesn't *need* the DUP support - in theory the Queen gets to accept whichever proposal to form a government she wishes regardless of how many seats they have, and her strict non-political stance pretty much means that whoever has the largest number of seats and gets to make the request first isn't likely to get rebuffed. Still, having some form of coalition, or whatever the relationship with the DUP is going to be, that pushes them over the 326 seat line (or 322 if we exclude Sinn Fein's seven seats on the assumption they will continue not to take them) is an easier sell to the electorate and a small sop to her own party that they still, kinda, have a majority. It's also the least risky option on the numbers - Theresa May's proposed government may well be at risk of losing a no confidence vote or other major proposal with her slim minority, but the risk is surely vastly greater for a Corbyn led minority government who would need to find board cross party support for every single motion.
Still, at least we can be thankful that we don't yet have the levels of willful obstructionism between the major parties that current US politics does; the train wreck that would result from five years of that during Brexit and everything else doesn't even bear thinking about.
Plus you've got a risk of MPs voting against the party over key issues, especially things like May's comments on human rights vs. combatting terrorism should that now proceed into some form of proposed legislation. CON/DUP might have a majority, but it's not enough to provide the kind of mandate that Theresa May was hoping for and it certainly doesn't provide the cast iron guarantee that a given vote will go her way, even with a three line whip. I'm also wondering what kind of concessions the DUP might be after, given that perhaps the most obvious one is the border with Eire. No one on either side wants the checkpoints to come back and that's something the EU team has indicated might be a tactic they'll use, so at a stroke that might kill of any chance of a hard exit, or at the very least force some major concessions on freedom of movement in the deal. That's not going to mean Schengen - at best/worst depending on your perspective it'll be the status quo with retention of the EU/UK border arrangements - but even with a compromise, it's still likely to be the death knell for May's immigration targets and a failure to deliver one of the primary reasons many people wanted Brexit in the first place.
Possibly, but once we're out (and that does seem to be the way things are headed, for whatever form of "out" we end up with - fatalism or not), we're not going to be coming back in any time soon because of the required concessions, at least some of which will probably be needed with the "cap in hand, abort Article 50" approach too for that matter. When the UK joined the EU, we got a whole bunch of concessions because our economy was fucked and we needed them, although the EU also wanted us because they thought the likely UK recovery would ultimately benefit the EU and saying "no" to anyone would scupper the "One Federal Europe" vision they were starting to aim for.
Since then membership requirements have changed - things like adoption of the Euro, Schengen, and other things we are currently exempt from have been mandatory for many of the countries of the current EU, and there's no way ALL of those countries - and membership requires it to be "all" - are going to let the UK back in without the same commitments. Not to mention anything else they might add once they UK's repeated vetoing of anything that moves them closer to a Federal State gets cut loose. 48% might have voted Remain in the referendum, but that was on the assumption of maintaining the status quo; I can't see anything like that percentage of the current population agreeing to adopting the Euro and Schengen to get back in, no matter how screwed the economy/Sterling might be and how secure the EU might become from Islamic fundamentalism, which obviously isn't happening soon. We're currently just too sentimental about Sterling (even as we march towards a cashless economy and it becomes mostly moot), and too fearful over the relatively miniscule risk of being a victim of terrorism for that to happen.
Actually, my bad. I thought the term was more specific than that, but a minority government is indeed *any* party that forms a government having won less than 50% of the seats, even if they have the most seats. Looks like May is off to the Queen at 12:30 based on support from the DUP though, so at least we appear to know the answer to that part of the question - so now we wait and see whether or not she'll be leading it.
That's not what a minority government is. A minority government would be when a party that didn't get the most seats (Labour in this case) successfully manages to form some kind of coalition that provides a combined total that *is* a majority, so even though they have less seats in the Commons than the Convservatives they would still get to select Corbyn as the Prime Minister.
Anyway, the chances of that happening are awfully slim. There are 650 seats, so the line is 326 for majority. With one seat left to declare, the Conservatives have 318 and the DUP in Northern Ireland have 10, which gives a combined total of 328, which is enough. The DUP has worked with the Conservatives in the past and has said that they are willing to do so again, so there's not a great deal of doubt over which party the next PM is going to come from. What might be in doubt is whether Theresa May is going to be able to hold on, and if not how that section of the electorate that doesn't understand they vote for a party to lead, not a person, will react to five whole years under someone they didn't vote for, or how those that do understand that might feel if it turns out to be Boris Johnson...
I'd disagree with Corbyn being good. Despite a few missteps, like fumbling for figures on his iPad during a live interview, he talked the talk on the campaign trail which was a big surprise for many, but his proposed policies for the UK are no less of a disaster area than those of the Conservatives. Given how the redistribution of the UKIP vote was split between the two parties, my take is that this was the equivalent of Trump vs. Clinton, with many people voting for their least worst choice rather than an clear preferred choice.
In my view, that split in UKIP is the real takeaway here, and is what the next government (in whatever form it eventually takes, although a Conversatives + DUP alliance looks most likely) really needs to take note of. Other policies aside, the Conversatives were promising a hard exit, Labour were promising a softer one, and the former UKIP voters (and many others) seem to have picked accordingly. Looking at the figures now it seems that on top of the 48% of the electorate that didn't want Brexit in the first place, about half of those who might be said to be the hardliners for it don't want a hard Brexit either - swinging from the political right of UKIP to the political left of Labour to do so. That's a clear rejection of the hard-Brexit strategy that Theresa May was working for, and absoutely demands that the next government take the softer stance that the ~50:50 referendum split should have made them take in the first place, and in doing so hopefully salvage a workable arrangement.
Slight correction, but the UK isn't home to the world's largest windfarm - that's actually Gansu in China - but it is home to no less than six of the world's largest off-shore farms, including the largest of those, The London Array.
Assuming that you are not going to get upset over a number of non-straight sex scenes, graphic violence, and some quite disturbing imagery, then Morgan's Ringil Eskiath books (Steel Remains, Cold Commands, Dark Defiles) contain an absolutely masterful mind-fuck over just where and when the books are set that plays out over the three books, taking it from traditional fantasy and firmly into SciFi. It's not specifically stated though, and occurs over several stages, so you'll need to be paying attention as you go from "generic fantasy world" to... somewhere else (and when).
His other works, "Black Man" (I think it's called "Thirteen" in the US) is an excellent cautionary tale on genetic enhancement and "Market Forces", a dystopian near-future look at Thatcher-style capitalism taken to extremes, are both worth a read as well. Don't expect particularly happy endings in any of them though...
STFU, you idiot! Some marketing weasel might start getting ideas...
She's 100% responsible for deciding to leak information to serve her agenda, sure - but that wasn't my point. Whether she'd currently be on the hook for it - or ever would be, for that matter - is entirely on The Intercept's sloppy handing of the data they were provided. Imagine if the situation were reversed and a document was provided to the US as evidence of a foreign power's activities and then released to the media with being properly sanitised for some reason. Whoops! The US just lost an asset in a foreign government because of their incompetence, not to mention that others considering similar actions will probably think twice in future, but by your rationale that's entirely on the asset for becoming a US spy in the first place.
For better or worse, The Intercept screwed up here, and if they hope to be be a recipient of leaks in future, regardless of the subject matter and its origin, then they're going to have to be seen to be doing all they can to protect their now blown source.
While the means might be old news to some, it appears that neither Reality Winner nor The Intercept was sufficiently aware of hardcoded printer tracking techology, or just didn't think to check for it and take preventative steps. I can kind of understand that from Winner who might have just acted on the spur of an opportunistic moment, but The Intercept really ought to have known better and cleaned up the PDFs before publishing, and that may well deter people from leaking to The Intercept in future if they're not confident in their own ability to properly sanitise the data.
Going to be interesting to see how The Intercept tries to make up for their part in her now almost certainly ruined life...
It's any gear larger than a phone, which means all your expensive cameras and lenses as well. I was hoping to see a few ideas I might not have thought of from fellow photographers already given there's over 100 comments, but since I appear to be the first here's my thoughts for travelling with a backpack's worth of high-end camera gear:
Firstly, define "global". If we're just talking about any flights flying to/from the US/UK (or any other countries that start doing this), then the obvious initial step is to route around the problem by flying via airports that don't transit the US and UK. If one of your endpoints is in the US/UK, then that's tougher and depends on your location - driving over the Candian or Mexican border may be an option for the US, while for the UK CDG is only a Eurostar and change from London, and Dublin a short trip from Northern Ireland.
If we *really* mean "global" - e.g. every international flight, regardless of endpoints - or the above is unworkable for any reason, then it's going to have to be a Peli Case or similar, and rolling the dice with theft by airport staff and genuine loss in transit. Where practical, I'd hope to mitigate against that by shipping ahead of time as freight - there's better insurance cover anyway, and I'd expect international couriers to start exploring opportunities in this area to make things easier and more cost effective if the ban does go global. If I do have to travel with the gear, then I'm thinking of going for a padded Pelicase I can just put my regular backpack and a few other items in, which means it's going to be big and heavy and will need to be run though oversize baggage. Actually, I'm probably going to make sure that it does, because while that means special handling and more cost, it also means better tracking and in some instances to put the airline on the hook for the full value of the contents if it goes astray. I'll probably put couple of "Fragile" stickers and maybe some of those impact detection stickers on there as well.
Finally, and regardless of the above, screw the compromised TSA locks. I use proper padlocks and security gets confronted with an inventory of the case's contents should they decide to bolt-cutter it - good padlocks are not that expensive, and it's a much better deterant against opportunistic theft by anyone with the magic key.
Kind of favouring the hung parliament outcome myself, but I think it's a real roll of the dice. If it forces different political viewpoints into the negotiations then that's absolutely a good thing - not to mention restoring the part of the democratic process that seems to have been forgotten of late; ensuring *all* sides get a say and the best possible compromise is achieved - then great. If it turns into grandstanding politicians trying to micro-manage the civil servants on Sir Tim Barrow's team that will be doing the bulk of the work then it's going to turn into a pissing contest which will only help the EU's position, let alone if they decide to "revamp" the team because it wasn't appointed by the new leadership.
I was going to say the same thing - they did, and that apparently not only included close associates, but one of them was the Imam at his mosque who had also apparently banned him from attending because of his controversial views. If the security services can't pick up on such a blatent red flag as that, then what hope have they got of picking them out of petabytes of mostly random innocuous data being hoovered up through bulk surveillance?
The problem isn't lack of surveillance, or people failing to call tiplines, the problem is that the security services are unable to effectively process the data they have as often as they are expected to do - and *want* to do - without the terrorists getting that one chance they need. That's not something that can be fixed with broad dumb surveillance such as May is proposing here; it's something that has to be fixed though smarter and more targetted surveillance. They need fewer items of high-quality data they can focus on, not more items of low-quality data that they have to pick though and hope they are luckier than the terrorists.
Of course they use the Internet and phones, but, other than the really dumb ones that are most likely not part of any serious group or at the very bottom of the ladder, there's not a great deal of public evidence that shows they use them for much more than the rest of us do. In the case of the more organized groups like Daesh, it's often the opposite and it seems they now actively avoid using means that can easily be monitored for planning and carrying out their activities except where it doesn't matter anymore. Daesh's leadership appears to understand OpSec and PerSec pretty well, and you can be sure they're going to be hammering that into their more immediate subordinates, if only to try and protect themselves.
There may well be mountains of classified actionable intelligence data - *something* has to be enabling all those drone strikes - but that's not much use when it comes to a member of the public forming an opinion as to whether politicians are trying to pass over-reaching surveillance legislation or not, is it? Especially if the impression J.Q. Public is getting is that most of the time it's either essentially useless until after the fact because there's just so *much* of it, and/or it didn't contain the necessary data that would have enabled the attack to be prevented in the first place.
I wish we could, but at this point we're pretty much fucked whatever we do. Depending on how you interpret the election polls (which are probably no more reliable than the last ones anyway), there are really only two possible outcomes in the general election next week:
1. The electorate rallies around the Conservative Party (essentially "UKIP Lite" at this point), which results in at least five more years under Theresa May and a raft of 1984-style legislation as result, but at least *some* chance at getting a non-catastrophic outcome from the upcoming Brexit negotiations.
2. Enough of the electorate decides to vote for other parties that we end up with a hung parliament and all the main parties bickering and backstabbing to try and form a workable coalition which then has to run a government through what might be the most critical period of the UK's history since the Battle of Britain in WWII. That *might* rein in the Orwellian crap at least a few notches, and will almost certainly be the final curtain for Theresa May, but means we'll be going into the first round of Brexit negotiations (which is just one week after the vote, FFS!) like a headless chicken, and probably without much hope of things improving for subsequent rounds.
Never mind being careful what you wish for; the lesson here is that you need to be *really* careful what you vote for, because however this pans out it's going to be on the UK electorate just as much as it is on the politicians they voted for.
Say what you like about milking a legacy with copyright, you can't really accuse Christopher Tolkein of failing to earn his share of it or putting the time in - he's in his 90s and still going! Not only did he draw the original maps for Lord of the Rings (they are signed with his initials, C.J.R.T.) but he put in a huge amount of effort editing his father's writings to produce 12-volumes of The History of Middle-earth, on top of the effort to finish the various other posthumously published works by JRR Tolkein.
Probably next to none. BA certainly failed to learn any lessons from the various other organizations that have suffered similar problems when power was restored after a major outage, and even if the people responsible for other DCs that are susceptible take note of what went wrong for BA (I'm hoping they'll publish an incident report at some point), they've still got to consider whether it applies to their own systems and, if it does, convince bean counters that it's something that needs money to be spent on. As Archangel Michael notes in his reply to my post, "You can engineer for maximum efficiency/lowest cost or you can engineer for redundancy/max safety. Penny Pinchers always choose the former, and IT guys usually want the latter" which is perfectly true, because once it gets up to the bean counters it typically devolves into a simple case of risk:
What is the probability of this happening? (P)
What is the cost of impact (financial, reputation damage, compensation, etc.) if it does? (Ci)
What is the cost of preventing this from happening? (Cp)
If P*Ci < Cp then the IT guys are not getting their toys, but you can bet they'll get the blame if the gamble comes up short.
Still unclear, but that's what BA claimed in their previous statement - physical damage to some of their hardware - although it was never made very clear whether they meant to the actual IT hardware (which was generally assumed, given the outage), the power supply hardware, or something else entirely. Given the power supply is now a major part of the cause of failure it could be almost anything, but if I had to guess I'd probably go with a physical failure somewhere between the incoming HV supply from the National Grid and the power distribution rails in the DC.
Even before you consider the safety and procedural aspects of working on high-voltage electrical switch gear (permits to work, etc.), that's often hardware that cannot simply be swapped out on the fly, especially if a breaker or whatever has actually blown rather than tripped, which might also entail issues with actually getting a replacement to site in the first place or collateral damage to adjacent equipment. Plus, if they'd already determined they couldn't simply replace/reset the failed unit(s) and try to power-on again without ending up with another failure, they'd need to look into powering stuff back on in stages, and if they didn't properly understand which systems were dependant on which (lots of things can fail to start up cleanly if things like DNS and LDAP/AD. are absent, for instance) then they'll have to get that data from the admins - who they outsourced to India last year...
Apparently that was what led to the major outage turning into a prolonged major outage. It seems that the sequence of events is now that the contractor turned off the power (presumably killing one of more phases), obviously leading to a large scale hardware shutdown. Someone (the same contractor, most likely) tried to restore power, as you would, only to find that the power surge of all that hardware switching back on at the same time, which often means that they are close to maximum power draw, overloaded the system and caused physical damage to the hardware.
While a there's a lot of mocking of BA going on at the moment, that's actually a pretty easy situation to get into if you've expanded a DC - or even an regular equipment room - over several years without proper power managment, and BA is far from the first company to be caught out. So, if you are responsible for some IT equipment rooms, here's two things to consider; what's the combined total power draw of all the equipment in each room on power on (don't forget to include any UPS units topping up their batteries!), and what the maximum power load that can be supplied to each room? If you can't answer both of those, or at least be certain that the latter exceeds the former in each case, then you've potentially got exactly the same situation as BA.
None of which excuses BA from not having the ability to successfully failover between redundant DCs in the event of a catastrophic outage at one facility, of course.
Sure, but what it doesn't answer the question of what they are all going to *do*. It's all very well saying things like self-driving cars will save lives and create jobs, but I'm not hearing many suggestions as to what those jobs are going to be other than designing, building, and repairing self-driving cars, which is mostly covered by the current automotive industry. With more complex vehicles, there will presumably be more to do in the automotive industry and those that support it which means more jobs, but how much of that will itself be automated or just extend existing infrastructure? Fewer road traffic accidents also means less work for the health care industry, for emergency services, vehicle recovery services, body shops... not all of which is going to readily transition to other things, especially if you get situations like politicians seeing it as a way to cut policing costs through headcount reductions, rather than more cops available for tackling crime.
Like the biosphere, the job market is hugely complicated ecosystem with a lot of dependencies and symbiotic relationships that might not be immediately apparent. It might be capable of recovery should a certain species suddenly become extinct, but the process generally takes time, causes unexpected upheavals in what may have previously seemed unrelated species, and every now and again leads to a cascade like reaction resulting a great extinction. Despite Andresson's claims, there was actually massive upheaval and widespread poverty during the industrial revolution in Europe; a situation that didn't really start to improve until the great wars of the late 19thC and first half of the 20thC, and there's no reason why this couldn't trigger a similar cascade in the job market. Sure, it could all work out for the better on a reasonable short timescale, or it could trigger decades of turmoil - assuming either outcome is a given seems unwise, to say the least.
You're going to have to wait, and even if Trump starts the process today with an executive order he may not see it run to fruition as POTUS. Apparently there are two ways that Trump can actually do this; he can just withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which is a process that takes four years (a rule introduced immediately after Trump was elected but before he actually became POTUS), or he can take the nuclear option (or should that now be "coal option"?) and withdraw from the UN's climate body, the UNFCCC, which "only" takes a year. The latter might be a stretch though, given that the US membership of the UNFCCC was signed under Bush Snr. in 1992, is well supported in Congress and Senate, and has all sorts of other implications making it even more likely to see challenges like those applied to the Travel Bans than just withdrawing from the Paris Agreement will.
For the primary resident of each given tomb, certainly, but beside various treasures, there's also a lot of evidence that many pharoahs were accompanied to the afterlife with mumified servants and livestock (there are *many* examples of mummified cats in particular). As long as you are able to take DNA samples from a decent cross section of the available mummies in a given tomb, then you're going likely to get a much more representative sample of the population of a whole than just the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of the 1%. While that's not going to be a perfect cross section of the society, it should at least include a decent number of representatives from both the indigneous and immigrant labour pools.
Taking whatever Fox News and The Daily Mail say and assuming the exact opposite works just as well, and is usually more entertaining.
FileZilla has its faults, but being adware is NOT one of them. It was one of many victims (GIMP and VLC were others) of third party mirror sites like SourceForge that decided to make some additional money by bundling crapware with downloads, often without the knowledge of the projects involved. Unless you've been sourcing your software from a particularly shady mirror site, this bundling was usually made pretty clear during the install process, such as the screenshot in the link.