There are a lot of Hindus who would like to erect shrines to their couple of tens of thousands of gods right next to yours.
Space may become an issue but faith overcomes all.
I might be even able to round up a couple of Buddhists to join in with their demands. But they are mostly awefully nice people and there is a statistical chance the Hindus already have that one covered. Which might also be true for Lord Jeebus, Mohammed, Moses and Geoff the God of Biscuits.
Those nutters who allowed that religious monument on public space can't have it both ways. Geoff will not be denied!
Just because it is so doesn't make it true! You lovely heretic!
Please report to the POEE. They will reeducate you properly and convert you to the beliefs you currently hold. For the greater good. Or not.
I found people who studied philosophy make very good project managers and decision-makers. Must have something to do with reading about all those different approaches and methodologies to solve those dilemmas or indeed know when they are propably not solvable. MBAs simply apply the models they don't understand and hunt for KPIs to optimize without even thinking what they try to achieve, if this is the right way to do it and lacking an appropriate metric to measure the rate of their failure.
They tend to have very strong opinions and very weak understanding of the systems they try to administrate.
Believe me, whatever Munich does stays in Munich. It will not be adopted by the Bavarian gov since even if they are seated in Munich they hate the city administration with a passion. Opposing parties. OTOH the mayor of Munich ran for office in Bavaria and failed as he was expected to. And even if Bavaria adopted LiMUX it wouldn't be used on a German federal level. But this time not because of opposing parties. It's something even worse: sister parties.
Ain't highly federal gov structures a hilarious thing? Honestly, who needs imported sitcoms if you have politics.
Nope. Those were in Pakistan. Even if they had been in Afghanistan this was long ofter the war had officially ended and the mopping up process against "insurgents" had started.
The US laws here are completely irrelevant. This is against international laws, against anything that is right and decent and there is a reason why the US(and the Norks and other dodgy states) doesn't hand over their alleged war criminals to The Hague because there international law will be applied. It must be awefully bad press if your own soldiers sit on the same bench as Milosevic instead of a sympathetic US military tribunal.
Simple: The conservative party who were the only ones to vote against this were in the minority. The centre-left party, the green party and the GLBT folks voted for the Linux transition. It was a vote for long-term indipendence against short-term planning and a matter of principle.
I had dealings with the LHM back then and I do fully believe they haven't saved a single cent on the transition. There were hordes of IBM and SuSE consultants stampeding through the halls and they hired a bunch of permanent employees for this. In fact MS made them a couple of offers which as it turned out they could refuse. They hadn't planned on saving money so special deals by MS were not that juicy.
The frustration of the MS sales reps(there were even rumors monkey boy himself traveled to Munich) must have been immense. Munich back then was still running NT and a lot of their servers were Suns. In short it must have been the big cahuna back then.
First of all police officers need to be much more transparent. Their accountability needs to be improved. Police brutality and esprit de corps types of cover-up of malfeasance is a problem worldwide. Not only in the US, but Germany and the UK, too. There are conflicting reports about the amount of force used during arrests. Too many detainees(the majority of which aren't hardened criminals) have suffered injuries while a band of coppers declared unisono that they fell down a flight of stairs, resisted arrests and the usual nonesense. I'd dearly like to see recordings for everything they do.
On the other hand we shouldn't forget that coppers are also persons with a right to privacy and that the ones who pick up drunks, get called to petty disputes and car accidents are notoriously underappreciated, underpaid and overworked with a high risk for burn-out. They do deserve our appreciation for that.
So I'd say that yes, we should do any type of recording including video, sound and GPS data. But we also need PROPER ways to protect the individual rights of the coppers. If the GPS data is needed for statistical analysis then we should store it anonymously and in bulk with no way to tie it back to individual officers. If we OTOH need that data for accountability purposes then it needs to be sealed away and only be accessed by court order. A proper court. Not a FISA kangaroo court.
You crack your little doughnut shop based jokes but if you spend some thought on a problem then you will find that it isn't so easy to solve in a world that stubbornly refuses to be black&white and where stereotypes hardly happen. This is not a third rate The Simpsons episode.
Anwar al-Awlaki - intentionally executed without trial.
Samir Khan - unintentionally executed as part of the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki.
Jude Kenan Mohammad - intentionally executed. Had previously been convicted of terrorism conspiracy, but not to a sufficient degree to actually be imprisoned.
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki - 16 year old with no personal involvement in terrorism, but who had a father (Anwar al-Awlaki) who was involved. Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary, stated that he "should have had a more responsible father." Unclear at what level the execution was a mistake.
Three of the four are arguably "bad guys" - but they should still have gotten a proper trial, so we could determine if they are. The last one doesn't even seem to be a bad guy, just somebody that happened to be born to an unfortunate father.
Surely those drone strikes have produced more deaths than that. Unless these so called "surgical strikes" involve explosions that do only affect the intended target instead of everybody in the blast area. Sure, you can keep the number of extrajudically killed "targets" low if you only list those you intentionally killed. This kind of fiddling with the figures for the press and the voters at home is especially cynical if it involves human beings blwn to smithereens. What about the family of Uzman Wasir who was killed in a drone strike while he was off selling fruit? His two kids, his brother and his wife makes four deaths. But that wasn't an extra judicial killing but a "'orrible, 'orrible misunderstanding".
Precisely. The amount of jingoism in the US is nearly without peer. In fact it is a bit frowned upon in Europe since this was precisely what led to one of the most pointless and bloody wars that ever devastated a whole continent. Afterwards nobody really knew what WW1 was really about. Some toff getting shot? Imperialistic bastards(which describes absolutely everybody involved) getting uppity? At the beginning it was considered a bit of a sports event by Joe Public. We'll have this match won before Christmas because we are the best.
Heh. Everybody involved in THAT movie was a bit appalled that the yuppies started wearing suspenders to work. A typical situation of "you didn't quite get the point".
Some awefully clever chap in The Grauniad speculated the lack of noise from the UK might come from misplaced pride stemming from Bletchley Park and 007. That or the dearly beloved island monkeys wear so much wool it's easy to pull over their eyes. God bless their tiny little toes. Fee-fie-foe-fum, I smell a bloodless Englishman.
I shouldn't rock the boat too much since the German authorities seem not so much miffed at the spying but that they weren't playing any significant part in it. Although there was some GCHQ praise for the BND capabilities. The official response to that seems to have been "Gosh! Jolly! That's an awefully nice thing to say, isn't it?". Mutti is rather upset she hadn't been properly and officially notified the Yanks had been naughty nosy little boys.
All in all it seems nobody refrained from spying on everybody. Interestingly only the Mossad remains with not more than the usual egg on face. It's so beautiful I might break into song at any given minute. Something about model generals should be appropriate.
Let's not forget the recent findings that gov outsourcing isn't too hot either.
Seems like they outsourced entire bureaucracies to G4S and their ilk(most of the contracts go to 4 megacorps) without any kind of oversight. And then, suddenly, olympics and the armed forces have to step in due to G4S not being able to provide security. Also the embarrassment of the outsourced fit-for-work assessment centres produce lawsuit after lawsuit. The total saving seem to eat up the entire budget of a couple of ministries.
The UK Tories under Cameron are indeed appalling. It is hard to decide if they are merely incompetent or malicious. Their actions of late point to the latter. Indeed one could only speculate how bad it would have been without the LibDems.
The UK political scene has always been a bit foreign to my German tastes. A backbench MP suggesting that feckless fathers should be dragged to work in chains in defense of the badly executed bedroom-tax would have been forced to apologize in German politics. And he would have lost his seat come the next election. The comically idiotic ads targeting "illegal" immigrants to turn themselves in are both malicious and incompetent. And even now there is another push to introduce the "snooper's charta" which in the light of the recent revelations about the GCHQ isn't even needed for them to do what they do.
The other paries in the UK look good in comparison because of the unmitigated disaster that is the current Tory crop. Thatcher was bad but potentially a necessary evil due to the unmaintainability of the Postwar Dream. But think as I may I can't begin to fathom where to start to look for a justification for that cabinet, that PM and that party. They do not even have the use of a compass needle that permanently points to the south. You can't say "let's do the opposite of what they are suggesting" due to the utter confusion that is their politics.
How many of those are privately operated and how many of those are courtesy of Theresa May?
The privately operated CCTVs are mostly unwatched and the businesses will only look at them when there is a need because honestly, they don't make money. They are propably writing over the same tape over and over again and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the material were completely useless.
They are a bit like a backup process a company has set up a couple of years ago and nobody testing the actual backups or even looking at the logs. When push comes to shove they propably are useless. Unless of course the London Underground ones. The ones pointing at a bus stop in Derby most likely are useless.
There I do agree. Windows never made anything better. Windows 7/7.5 Mobe had the air of exclusivity(because everybody already had abandoned it) so I guess that's what sold it to Nokia. Don't forget that Nokia's phone division thought themselves to be special and better than the rest. So going with the flow was really against corporate culture. They had their own reality distortion field just without the clever marketing.
It's a crying shame because I heard good things about their latest crop.
Yes, he could have gone Android. I still remember the discussion about that a couple of years ago. The rationale then was that that would turn Nokia from THE dominant market player into just another mobe manufacturer. That was when the sales figures of Android devices was going up and was predicted to rise even more at the cost of Nokia's share.
The difference between Google developing Android and Nokia developing Maemo was that Google was really comitted to it whereas the infighting at Nokia around Maemo/Meego was legendary. Also Google was prepared to quickly go public with a crap first Android version while Nokia kept polishing, reworking and restructuring their new systems just to find a market that wouldn't sustain another mobe OS.
I had an E61 in 2007 and I thought it was the bee's knees and fanboyishly shrugged off anybody who said it was dated since I could run ScummVM on it. In 2008/2009 I was seriously eying a N800 and was counting the moments until its release. One year later I had an Android phone with the same capabilities. Elop showed up at Nokia in 2010.
In 2008 Maemo was designed with a single-touch gesture UI while world+dog was raving about "pinch to zoom". Hadn't they dragged their feet and rushed it out they could have competed with Android.
The only thing I grant you lot was that jumping onto the Windows mobe train(well dog cart at most) was doomed. But Nokia was dying/dead long before Elop put his dick into it.
That moron completely destroyed Nokia, he will do the same to Microsoft.
He didn't destroy Nokia. It was doomed before he showed up. They had slept through the smartphone revolution for quite some time before and spent most of the time infighting or directionlessly redoing the Meego/Maemo UI over and over again.
He failed to turn the company around after the market had already been neatly divided between iThings and Androids.
From a business point of view Microsoft had used the XBox to get a foothold "in the living room" and has sunk quite a lot of money into that and the competition is fierce. It might very well be that they should do just that.
While I too am not a fan of government bans I have to say that relying on consumer choice for them to get something as basic nutrition right is beyond naive. While vegans truly must come from another star system the mainstream is not any better.
To my European taste the US food is not edible. Everything is far, far too sweet. Setting aside the madness that is HFCS most of the processed foods are frankly disgusting. Why there needs to be so much sweetener in bread, ketchup, peanutbutter, stuff that doesn't need to be sweet is beyond me. And the sweets are so sweet you feel like your mouth is being pickled with sugar.
This, too, is a problem in Europe. But in the US you can detect it with a minimum of functional taste buds.
I think the story you can take away from TFA is that you shouldn't buy processed food. Anywhere. Problem is, it tends to be dirt cheap.
A person is a person. Illegal is only a state of law and as such arbitrary. If a law gets in the way of doing the right thing like sheltering somebody who's country has been just bombed to bits then you can safely ignore it.
I don't get why so many people are prepared to accept laws at face value.
Sociopaths are, for the most part, charming. The ones who do not get thrown in prison or institutionalized have adapted to demonstrate the proper behavior at the right time, simply to get what they want.
No, those are psychopaths. Sociopaths are in fact those who can't even simulate being sane in public.
But , honestly, couldn't the whole thing be solved with instituting a hunting season w/ no limits? They still have hunting weapons over there don't they?
A list of registered offenders and a box of 12 ga. shells. All that's left is to call for an appt. with the taxidermist.
Personally I'd love a hunting season. I already print off the I.D. pages from the local registry and tack them to lampposts near the offenders home, in case the neighbors didn't know about the registry. What FUN! If they get torn down, I just put them back up again , wheeeeeeeeeeeee! Sneakernet LIVES! Webpages on poles.
Unfortunately, we even have to import the bananas.
...and the monarchs.
Let's not forget the Windsors rebranded themselves from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha when being German was considered somewhat unpopular during WW1. So they named themselves after a German brand of Danish cookies.
So you think leaking confidential documents *doesn't* damage security in some way? Have you just landed from Planet Naive?
In this case, pretty much no.
In this case, pretty much yes.
It is a severe threat to the job security and budget of those parasites who lost a sense of proportion of what is acceptable and those who were supposed to oversee them.
National security is still exposed to the usual threat by those who are supposed to run the country for the benefit of all. Which justifies a permanent orange threat level. If the current bunch were vikings, Alfred the Great would rise from the grave and drive them back into the sea. Although that might not be possible due to the current international treaties concerning pollution of the North Sea.
(Copied from a Techdirt comment):
I wonder if the CIA distributes pedo material the same way they get Swiss bankers to drink-drive?
Imagine you are a UK minister. Like most men you look at porn because you're biologically programmed to like pictures of woman doing stuff. Like most ministers you pretend porn is vial and evil, because that's how you get elected.
CIA wants to turn you into an apparatchik, so they do their 'redirect' attack, the one they use to MITM Google in one of the leaks. CIA redirects them to a kiddy porn server in Orlando, now the logs of both GCHQ and NSA show them visiting a kiddy diddling site.
CIA man visits minister and explains the shock and outrage at finding this, but assures minister that he's a good man and therefore the CIA won't tell.
Minister can't go to MI5 because Parker could be a CIA apparatchik (he is doing an attack on the free press FFS). Indeed he can't get help at all, because all it takes is ONE apparatchik among the people in the know and he is gone.
It may sound fanciful, but the mechanisms are already in place. Also read a few leaks. The plan to attack Greenwald & Wikileaks.
Slashdot Mirror
I recommend a statue of Jesus, the FSM, Vishnu, and Abraham, all playing poker.
Vish, keep those hands where we can see them!
You heretic forgot Geoff the God of Biscuits again! His crunchy anger shall come over you like a giant pot of tea!
There are a lot of Hindus who would like to erect shrines to their couple of tens of thousands of gods right next to yours.
Space may become an issue but faith overcomes all.
I might be even able to round up a couple of Buddhists to join in with their demands. But they are mostly awefully nice people and there is a statistical chance the Hindus already have that one covered. Which might also be true for Lord Jeebus, Mohammed, Moses and Geoff the God of Biscuits.
Those nutters who allowed that religious monument on public space can't have it both ways. Geoff will not be denied!
Just because it is so doesn't make it true! You lovely heretic!
Please report to the POEE. They will reeducate you properly and convert you to the beliefs you currently hold. For the greater good. Or not.
I found people who studied philosophy make very good project managers and decision-makers. Must have something to do with reading about all those different approaches and methodologies to solve those dilemmas or indeed know when they are propably not solvable. MBAs simply apply the models they don't understand and hunt for KPIs to optimize without even thinking what they try to achieve, if this is the right way to do it and lacking an appropriate metric to measure the rate of their failure.
They tend to have very strong opinions and very weak understanding of the systems they try to administrate.
Believe me, whatever Munich does stays in Munich. It will not be adopted by the Bavarian gov since even if they are seated in Munich they hate the city administration with a passion. Opposing parties. OTOH the mayor of Munich ran for office in Bavaria and failed as he was expected to. And even if Bavaria adopted LiMUX it wouldn't be used on a German federal level. But this time not because of opposing parties. It's something even worse: sister parties.
Ain't highly federal gov structures a hilarious thing? Honestly, who needs imported sitcoms if you have politics.
Nope. Those were in Pakistan. Even if they had been in Afghanistan this was long ofter the war had officially ended and the mopping up process against "insurgents" had started.
The US laws here are completely irrelevant. This is against international laws, against anything that is right and decent and there is a reason why the US(and the Norks and other dodgy states) doesn't hand over their alleged war criminals to The Hague because there international law will be applied. It must be awefully bad press if your own soldiers sit on the same bench as Milosevic instead of a sympathetic US military tribunal.
Simple: The conservative party who were the only ones to vote against this were in the minority. The centre-left party, the green party and the GLBT folks voted for the Linux transition. It was a vote for long-term indipendence against short-term planning and a matter of principle.
I had dealings with the LHM back then and I do fully believe they haven't saved a single cent on the transition. There were hordes of IBM and SuSE consultants stampeding through the halls and they hired a bunch of permanent employees for this. In fact MS made them a couple of offers which as it turned out they could refuse. They hadn't planned on saving money so special deals by MS were not that juicy.
The frustration of the MS sales reps(there were even rumors monkey boy himself traveled to Munich) must have been immense. Munich back then was still running NT and a lot of their servers were Suns. In short it must have been the big cahuna back then.
I am in two minds concerning this.
First of all police officers need to be much more transparent. Their accountability needs to be improved. Police brutality and esprit de corps types of cover-up of malfeasance is a problem worldwide. Not only in the US, but Germany and the UK, too. There are conflicting reports about the amount of force used during arrests. Too many detainees(the majority of which aren't hardened criminals) have suffered injuries while a band of coppers declared unisono that they fell down a flight of stairs, resisted arrests and the usual nonesense. I'd dearly like to see recordings for everything they do.
On the other hand we shouldn't forget that coppers are also persons with a right to privacy and that the ones who pick up drunks, get called to petty disputes and car accidents are notoriously underappreciated, underpaid and overworked with a high risk for burn-out. They do deserve our appreciation for that.
So I'd say that yes, we should do any type of recording including video, sound and GPS data. But we also need PROPER ways to protect the individual rights of the coppers. If the GPS data is needed for statistical analysis then we should store it anonymously and in bulk with no way to tie it back to individual officers. If we OTOH need that data for accountability purposes then it needs to be sealed away and only be accessed by court order. A proper court. Not a FISA kangaroo court.
You crack your little doughnut shop based jokes but if you spend some thought on a problem then you will find that it isn't so easy to solve in a world that stubbornly refuses to be black&white and where stereotypes hardly happen. This is not a third rate The Simpsons episode.
Anwar al-Awlaki - intentionally executed without trial. Samir Khan - unintentionally executed as part of the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki. Jude Kenan Mohammad - intentionally executed. Had previously been convicted of terrorism conspiracy, but not to a sufficient degree to actually be imprisoned. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki - 16 year old with no personal involvement in terrorism, but who had a father (Anwar al-Awlaki) who was involved. Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary, stated that he "should have had a more responsible father." Unclear at what level the execution was a mistake.
Three of the four are arguably "bad guys" - but they should still have gotten a proper trial, so we could determine if they are. The last one doesn't even seem to be a bad guy, just somebody that happened to be born to an unfortunate father.
Surely those drone strikes have produced more deaths than that. Unless these so called "surgical strikes" involve explosions that do only affect the intended target instead of everybody in the blast area. Sure, you can keep the number of extrajudically killed "targets" low if you only list those you intentionally killed. This kind of fiddling with the figures for the press and the voters at home is especially cynical if it involves human beings blwn to smithereens. What about the family of Uzman Wasir who was killed in a drone strike while he was off selling fruit? His two kids, his brother and his wife makes four deaths. But that wasn't an extra judicial killing but a "'orrible, 'orrible misunderstanding".
Dear Sirs,
Would you kindly fuck yourselves.
Kind regards,
The Rest of the World
Precisely. The amount of jingoism in the US is nearly without peer. In fact it is a bit frowned upon in Europe since this was precisely what led to one of the most pointless and bloody wars that ever devastated a whole continent. Afterwards nobody really knew what WW1 was really about. Some toff getting shot? Imperialistic bastards(which describes absolutely everybody involved) getting uppity? At the beginning it was considered a bit of a sports event by Joe Public. We'll have this match won before Christmas because we are the best.
Heh. Everybody involved in THAT movie was a bit appalled that the yuppies started wearing suspenders to work. A typical situation of "you didn't quite get the point".
Some awefully clever chap in The Grauniad speculated the lack of noise from the UK might come from misplaced pride stemming from Bletchley Park and 007. That or the dearly beloved island monkeys wear so much wool it's easy to pull over their eyes. God bless their tiny little toes. Fee-fie-foe-fum, I smell a bloodless Englishman.
I shouldn't rock the boat too much since the German authorities seem not so much miffed at the spying but that they weren't playing any significant part in it. Although there was some GCHQ praise for the BND capabilities. The official response to that seems to have been "Gosh! Jolly! That's an awefully nice thing to say, isn't it?". Mutti is rather upset she hadn't been properly and officially notified the Yanks had been naughty nosy little boys.
All in all it seems nobody refrained from spying on everybody. Interestingly only the Mossad remains with not more than the usual egg on face. It's so beautiful I might break into song at any given minute. Something about model generals should be appropriate.
Let's not forget the recent findings that gov outsourcing isn't too hot either.
Seems like they outsourced entire bureaucracies to G4S and their ilk(most of the contracts go to 4 megacorps) without any kind of oversight. And then, suddenly, olympics and the armed forces have to step in due to G4S not being able to provide security. Also the embarrassment of the outsourced fit-for-work assessment centres produce lawsuit after lawsuit. The total saving seem to eat up the entire budget of a couple of ministries.
Jim Hacker would be proud.
The UK Tories under Cameron are indeed appalling. It is hard to decide if they are merely incompetent or malicious. Their actions of late point to the latter. Indeed one could only speculate how bad it would have been without the LibDems.
The UK political scene has always been a bit foreign to my German tastes. A backbench MP suggesting that feckless fathers should be dragged to work in chains in defense of the badly executed bedroom-tax would have been forced to apologize in German politics. And he would have lost his seat come the next election. The comically idiotic ads targeting "illegal" immigrants to turn themselves in are both malicious and incompetent. And even now there is another push to introduce the "snooper's charta" which in the light of the recent revelations about the GCHQ isn't even needed for them to do what they do.
The other paries in the UK look good in comparison because of the unmitigated disaster that is the current Tory crop. Thatcher was bad but potentially a necessary evil due to the unmaintainability of the Postwar Dream. But think as I may I can't begin to fathom where to start to look for a justification for that cabinet, that PM and that party. They do not even have the use of a compass needle that permanently points to the south. You can't say "let's do the opposite of what they are suggesting" due to the utter confusion that is their politics.
How many of those are privately operated and how many of those are courtesy of Theresa May?
The privately operated CCTVs are mostly unwatched and the businesses will only look at them when there is a need because honestly, they don't make money. They are propably writing over the same tape over and over again and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the material were completely useless.
They are a bit like a backup process a company has set up a couple of years ago and nobody testing the actual backups or even looking at the logs. When push comes to shove they propably are useless. Unless of course the London Underground ones. The ones pointing at a bus stop in Derby most likely are useless.
"Non-toxic taste carriers" is such a sexy term for junk/fast food.
Have you ever considered to move into marketing?
There I do agree. Windows never made anything better. Windows 7/7.5 Mobe had the air of exclusivity(because everybody already had abandoned it) so I guess that's what sold it to Nokia. Don't forget that Nokia's phone division thought themselves to be special and better than the rest. So going with the flow was really against corporate culture. They had their own reality distortion field just without the clever marketing.
It's a crying shame because I heard good things about their latest crop.
Yes, he could have gone Android. I still remember the discussion about that a couple of years ago. The rationale then was that that would turn Nokia from THE dominant market player into just another mobe manufacturer. That was when the sales figures of Android devices was going up and was predicted to rise even more at the cost of Nokia's share.
The difference between Google developing Android and Nokia developing Maemo was that Google was really comitted to it whereas the infighting at Nokia around Maemo/Meego was legendary. Also Google was prepared to quickly go public with a crap first Android version while Nokia kept polishing, reworking and restructuring their new systems just to find a market that wouldn't sustain another mobe OS.
I had an E61 in 2007 and I thought it was the bee's knees and fanboyishly shrugged off anybody who said it was dated since I could run ScummVM on it. In 2008/2009 I was seriously eying a N800 and was counting the moments until its release. One year later I had an Android phone with the same capabilities. Elop showed up at Nokia in 2010.
In 2008 Maemo was designed with a single-touch gesture UI while world+dog was raving about "pinch to zoom". Hadn't they dragged their feet and rushed it out they could have competed with Android.
The only thing I grant you lot was that jumping onto the Windows mobe train(well dog cart at most) was doomed. But Nokia was dying/dead long before Elop put his dick into it.
That moron completely destroyed Nokia, he will do the same to Microsoft.
He didn't destroy Nokia. It was doomed before he showed up. They had slept through the smartphone revolution for quite some time before and spent most of the time infighting or directionlessly redoing the Meego/Maemo UI over and over again.
He failed to turn the company around after the market had already been neatly divided between iThings and Androids.
From a business point of view Microsoft had used the XBox to get a foothold "in the living room" and has sunk quite a lot of money into that and the competition is fierce. It might very well be that they should do just that.
Whatever. I don't care either way.
While I too am not a fan of government bans I have to say that relying on consumer choice for them to get something as basic nutrition right is beyond naive. While vegans truly must come from another star system the mainstream is not any better.
To my European taste the US food is not edible. Everything is far, far too sweet. Setting aside the madness that is HFCS most of the processed foods are frankly disgusting. Why there needs to be so much sweetener in bread, ketchup, peanutbutter, stuff that doesn't need to be sweet is beyond me. And the sweets are so sweet you feel like your mouth is being pickled with sugar.
This, too, is a problem in Europe. But in the US you can detect it with a minimum of functional taste buds.
I think the story you can take away from TFA is that you shouldn't buy processed food. Anywhere. Problem is, it tends to be dirt cheap.
A person is a person. Illegal is only a state of law and as such arbitrary. If a law gets in the way of doing the right thing like sheltering somebody who's country has been just bombed to bits then you can safely ignore it.
I don't get why so many people are prepared to accept laws at face value.
Sociopaths are, for the most part, charming. The ones who do not get thrown in prison or institutionalized have adapted to demonstrate the proper behavior at the right time, simply to get what they want.
No, those are psychopaths. Sociopaths are in fact those who can't even simulate being sane in public.
But , honestly, couldn't the whole thing be solved with instituting a hunting season w/ no limits? They still have hunting weapons over there don't they? A list of registered offenders and a box of 12 ga. shells. All that's left is to call for an appt. with the taxidermist. Personally I'd love a hunting season. I already print off the I.D. pages from the local registry and tack them to lampposts near the offenders home, in case the neighbors didn't know about the registry. What FUN! If they get torn down, I just put them back up again , wheeeeeeeeeeeee! Sneakernet LIVES! Webpages on poles.
That is actually a bit creepy.
Unfortunately, we even have to import the bananas.
...and the monarchs.
Let's not forget the Windsors rebranded themselves from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha when being German was considered somewhat unpopular during WW1. So they named themselves after a German brand of Danish cookies.
It's a rightful mess, innit?
So you think leaking confidential documents *doesn't* damage security in some way? Have you just landed from Planet Naive?
In this case, pretty much no.
In this case, pretty much yes.
It is a severe threat to the job security and budget of those parasites who lost a sense of proportion of what is acceptable and those who were supposed to oversee them.
National security is still exposed to the usual threat by those who are supposed to run the country for the benefit of all. Which justifies a permanent orange threat level. If the current bunch were vikings, Alfred the Great would rise from the grave and drive them back into the sea. Although that might not be possible due to the current international treaties concerning pollution of the North Sea.
(Copied from a Techdirt comment): I wonder if the CIA distributes pedo material the same way they get Swiss bankers to drink-drive?
Imagine you are a UK minister. Like most men you look at porn because you're biologically programmed to like pictures of woman doing stuff. Like most ministers you pretend porn is vial and evil, because that's how you get elected.
CIA wants to turn you into an apparatchik, so they do their 'redirect' attack, the one they use to MITM Google in one of the leaks. CIA redirects them to a kiddy porn server in Orlando, now the logs of both GCHQ and NSA show them visiting a kiddy diddling site.
CIA man visits minister and explains the shock and outrage at finding this, but assures minister that he's a good man and therefore the CIA won't tell.
Minister can't go to MI5 because Parker could be a CIA apparatchik (he is doing an attack on the free press FFS). Indeed he can't get help at all, because all it takes is ONE apparatchik among the people in the know and he is gone.
It may sound fanciful, but the mechanisms are already in place. Also read a few leaks. The plan to attack Greenwald & Wikileaks.
http://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Data-intelligence-firms-proposed-a-systematic-attack -against-WikiLeaks/12751/
The leverage they got over a Swiss Banker:
http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-describes-cia-tricks-2013-6
The weird way ministers are behaving.
This practice goes way back. That's how they got Thatcher to do Reagans biddings...