I'm of the same feeling here, I was certainly a Lib Dem voter until I read this. However, I do intend to seek clarification- is this just some Lord going off on his own little journey, or does it have party support?
The summary makes no fucking sense either, it seems to imply the Conservatives support the Lib Dems stance of challenging large parts of the bill. This is outright false, the Tories have only agreed to challenge clause 17 which gives Mandelson full control over copyright law with no parliamentary oversight and nothing more, in fact, to date, other than that, the only real noise we've heard from Tories officials on the bill is that they think the whole 3 strikes thing should've been done sooner, they believed it should've happened already.
I don't know who wrote the summary, but they clearly have no idea of the UK political situation regarding the DEB.
Certainly if the Tories get in, I think it's likely the DEB will remain as is, or perhaps be even worse, because they're at least as pro-music industry as Labour, possible more so, because David Cameron has a hard on for celebrities- i.e. putting a creative industries person in charge of his broadband/internet review rather than a technologist, putting Carol Vorderman (a highly numerate TV presenter) in charge of his maths review, rather than you know, a mathematician, missing the point that numeracy is just a tiny part of maths and hence being part the fucking problem with current maths education in not understanding maths himself. But then, I suppose putting people who would actually be competent at those roles, such as Tim Berners-Lee and Marcus du Sautoy would require some level of competence, which is a rare thing in public sector.
Of course, there are people for and against it in every party, the problem is those who are against it in the likes of the Conservatives such as David Davis no longer hold the power they once did. Those in Labour who disagreed with 3 strikes such as David Lammy and Stephen Timms have been mysteriously dragged into line to oddly now support it contradicting their original comments- I assume this is one of Dark Lord Mandelson's jedi mind tricks which would make sense in the context that Lammy is now in Mandelson's department.
Really, I don't expect that the Lib Dems would be perfect, but the difference with the Lib Dems is that their smarter people like Clegg, Cable, Huhne all hold prominent positions in the party, whilst in the other two parties, the smart people are marginalised and supressed.
It shouldn't harm the BBC's news operation, and despite media linking it to Murdoch and so forth I don't think it's actually anything to do with that. I think the BBC just realises there's a lot of needless sprawl, and that cash will get tight if it continues with that and it's literally just cutting away all the crap.
The news section if the BBC sites bread and butter, and it's award winning, I doubt for a minute they'd be willing to make any cuts into that, for precisely the reasons you point out- it's perhaps one of the finest elements they have in reaching out globally to show their existence and bring in further viewers.
Well the real question is, are they Jewish immigrants? Does Mossad have a bias to the Jewish cause?
You may answer no to the latter question, but the point is this, it's a possible explanation as to why Mossad would have no problem using those passports. They are just possible explanations.
People like yourself don't help the cause, I'm certainly not one to blame Mossad or the Jewish state unfairly, and making the insane assertion that I have paranoid fantasies about Mossad is hardly a good way to make people like myself respect the situation. I do respect the problem Israel faces (see my other posts), but it would certainly be naive to assume that Mossad definitely wasn't involved, when the majority of facts suggest they were, even if other facts suggest they may not be.
Frankly also, if Mossad was involved then I'm of the opinion job well done. It's not like the guy that was killed was a nice man that was worthy of a place on this planet going by the amount of innocent civilian lives he's responsible for taking.
"Hamas would not have been voted in to power in Palestine and it's membership would be tiny."
yeah, and al Qaeda, the Islamic Brotherhood and Hezbollah would cease to exist too right?
I don't think you really understand the problem of radicalisation. Particularly the stated aims of the likes of the Islamic Brotherhood - one of Hamas' closest allies of also wanting to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, we have radicals throughout Europe pushing for the same. They're not just going to go away if Israel hands back territory, they're not going to just stop moving in weapons to attack Israel with if they pull back and open up full access to Gaza.
Part the issue is that Hezbollah and Hamas are puppets of Iran and Syria, they're Iran and Syria's methods of attacking Israel by proxy, it's a far bigger issue than just giving back land, and freedoms, because you have to simultaneously deal with the problems of Iran and Syria too. If you truly believe Hamas wouldn't exist without the Israeli position being what it is, then you certainly have no understanding of the politics and people involved.
"oh and Hamas don't stand behind pregnant women. come on, think about it for a moment. how big do you think they are, large enough that the only way you could shoot a fighter behind is to target the womb?"
Ah, I see, and you know how easy it is to watch what you shoot in a warzone because you've played Call of Duty or something right? If you're in a warzone, it's not a "Hamas member stood behind pregnant women face-off" like in the movies, it's combat between buildings, with no fucking idea what's round the corner, what's behind the next wall and so forth, if you get AK47 fire from a window and fire back, there's no possible way to be sure you won't hit a civilian. Similarly there's no possible way you know that that building that just had rockets launched from it's roof doesn't contain civilians. What's the alternative, not fire back and let them kill Israeli civilians instead?
The shirts you refer to were typical military bravado, you think any military world wide doesn't have soldiers making the same jokes? The only difference being of course, that the Israeli soldiers made the mistake of thinking they would be treated with the same standards of every other military. Here's an exercise for you, look at the amount of civilian kills in Iraq, Afghanistan, or an entirely non-Western war like Georgia in recent years, and then try and tell me that civilian casualties inflicted by Israel in it's incursions into Gaza are any worse than any other war, let alone an insurgency war (where any dead militant can be turned into a 'civilian death' propaganda tool simply by taking his rifle/rpg from the scene). You'll find that Israeli civilian kills aren't exactly unusually high, which would be the case if they really did specifically target civilians as per the propaganda.
I think Israel should hand back the Golan Heights, and other annexed territory so that they really do have the moral upperhand, though I suspect they would then get bombarded from the heights by Syria, would still suffer regularly suicide bombings in nightclubs and so forth like they did before they ring-fenced Gaza - notice how that shit doesn't really happen in Israel anymore? the daily suicide bombings? Fact is, those measures are in place, because they work. It's understandable in this context why they do it, because with the heights held, and Gaza ring fenced, they're actually safer than they've ever been.
The problem is, your justification for Israel not being the lesser of two evils is that you don't understand that Hamas, being extremists, would be a problem regardless, and that if Israel really did want to push genocide, then they would be able to rack up far higher civilian kills than they do. You also do not seem to realise that Israeli civilian kills are not disproportionate from many military campaigns, suggesting Israel is doing nothing out of the ordinary when it does carry out military campaigns.
"John Saffran seems to be okay. Tell me, do Hamas fighters distribute shirts with cross hairs on pregnant women and wear them with pride?"
If you class standing behind them with an AK47 shooting at Israeli soldiers, or launching rocket attacks from their bedroom roof as a t-shirt with a cross hair on then yes, absolutely.
I very much dislike Israel, particularly recently with their election of an even less moderate government, but let's not pretend Hamas are innocent. They're certainly as much to blame for civilian deaths as Israel is and at least Israel has shown some restraint- they could've completely cleansed Gaza of any living being by now if they really wanted to as they have the power to do so, but they've far from done that. Do you really believe Hamas would show a similar level of restraint if positions were swapped keeping in mind that Hamas has said that even if they got their own way they would seek to destroy the Jewish population and with the Islamic Brotherhood would attempt the same in Egypt, and many other nations too?
There are some pretty big problems on both sides, Israel is certainly the lesser of two evils, but only just, although they seem to working quite hard to change that right now with their continued illegal settlement expansion and so forth.
I think it probably was Mossad, but the whole situation is a little odd.
Fleeing to Iran is weird certainly, the inclusion of Palestinians is odd. I don't see the use of Israeli citizen's passports as odd though, as the passports used were of people with dual citizenship and as such probably aren't seen by Mossad as "true citizens" such that they were probably treated as fair game, the fact they had British passports etc. was a bonus.
There were other odd things though- as was said, they didn't bother to do anything about the security cameras, the faked passports were easily identified as fake, sloppily so- unique identifiers on the passports for example didn't use the correct combination of letters and numbers on some of them, so not only were they not valid identifiers, but the identifiers weren't even of the right pattern.
I suspect we'll never know what happened, and I suspect Israel is at least somewhat responsible, but I do wonder perhaps if they were working with another country which wasn't quite so experienced at this.
It's sad, but understandable. My girlfriend is Canadian, and when we head back over there to see her family sometimes I always find it amusing that she talks of a short trip from Ottawa to Toronto, which is like a 6hr drive- to many in North America, that's not an awful lot, but bear in mind that in England that'll get you from the south coast all the way up to the Scottish border- i.e. the entire length of the country from bottom to top, here 2hrs is generally seen as a long journey, and 1hr is far enough for most people to be put off.
As you say, with those distances involved, it'd really have to be a full time job I guess. It'll be interesting to know if some larger farms, that do do it full time, but are willing to stick to more humane and natural farming processes do decide to start going down this route in the US a bit more frequently to give the supermarkets some real challenges, and in turn, force them to be far more ethical too.
In recent years in the UK, many smaller shops have been shut down due to competition from supermarkets that have turned into mega-corps. being able to squeeze costs from suppliers to as small a level as possible, driving their prices down and creating the situation you describe well.
The UK of course has the advantage of being a smaller country, but you may be interested to know that we have the scenario whereby in recent years there's been a massive increase in farm shops. Because the farms are sick of the supermarkets squeezing them to the point they struggle to make money then the vast majority of them are in fact taking this route of selling directly.
We're fortunate enough with our country size, and amount of farms that a vast amount of the population is within short driving distance of a farm shop, and it's great, because the product we get straight from the farm shops is just so much nicer than that from supermarkets. In fact, I exclusively buy eggs, milk, meat, bread and so forth from our nearest farm shop nowadays, going to supermarkets only for packaged stuff. What's interesting is how much these places have grown too, many farm shops have gone from being new businesses say 5 years ago, to constant expansion, to usually running nice restaurants alongside their shop. One of the key turning points for me in exclusively using farm shops where possible, was when I bought some chicken from ASDA (a major supermarket owned by Walmart), and noticed on the packaging it stated it had been imported from Thailand.
It was quite a wtf moment, why was I eating chicken flown all the way from Thailand, not particularly known for it's high standards of food production, when I could buy from a free range, UK regulated for food safety shop just 15 minutes down the road? Certainly farm shops can be more expensive than imported foods in some cases like this, but I'd rather just pay that little bit more, and know I'm getting quality, local, free range meat, than I would pay a little less, and eat battery farmed chicken from around 6000 miles away in Thailand.
Still, this doesn't help you much, but I thought you may be interested to know that in some parts of the world, the situation does work, and people like myself are glad that suppliers like the one your family runs exists. As an aside though, would it not be possible in your case of rather than having people visit you, have a market stall, a portable chilled freezer van or even fixed building at the closest major city and base your farm shop there? That way only the farm needs to do the transporting, rather than each customer and hence transportation costs can be cut drastically as they are divided amongst each customer. Or is competition still too tight to compete with a classic market or butcher type method?
Yeah, because of course, the EU is in control of London?
The London CCTV problem is a problem for British people by British people, particularly Londoners, and no one else. It's a problem they need to sort themselves, the EU has no legal power to control CCTV in London.
Yeah, but in the US, if you were naked, in your own home, it'd also mean you could be done for indecency, so really, it shows how utterly stupid US laws are regarding this sort of thing. See here:
If I have no right to privacy in my own home, then passers by deserve no right to complain about what they see when staring into my own home. I should be free to jerk off in the window if I see fit, and if they don't like it, they can choose not to look.
The problem is, in the US, you not only have the right to sit outside someone's house, staring in, using binoculars if you so wish, or record every detail. But you also have the right to complain about what you see. Just as you can close curtains if you don't want people to look in, you can simply not look in if you don't like what you see.
Sorry, but what the fuck? How did you comment get modded insightful? It's completely ignorant.
The EU doesn't control Britain, it can however lay down rulings against it if it doesn't comply with laws it has agreed to comply to as a member of the EU. The EU has no power to act against a member nation if a member nation is not breaking any EU rules or agreements. The EU has absolutely no blame in the state of Britain as a surveillance state.
Now, I'm British, it's quite clear Europe is actually of net positive benefit with respect to privacy and rights, the real problem with the UK is the British government and the people that support it. Blaming the EU for the UK's problems is so utterly idiotic and ignorant, when it's quite clear the EU has done everything it can within it's power, to prevent the British government from further eroding the rights of British citizens. But here's the problem, most people in Britain are impartial to it, most of the people here are their own worst enemy.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the fuckwads that keep voting in Labour and the Tories over and over. Blame the idiots here who don't bat an eyelid when their government steals yet more fundamental rights away from them. Sure as hell don't blame the EU though, because it's the only entity with any power that actually does anything in our favour- certainly more so than the government of any member state, or of countries like the US, Australia and so forth.
But then how would PHP win in the performance benchmarks if it had to do things properly from the start!
Really, this is the problem, this is what it comes down to- arguments of how they impede performance and shouldn't be enforced on years, but it's bollocks.
I'm not against optional security for the few times people do need it, but it should be opt-out, not opt-in.
This is somewhat what Microsoft pulled off with the.NET philosophy, but they only did it half-arsed. The fact that code is managed by default, but if you really want to and can be sure you can handle security yourself, you can drop out to unmanaged code.
Like you say, there's no excuse for libraries not to be secure by default, performance simply isn't a good enough excuse to override security.
It should be quite trivial, you can quit or kill processes by getting an array of them with Process.GetProcessesByName(processName) in the System.Diagnostics namespace. It returns an array of Processes, that you can just iterate through with a foreach loop, and just invoke Kill() or Close() on each process with the name passed to GetProcessesByName.
Not sure about starting processes but you should be able to do it with the same object I imagine by instantiating a new copy of it, and you'd need to knock together a UI for defining the schedule itself, as well as a bit of code for persistence of the schedule, some short bits of code for a tray icon perhaps. You might want to set it up as a service possibly too, and create an installer, but all in all it's the kind of project you could put together in an evening I suppose. I just wish I had enough free evenings nowadays for that sort of thing;)
It uses the same OS as the iPhone and even that has been vulnerable to security vulnerabilities even when not unlocked (search for iPhone SMS vulnerability for example).
A locked down appliance like this wont do any more to protect her I'm afraid.
The problem is, there really is no better connection plan.
The option here is to have no caps, and a slow connection with high latency due to being over-subscribed, or having a connection that's capped, but is at least fast and gives you the speed you pay for. It's really a trade off between speed and bandwidth.
If you're lucky and your area is LLU or Cable enabled you can get a better mixture of both, but it's still really only a small portion of the UK geographically that has that benefit.
I don't even really find bandwidth caps a problem for the most part, because everything else can be scheduled to download off-peak, it's just things like Steam and XBox live demos and stuff that can't.
It's kind of sad, because the UK has deteriorated in this respect, 5 years ago, whilst connection speeds were generally slower, I still had no cap and I didn't have the latency you get now despite "faster" connections.
I think the problem stems from ISPs overstretching themselves, they kept advertising £5 a month connections and such which are rediculous and simply are not a sustainable business model, so instead they took from those of us at the high end to subsidise these people with the intention of trying to monetise the low end users with content and ads. This battle for subscribers has just raped the quality of high end connections, of course, low end connections are even more crap- but at least in that case, you get what you pay for. So now I'm stuck in a situation where I'm paying more (£20 a month) for a decent connection, but getting far less than I used to for the money- but back then, it was £20 or nothing, there were no £5 and £10 plans.
I think really my best bet is going to be writing a quick.NET app to create schedules and kill Steam and load Steam at certain times I've still got the issue of heading off to work a couple of hours before off-peak ends and possibly forgetting to close it in the morning so I'd much rather see it automated than a months bandwidth on-peak wasted in a day!
It's just a little annoying that I have to do it all myself when it's a simple feature to implement, of course it doesn't help me with XBox Live either, I guess my only option there is some kind of protocol throttling on a timer on the router.
More realistically though as I'm busy when I get home I'll probably just carry on as normal though and not bother;)
The problem is that our exchange isn't unbundled, or at least, there's no 3rd parties operating their kit on our exchange, so we're stuck with 8mbps ADSL max over BT's infrastructure.
That means that where I am we're stuck with ISPs who have to put up with getting ripped off by BT. The only upside is in a year or two we should gain decent connections from the Digital Region scheme so that might be something at least, although it's still a year or two off.
It's not just Battle.Net really, these are features that XBox Live has had for a while and that Microsoft has tried to bring to Windows with Games for Windows Live also, which now has it's own games store too.
I don't think this was so much about bringing new features for the benefit of users in general as much as it was about keeping up with the competition.
If Steam didn't introduce these features it would start to look very dated.
One thing I wish ALL these services would introduce is download scheduling though, over the last few years there's been a shift towards capped peak time downloads in the UK (and many other countries), and I can't afford to have multi-gigabyte game updates and downloads and so forth chewing into my bandwidth allowance. I don't have the option of just loading it up when the off-peak period starts and downloads aren't capped, and turning it off in the morning, because I go to bed a couple of hours before peak time starts, and get up and go to work a couple of hours before it ends.
It may sound trivial but for me, and I imagine others in my position it's actually a big deal- I don't buy games via Steam partly because it's annoying only being able to download said games on weekends when I am up at the right times to be able to get it going and stop it during the off-peak period. For me, it's actually more convenient to just buy games in shops, or order them online. Similarly I don't buy retail games on XBox Live or even bother trying multi-gb demos for this reason- I can't control when they will be downloaded.
Valve, Microsoft, Blizzard et al. seem oblivious to the fact that being too lazy to implement a download scheduler is costing them customers. Sure there are workarounds, and ways to implement these sorts of things themselves, but they're hacks that updates can break and there's nothing less amusing than coming home to find some update has fucked your scheduling hack and you've had 90% your monthly on-peak usage allowance chewed up right at the start of the month because of it.
Of course another option is to go to an ISP that oversells and doesn't have caps like this, but then that's equally useless because those ISPs are the same ones that are utterly hopeless for online gaming.
It's ironic that once again, it's a simple feature that's ignored, but that most popular BitTorrent, or USENET clients provide- yet again, it seems piracy offers the superior distribution mechanism.
Not all judges hold the same opinion. Italy is an extremely corrupt nation, there are plenty of judges that support Berlusconi or are easily influenced one way or the other also.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm of the same feeling here, I was certainly a Lib Dem voter until I read this. However, I do intend to seek clarification- is this just some Lord going off on his own little journey, or does it have party support?
The summary makes no fucking sense either, it seems to imply the Conservatives support the Lib Dems stance of challenging large parts of the bill. This is outright false, the Tories have only agreed to challenge clause 17 which gives Mandelson full control over copyright law with no parliamentary oversight and nothing more, in fact, to date, other than that, the only real noise we've heard from Tories officials on the bill is that they think the whole 3 strikes thing should've been done sooner, they believed it should've happened already.
I don't know who wrote the summary, but they clearly have no idea of the UK political situation regarding the DEB.
Certainly if the Tories get in, I think it's likely the DEB will remain as is, or perhaps be even worse, because they're at least as pro-music industry as Labour, possible more so, because David Cameron has a hard on for celebrities- i.e. putting a creative industries person in charge of his broadband/internet review rather than a technologist, putting Carol Vorderman (a highly numerate TV presenter) in charge of his maths review, rather than you know, a mathematician, missing the point that numeracy is just a tiny part of maths and hence being part the fucking problem with current maths education in not understanding maths himself. But then, I suppose putting people who would actually be competent at those roles, such as Tim Berners-Lee and Marcus du Sautoy would require some level of competence, which is a rare thing in public sector.
Of course, there are people for and against it in every party, the problem is those who are against it in the likes of the Conservatives such as David Davis no longer hold the power they once did. Those in Labour who disagreed with 3 strikes such as David Lammy and Stephen Timms have been mysteriously dragged into line to oddly now support it contradicting their original comments- I assume this is one of Dark Lord Mandelson's jedi mind tricks which would make sense in the context that Lammy is now in Mandelson's department.
Really, I don't expect that the Lib Dems would be perfect, but the difference with the Lib Dems is that their smarter people like Clegg, Cable, Huhne all hold prominent positions in the party, whilst in the other two parties, the smart people are marginalised and supressed.
I wouldn't worry too much, I don't think the cuts are due to have any effect on the main news site to be honest.
Most the stuff being cut is crap like this, which people don't even realise exists:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/switch/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/switch/slink/
It shouldn't harm the BBC's news operation, and despite media linking it to Murdoch and so forth I don't think it's actually anything to do with that. I think the BBC just realises there's a lot of needless sprawl, and that cash will get tight if it continues with that and it's literally just cutting away all the crap.
The news section if the BBC sites bread and butter, and it's award winning, I doubt for a minute they'd be willing to make any cuts into that, for precisely the reasons you point out- it's perhaps one of the finest elements they have in reaching out globally to show their existence and bring in further viewers.
Thank you for this highly informative, clearly factual, and well sourced post.
I am deeply pleased with your ability to back up your assertions with a plethora of objective references.
Actually, they blew that a while ago:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2009/09/playstation3_and_the_yellow_li.html
Well the real question is, are they Jewish immigrants? Does Mossad have a bias to the Jewish cause?
You may answer no to the latter question, but the point is this, it's a possible explanation as to why Mossad would have no problem using those passports. They are just possible explanations.
People like yourself don't help the cause, I'm certainly not one to blame Mossad or the Jewish state unfairly, and making the insane assertion that I have paranoid fantasies about Mossad is hardly a good way to make people like myself respect the situation. I do respect the problem Israel faces (see my other posts), but it would certainly be naive to assume that Mossad definitely wasn't involved, when the majority of facts suggest they were, even if other facts suggest they may not be.
Frankly also, if Mossad was involved then I'm of the opinion job well done. It's not like the guy that was killed was a nice man that was worthy of a place on this planet going by the amount of innocent civilian lives he's responsible for taking.
"Hamas would not have been voted in to power in Palestine and it's membership would be tiny."
yeah, and al Qaeda, the Islamic Brotherhood and Hezbollah would cease to exist too right?
I don't think you really understand the problem of radicalisation. Particularly the stated aims of the likes of the Islamic Brotherhood - one of Hamas' closest allies of also wanting to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, we have radicals throughout Europe pushing for the same. They're not just going to go away if Israel hands back territory, they're not going to just stop moving in weapons to attack Israel with if they pull back and open up full access to Gaza.
Part the issue is that Hezbollah and Hamas are puppets of Iran and Syria, they're Iran and Syria's methods of attacking Israel by proxy, it's a far bigger issue than just giving back land, and freedoms, because you have to simultaneously deal with the problems of Iran and Syria too. If you truly believe Hamas wouldn't exist without the Israeli position being what it is, then you certainly have no understanding of the politics and people involved.
"oh and Hamas don't stand behind pregnant women. come on, think about it for a moment. how big do you think they are, large enough that the only way you could shoot a fighter behind is to target the womb?"
Ah, I see, and you know how easy it is to watch what you shoot in a warzone because you've played Call of Duty or something right? If you're in a warzone, it's not a "Hamas member stood behind pregnant women face-off" like in the movies, it's combat between buildings, with no fucking idea what's round the corner, what's behind the next wall and so forth, if you get AK47 fire from a window and fire back, there's no possible way to be sure you won't hit a civilian. Similarly there's no possible way you know that that building that just had rockets launched from it's roof doesn't contain civilians. What's the alternative, not fire back and let them kill Israeli civilians instead?
The shirts you refer to were typical military bravado, you think any military world wide doesn't have soldiers making the same jokes? The only difference being of course, that the Israeli soldiers made the mistake of thinking they would be treated with the same standards of every other military. Here's an exercise for you, look at the amount of civilian kills in Iraq, Afghanistan, or an entirely non-Western war like Georgia in recent years, and then try and tell me that civilian casualties inflicted by Israel in it's incursions into Gaza are any worse than any other war, let alone an insurgency war (where any dead militant can be turned into a 'civilian death' propaganda tool simply by taking his rifle/rpg from the scene). You'll find that Israeli civilian kills aren't exactly unusually high, which would be the case if they really did specifically target civilians as per the propaganda.
I think Israel should hand back the Golan Heights, and other annexed territory so that they really do have the moral upperhand, though I suspect they would then get bombarded from the heights by Syria, would still suffer regularly suicide bombings in nightclubs and so forth like they did before they ring-fenced Gaza - notice how that shit doesn't really happen in Israel anymore? the daily suicide bombings? Fact is, those measures are in place, because they work. It's understandable in this context why they do it, because with the heights held, and Gaza ring fenced, they're actually safer than they've ever been.
The problem is, your justification for Israel not being the lesser of two evils is that you don't understand that Hamas, being extremists, would be a problem regardless, and that if Israel really did want to push genocide, then they would be able to rack up far higher civilian kills than they do. You also do not seem to realise that Israeli civilian kills are not disproportionate from many military campaigns, suggesting Israel is doing nothing out of the ordinary when it does carry out military campaigns.
"John Saffran seems to be okay. Tell me, do Hamas fighters distribute shirts with cross hairs on pregnant women and wear them with pride?"
If you class standing behind them with an AK47 shooting at Israeli soldiers, or launching rocket attacks from their bedroom roof as a t-shirt with a cross hair on then yes, absolutely.
I very much dislike Israel, particularly recently with their election of an even less moderate government, but let's not pretend Hamas are innocent. They're certainly as much to blame for civilian deaths as Israel is and at least Israel has shown some restraint- they could've completely cleansed Gaza of any living being by now if they really wanted to as they have the power to do so, but they've far from done that. Do you really believe Hamas would show a similar level of restraint if positions were swapped keeping in mind that Hamas has said that even if they got their own way they would seek to destroy the Jewish population and with the Islamic Brotherhood would attempt the same in Egypt, and many other nations too?
There are some pretty big problems on both sides, Israel is certainly the lesser of two evils, but only just, although they seem to working quite hard to change that right now with their continued illegal settlement expansion and so forth.
I think it probably was Mossad, but the whole situation is a little odd.
Fleeing to Iran is weird certainly, the inclusion of Palestinians is odd. I don't see the use of Israeli citizen's passports as odd though, as the passports used were of people with dual citizenship and as such probably aren't seen by Mossad as "true citizens" such that they were probably treated as fair game, the fact they had British passports etc. was a bonus.
There were other odd things though- as was said, they didn't bother to do anything about the security cameras, the faked passports were easily identified as fake, sloppily so- unique identifiers on the passports for example didn't use the correct combination of letters and numbers on some of them, so not only were they not valid identifiers, but the identifiers weren't even of the right pattern.
I suspect we'll never know what happened, and I suspect Israel is at least somewhat responsible, but I do wonder perhaps if they were working with another country which wasn't quite so experienced at this.
It's sad, but understandable. My girlfriend is Canadian, and when we head back over there to see her family sometimes I always find it amusing that she talks of a short trip from Ottawa to Toronto, which is like a 6hr drive- to many in North America, that's not an awful lot, but bear in mind that in England that'll get you from the south coast all the way up to the Scottish border- i.e. the entire length of the country from bottom to top, here 2hrs is generally seen as a long journey, and 1hr is far enough for most people to be put off.
As you say, with those distances involved, it'd really have to be a full time job I guess. It'll be interesting to know if some larger farms, that do do it full time, but are willing to stick to more humane and natural farming processes do decide to start going down this route in the US a bit more frequently to give the supermarkets some real challenges, and in turn, force them to be far more ethical too.
In recent years in the UK, many smaller shops have been shut down due to competition from supermarkets that have turned into mega-corps. being able to squeeze costs from suppliers to as small a level as possible, driving their prices down and creating the situation you describe well.
The UK of course has the advantage of being a smaller country, but you may be interested to know that we have the scenario whereby in recent years there's been a massive increase in farm shops. Because the farms are sick of the supermarkets squeezing them to the point they struggle to make money then the vast majority of them are in fact taking this route of selling directly.
We're fortunate enough with our country size, and amount of farms that a vast amount of the population is within short driving distance of a farm shop, and it's great, because the product we get straight from the farm shops is just so much nicer than that from supermarkets. In fact, I exclusively buy eggs, milk, meat, bread and so forth from our nearest farm shop nowadays, going to supermarkets only for packaged stuff. What's interesting is how much these places have grown too, many farm shops have gone from being new businesses say 5 years ago, to constant expansion, to usually running nice restaurants alongside their shop. One of the key turning points for me in exclusively using farm shops where possible, was when I bought some chicken from ASDA (a major supermarket owned by Walmart), and noticed on the packaging it stated it had been imported from Thailand.
It was quite a wtf moment, why was I eating chicken flown all the way from Thailand, not particularly known for it's high standards of food production, when I could buy from a free range, UK regulated for food safety shop just 15 minutes down the road? Certainly farm shops can be more expensive than imported foods in some cases like this, but I'd rather just pay that little bit more, and know I'm getting quality, local, free range meat, than I would pay a little less, and eat battery farmed chicken from around 6000 miles away in Thailand.
Still, this doesn't help you much, but I thought you may be interested to know that in some parts of the world, the situation does work, and people like myself are glad that suppliers like the one your family runs exists. As an aside though, would it not be possible in your case of rather than having people visit you, have a market stall, a portable chilled freezer van or even fixed building at the closest major city and base your farm shop there? That way only the farm needs to do the transporting, rather than each customer and hence transportation costs can be cut drastically as they are divided amongst each customer. Or is competition still too tight to compete with a classic market or butcher type method?
It's a real shame, rather than focussing on this, politicians don't implement a 3 strikes for corruption amongst politicians.
If they did, then Mandelson would've been long out of the game already, as he has been caught red handed 4 times now.
Yeah, because of course, the EU is in control of London?
The London CCTV problem is a problem for British people by British people, particularly Londoners, and no one else. It's a problem they need to sort themselves, the EU has no legal power to control CCTV in London.
Yeah, but in the US, if you were naked, in your own home, it'd also mean you could be done for indecency, so really, it shows how utterly stupid US laws are regarding this sort of thing. See here:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/34483145/
If I have no right to privacy in my own home, then passers by deserve no right to complain about what they see when staring into my own home. I should be free to jerk off in the window if I see fit, and if they don't like it, they can choose not to look.
The problem is, in the US, you not only have the right to sit outside someone's house, staring in, using binoculars if you so wish, or record every detail. But you also have the right to complain about what you see. Just as you can close curtains if you don't want people to look in, you can simply not look in if you don't like what you see.
Sorry, but what the fuck? How did you comment get modded insightful? It's completely ignorant.
The EU doesn't control Britain, it can however lay down rulings against it if it doesn't comply with laws it has agreed to comply to as a member of the EU. The EU has no power to act against a member nation if a member nation is not breaking any EU rules or agreements. The EU has absolutely no blame in the state of Britain as a surveillance state.
The EU has however acted against Britain when the British government has allowed illegal interception of people's data. It has acted to rule against the UK on it's DNA database. It has moved to block Britain and France's 3-strikes policy being supported globally by ACTA. Now, it is moving to block street view from taking pictures without warning as this very article states, and is another ruling that runs counter to the UK position on street view
Now, I'm British, it's quite clear Europe is actually of net positive benefit with respect to privacy and rights, the real problem with the UK is the British government and the people that support it. Blaming the EU for the UK's problems is so utterly idiotic and ignorant, when it's quite clear the EU has done everything it can within it's power, to prevent the British government from further eroding the rights of British citizens. But here's the problem, most people in Britain are impartial to it, most of the people here are their own worst enemy.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the fuckwads that keep voting in Labour and the Tories over and over. Blame the idiots here who don't bat an eyelid when their government steals yet more fundamental rights away from them. Sure as hell don't blame the EU though, because it's the only entity with any power that actually does anything in our favour- certainly more so than the government of any member state, or of countries like the US, Australia and so forth.
But then how would PHP win in the performance benchmarks if it had to do things properly from the start!
Really, this is the problem, this is what it comes down to- arguments of how they impede performance and shouldn't be enforced on years, but it's bollocks.
I'm not against optional security for the few times people do need it, but it should be opt-out, not opt-in.
This is somewhat what Microsoft pulled off with the .NET philosophy, but they only did it half-arsed. The fact that code is managed by default, but if you really want to and can be sure you can handle security yourself, you can drop out to unmanaged code.
Like you say, there's no excuse for libraries not to be secure by default, performance simply isn't a good enough excuse to override security.
"What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?"
The web. Porn. Fun.
In that order.
It should be quite trivial, you can quit or kill processes by getting an array of them with Process.GetProcessesByName(processName) in the System.Diagnostics namespace. It returns an array of Processes, that you can just iterate through with a foreach loop, and just invoke Kill() or Close() on each process with the name passed to GetProcessesByName.
Not sure about starting processes but you should be able to do it with the same object I imagine by instantiating a new copy of it, and you'd need to knock together a UI for defining the schedule itself, as well as a bit of code for persistence of the schedule, some short bits of code for a tray icon perhaps. You might want to set it up as a service possibly too, and create an installer, but all in all it's the kind of project you could put together in an evening I suppose. I just wish I had enough free evenings nowadays for that sort of thing ;)
You still have to patch, update, and secure it.
It uses the same OS as the iPhone and even that has been vulnerable to security vulnerabilities even when not unlocked (search for iPhone SMS vulnerability for example).
A locked down appliance like this wont do any more to protect her I'm afraid.
Or any porn at all if Apple keeps up it's latest crusade :p
The problem is, there really is no better connection plan.
The option here is to have no caps, and a slow connection with high latency due to being over-subscribed, or having a connection that's capped, but is at least fast and gives you the speed you pay for. It's really a trade off between speed and bandwidth.
If you're lucky and your area is LLU or Cable enabled you can get a better mixture of both, but it's still really only a small portion of the UK geographically that has that benefit.
I don't even really find bandwidth caps a problem for the most part, because everything else can be scheduled to download off-peak, it's just things like Steam and XBox live demos and stuff that can't.
It's kind of sad, because the UK has deteriorated in this respect, 5 years ago, whilst connection speeds were generally slower, I still had no cap and I didn't have the latency you get now despite "faster" connections.
I think the problem stems from ISPs overstretching themselves, they kept advertising £5 a month connections and such which are rediculous and simply are not a sustainable business model, so instead they took from those of us at the high end to subsidise these people with the intention of trying to monetise the low end users with content and ads. This battle for subscribers has just raped the quality of high end connections, of course, low end connections are even more crap- but at least in that case, you get what you pay for. So now I'm stuck in a situation where I'm paying more (£20 a month) for a decent connection, but getting far less than I used to for the money- but back then, it was £20 or nothing, there were no £5 and £10 plans.
I think really my best bet is going to be writing a quick .NET app to create schedules and kill Steam and load Steam at certain times I've still got the issue of heading off to work a couple of hours before off-peak ends and possibly forgetting to close it in the morning so I'd much rather see it automated than a months bandwidth on-peak wasted in a day!
It's just a little annoying that I have to do it all myself when it's a simple feature to implement, of course it doesn't help me with XBox Live either, I guess my only option there is some kind of protocol throttling on a timer on the router.
More realistically though as I'm busy when I get home I'll probably just carry on as normal though and not bother ;)
The problem is that our exchange isn't unbundled, or at least, there's no 3rd parties operating their kit on our exchange, so we're stuck with 8mbps ADSL max over BT's infrastructure.
That means that where I am we're stuck with ISPs who have to put up with getting ripped off by BT. The only upside is in a year or two we should gain decent connections from the Digital Region scheme so that might be something at least, although it's still a year or two off.
It's not just Battle.Net really, these are features that XBox Live has had for a while and that Microsoft has tried to bring to Windows with Games for Windows Live also, which now has it's own games store too.
I don't think this was so much about bringing new features for the benefit of users in general as much as it was about keeping up with the competition.
If Steam didn't introduce these features it would start to look very dated.
One thing I wish ALL these services would introduce is download scheduling though, over the last few years there's been a shift towards capped peak time downloads in the UK (and many other countries), and I can't afford to have multi-gigabyte game updates and downloads and so forth chewing into my bandwidth allowance. I don't have the option of just loading it up when the off-peak period starts and downloads aren't capped, and turning it off in the morning, because I go to bed a couple of hours before peak time starts, and get up and go to work a couple of hours before it ends.
It may sound trivial but for me, and I imagine others in my position it's actually a big deal- I don't buy games via Steam partly because it's annoying only being able to download said games on weekends when I am up at the right times to be able to get it going and stop it during the off-peak period. For me, it's actually more convenient to just buy games in shops, or order them online. Similarly I don't buy retail games on XBox Live or even bother trying multi-gb demos for this reason- I can't control when they will be downloaded.
Valve, Microsoft, Blizzard et al. seem oblivious to the fact that being too lazy to implement a download scheduler is costing them customers. Sure there are workarounds, and ways to implement these sorts of things themselves, but they're hacks that updates can break and there's nothing less amusing than coming home to find some update has fucked your scheduling hack and you've had 90% your monthly on-peak usage allowance chewed up right at the start of the month because of it.
Of course another option is to go to an ISP that oversells and doesn't have caps like this, but then that's equally useless because those ISPs are the same ones that are utterly hopeless for online gaming.
It's ironic that once again, it's a simple feature that's ignored, but that most popular BitTorrent, or USENET clients provide- yet again, it seems piracy offers the superior distribution mechanism.
Anyway, that's my rant for the day ;)
See here, you are not the only one to hold this mistaken belief:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1561602&cid=31265116
There is certainly a sizeable group of judges out to get him, but there's certainly still a lot left that support him or who are easily influenced.
See here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1561602&cid=31265116
Not all judges hold the same opinion. Italy is an extremely corrupt nation, there are plenty of judges that support Berlusconi or are easily influenced one way or the other also.