Britain is a monarchy in name only. The Queen may be the Head of State but all power lies with Parliament. Yes, her signature is required on Acts of Parliament (laws, etc) but if she or any other modern monarch were to refuse to sign anything that Parliament had passed into law then the monarchy would certainly be abolished overnight.
Frankly, I like this system. It means our Head of State is a dedicated dignatory, a proper ambassador whose personal politics won't ever come back to bit him or her in the backside, and the power, the authority and the management of the country is left to the elected government of the day.
So, whilst Britain is technically a consitutional monarchy it is effectively a democratic republic in all but name.
Price the device at less than 1K and people will buy these devices. Price them near 2K and they will be niche devices that people will look at, comment as interesting, and move on.
Ever considered that, to design, develop, manufacture, market, sell and support these devices, you have to sell them for near 2K if you want to stay in business?
Which "King's College?" Are you sure there wasn't a burger on the sign out front?
Hint: there's a world full of other countries and other universities beyond the 50 states. And, in some of those universities, you can get a real education.
By the way, if your own education had given you any sort of basic research skills, or if you weren't so damn lazy, then you'd know that he's talking about King's College, London. You'd be able to guess that from googling "King's College, but in this case you could say that that's the place for sure simply by looking at the guy's Slashdot journals, which point to his detailed blog.
Perhaps the reason why you can't do these simple things is because the only place that you graduated from was McDonalds U?
(Yeah, yeah, off-topic but you've got to respond when someone asks that kind of question.)
The US occupiers in post-WWII weren't calling in air strikes on cities and killing innocent men, women and children in the process. If you're American, you hear about every US soldier that dies but how often do you hear about Iraqi deaths at American hands?
According to some estimates, this war has killed over 25,000 Iraqi civilians so far. Note, those are estimates, because nobody's been keeping an official count of Iraqi dead probably because - and this is the honest truth that most politicians wouldn't admit - most people in positions of responsibility don't give a shit.
Now, answer honestly, if you're an average Joe, and your wife and kids are killed in by an American air strike that flattens you home and you neighbourhood, just how hurt, how frustrated and how angry are you going to feel? And what are you more likely to do: take it lying down or want to fight back.
300 Iraqis civilians are dying every week as a result of the ongoing fighting. That's 300 people per week in a country with less than 10 percent of America's population. In other words, that's the Iraqi equivalent of a September 11th every damn week.
Now do you get an idea of why the country is so fucked up?
Did I mention that the war's illegal? That there never were WMDs? That there never was any link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime? That September 11th had nothing to do with Iraq? Etc, etc.
Why is it that CSS is held up to higher standards that OSS?
So what that the service isn't as fast as it could be all the time? It's still in beta! In fact, if you speak to any of the development team, as I have done personally, they'll tell you that it isn't technically in beta now (I forget the exact term the Gmail developer used to describe the current state of the service), so it's not entirely surprising that it doesn't work as fast as lightning right now 100 percent of the time.
Believe me, there's still a lot more of work to be done before Gmail is ready for public launch, including support for browsers that aren't currently supported (eg, Opera) and drafting to name but two. Expecting the code to be optimised for speed before the final feature set is tied down is asking a bit much, don't you think?
Besides, isn't it standard practice to cut pre-release software some slack? I've lost track of the number of times I've seen someone justify the presence of bugs in FireFox or any other OSS product as being natural because "it's still in beta", so why not give Google the same breaks too?
Don't forget that there are millions of people out there that are either happy with their Hotmail accounts and/or who would be greatly inconvenienced by abandoning those accounts altogether.
I have both a Hotmail account and a Gmail one. My Hotmail one dates back to 1996 (maybe 1995), definitely before the date that the service was acquired by Microsoft.
My Gmail account is maybe six months old. Which do I prefer using? Well, for reasons other than the account size (ie, the superior filtering, the unlimited [accountname]+[anythingyouwanttoputhere]@gmail.com aliases, the searching, the labelling as opposed to foldering approach, etc) but there's no way in hell that I'm going to abandoning my Hotmail account anytime soon.
Why? Well an eight (nine?) year-old email address has been the primary method of email communication for friends, family and others that want to contact me. If I were to abandon that email address, even after notifying everyone that I could think of who would want to send me an email, then I'm sure that there would be some messages that wouldn't get to me as intended.
And even if I could guarantee that all personal communication would suddenly come to my Gmail account, I'd still keep the Hotmail one, if only for site registrations, etc, that one day might lead to spam.
Does Hotmail compare well to Gmail? No. Is Microsoft increasing the size limit on Hotmail accounts a "me too" move? Yes. Does that mean that Hotmail is now redundant. No, not for me, not for millions of others.
Yeah, because the science and technology sections of so many other news gathering organisations are so superior to the BBC's, aren't they?
Listen, let me explain this in simple terms: BBC News caters to a wide audience made up of mainly lay people and, as such, it pitches its articles accordingly. It's not New Scientist, Nature, The Lancet or whatever academic publication that's on your reading list and it doesn't pretend to be. It doesn't try to blind its readers with science because it's readers aren't all PhDs with specialist knowledge of every field. It just delivers the basic facts in a manner that the average man on the street can comprehend. And that, my friend, is a very good thing.
Take any news story and you could pitch it on so many different levels and in so many different directions. A plane crash can be a human interest story, an engineering story, a health and safety story, an insurance story or an investment story. The same facts can be slanted so many ways, and that's before you start to compare and contrast the weighty analysis of a broadsheet to the relative throwaway analysis of a tabloid.
Criticising BBC News for having articles that are easily digested and understood by its readership is like criticising MTV for showing music videos. Both are simply trying to give their target demographic what they want and need.
If you want more in-depth analysis of every story then go get it. Go look up the details yourself or go find them on another site. As a starting point, the "Related Internet Links" provided in the right-hand column of every BBC News Online story should be a good starting point: or is that something else the BBC isn't doing to your satisfaction?
Frankly, it seems to me that you're having a good bitch at the BBC simply because you want to have a good bitch at the BBC. After all, it's not like the BBC has any control over what stories make the frontpage of Slashdot or any other site that you happen to read.
Frankly, I find it ironic when the majority of people don't even bother to RTFA that you're bitching about articles that don't provide enough detail but if you really want to see story submissions that are aimed at people that have degree- and doctorate-level understanding of the subject material, and who have the time to read it all, then why don't you start submitting you own stories and see how many make the cut.
In simple terms (or as BBC News Online might put it), if you don't like it then why not try doing something about it yourself?
(Oh, and by the way, you are being a troll or flamebait or whatever. You might like to think that you're not, but you are.)
Britain doesn't exactly have a manned space flight programme so Foale, like many people with space-orientated ambitions emigrated to a country where he could fulfil his dreams.
Foale's got dual UK-US nationality but in a way it's safe to say that he's American for the same reasons that Rupert Murdoch is American: not because he especially wanted to be American but because becoming an American citizen was a means to an end.
Ah, but you're assuming that they can't use the law to protect themselves from blame.
Ever heard of liability shields? They're common practice in many hazardous industries and they stop, for example, oil companies having to foot the 9-figure bill when one of their single-hulled VLCCs runs aground and pours thousands and thousands of tons of crude oil onto your shoreline.
If you had any kind of legislation that held management personally responsible for more than a cup of cold coffee then you'd have liability shields for everything.
Want one-word proof that the big guys never pay whilst the little guys suffer? Enron.
You know, that's a rather optimistic view of what would happen without any governmental intervention. For one thing, the absence of regulatory legislation would let businesses do whatever they wanted when they wanted, and that would mean screwing the customer and the environment whenever possible if it meant a cheap buck.
Of course, ever now and then they'd get sued, but when you have that much money you can buy a lot of lawyers, drag things out in court until the end of the Earth, or, if things are looking bad, simply buy people and their silence. Left to their own devices I have no doubt that corporations would err on the side of greed every time. You only have to look at how the music, movie and software industries operate in the US to see that the big guys shaft the little guys every chance they get, time after time after time.
Google the word then click "definition" in the top right-hand corner. Then look at the second meaning of the word. In that respect, "factoid" works well here.
Don't like to be picky but there are actually Five terrestial analogue broadcasters (although I personally can't get channel 5).
Don't like to be picky either (well, sometimes I do), but BBC1 and BBC2 are both BBC channels. That's one terrestrial broadcaster providing two channels. So the four terrestrial analogue broadcasters are the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and five.
Uh, it may not seem as useful as it sounds today, because we're used to always-on broadband Internet connections that give us fast page loading, but in its day it was king. And, even today, it's a very useful service.
I know that I'd rather have the option of finding out what's on TV later that day, or what the weather's going to be like, or how my team got on, via my remote control than being forced to get up and check it out on my PC, etc.
It's called teletext here in the UK too. Ceefax is just the BBC's name for its teletext services.
All four terrestrial analogue broadcasters have teletext services and the hundreds of terrestrial/cable/satellite broadcasters have similar digital services too.
One interesting factoid about teletext is that, at one stage, over half the holidays in Britain were bought via teletext (ads on teletext, response by phone). Obviously, with the development of the Internet that's changed, but the teletext holiday market is still pretty big.
If Symantec can identify that 30,000 machines are being infected a day, why can't they take the next step and come up with a notification method to let people know that their machine has a problem. How about a site listing infected addresses? Does that exist anywhere?
Wow. I don't know where to begin to respond. Well, here's a quick list of things that ran through my head when I read your post:
1. This 30,000 isn't an exact figure, it's an estimation.
2. They don't know which individual machines are being infected. Symantec isn't scanning every PC out there connected to the internet in real time. (How could it be?)
3. Just how do you expect them (or anyone else) to know how to contact the owner's/admin's of the infected PCs?
4. Why do you expect that it's Symantec's (or any other third party's) responsibility to tell people that they are being exploited?
5. How do you expect Symantec (or anyone else) to get that message across to the uninitiated/uneducated without seeming as if they are partly to blame for the problem?
Your question is like asking why if x many people are going to be run over and killed why can't we just phone them up beforehand and tell them to watch themselves.
For any notification method to work, people would have to have subscribed to a service or installed something to do that for them. But it's the very people that don't take the trouble to (or don't know to) take any precautions that get exploited, just as it's the people that cross the street without looking that get run over.
No, what's funny here is that someone bothered to look up "spelt" in a dictionary, found an alternative meaning of the word but couldn't find anything other meanings of the word.
As for an empire, well, empires are meant to fall, I'll be the first to tell you that. Every great civilisation in history learnt that lesson (most of them the hard way) but it seems that the US is insistant on having a go at it too. From the looks of the situation in Iraq, it doesn't seem to be working to plan.
How ironic is that a story submission about language and word usage, featuring a website called WordCount.org can't even get the word "word" spelt correctly in the story summary?
Why bad-mouth Symantec for pointing out the reality of the situation? Would you be happier if it were CERT or someone else delivering the bad news?
Symantec and its tools are part of the solution. Not exclusively the solution, or the only solution, but a part of it. And, by letting people know that problems are out there, they're performing a service that is necessary; you didn't think someone like Microsoft was going to be issuing press releases to the media that put its products in a negative light, did you?
It's not even as if the other AV vendors that you mention are any different to Symantec: both Panda and Kaspersky are closed-source commercial products and both companies have prevalent virus activity and warning indicators on the homepages of their respective websites. And I bet they both send out press releases to the media highlighting large-scale infestations and particularly dangerous threats, so why crucify Symantec for being the company whose press release the BBC chose to focus on?
Bottom line: why blame the messenger if the message is accurate?
Just what's Symantec done here to warrant you being any more ticked off at them than anyone else? Do you have a legitimate reason for targetting them or are you just trolling?
Yeah, if by "modern" you mean in the last five years, which is a very narrow time-frame to be attaching that word to. Non-Muslim terrorists haven't exactly been sitting on their backsides for decades and most have committed more than a handful of terrorist attacks in the last ten years.
Attributing the relative inactivity of the IRA and its various splinter groups, ETA, etc since September 11th to those organisations no longer pursuing a policy of using fear and violence as a means of attaining their political agendas is, frankly, the most short-sighted thing that I've heard. These groups haven't laid down their arms, they've merely been dormant, because the post-September 11th world isn't as forgiving of their activities as it had previously been: remember, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
So, the more radical wings of the IRA (Continuity IRA, the Real IRA), ETA and others, haven't gone away, renounced violence or given up their cause, they've merely been lying low while the heat's been on.
And just because the remaining terrorism can be mainly (though not totally) attributed to Muslim groups that doesn't make terrorism a Muslim-only problem. It's that kind of xenophobic tunnel-vision that non-Muslim crackpots (like the Unabomber) would love to exploit by striking from the direction that you're ignoring whilst you least expect it.
Yeah, well Sum Of All Fears sprung to my mind too, just as Debt Of Honor sprung to my mind on September 11th.
Pity that nobody in the US intelligence agencieswho had the information that Al Qaeda was planning strikes on the US and that some of its operatives were going through flight school managed to join the dots. If they had then perhaps 19 people wouldn't have been able to change the world.
For one thing it's a danger to the local marine environment. There's no telling how long radiation levels in the area have been higher than normal, but leaving a nuke with decaying seals on it will do nothing for the area.
And, for another thing, you want to go retrieve it before someone else does. Nuclear - or should that be "nu-cu-lar"? - material lying there just waiting to be had is a potential goldmine for a terrorist organisation, etc. The symbolism of using an American nuke to make the material for its own nuclear device, dirty bomb, or whatever against the very people that built it would be just the kind of thing that Al Qaeda would love.
Bottom line: it's there, you know where it is, so go get it so it's out of play.
Slashdot Mirror
Britain is a monarchy in name only. The Queen may be the Head of State but all power lies with Parliament. Yes, her signature is required on Acts of Parliament (laws, etc) but if she or any other modern monarch were to refuse to sign anything that Parliament had passed into law then the monarchy would certainly be abolished overnight.
Frankly, I like this system. It means our Head of State is a dedicated dignatory, a proper ambassador whose personal politics won't ever come back to bit him or her in the backside, and the power, the authority and the management of the country is left to the elected government of the day.
So, whilst Britain is technically a consitutional monarchy it is effectively a democratic republic in all but name.
Price the device at less than 1K and people will buy these devices. Price them near 2K and they will be niche devices that people will look at, comment as interesting, and move on.
Ever considered that, to design, develop, manufacture, market, sell and support these devices, you have to sell them for near 2K if you want to stay in business?
Which "King's College?" Are you sure there wasn't a burger on the sign out front?
Hint: there's a world full of other countries and other universities beyond the 50 states. And, in some of those universities, you can get a real education.
By the way, if your own education had given you any sort of basic research skills, or if you weren't so damn lazy, then you'd know that he's talking about King's College, London. You'd be able to guess that from googling "King's College, but in this case you could say that that's the place for sure simply by looking at the guy's Slashdot journals, which point to his detailed blog.
Perhaps the reason why you can't do these simple things is because the only place that you graduated from was McDonalds U?
(Yeah, yeah, off-topic but you've got to respond when someone asks that kind of question.)
The US occupiers in post-WWII weren't calling in air strikes on cities and killing innocent men, women and children in the process. If you're American, you hear about every US soldier that dies but how often do you hear about Iraqi deaths at American hands?
According to some estimates, this war has killed over 25,000 Iraqi civilians so far. Note, those are estimates, because nobody's been keeping an official count of Iraqi dead probably because - and this is the honest truth that most politicians wouldn't admit - most people in positions of responsibility don't give a shit.
Now, answer honestly, if you're an average Joe, and your wife and kids are killed in by an American air strike that flattens you home and you neighbourhood, just how hurt, how frustrated and how angry are you going to feel? And what are you more likely to do: take it lying down or want to fight back.
300 Iraqis civilians are dying every week as a result of the ongoing fighting. That's 300 people per week in a country with less than 10 percent of America's population. In other words, that's the Iraqi equivalent of a September 11th every damn week.
Now do you get an idea of why the country is so fucked up?
Did I mention that the war's illegal? That there never were WMDs? That there never was any link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime? That September 11th had nothing to do with Iraq? Etc, etc.
Why is it that CSS is held up to higher standards that OSS?
So what that the service isn't as fast as it could be all the time? It's still in beta! In fact, if you speak to any of the development team, as I have done personally, they'll tell you that it isn't technically in beta now (I forget the exact term the Gmail developer used to describe the current state of the service), so it's not entirely surprising that it doesn't work as fast as lightning right now 100 percent of the time.
Believe me, there's still a lot more of work to be done before Gmail is ready for public launch, including support for browsers that aren't currently supported (eg, Opera) and drafting to name but two. Expecting the code to be optimised for speed before the final feature set is tied down is asking a bit much, don't you think?
Besides, isn't it standard practice to cut pre-release software some slack? I've lost track of the number of times I've seen someone justify the presence of bugs in FireFox or any other OSS product as being natural because "it's still in beta", so why not give Google the same breaks too?
Don't forget that there are millions of people out there that are either happy with their Hotmail accounts and/or who would be greatly inconvenienced by abandoning those accounts altogether.
m aliases, the searching, the labelling as opposed to foldering approach, etc) but there's no way in hell that I'm going to abandoning my Hotmail account anytime soon.
I have both a Hotmail account and a Gmail one. My Hotmail one dates back to 1996 (maybe 1995), definitely before the date that the service was acquired by Microsoft.
My Gmail account is maybe six months old. Which do I prefer using? Well, for reasons other than the account size (ie, the superior filtering, the unlimited [accountname]+[anythingyouwanttoputhere]@gmail.co
Why? Well an eight (nine?) year-old email address has been the primary method of email communication for friends, family and others that want to contact me. If I were to abandon that email address, even after notifying everyone that I could think of who would want to send me an email, then I'm sure that there would be some messages that wouldn't get to me as intended.
And even if I could guarantee that all personal communication would suddenly come to my Gmail account, I'd still keep the Hotmail one, if only for site registrations, etc, that one day might lead to spam.
Does Hotmail compare well to Gmail? No. Is Microsoft increasing the size limit on Hotmail accounts a "me too" move? Yes. Does that mean that Hotmail is now redundant. No, not for me, not for millions of others.
Well, there are a lot of major differences between the two. For one thing, Buran has no main engines, whereas the NASA STS orbiters do.
Yeah, because the science and technology sections of so many other news gathering organisations are so superior to the BBC's, aren't they?
Listen, let me explain this in simple terms: BBC News caters to a wide audience made up of mainly lay people and, as such, it pitches its articles accordingly. It's not New Scientist, Nature, The Lancet or whatever academic publication that's on your reading list and it doesn't pretend to be. It doesn't try to blind its readers with science because it's readers aren't all PhDs with specialist knowledge of every field. It just delivers the basic facts in a manner that the average man on the street can comprehend. And that, my friend, is a very good thing.
Take any news story and you could pitch it on so many different levels and in so many different directions. A plane crash can be a human interest story, an engineering story, a health and safety story, an insurance story or an investment story. The same facts can be slanted so many ways, and that's before you start to compare and contrast the weighty analysis of a broadsheet to the relative throwaway analysis of a tabloid.
Criticising BBC News for having articles that are easily digested and understood by its readership is like criticising MTV for showing music videos. Both are simply trying to give their target demographic what they want and need.
If you want more in-depth analysis of every story then go get it. Go look up the details yourself or go find them on another site. As a starting point, the "Related Internet Links" provided in the right-hand column of every BBC News Online story should be a good starting point: or is that something else the BBC isn't doing to your satisfaction?
Frankly, it seems to me that you're having a good bitch at the BBC simply because you want to have a good bitch at the BBC. After all, it's not like the BBC has any control over what stories make the frontpage of Slashdot or any other site that you happen to read.
Frankly, I find it ironic when the majority of people don't even bother to RTFA that you're bitching about articles that don't provide enough detail but if you really want to see story submissions that are aimed at people that have degree- and doctorate-level understanding of the subject material, and who have the time to read it all, then why don't you start submitting you own stories and see how many make the cut.
In simple terms (or as BBC News Online might put it), if you don't like it then why not try doing something about it yourself?
(Oh, and by the way, you are being a troll or flamebait or whatever. You might like to think that you're not, but you are.)
Genetic research. World leaders in the field, in fact.
Britain doesn't exactly have a manned space flight programme so Foale, like many people with space-orientated ambitions emigrated to a country where he could fulfil his dreams.
Foale's got dual UK-US nationality but in a way it's safe to say that he's American for the same reasons that Rupert Murdoch is American: not because he especially wanted to be American but because becoming an American citizen was a means to an end.
Ah, but you're assuming that they can't use the law to protect themselves from blame.
Ever heard of liability shields? They're common practice in many hazardous industries and they stop, for example, oil companies having to foot the 9-figure bill when one of their single-hulled VLCCs runs aground and pours thousands and thousands of tons of crude oil onto your shoreline.
If you had any kind of legislation that held management personally responsible for more than a cup of cold coffee then you'd have liability shields for everything.
Want one-word proof that the big guys never pay whilst the little guys suffer? Enron.
You know, that's a rather optimistic view of what would happen without any governmental intervention. For one thing, the absence of regulatory legislation would let businesses do whatever they wanted when they wanted, and that would mean screwing the customer and the environment whenever possible if it meant a cheap buck.
Of course, ever now and then they'd get sued, but when you have that much money you can buy a lot of lawyers, drag things out in court until the end of the Earth, or, if things are looking bad, simply buy people and their silence. Left to their own devices I have no doubt that corporations would err on the side of greed every time. You only have to look at how the music, movie and software industries operate in the US to see that the big guys shaft the little guys every chance they get, time after time after time.
Google the word then click "definition" in the top right-hand corner. Then look at the second meaning of the word. In that respect, "factoid" works well here.
Don't like to be picky but there are actually Five terrestial analogue broadcasters (although I personally can't get channel 5).
Don't like to be picky either (well, sometimes I do), but BBC1 and BBC2 are both BBC channels. That's one terrestrial broadcaster providing two channels. So the four terrestrial analogue broadcasters are the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and five.
Uh, it may not seem as useful as it sounds today, because we're used to always-on broadband Internet connections that give us fast page loading, but in its day it was king. And, even today, it's a very useful service.
I know that I'd rather have the option of finding out what's on TV later that day, or what the weather's going to be like, or how my team got on, via my remote control than being forced to get up and check it out on my PC, etc.
It's called teletext here in the UK too. Ceefax is just the BBC's name for its teletext services.
All four terrestrial analogue broadcasters have teletext services and the hundreds of terrestrial/cable/satellite broadcasters have similar digital services too.
One interesting factoid about teletext is that, at one stage, over half the holidays in Britain were bought via teletext (ads on teletext, response by phone). Obviously, with the development of the Internet that's changed, but the teletext holiday market is still pretty big.
What next? Duke Nukem Forever almost launched? Great story. Not.
If Symantec can identify that 30,000 machines are being infected a day, why can't they take the next step and come up with a notification method to let people know that their machine has a problem. How about a site listing infected addresses? Does that exist anywhere?
Wow. I don't know where to begin to respond. Well, here's a quick list of things that ran through my head when I read your post:
1. This 30,000 isn't an exact figure, it's an estimation.
2. They don't know which individual machines are being infected. Symantec isn't scanning every PC out there connected to the internet in real time. (How could it be?)
3. Just how do you expect them (or anyone else) to know how to contact the owner's/admin's of the infected PCs?
4. Why do you expect that it's Symantec's (or any other third party's) responsibility to tell people that they are being exploited?
5. How do you expect Symantec (or anyone else) to get that message across to the uninitiated/uneducated without seeming as if they are partly to blame for the problem?
Your question is like asking why if x many people are going to be run over and killed why can't we just phone them up beforehand and tell them to watch themselves.
For any notification method to work, people would have to have subscribed to a service or installed something to do that for them. But it's the very people that don't take the trouble to (or don't know to) take any precautions that get exploited, just as it's the people that cross the street without looking that get run over.
No, what's funny here is that someone bothered to look up "spelt" in a dictionary, found an alternative meaning of the word but couldn't find anything other meanings of the word.
As for an empire, well, empires are meant to fall, I'll be the first to tell you that. Every great civilisation in history learnt that lesson (most of them the hard way) but it seems that the US is insistant on having a go at it too. From the looks of the situation in Iraq, it doesn't seem to be working to plan.
Spelt?
How the English and most of the English-speaking word spell the word that Americans insist on spelling "spelled".
Not "Wword", I guess.
How ironic is that a story submission about language and word usage, featuring a website called WordCount.org can't even get the word "word" spelt correctly in the story summary?
Why bad-mouth Symantec for pointing out the reality of the situation? Would you be happier if it were CERT or someone else delivering the bad news?
Symantec and its tools are part of the solution. Not exclusively the solution, or the only solution, but a part of it. And, by letting people know that problems are out there, they're performing a service that is necessary; you didn't think someone like Microsoft was going to be issuing press releases to the media that put its products in a negative light, did you?
It's not even as if the other AV vendors that you mention are any different to Symantec: both Panda and Kaspersky are closed-source commercial products and both companies have prevalent virus activity and warning indicators on the homepages of their respective websites. And I bet they both send out press releases to the media highlighting large-scale infestations and particularly dangerous threats, so why crucify Symantec for being the company whose press release the BBC chose to focus on?
Bottom line: why blame the messenger if the message is accurate?
Just what's Symantec done here to warrant you being any more ticked off at them than anyone else? Do you have a legitimate reason for targetting them or are you just trolling?
Yeah, if by "modern" you mean in the last five years, which is a very narrow time-frame to be attaching that word to. Non-Muslim terrorists haven't exactly been sitting on their backsides for decades and most have committed more than a handful of terrorist attacks in the last ten years.
Attributing the relative inactivity of the IRA and its various splinter groups, ETA, etc since September 11th to those organisations no longer pursuing a policy of using fear and violence as a means of attaining their political agendas is, frankly, the most short-sighted thing that I've heard. These groups haven't laid down their arms, they've merely been dormant, because the post-September 11th world isn't as forgiving of their activities as it had previously been: remember, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
So, the more radical wings of the IRA (Continuity IRA, the Real IRA), ETA and others, haven't gone away, renounced violence or given up their cause, they've merely been lying low while the heat's been on.
And just because the remaining terrorism can be mainly (though not totally) attributed to Muslim groups that doesn't make terrorism a Muslim-only problem. It's that kind of xenophobic tunnel-vision that non-Muslim crackpots (like the Unabomber) would love to exploit by striking from the direction that you're ignoring whilst you least expect it.
Yeah, well Sum Of All Fears sprung to my mind too, just as Debt Of Honor sprung to my mind on September 11th.
Pity that nobody in the US intelligence agencieswho had the information that Al Qaeda was planning strikes on the US and that some of its operatives were going through flight school managed to join the dots. If they had then perhaps 19 people wouldn't have been able to change the world.
For one thing it's a danger to the local marine environment. There's no telling how long radiation levels in the area have been higher than normal, but leaving a nuke with decaying seals on it will do nothing for the area.
And, for another thing, you want to go retrieve it before someone else does. Nuclear - or should that be "nu-cu-lar"? - material lying there just waiting to be had is a potential goldmine for a terrorist organisation, etc. The symbolism of using an American nuke to make the material for its own nuclear device, dirty bomb, or whatever against the very people that built it would be just the kind of thing that Al Qaeda would love.
Bottom line: it's there, you know where it is, so go get it so it's out of play.