Don't have to use JSPs and don't even really have to go near Oracle. There are fully open source Java stacks.
"ASP Microsoft is the bad guy right."
Truly skilled high quality professionals don't care about fanboyism, they just use the best tool for the job. If that's ASP.NET then so be it.
"Perl The 1990's called and they want their programming back."
I'll let you have that, though I'd argue that Perl is both of a higher quality design in that it's been built with sound academic understanding at it's heart, and more thoroughly tried and tested. It's certainly not worse than PHP that's for sure, though I'd agree there are probably better alternatives now.
"Ruby on Rails, good alternative however it will be hard to find replacement programmers."
Not really, I guess it depends in part what level you're hiring at. Any senior developer or upwards worth his salt will be at a point in their career where you can throw a new language and stack at them and they wont care what it is, they'll just get on and work with it being up to speed in no time at all. It may be harder at junior levels or normal developer levels perhaps but I'm not convinced it would be any more an impediment than companies face hiring say, iOS or Android developers for example though admittedly not as easy as finding Java, C# and PHP developers (though purely PHP only developers tend to be low calibre so you should be asking if you really want them working on your software anyway).
"Python, Python is my favorite language, however it isn't that good for web."
Neither is PHP but that doesn't seem to be much of an impediment to people choosing to use it. I'd argue Python is better because it's learnt from many of PHP's mistakes in this respect.
I don't think that's a bad thing though. Personally I feel a job where I work with multiple languages (and technology stacks) is far more interesting than just working with the same language and framework day in day out for all eternity.
Most of them don't "know" PHP though, they can hack things together in it, but they're blissfully unaware of the hundreds of pitfalls in it that they fall into time and time again.
The problem is that the people who genuinely know PHP, and know those pitfalls well enough to avoid them consistently also know it well enough to know that there are better alternative languages to use instead.
Erm, people have offered better solutions, that's kind of why they bitch.
I'm very much a best tool for the job type of person but the inherent problem with PHP is that it's really not the best tool for any job any more.
If you want high quality secure scalable web development then you need something like Java,.NET, or C++ if you actually know what you're doing with it because catching errors at compile time is always better than (possibly not) catching them at runtime. Most issues with type conversion must be explicitly dealt with before you can even run the application which means your application basically has to be more error free before it can be deployed and hence become an attack vector on a server.
If you really want dynamic language support (and.NET's DLR wont cut it, because for example, you want to host on a non-Windows or non-Mono platform) then there's Python, or node.js if that's your thing.
For I think every single use case there is now something better than PHP, and that's precisely why so many people slate it - because it's a bad language and there's literally no reason to use it anymore. Even the fact it used to be the only offering on cheap webhosting seems to have largely gone out the window now given that hosts always seem to support alternatives to PHP and if yours doesn't you can just switch hosting provider to one that does without any financial or hosting quality cost resulting from that.
The only reason people stick with PHP is either because they're lazy, because it's all they know, and they can't be bothered to move to anything else or because they're too incompetent to understand why PHP is bad (despite the reasons being documented aplenty across the web). "I'm lazy" and "I'm incompetent" is not a legitimate defence of any language though.
Well about 100 of these sub-postmasters are looking at taking them to court over this so yes I suspect they'll win and win big given that people lost houses and went to jail over these bugs.
That and if you're coding to the requirements knowing full well they're wrong then you're just as complicit regardless.
Whenever I've been given a spec that I know is wrong I get it changed, change it myself, or go over the spec writers head if they wont budge and send an e-mail to the highest levels along the lines of "This has x issue. Do you still want me to implement this? Note that if I do go ahead and do it anyway I am not willing to take any responsibility for faults that affect us or the client", then if it does come back to you just print out the e-mail and hold it up to their face. Thankfully nowadays I'm normally the one writing the spec, but there's no "I'm just doing what I'm told" excuse, if you know it's wrong get it fucking changed, if you don't, you're still just as much at fault.
What's the worst they can do? fire you? The software development industry only has an unemployment rate of about 2% - 3% and has largely been recession proof (because even when cuts have been made, other firms have been ramping up automation requiring more developers more than filling the gap). If you're not in the bottom 2% - 3% you can trivially just go work elsewhere.
Either way there's no legitimate reason to just go ahead and implement bad software.
Yes absolutely, I tend to reply to a lot of public consultations, the problem is that they're mostly ineffective. My response weighing up counter points is lost amongst the hundreds of "A dog bit me because I pulled it's tail once so we should just ban them all wah wah wah" responses and certainly isn't given the same weight as that of the police officer being questioned directly by the politicians. More importantly though this consultation occured before the parliamentary committee hearing so it was impossible for me to address falsehoods and offer counterpoints where they were not being sought.
Consultations also don't always happen, are sometimes restricted, and other times are just outright ignored.
The effectiveness of public consultations is pretty poor, they need a better mechanism whereby the public can explicitly raise a formal objection to a comment made in a public hearing and have that included in consideration alongside the notes of the hearing so that it's given more equal weighting. Effectively if they're just interviewing select people like a handful of top police officers then they're not producing law democratically, they're just giving those select few what they want because they're only hearing their side of the story and this is time and time again why bad law passes and as I say, I think it's nearly always because of incompetence in not getting that process right.
"but I used to say that their motto ought to be "Using yesterday's technology today""
It's a problem here in the UK too. Case in point, I believe in the UK the MoD or at least The Army is still standardised around IE6, there has been talk for years about upgrading but I still do not believe it has happened yet.
I think that's a fair argument, I've wondered for some time how much he has given to the press as he must surely have given them more than we're already aware of due to the simple fact that if anything were to happen to him he'd surely want it published to make a point.
What's somewhat interesting is that leaks seem to have stopped occurring through The Guardian though and moved to Der Spiegel. I wonder if, like Assange, he started to have problems with The Guardian?
It's no different here in the UK though, the Conservative part of the coalition government got into power in large part on a ticket of rolling back the surveillance state and excesses of the previous government but once in power it hasn't taken them long to push the interception modernisation programme from the previous government.
I think the problem is that it's easy to make promises when you don't matter, but once in power you have the likes of the security services lying to you - "There's a real threat that if you don't get this law passed for us that there'll be a major terrorist incident and then it'll be all your fault, do you really want that on your head Home Secretary?".
I've actually watched a few of the select committees on the BBC's parliament channel for the UK and it's interesting seeing the questions asked by MPs and answers given by police and such, the MPs are actually quite probing but the problem is there isn't enough plurality of opinion, one example was about changes to dangerous dog laws, specifically that under current law if you're attacked by a dog on private property that is out of control the owner can't be touched, they want to change it so that the owner can be prosecuted unless you were trespassing so that for example you can get in trouble if your dog bites the postman, but not a burglar. The police were pushing for more than that and it was frustrating to watch - they were saying well there are different types of trespassing, what if little Timmy jumps the fence to get his ball? The owner should still be prosecuted if little Timmy gets bitten they argued, but there was no one to offer the counter-balance to that - what if little Timmy was trying to break in and steal shit and just used throwing his ball over the fence as an excuse? Private enclosed garden is a private enclosed garden and little Timmy should learn to knock on the door, not jump the fence.
As a result I could see how bad law could be written such that an owner of a dog could be prosecuted if it bit a criminal who tried to break in or who even got bitten trying to attack the dog itself. There was no malice, the MPs were trying to get a balanced view and were asking fair questions, and the police were just giving their opinion, but what none of them did was consider differing opinions, or look at the other side of the equation and sought to weigh up both sides - it wasn't malice, it was just laziness/incompetence. The lady asking the questions was asking some good questions but she wasn't asking enough good questions, she just simply wasn't smart enough to see where contradictions in the law could arise and to probe the people giving answers as to how they'd square those contradictions against their proposals and so forth to get more balanced objective view.
I think the problem is that we just don't get enough smart people into these sorts of positions, people who can rationally weigh up the pros and cons without bias and who can genuinely take a step back and look at whether something is a good idea with no unforeseen consequences or not. Too many politicians are the type of people who are too easily caught up in sentiment, bias, and subjective personal opinion.
There are of course corrupt politicians too, but I don't think they're all like this, I think a lot genuinely are just incompetent from what I've seen of them at work.
Bradley Manning is another good example, he was working at a field base in Iraq yet not only did he have access to military cables for Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Apache video, he also had access to diplomatic cables from embassies across the globe. All this despite being a low ranking bottom of the pile private on a pretty basic wage.
This alone shows what an utter farce the GP's claim is, there's been plenty of evidence that compartmentalisation in the US security services is far better in theory than it actually is in practice.
That's probably the most pathetic article I've ever seen. It's 80% hearsay, and the remaining 20% has since been proven false by the government themselves.
You realise that some of the people carrying out extraordinary rendition to black sites, something that's established fact, not spy fiction were also contract employees right?
The US has been using ever greater numbers of contractors since 9/11 for a combination of the fact that many politicians have shares in said companies so it profits them directly and also because it provides a layer of deniability should it come back to bite them - "Oh we had no idea the contractors were doing that!". The third and final reason was simply that private sector could scale faster than existing public sector organisations after the massive influx of security spending post 9/11. None of which means that they have any less access to secretive material, in fact, given the sort of risky operations they're using contractors for it's often the contractors that are engaged in the really dirty stuff the government doesn't want to get directly implicated in.
That and the fact that Snowden wasn't always just an external contractor of course, he did actually work at the NSA for some time.
It's not about me reading spy novels (I've never read a single one, don't interest me), it's about your naivety and lack of understanding of the structure of modern military and security operations by government. Or to cut a long story short, you've obviously just not been paying attention this last 10 years.
"Yes, because it's not like there have ever been problems with spread of bacteria in the past and it also doesn't seem like it will ever be a problem in the future either! Who needs to worry about bacteria! Nature wouldn't make something that could hurt me, would it?"
So what are you saying exactly, that you believe that if we could just bacteria proof mobile phones, and ATMs and such that nature will no longer produce anything to hurt you? It's precisely that naivety that I'm pointing out the idiocy of. All it means is that we'll end up with bacteria that evolves mechanisms to defeat the anti-bacterial technologies we implement making them even more difficult to deal with.
I didn't claim that bacteria can't be harmful, but simply that we don't need to go to absurd extremes to try and eliminate all bacteria that we may encounter because that's frankly fucking stupid and nonsensical. There will always be bacteria and there will always be some degree of chance that it will evolve into something very dangerous. Bacteria "proofing" ATMs and so forth without all also wearing masks to stop the spread of airborne bacteria and bacteria proofing our clothes, any handrails we may touch, any food we may eat and everything else isn't going to magically change that at all, there'll still be an ever present threat of a dangerous form of easily spread bacteria however you cut it, the difference is that when it does come it'll have already had to evolve to defeat the low hanging options for dealing with it that we might otherwise have had if we didn't engage in paranoid splashing of said technologies left right and centre to no practical benefit at the time.
"I'd be prepared to accept full responsibility for what someone did with it."
Then you're an idiot because even the law wouldn't recognise it as your fault that someone was killed with your vehicle, yes, even if you feel the need to take it to the extreme that you left the doors open and the keys in the ignition as if that would somehow add any validity to your argument (hint: it doesn't).
Which again highlights the idiocy of your argument.
The fact is that it's long been extremely well established in law that you cannot be held responsible for what some idiot does with your property or a service you pay for. That shouldn't and doesn't need to change in the digital age, it makes sense, otherwise it'd be far too easy to get people jailed/killed - someone left their mobile phone on the desk when they went to the toilet? use it to phone in a death threat to the leader of your country and have them arrested/shot/jailed. Obviously that's a stupid idea to assume that service/product ownership = complete liability for use of that service/product.
No, Russia said they would give him asylum as long as he stopped leaking information. He withdrew his asylum request to Russia in response and so has opted not to take them up their offer in exchange to stop leaking, which is why he's continued leaking.
Russia views him as not their problem whilst he continues to not enter the country officially and if he continues to opt not to officially enter Russia then they seem to let him do whatever he feels the need to do.
Or maybe it's not as compartmentalized as you theorise.
Or maybe Snowden was working at a higher level than the US government has admitted.
Or maybe Snowden simply used the skills he was taught to use against the Chinese against his own government.
Either way, what he says has enough validity that world leaders are listening and issuing formal statements over it, and the US isn't denying it, so it's obviously got a reasonable degree of validity to it and isn't just about parroting speculation like you claim.
What about them? Humans didn't evolve in a vacuum, we evolved to encounter and co-exist with bacteria. Making ATMs bacteria proof wont magically protect you from them, it'll just mean your body is even less well equipped to cope when you inevitably do encounter harmful bacteria elsewhere.
Just stick to basic hygiene like washing your hands before you eat and you'll be fine. GP is right, it's like some kind of cultural OCD.
The problem is that such claims are rarely valid in practice, note the disclaimer:
"Stored properly, designed to last up to 100 years Limited lifetime warranty"
Right, and what is properly? how do you prove they were stored properly if they contest the claim? If it's such a good trustworthy product then why is the warranty limited? what are the limits?
The fact is most manufacturers will make such claims even when they know they are not true because the chance of the staff behind said claims being around in as little as even 10 - 20 years to care is pretty slim and the amount of people who file a claim in the face of failure is negligible enough to be outweighed by the marketing benefits this brings in terms of sales.
Really it's most likely just marketing crap. I've had cheap DVDs and CDs fail in just a couple of years, not all of them, just the odd one or two, and I'm sure the expensive stuff will last much longer, but I sure as hell wouldn't bet my data on them no matter what inflated claim they can come up with (and then backtrack on using the disclaimers).
It's not just fire proofing that's the problem but heat proofing too.
We had a "fire" safe in a building that burnt down once and the hard drive stored inside was useless because much of the plastics used had melted and the paper had browned to the point of pretty much uselessness.
Luckily it was a pretty pointless site that had nothing of value (it was when I worked public sector, so you could really argue that about most sites there) but it certainly taught a lesson not to rely on onsite backups no matter how good your fire safe is. It'll stop shit catching fire, but it wont stop it being cooked to the point of uselessness so unless you're keeping something safe with an extremely high melting point then just store multiple redundant copies securely off-site.
Yes, France is helping Iran by being one of the leading countries in the EU pushing for crippling sanctions being placed on Iran's economy such that it has leading to it's complete economic collapse.
To be fair that's already happening to a large degree. US bases are shutting down en-mass in Europe.
Just the other week the last A10s left so they're very much in exit mode from Europe as an ongoing process. They have no presence at all in many European countries now and even the UK hosts I believe only about 4 air bases, not all (none?) of which are even US exclusive. The US marines only have one base left in the whole of Europe now too IIRC.
Personnel is down to well under 75,000 troops now in the whole of Europe I believe, which spread across a continent of over 700 million people is pretty negligible and that number is decreasing regularly. I believe their largest deployment is still Germany with about 40,000 troops, followed by Italy with about 10,000 and the UK with about 9000. Countries like France and the Scanadinavian nations have none whatsoever (other than for short training/join exercise visits, no permanent deployments).
Slashdot Mirror
"JSP Oracle is the bad guy right.
Don't have to use JSPs and don't even really have to go near Oracle. There are fully open source Java stacks.
"ASP Microsoft is the bad guy right."
Truly skilled high quality professionals don't care about fanboyism, they just use the best tool for the job. If that's ASP.NET then so be it.
"Perl The 1990's called and they want their programming back."
I'll let you have that, though I'd argue that Perl is both of a higher quality design in that it's been built with sound academic understanding at it's heart, and more thoroughly tried and tested. It's certainly not worse than PHP that's for sure, though I'd agree there are probably better alternatives now.
"Ruby on Rails, good alternative however it will be hard to find replacement programmers."
Not really, I guess it depends in part what level you're hiring at. Any senior developer or upwards worth his salt will be at a point in their career where you can throw a new language and stack at them and they wont care what it is, they'll just get on and work with it being up to speed in no time at all. It may be harder at junior levels or normal developer levels perhaps but I'm not convinced it would be any more an impediment than companies face hiring say, iOS or Android developers for example though admittedly not as easy as finding Java, C# and PHP developers (though purely PHP only developers tend to be low calibre so you should be asking if you really want them working on your software anyway).
"Python, Python is my favorite language, however it isn't that good for web."
Neither is PHP but that doesn't seem to be much of an impediment to people choosing to use it. I'd argue Python is better because it's learnt from many of PHP's mistakes in this respect.
I don't think that's a bad thing though. Personally I feel a job where I work with multiple languages (and technology stacks) is far more interesting than just working with the same language and framework day in day out for all eternity.
Most of them don't "know" PHP though, they can hack things together in it, but they're blissfully unaware of the hundreds of pitfalls in it that they fall into time and time again.
The problem is that the people who genuinely know PHP, and know those pitfalls well enough to avoid them consistently also know it well enough to know that there are better alternative languages to use instead.
Erm, people have offered better solutions, that's kind of why they bitch.
I'm very much a best tool for the job type of person but the inherent problem with PHP is that it's really not the best tool for any job any more.
If you want high quality secure scalable web development then you need something like Java, .NET, or C++ if you actually know what you're doing with it because catching errors at compile time is always better than (possibly not) catching them at runtime. Most issues with type conversion must be explicitly dealt with before you can even run the application which means your application basically has to be more error free before it can be deployed and hence become an attack vector on a server.
If you really want dynamic language support (and .NET's DLR wont cut it, because for example, you want to host on a non-Windows or non-Mono platform) then there's Python, or node.js if that's your thing.
For I think every single use case there is now something better than PHP, and that's precisely why so many people slate it - because it's a bad language and there's literally no reason to use it anymore. Even the fact it used to be the only offering on cheap webhosting seems to have largely gone out the window now given that hosts always seem to support alternatives to PHP and if yours doesn't you can just switch hosting provider to one that does without any financial or hosting quality cost resulting from that.
The only reason people stick with PHP is either because they're lazy, because it's all they know, and they can't be bothered to move to anything else or because they're too incompetent to understand why PHP is bad (despite the reasons being documented aplenty across the web). "I'm lazy" and "I'm incompetent" is not a legitimate defence of any language though.
Well about 100 of these sub-postmasters are looking at taking them to court over this so yes I suspect they'll win and win big given that people lost houses and went to jail over these bugs.
That and if you're coding to the requirements knowing full well they're wrong then you're just as complicit regardless.
Whenever I've been given a spec that I know is wrong I get it changed, change it myself, or go over the spec writers head if they wont budge and send an e-mail to the highest levels along the lines of "This has x issue. Do you still want me to implement this? Note that if I do go ahead and do it anyway I am not willing to take any responsibility for faults that affect us or the client", then if it does come back to you just print out the e-mail and hold it up to their face. Thankfully nowadays I'm normally the one writing the spec, but there's no "I'm just doing what I'm told" excuse, if you know it's wrong get it fucking changed, if you don't, you're still just as much at fault.
What's the worst they can do? fire you? The software development industry only has an unemployment rate of about 2% - 3% and has largely been recession proof (because even when cuts have been made, other firms have been ramping up automation requiring more developers more than filling the gap). If you're not in the bottom 2% - 3% you can trivially just go work elsewhere.
Either way there's no legitimate reason to just go ahead and implement bad software.
Yes absolutely, I tend to reply to a lot of public consultations, the problem is that they're mostly ineffective. My response weighing up counter points is lost amongst the hundreds of "A dog bit me because I pulled it's tail once so we should just ban them all wah wah wah" responses and certainly isn't given the same weight as that of the police officer being questioned directly by the politicians. More importantly though this consultation occured before the parliamentary committee hearing so it was impossible for me to address falsehoods and offer counterpoints where they were not being sought.
Consultations also don't always happen, are sometimes restricted, and other times are just outright ignored.
The effectiveness of public consultations is pretty poor, they need a better mechanism whereby the public can explicitly raise a formal objection to a comment made in a public hearing and have that included in consideration alongside the notes of the hearing so that it's given more equal weighting. Effectively if they're just interviewing select people like a handful of top police officers then they're not producing law democratically, they're just giving those select few what they want because they're only hearing their side of the story and this is time and time again why bad law passes and as I say, I think it's nearly always because of incompetence in not getting that process right.
"but I used to say that their motto ought to be "Using yesterday's technology today""
It's a problem here in the UK too. Case in point, I believe in the UK the MoD or at least The Army is still standardised around IE6, there has been talk for years about upgrading but I still do not believe it has happened yet.
I'm guessing MIT haven't tapped Google's fibre like the NSA so are doing it on a consent based basis, but no, I haven't read TFA.
I think that's a fair argument, I've wondered for some time how much he has given to the press as he must surely have given them more than we're already aware of due to the simple fact that if anything were to happen to him he'd surely want it published to make a point.
What's somewhat interesting is that leaks seem to have stopped occurring through The Guardian though and moved to Der Spiegel. I wonder if, like Assange, he started to have problems with The Guardian?
It's no different here in the UK though, the Conservative part of the coalition government got into power in large part on a ticket of rolling back the surveillance state and excesses of the previous government but once in power it hasn't taken them long to push the interception modernisation programme from the previous government.
I think the problem is that it's easy to make promises when you don't matter, but once in power you have the likes of the security services lying to you - "There's a real threat that if you don't get this law passed for us that there'll be a major terrorist incident and then it'll be all your fault, do you really want that on your head Home Secretary?".
I've actually watched a few of the select committees on the BBC's parliament channel for the UK and it's interesting seeing the questions asked by MPs and answers given by police and such, the MPs are actually quite probing but the problem is there isn't enough plurality of opinion, one example was about changes to dangerous dog laws, specifically that under current law if you're attacked by a dog on private property that is out of control the owner can't be touched, they want to change it so that the owner can be prosecuted unless you were trespassing so that for example you can get in trouble if your dog bites the postman, but not a burglar. The police were pushing for more than that and it was frustrating to watch - they were saying well there are different types of trespassing, what if little Timmy jumps the fence to get his ball? The owner should still be prosecuted if little Timmy gets bitten they argued, but there was no one to offer the counter-balance to that - what if little Timmy was trying to break in and steal shit and just used throwing his ball over the fence as an excuse? Private enclosed garden is a private enclosed garden and little Timmy should learn to knock on the door, not jump the fence.
As a result I could see how bad law could be written such that an owner of a dog could be prosecuted if it bit a criminal who tried to break in or who even got bitten trying to attack the dog itself. There was no malice, the MPs were trying to get a balanced view and were asking fair questions, and the police were just giving their opinion, but what none of them did was consider differing opinions, or look at the other side of the equation and sought to weigh up both sides - it wasn't malice, it was just laziness/incompetence. The lady asking the questions was asking some good questions but she wasn't asking enough good questions, she just simply wasn't smart enough to see where contradictions in the law could arise and to probe the people giving answers as to how they'd square those contradictions against their proposals and so forth to get more balanced objective view.
I think the problem is that we just don't get enough smart people into these sorts of positions, people who can rationally weigh up the pros and cons without bias and who can genuinely take a step back and look at whether something is a good idea with no unforeseen consequences or not. Too many politicians are the type of people who are too easily caught up in sentiment, bias, and subjective personal opinion.
There are of course corrupt politicians too, but I don't think they're all like this, I think a lot genuinely are just incompetent from what I've seen of them at work.
Bradley Manning is another good example, he was working at a field base in Iraq yet not only did he have access to military cables for Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the Apache video, he also had access to diplomatic cables from embassies across the globe. All this despite being a low ranking bottom of the pile private on a pretty basic wage.
This alone shows what an utter farce the GP's claim is, there's been plenty of evidence that compartmentalisation in the US security services is far better in theory than it actually is in practice.
That's probably the most pathetic article I've ever seen. It's 80% hearsay, and the remaining 20% has since been proven false by the government themselves.
You realise that some of the people carrying out extraordinary rendition to black sites, something that's established fact, not spy fiction were also contract employees right?
The US has been using ever greater numbers of contractors since 9/11 for a combination of the fact that many politicians have shares in said companies so it profits them directly and also because it provides a layer of deniability should it come back to bite them - "Oh we had no idea the contractors were doing that!". The third and final reason was simply that private sector could scale faster than existing public sector organisations after the massive influx of security spending post 9/11. None of which means that they have any less access to secretive material, in fact, given the sort of risky operations they're using contractors for it's often the contractors that are engaged in the really dirty stuff the government doesn't want to get directly implicated in.
That and the fact that Snowden wasn't always just an external contractor of course, he did actually work at the NSA for some time.
It's not about me reading spy novels (I've never read a single one, don't interest me), it's about your naivety and lack of understanding of the structure of modern military and security operations by government. Or to cut a long story short, you've obviously just not been paying attention this last 10 years.
"Yes, because it's not like there have ever been problems with spread of bacteria in the past and it also doesn't seem like it will ever be a problem in the future either! Who needs to worry about bacteria! Nature wouldn't make something that could hurt me, would it?"
So what are you saying exactly, that you believe that if we could just bacteria proof mobile phones, and ATMs and such that nature will no longer produce anything to hurt you? It's precisely that naivety that I'm pointing out the idiocy of. All it means is that we'll end up with bacteria that evolves mechanisms to defeat the anti-bacterial technologies we implement making them even more difficult to deal with.
I didn't claim that bacteria can't be harmful, but simply that we don't need to go to absurd extremes to try and eliminate all bacteria that we may encounter because that's frankly fucking stupid and nonsensical. There will always be bacteria and there will always be some degree of chance that it will evolve into something very dangerous. Bacteria "proofing" ATMs and so forth without all also wearing masks to stop the spread of airborne bacteria and bacteria proofing our clothes, any handrails we may touch, any food we may eat and everything else isn't going to magically change that at all, there'll still be an ever present threat of a dangerous form of easily spread bacteria however you cut it, the difference is that when it does come it'll have already had to evolve to defeat the low hanging options for dealing with it that we might otherwise have had if we didn't engage in paranoid splashing of said technologies left right and centre to no practical benefit at the time.
"I'd be prepared to accept full responsibility for what someone did with it."
Then you're an idiot because even the law wouldn't recognise it as your fault that someone was killed with your vehicle, yes, even if you feel the need to take it to the extreme that you left the doors open and the keys in the ignition as if that would somehow add any validity to your argument (hint: it doesn't).
Which again highlights the idiocy of your argument.
The fact is that it's long been extremely well established in law that you cannot be held responsible for what some idiot does with your property or a service you pay for. That shouldn't and doesn't need to change in the digital age, it makes sense, otherwise it'd be far too easy to get people jailed/killed - someone left their mobile phone on the desk when they went to the toilet? use it to phone in a death threat to the leader of your country and have them arrested/shot/jailed. Obviously that's a stupid idea to assume that service/product ownership = complete liability for use of that service/product.
No, Russia said they would give him asylum as long as he stopped leaking information. He withdrew his asylum request to Russia in response and so has opted not to take them up their offer in exchange to stop leaking, which is why he's continued leaking.
Russia views him as not their problem whilst he continues to not enter the country officially and if he continues to opt not to officially enter Russia then they seem to let him do whatever he feels the need to do.
Or maybe it's not as compartmentalized as you theorise.
Or maybe Snowden was working at a higher level than the US government has admitted.
Or maybe Snowden simply used the skills he was taught to use against the Chinese against his own government.
Either way, what he says has enough validity that world leaders are listening and issuing formal statements over it, and the US isn't denying it, so it's obviously got a reasonable degree of validity to it and isn't just about parroting speculation like you claim.
What about them? Humans didn't evolve in a vacuum, we evolved to encounter and co-exist with bacteria. Making ATMs bacteria proof wont magically protect you from them, it'll just mean your body is even less well equipped to cope when you inevitably do encounter harmful bacteria elsewhere.
Just stick to basic hygiene like washing your hands before you eat and you'll be fine. GP is right, it's like some kind of cultural OCD.
The problem is that such claims are rarely valid in practice, note the disclaimer:
"Stored properly, designed to last up to 100 years
Limited lifetime warranty"
Right, and what is properly? how do you prove they were stored properly if they contest the claim? If it's such a good trustworthy product then why is the warranty limited? what are the limits?
The fact is most manufacturers will make such claims even when they know they are not true because the chance of the staff behind said claims being around in as little as even 10 - 20 years to care is pretty slim and the amount of people who file a claim in the face of failure is negligible enough to be outweighed by the marketing benefits this brings in terms of sales.
Really it's most likely just marketing crap. I've had cheap DVDs and CDs fail in just a couple of years, not all of them, just the odd one or two, and I'm sure the expensive stuff will last much longer, but I sure as hell wouldn't bet my data on them no matter what inflated claim they can come up with (and then backtrack on using the disclaimers).
It's not just fire proofing that's the problem but heat proofing too.
We had a "fire" safe in a building that burnt down once and the hard drive stored inside was useless because much of the plastics used had melted and the paper had browned to the point of pretty much uselessness.
Luckily it was a pretty pointless site that had nothing of value (it was when I worked public sector, so you could really argue that about most sites there) but it certainly taught a lesson not to rely on onsite backups no matter how good your fire safe is. It'll stop shit catching fire, but it wont stop it being cooked to the point of uselessness so unless you're keeping something safe with an extremely high melting point then just store multiple redundant copies securely off-site.
It's okay, I get how Slashdot works, I've been here long enough - when engaging in discussion, attack first, before they do :)
Then feel free to explain...
Yes, France is helping Iran by being one of the leading countries in the EU pushing for crippling sanctions being placed on Iran's economy such that it has leading to it's complete economic collapse.
Wait, what?
To be fair that's already happening to a large degree. US bases are shutting down en-mass in Europe.
Just the other week the last A10s left so they're very much in exit mode from Europe as an ongoing process. They have no presence at all in many European countries now and even the UK hosts I believe only about 4 air bases, not all (none?) of which are even US exclusive. The US marines only have one base left in the whole of Europe now too IIRC.
Personnel is down to well under 75,000 troops now in the whole of Europe I believe, which spread across a continent of over 700 million people is pretty negligible and that number is decreasing regularly. I believe their largest deployment is still Germany with about 40,000 troops, followed by Italy with about 10,000 and the UK with about 9000. Countries like France and the Scanadinavian nations have none whatsoever (other than for short training/join exercise visits, no permanent deployments).