None of this seems "revolutionary" or "magical". Some of it looks like a rip off of Amazon TV, Google Translate, and the same look as last year's model which was nothing more than a larger look of the year before that's model. What happened to Apple supposedly "leading" the way? Did the sheep cause the shepard to fall behind?
Just think, you can finally be a huge dick to people on the road without worrying whether they've got a gun and a temper!
Oh wait, they might still have a gun and a temper, and now they don't need to have either hand on the wheel while they're trying to fuck you up.
A gun and a temper? Think of making this upgrade to your driverless car:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ....except with a remote control... or better yet, autonomous (and yes, it would run Linux).
I'm going to love self driving cars. I will never own one, they'll have to tear the steering wheel out of my cold dead hands, but pranking self driving car owners will be funny as hell: https://xkcd.com/1559/
Su is not a broken concept; it's a long well-established fundamental of BSD Unix/Linux.
You're pretty much making an argument to tradition here. The correct thing to do would be to counter his claims:
what "su" is supposed to do is very unclear. On one hand it's supposed to open a new session and change a number of execution context parameters (`uid`, `gid`, `env`,...), and on the other it's supposed to inherit a lot concepts from the originating session (`tty`, `cgroup`, `audit`,...). Since this is so weakly defined it's a really weird mix&match of old and new paramters.
I would like more detail from him on why and how it's broken, and how his replacement is truly different from "su -" but since it doesn't appear to be mutually exclusive with the use of "su" or "su -", other than typical reactionary hate I don't see what the problem is.
Also ask him why the conceptually correctly implemented replacement for simple little su has to be machinectl shell which is like... 16 kilometers long.
Every time I hear some political pundit on TV talking about the evils of communism and the police states of the old Soviet bloc I am reminded of crap like this and I laugh out loud. The more time that passes from the fall of communism the more 1984 becomes reality and not in fascist dictatorships or communist countries like Orwell predicted but in the so called democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. I wonder what Orwell would have made of that?
Dude got nerd sniped. I wouldn't be able to resist. An interesting puzzle mysteriously shows up? Yes please. Basically how I got into programming and math in general.
Of course all they're going to get are people who aren't savvy enough to use ad/tracking blockers and duckduckgo...
Speak for yourseelf. Somebody is monitoring your searches and evaluating you remotely like some lab rat in a glass cage. To me that is ceepy just like all other surveillance, nothing else, just creepy.
" quality of finish, all of these little details that make a beautiful design"
Yeah, that's nice and all, but what we really want is usability. Freedom from the advertising deluge. Control. Everybody and their brother can make a svelte 3D mockup that looks beautiful. But in the end it's going to come down to software. It's why Apple ruled the roost early on. A beautiful piece of garbage is still a piece of garbage. And, tbh, we have enough of that out here at the moment.
And beautiful design and usability are mutually exclusive? Let's save our scorn until after we have actually seen a working example of this thing and confirmed by physically testing the device that it is not usable.
If you can't have a rational discussion between your architects (who are most likely just really senior guys slinging code) and your product managers (who are most likely just sales and account reps without a market vision) you are already screwed.
Shit. I just described my own company.
The decision to go cloud should not be a decision made by any person as the original question implies, it should be a balanced decision made by systems/software/system-architecture people (does it get us anywhere technology wise), business people (does it make financial sense) and marketing types (is this what the customer wants). You might want to throw in a security expert to avoid getting yourself ashleymadisoned.
Which is fine, but if you're going to use such an edge case to make the claim that one suite of software is superior to the other, you're on thin ice.
If that one edge case was his entire case against Liber Office you'd have a point, however he just cited it as a single example. I expect that when it comes to features in spreadsheet apps it's a bit like search engines. The searches that make or break a search engines is not the ability to return hits for not common searches like "america's got talent winners" it's being able to return results for a large set of rare and specific searches like: "ip67 rated bulkhead mounted sma connectors" or "new old stock 1965 mustang steering box". If you talk to people who use Excel extensively to analyze data you'll quickly find that the reason they find LibreOffice lacking is not because Libreoffice is lacking basic features, it is because the Libre Spreadsheet app is unable to perform a for a wide collection of really specific 'edge' tasks that Excel can either do out of the box or for which there exist well established and professionally maintained third party Excel expansion packages. All of that is simply down to Excel having been around longer and having many more users doing a wider variety of specialised tasks that Libreoffice Calc has had and for Libreoffice Calc that boils down to the fact that gaining market share will be a long and tedious up hill struggle.
well the second part of the prank was obviously to hack and publish the user database.
a pretty elaborate prank I must say, I salute!
This hacker/prankster should be easy to find, he probably reads Slashdot uses an Android phone and had a girlfriend (that last fact should shorten the suspect list considerably). Oh, and he probably only got angry enough to hack AshleyMadison.com because she cheated on him with an Apple iPhone using hipster.
According to this 1 Xi'an is the worst in the world. With Phoenix being the worst American city at 97th worst, LA is 107th, London 171st
http://www.numbeo.com/pollutio...
Xi'an makes one list but not the other, that just comes to show how reliable these lists are. The rule of thumb here is that when you are going to work and you find yourself wishing that you could echolocate like a bat to find the subway station because you can't see your hand in front of your face due to smog then it's time to consider moving to a cleaner place. The sad thing is that many cities in China fit that description because of the fact that for decades the Chinese Govt. has not cared one bit about environmental issues because it lowered production costs. There are free market pundits in the west who'd like us to follow the Chinese example based on the premise that environmental regulations get in the way of companies making profit. If you want to know where that leads take a look at China. However, the Chinese public is getting fed up with this and that explosion in Tianjin is just the latest drop into the cup of their dissatisfaction (It's absolutely unbelievable that those firemen were sent into a hazardous chemicals storage facility without knowing what was kept there, simply because even the facilities operators didn't know). It will be interesting to watch what happens when that cup fills up and flows over.
Manslaughter... copyright infringement... they should both get about the same sentences, right? Nothing weird about that at all, is there? ~
Well these are conservatives we are talking about here and they do love draconian justice. Plus, we all know what massive success the Americans have had in their war on drugs with their longstanding policy of sentencing people to multi decade mandatory minimum sentences whenever they are caught with a few too many grams of pot.
I've seen a third world country go from pots lines to buried fiber, superior internet speed to most USA major cities, ubiquitous 3.75G mobile internet....in less than 10 years. And Cuba is smaller and less populous.
I'll wager by 2025 most Cubans traveling to USA will be complaining about the shit internet and shit cellular here.
I'm not a telecommunications industry insider so I have never quite understood why we are pissing about (pardon my French) with 3, 4 and 5G when we could have switched to long range WiFi a decade ago. If we can miniaturize a radio transmitter/receiver to the point where it will fit into a mobile phone and still provide high speed radio communications with a cell tower up to 35km away we can design a WiFi module that will fit into a laptop or tablet and that can communicate with a distant radio tower or a local hotspot with equal facility. What I'd like to see is Cuba or some other country to do that does not really give the volume of gas contained in a standard rectal emission about what the telecommunications industry thinks is build something like municipal wifi, except nationwide where there is no GSM, just skype like apps and where you can choose whichever app gives you best performance or features because they all run over the same IP network anyway.
Will there also be an array of cleaner upper robots to collect these things things into bundles when they break down so they can be ejected from orbit and burned up in the atmosphere (or disposed of in some other way) or do we just keep rocketing micro satellites up there by the pallet as the old ones break down and try not to think about the space junk problem?
Seems about as credible as that thing Homer Simpson won for being fat and falling in a hole.
yes, we now have confirmation that the ISDA is a bumch of clueless morons.
The Windows 10 Start Menu is an abomination that has almost none of the functionality of a real Start Menu (ie, Windows 7 and earlier) and all of the bad things of the Windows 8 Start Screen now crammed into a smaller space.
Bullshit. I haven't had to go to the internet once to find out how to do something on W10, unlike the abomination whack-a- mole administration method of Windows 8.
I installed and started using and started supporting all in the same day. Can't ask for much more than that.
And lest ye call me a shill, look up my other posts.
So what you are saying is that Windows has finally become borderline usable after a mere 23 years of varying degrees of FUBAR?
Nokia was dying even before being bought by Microsoft. What killed them is Symbian, and their refusal to switch to Android when it was the time (2008/2009). When they decided to switch to Windows Phone, it was already too late.
Jolla seems to be doing fine with MeeGo/Sailfish and it runs Android apps... believe it or not there is life beyond Android.
Calling these things 'unsinkable aircraft carriers' shows just what a daft idea this is, militarily.
In a no-holds-barred fight, they have a HUGE bullseye painted on them, and will be easy to take out. The general idea of naval power is to project power, and being able to hide this capability in plain sight in a huge ocean is what makes a movable aircraft carrier a better idea. You wouldn't use one of these to fight an actual war.
Fixed fortifications are monuments to human stupidity. I could see this being like the Maginot Line or the Atlantic Wall.t
That quote is lifted directly form the lips of George S. Patton and while it is mainly correct, you are not going to base your national defense on fortresses in this day and age. fortifited positions can be used very effectively in defebsive and delaying actions and were used very effectively against Patton himself in places such as Metz. Fort Driant was effectively everything Patton despised and yet he was unable to deal with it in the swift and effortless manner everybody expected him to after his bold claims about the uselessness of defensive positions. Patton was full of hot air and since he was a very good commander he could afford to be full of hot air because he could back most of his statement up with his ability but not that one. Patton got his ass handed to him a few times when dealing with fixed fortifications. I would have liked to see Patton launch a Blitzkrieg like offensive up the Italian peninsula and claim at the end of it that fortifications are monuments to stupidity. As it was he was saved from that embarrassment by his temper after he slapped those soldiers. Finally Pattons own famous dash to save the situation during the Battle of the bulge revolved around on a very famous fortification and defense of the town of Bastogne so perhaps fortifications and defensive warfare are not quite that useless. If you want to get an idea of how easy it is to assault a fortified position, even on that is defended by a poorly equipped 3rd world guerilla army without an air force or effective air defenses, ask a US Army veteran of the Afghanistan campaign or some of the US and Iraqi soldiers that fought the second battle of Fallujah.
The only reason why they would do this, is so that they can call it sovereign territory, and to game international border rules to their own benefit.
Of course they are... they want to be the one carrying the big stick in the region so they are bullying a couple of US allies to challenge the one power in the region who currently thought to carry the biggest stick. If Obama had any balls he would help the Philippines and Taiwan to push back and capitalise on this Chinese aggression to increase US influence among other nations threatened by China's imperialist tendencies. China's claims territorial claims in the South China Sea are quite outrageous since in some cases the Chinese even observe the 12 mile limit of some of the smaller powers in the region in their avaricious frenzy to make sure no potential mineable resources end up in the 'wrong hands'.
Hahahaha you still think this was a screw-up? It cost Clarkson basically nothing and got him a bunch of free publicity, and he's getting precisely what he wanted. You ignorant tool. You think that because Clarkson's character is a buffoon that he's an idiot? You really think you're something special, don't you?
Hahahahahaha If anybody here is an ignorant tool it's you. Are you really trying to convince us that Clarkson pretended to blow his gasket and punched Oisin Tymon in the face to get out of his BBC lucrative contract and strike it big on Amazon Prime of all places? I am simply awestruck by the genius of that plan.
Except, they wont be electable because the longer a party is in power, the more fucking batshit it becomes, and as such people are going to split away from it and it wont hold a parliamentary majority. It may remain the biggest party but wont be able to form a government, hell, it's barely there now - wait until the EU referendum is over and hard right Tories defect to UKIP whatever the result, their majority doesn't have much life in it. We've already seen a massive split of the vote the last two elections - an unheard of coalition, followed by a fracturing of parties.
I was thinking something similar. He really has two choices. Piss off the other EU nations, keep things peaceful at home and risk leaving the EU (the route he will take if push comes to shove) or try to compromise and be conciliatory with the EU nations in which case he'll have a backbench rebellion on his hand which might split the party. With an industry that is riding him not to leave the EU, a parliamentary majority of just ten MPs and band of rebel backbenchers that is way bigger than ten MPs his position is difficult to say the least. He would have been better off in a coalition, unheard of as that may be in the UK even if it is normal in most other countries.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone who lives outside the UK actually understand British politics?
Few people in the UK understand British politics either, including the post you quoted.
Who's talking about UK politics? I don't give a rat's ass about understanding UK politics. I was musing about the idiocy of the UK electoral system. Given 650 parliamentary seats, UKIP would have won at least 70 seats using electoral rules used in countries that try to minimize gerrymandering. Under the current UK system they get one seat, I repeat one seat. That is neither fair nor is it normal by any standard. I do not need to be an expert in UK politics to know that that's a stupid system, all it takes is basic math.
The UK electorate recently had an opportunity to change the electoral system to the "Alternative Vote", while would at least have decreased the disparity between the percentage of the vote and the number of MPs. In the referendum on the subject, 67.9% voted "no". So however twisted the current system is, I think they only have themselves to blame...
You're preaching to the converted here, I'm in the minority who was in favor of that change. In fact I don't think it went far enough. I won't be happy until one citizen effectively has one vote. The way it is now rural constituencies for example weigh more than heavily populated areas which is downright unfair and as I pointed out the fact that UKIP got 13 percent of the vote and one MP is simply outrageous. Democracy is about fair representation, not keeping the Tories in power so that they can lock the British people in behind a national firewall, record and warehouse every word they say or write, watch their every move with CCTV cameras and shove laws like this down their gullet that is effectively implementable for those burdened with following it. Oh, and if David Cameron thinks he's going to keep teenage boys from finding titty pictures on the internet he's in for a surprise.
You're ignoring the turnout. Only 66.1% of people bothered to vote. Which means 33.9% of the electorate don't care who won. Their inactivity is just as complicit in the result as those who voted for the "nasty party".
And this is moot anyway. British democracy allows you to select your local MP - and that's all. The PM and the government are appointed by the Queen based on the allegiances of the elected MPs.
Yes but with the way the UK electoral system is organized most of the people who voted for UKIP, just to take one example, might just as well not have bothered. They were a significant portion of the population and got one MP, agian I'm not a UKIP fan but those voters deserve representation. The whole system seems to be geared up for a couple of large parties taking turns at being in power with the Tories in particular riding tiny rural constituencies into power backed by a ridiculously small number of voters.
Slashdot Mirror
None of this seems "revolutionary" or "magical". Some of it looks like a rip off of Amazon TV, Google Translate, and the same look as last year's model which was nothing more than a larger look of the year before that's model. What happened to Apple supposedly "leading" the way? Did the sheep cause the shepard to fall behind?
Piss and moan, piss and moan...
Just think, you can finally be a huge dick to people on the road without worrying whether they've got a gun and a temper!
Oh wait, they might still have a gun and a temper, and now they don't need to have either hand on the wheel while they're trying to fuck you up.
A gun and a temper? Think of making this upgrade to your driverless car::
....except with a remote control... or better yet, autonomous (and yes, it would run Linux).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm going to love self driving cars. I will never own one, they'll have to tear the steering wheel out of my cold dead hands, but pranking self driving car owners will be funny as hell: https://xkcd.com/1559/
You're pretty much making an argument to tradition here. The correct thing to do would be to counter his claims:
I would like more detail from him on why and how it's broken, and how his replacement is truly different from "su -" but since it doesn't appear to be mutually exclusive with the use of "su" or "su -", other than typical reactionary hate I don't see what the problem is.
Also ask him why the conceptually correctly implemented replacement for simple little su has to be machinectl shell which is like... 16 kilometers long.
Every time I hear some political pundit on TV talking about the evils of communism and the police states of the old Soviet bloc I am reminded of crap like this and I laugh out loud. The more time that passes from the fall of communism the more 1984 becomes reality and not in fascist dictatorships or communist countries like Orwell predicted but in the so called democratic countries of Western Europe and North America. I wonder what Orwell would have made of that?
Dude got nerd sniped. I wouldn't be able to resist. An interesting puzzle mysteriously shows up? Yes please. Basically how I got into programming and math in general.
Of course all they're going to get are people who aren't savvy enough to use ad/tracking blockers and duckduckgo...
Speak for yourseelf. Somebody is monitoring your searches and evaluating you remotely like some lab rat in a glass cage. To me that is ceepy just like all other surveillance, nothing else, just creepy.
" quality of finish, all of these little details that make a beautiful design"
Yeah, that's nice and all, but what we really want is usability. Freedom from the advertising deluge. Control. Everybody and their brother can make a svelte 3D mockup that looks beautiful. But in the end it's going to come down to software. It's why Apple ruled the roost early on. A beautiful piece of garbage is still a piece of garbage. And, tbh, we have enough of that out here at the moment.
And beautiful design and usability are mutually exclusive? Let's save our scorn until after we have actually seen a working example of this thing and confirmed by physically testing the device that it is not usable.
If you can't have a rational discussion between your architects (who are most likely just really senior guys slinging code) and your product managers (who are most likely just sales and account reps without a market vision) you are already screwed.
Shit. I just described my own company.
The decision to go cloud should not be a decision made by any person as the original question implies, it should be a balanced decision made by systems/software/system-architecture people (does it get us anywhere technology wise), business people (does it make financial sense) and marketing types (is this what the customer wants). You might want to throw in a security expert to avoid getting yourself ashleymadisoned.
Which is fine, but if you're going to use such an edge case to make the claim that one suite of software is superior to the other, you're on thin ice.
If that one edge case was his entire case against Liber Office you'd have a point, however he just cited it as a single example. I expect that when it comes to features in spreadsheet apps it's a bit like search engines. The searches that make or break a search engines is not the ability to return hits for not common searches like "america's got talent winners" it's being able to return results for a large set of rare and specific searches like: "ip67 rated bulkhead mounted sma connectors" or "new old stock 1965 mustang steering box". If you talk to people who use Excel extensively to analyze data you'll quickly find that the reason they find LibreOffice lacking is not because Libreoffice is lacking basic features, it is because the Libre Spreadsheet app is unable to perform a for a wide collection of really specific 'edge' tasks that Excel can either do out of the box or for which there exist well established and professionally maintained third party Excel expansion packages. All of that is simply down to Excel having been around longer and having many more users doing a wider variety of specialised tasks that Libreoffice Calc has had and for Libreoffice Calc that boils down to the fact that gaining market share will be a long and tedious up hill struggle.
well the second part of the prank was obviously to hack and publish the user database.
a pretty elaborate prank I must say, I salute!
This hacker/prankster should be easy to find, he probably reads Slashdot uses an Android phone and had a girlfriend (that last fact should shorten the suspect list considerably). Oh, and he probably only got angry enough to hack AshleyMadison.com because she cheated on him with an Apple iPhone using hipster.
According to this report no Chinese city gets into the top 10 most polluted.... http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/world...
According to this 1 Xi'an is the worst in the world. With Phoenix being the worst American city at 97th worst, LA is 107th, London 171st http://www.numbeo.com/pollutio...
Xi'an makes one list but not the other, that just comes to show how reliable these lists are. The rule of thumb here is that when you are going to work and you find yourself wishing that you could echolocate like a bat to find the subway station because you can't see your hand in front of your face due to smog then it's time to consider moving to a cleaner place. The sad thing is that many cities in China fit that description because of the fact that for decades the Chinese Govt. has not cared one bit about environmental issues because it lowered production costs. There are free market pundits in the west who'd like us to follow the Chinese example based on the premise that environmental regulations get in the way of companies making profit. If you want to know where that leads take a look at China. However, the Chinese public is getting fed up with this and that explosion in Tianjin is just the latest drop into the cup of their dissatisfaction (It's absolutely unbelievable that those firemen were sent into a hazardous chemicals storage facility without knowing what was kept there, simply because even the facilities operators didn't know). It will be interesting to watch what happens when that cup fills up and flows over.
Manslaughter... copyright infringement... they should both get about the same sentences, right? Nothing weird about that at all, is there? ~
Well these are conservatives we are talking about here and they do love draconian justice. Plus, we all know what massive success the Americans have had in their war on drugs with their longstanding policy of sentencing people to multi decade mandatory minimum sentences whenever they are caught with a few too many grams of pot.
I've seen a third world country go from pots lines to buried fiber, superior internet speed to most USA major cities, ubiquitous 3.75G mobile internet....in less than 10 years. And Cuba is smaller and less populous.
I'll wager by 2025 most Cubans traveling to USA will be complaining about the shit internet and shit cellular here.
I'm not a telecommunications industry insider so I have never quite understood why we are pissing about (pardon my French) with 3, 4 and 5G when we could have switched to long range WiFi a decade ago. If we can miniaturize a radio transmitter/receiver to the point where it will fit into a mobile phone and still provide high speed radio communications with a cell tower up to 35km away we can design a WiFi module that will fit into a laptop or tablet and that can communicate with a distant radio tower or a local hotspot with equal facility. What I'd like to see is Cuba or some other country to do that does not really give the volume of gas contained in a standard rectal emission about what the telecommunications industry thinks is build something like municipal wifi, except nationwide where there is no GSM, just skype like apps and where you can choose whichever app gives you best performance or features because they all run over the same IP network anyway.
I challenge the next astronomer who discovers a new galaxy to call it Samsung....
Will there also be an array of cleaner upper robots to collect these things things into bundles when they break down so they can be ejected from orbit and burned up in the atmosphere (or disposed of in some other way) or do we just keep rocketing micro satellites up there by the pallet as the old ones break down and try not to think about the space junk problem?
Seems about as credible as that thing Homer Simpson won for being fat and falling in a hole.
yes, we now have confirmation that the ISDA is a bumch of clueless morons.
The Windows 10 Start Menu is an abomination that has almost none of the functionality of a real Start Menu (ie, Windows 7 and earlier) and all of the bad things of the Windows 8 Start Screen now crammed into a smaller space.
Bullshit. I haven't had to go to the internet once to find out how to do something on W10, unlike the abomination whack-a- mole administration method of Windows 8. I installed and started using and started supporting all in the same day. Can't ask for much more than that.
And lest ye call me a shill, look up my other posts.
So what you are saying is that Windows has finally become borderline usable after a mere 23 years of varying degrees of FUBAR?
Yes, it's called Android compatibility.
Oh, I thought it was called 'Having a Java VM'.
Nokia was dying even before being bought by Microsoft. What killed them is Symbian, and their refusal to switch to Android when it was the time (2008/2009). When they decided to switch to Windows Phone, it was already too late.
Jolla seems to be doing fine with MeeGo/Sailfish and it runs Android apps... believe it or not there is life beyond Android.
Calling these things 'unsinkable aircraft carriers' shows just what a daft idea this is, militarily.
In a no-holds-barred fight, they have a HUGE bullseye painted on them, and will be easy to take out. The general idea of naval power is to project power, and being able to hide this capability in plain sight in a huge ocean is what makes a movable aircraft carrier a better idea. You wouldn't use one of these to fight an actual war.
Fixed fortifications are monuments to human stupidity. I could see this being like the Maginot Line or the Atlantic Wall.t
That quote is lifted directly form the lips of George S. Patton and while it is mainly correct, you are not going to base your national defense on fortresses in this day and age. fortifited positions can be used very effectively in defebsive and delaying actions and were used very effectively against Patton himself in places such as Metz. Fort Driant was effectively everything Patton despised and yet he was unable to deal with it in the swift and effortless manner everybody expected him to after his bold claims about the uselessness of defensive positions. Patton was full of hot air and since he was a very good commander he could afford to be full of hot air because he could back most of his statement up with his ability but not that one. Patton got his ass handed to him a few times when dealing with fixed fortifications. I would have liked to see Patton launch a Blitzkrieg like offensive up the Italian peninsula and claim at the end of it that fortifications are monuments to stupidity. As it was he was saved from that embarrassment by his temper after he slapped those soldiers. Finally Pattons own famous dash to save the situation during the Battle of the bulge revolved around on a very famous fortification and defense of the town of Bastogne so perhaps fortifications and defensive warfare are not quite that useless. If you want to get an idea of how easy it is to assault a fortified position, even on that is defended by a poorly equipped 3rd world guerilla army without an air force or effective air defenses, ask a US Army veteran of the Afghanistan campaign or some of the US and Iraqi soldiers that fought the second battle of Fallujah.
The only reason why they would do this, is so that they can call it sovereign territory, and to game international border rules to their own benefit.
Of course they are... they want to be the one carrying the big stick in the region so they are bullying a couple of US allies to challenge the one power in the region who currently thought to carry the biggest stick. If Obama had any balls he would help the Philippines and Taiwan to push back and capitalise on this Chinese aggression to increase US influence among other nations threatened by China's imperialist tendencies. China's claims territorial claims in the South China Sea are quite outrageous since in some cases the Chinese even observe the 12 mile limit of some of the smaller powers in the region in their avaricious frenzy to make sure no potential mineable resources end up in the 'wrong hands'.
Why do they need any international law? Might makes right.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a big rock...
So? find a bigger rock. Tell US Pacific Fleet command to sail a carrier group straight through their artificial island chain.
Clarkson had to screw it up by being a dick
Hahahaha you still think this was a screw-up? It cost Clarkson basically nothing and got him a bunch of free publicity, and he's getting precisely what he wanted. You ignorant tool. You think that because Clarkson's character is a buffoon that he's an idiot? You really think you're something special, don't you?
Hahahahahaha If anybody here is an ignorant tool it's you. Are you really trying to convince us that Clarkson pretended to blow his gasket and punched Oisin Tymon in the face to get out of his BBC lucrative contract and strike it big on Amazon Prime of all places? I am simply awestruck by the genius of that plan.
Except, they wont be electable because the longer a party is in power, the more fucking batshit it becomes, and as such people are going to split away from it and it wont hold a parliamentary majority. It may remain the biggest party but wont be able to form a government, hell, it's barely there now - wait until the EU referendum is over and hard right Tories defect to UKIP whatever the result, their majority doesn't have much life in it. We've already seen a massive split of the vote the last two elections - an unheard of coalition, followed by a fracturing of parties.
I was thinking something similar. He really has two choices. Piss off the other EU nations, keep things peaceful at home and risk leaving the EU (the route he will take if push comes to shove) or try to compromise and be conciliatory with the EU nations in which case he'll have a backbench rebellion on his hand which might split the party. With an industry that is riding him not to leave the EU, a parliamentary majority of just ten MPs and band of rebel backbenchers that is way bigger than ten MPs his position is difficult to say the least. He would have been better off in a coalition, unheard of as that may be in the UK even if it is normal in most other countries.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone who lives outside the UK actually understand British politics?
Few people in the UK understand British politics either, including the post you quoted.
Who's talking about UK politics? I don't give a rat's ass about understanding UK politics. I was musing about the idiocy of the UK electoral system. Given 650 parliamentary seats, UKIP would have won at least 70 seats using electoral rules used in countries that try to minimize gerrymandering. Under the current UK system they get one seat, I repeat one seat. That is neither fair nor is it normal by any standard. I do not need to be an expert in UK politics to know that that's a stupid system, all it takes is basic math.
The UK electorate recently had an opportunity to change the electoral system to the "Alternative Vote", while would at least have decreased the disparity between the percentage of the vote and the number of MPs. In the referendum on the subject, 67.9% voted "no". So however twisted the current system is, I think they only have themselves to blame...
You're preaching to the converted here, I'm in the minority who was in favor of that change. In fact I don't think it went far enough. I won't be happy until one citizen effectively has one vote. The way it is now rural constituencies for example weigh more than heavily populated areas which is downright unfair and as I pointed out the fact that UKIP got 13 percent of the vote and one MP is simply outrageous. Democracy is about fair representation, not keeping the Tories in power so that they can lock the British people in behind a national firewall, record and warehouse every word they say or write, watch their every move with CCTV cameras and shove laws like this down their gullet that is effectively implementable for those burdened with following it. Oh, and if David Cameron thinks he's going to keep teenage boys from finding titty pictures on the internet he's in for a surprise.
You're ignoring the turnout. Only 66.1% of people bothered to vote. Which means 33.9% of the electorate don't care who won. Their inactivity is just as complicit in the result as those who voted for the "nasty party".
And this is moot anyway. British democracy allows you to select your local MP - and that's all. The PM and the government are appointed by the Queen based on the allegiances of the elected MPs.
Yes but with the way the UK electoral system is organized most of the people who voted for UKIP, just to take one example, might just as well not have bothered. They were a significant portion of the population and got one MP, agian I'm not a UKIP fan but those voters deserve representation. The whole system seems to be geared up for a couple of large parties taking turns at being in power with the Tories in particular riding tiny rural constituencies into power backed by a ridiculously small number of voters.