Yes, you're right Woosh. I totally didn't see it coming that you'd try and pass off your stupid comment as a joke in a desperate attempt to stave off your own embarrassment that you posted something so wrong in the first place.
You know Woosh isn't just a thing you get to post to make yourself no longer an idiot after you posted something stupid right? You know you're still clearly the idiot here yes?
"Python - No way in hell.. the language has to bend to my will, not me bending to its will."
Few languages bend to your will, some learning is always required. I'm not terribly convinced the learning curve for Python is less than for PHP/Javascript given that those two have so many dangerous nuances that it takes years to truly understand them and develop with them without falling victim to their countless pitfalls. If you don't like the syntax of Python that's fine, but it's hardly a compelling technical argument not to use it over PHP and Javascript.
"Java - Antiquated and full of perversions, along with the spectre of Oracle hanging over you."
Java is antiquated? It was first released in 1995. That's the same year that both PHP and Javascript turned up you realise?
As for perversions, what perversions exactly? It's a pure OO language and sticks to that properly. Compared to Javascript that really doesn't know what it is and has functionality that's basically broken like closures because it tried to do away with explicit pass by value and pass by reference meaning you need to do horrible hacks to force creation of a new scope if you want to pass by value into a closure rather than have a variable captured.
PHP? It's about as perverted as you can get. It started out basically like C for the web, but without the difficult stuff. Then it did exactly like C++ and tried to glue OO on top, only C++ kinda worked because it was done by a competent computer scientist whilst PHP had it's OO tacked on by a mob of wannabes.
Out of the 3, Java is no older, and is the only one that actually determined and stuck with a consistent and planned design philosophy. Your criticism therefore seems to be wholly nonsensical in the context of comparison against Javascript and PHP. The very fact that Javascript was rushed out with a similar name in the same year as Java to cash in on it's hype should at least tell you something about the quality of Javascript as a language if nothing else.
"C/C++ - I know it is done, but would you?"
It really depends what you're doing and how competent you are.
"C#/VBV.Net - Even with MS opening up things.. "It's a trap"/Ackbar"
If it's a trap then it's a pretty poor one because they keep on open sourcing more and more of it. First they go and make the language a real actual standard, and then they start open sourcing the framework whilst giving Mono their explicit blessing.
Microsoft now isn't Microsoft the 90s, it has realised that it needs C# to be runnable in as many places as possible like Java, hence why they opened up the core and plan to open up more and more of it. Nadella knows they lost the smartphone war, and he knows that Windows Server hasn't taken over the server world. He knows that the only way to get a foothold in these areas is to at least take what it does well there - development tools and technologies. The newest version of Visual Studio even supports Android development.
You seem to have pulled together a list of pretty weak criticisms of each language and pretended that's justification not to use them over PHP and Javascript despite PHP and Javascript both having glaring deficiencies that make the negative considerations you pass off as fact above wholly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Each technology has it's merits, but saying I'm going to use a technology with 100 deficiencies because the alternative has 1 deficiency seems to me to be a bit short sighted (no zealots, please don't take the 100 to 1 literally, it's intentional hyperbole to make a point).
At the end of the day we're stuck with Javascript on the client for the foreseeable future and that doesn't bother me too much. But why use it or PHP on the server when there genuinely are just all around better alternatives for that particular case?
I don't even buy the Javascript on the server because you can share code with the client thing either - your server objects automat
"Of the 32.6%, 97% said humans were responsible, which yields 31.6% believe humans are causing global warming, or less than one-third."
You've made a classic attempt to distort the figures. One could just as equally make an equally valid loaded claim such as:
97.8% of scientific papers that expressed a position on climate change believe it is real. Of those 94.8% claim it is man made.
This is correct based on the 32.6% vs. 0.7% divide you suggest amongst those who have take up a position.
This is ultimately similar to the election polling problem, sure the don't knows are a largely unknown quantity but unless there's sufficient reason to believe the unknowns would tend towards rejection of climate change if they had to make a choice then the most likely outcome is that the don't knows would follow the same trend with a few percent margin of error and you'd end up with a fairly similar final result.
Of course the meta-study is based on outcomes of formal scientific papers which is different to the opinion of scientists themselves. Just because someone is erring on the side of caution in a formal scientific paper doesn't mean that they don't believe that the actual weight of evidence suggests one outcome more than the other.
So sure his 99.9% may be made up, but it'd appear plausible that it's a whole lot closer to the actual figure than the alternative theory that there are plenty of scientists against would pose. Given the figures it seems statistically highly unlikely to expect a massive swing towards anything more than around 10% of scientists believing global warming is not a man made problem.
It's pretty clear however you spin it that scientific consensus tends far more towards climate change being real, and likely man made than it does any other outcome.
And why do you feel that defeating cancer isn't already part of the research into helping us live longer?
You can make the same argument about all of it, the longer you live the more likely you are to catch any deadly disease. The longer you live the more likely your heart is to give in. The longer you live the more likely you are to suffer a stroke. The longer you live the more likely you are to go deaf and lose your vision.
Cancer is no different, increasing age increases the chance of suffering all these things. Part of living older is defeating or delaying each and every one of these possible threats. What makes you think that cancer is somehow a distinctly different problem on the way to the same goal as the rest of it that means that it should be singled out and held up as a possible problem of increasing age more than anything else?
"Given I've already told you in this thread that I've contacted my MP to raise concerns over surveillance powers available to the security service your continued claims that I'm an apologist merely expose your own ignorance and blindness to bitter realities."
Well no actually, if anything it just demonstrates that you're either a very contradictory person or you're simply full of shit. Whether you've written to your MP or not makes no difference to the fact you're making apologies for MI5 and defending it's request for more powers whilst inadvertently admitting that if they need anything it's not more powers, it's more staff, because they already can't get through the data they harvest with the powers they have as is.
"No. Do I want ubiquitous surveillance? No."
It may not be what you want, but it's exactly what you're defending and asking for. You're saying it's okay that MI5 wants more power because their job is difficult whilst arguing that what they actually need is more manpower.
"Is the answer to pretend that the collective security services don't need the ability to monitor communications? Join the real world you idiotic twat."
Okay I can see this is beginning to make you cry now, you're obviously one of those irrational types who just no matter what cannot admit they've made stupid arguments. But here's what's odd, you create a great long rant about how you don't want ubiquitous surveillance and you then say it's somehow necessary in the real world, so what you're saying is you do want ubiquitous surveillance, that is the only logical conclusion of your argument.
It's the logical conclusion of your argument you see, because security services already monitor all communications, they already have the power to invade the privacy of suspects to whatever degree they require, and that's okay, because that's what they need to do. They can already do all this - targeted surveillance of threats to national security isn't illegal and isn't what they're asking for.
What they're asking for is the ability to access every digital communication of every person in the country at will, regardless of whether they're a suspect or not. You're defending their request for something you previously said you're wholly against. This is why between all your bile spewing you also come across as not only completely out of control of your emotions, but wholly confused also.
So there's one of two conclusions we can reach here:
1) You're making contradictory statements because you seem to admit you've no idea what the job of the security services are, and because you clearly have no idea what they're asking for given that you're defending their request whilst arguing you don't want what they're requesting
2) You do actually finally concede that you were wrong, but are one of those people who just can't say it, no matter how much bile they start spewing and how much nonsensical rubbish they keep throwing out which makes them look more and more irrational and crazed so continue to spout falsehoods and nonsense alongside comments that agree with everything I've been saying all along
But whichever doesn't really matter, the point is that you've highlighted full and well that you were wrong either way. Spewing bile everywhere and contradicting yourself doesn't change that, and if you think that you doing that is somehow my problem rather than yours, well, I genuinely feel sorry for you - you clearly have anger management issues.
"but then that really is a can of worms, and a lot of the people who pushed for Amendment 1 or Article 10 to protect their right to express their views really don't want to eat their own dogfood"
This shows a complete ignorance of historic context and is a rather unfair portrayal. The European Convention on Human Rights was drafted in the years that followed World War II and the lessons learnt from that. It was put together explicitly to try to prevent a repeat of things like the persecution of the Jews.
There was an explicit recognition at the time that much of what happened in Nazi Germany happened because the Jews had no external recourse against their own fascist government. The government's word was supreme and there was no higher international power they could appeal to in the face of wrongdoing by government. There was a belief that if you could give the people a last resort against government, a higher international order that held oppressive governments to account, that you could prevent a repeat of Nazi Germany's concentration camps.
Just because that has been perverted somewhat now and attempts at further perversion are growing doesn't mean those in charge have always succumbed to modern authoritarianism. Post-war was a period of relative political enlightenment in the West, but unfortunately due to the weight of the cold war, it was far too short lived. The ideas and intentions of leaders at the time were genuinely quite noble - look at the reasons behind the creation of the European Court of Human Rights too for example, it was all part of the same noble goal - to attempt to give the oppressed by government a voice against government.
It wasn't a complete failure, the European Court of Human Rights still does a great job in many cases of upholding the rights of citizens against overbearing government and corporations using the convention as it's guiding principles. It's imperfect but we can thank it for putting things like Phorm in the UK to death for example calling it out as the blatant widespread invasion of privacy that it was after the government refused to deal with it and instead opted to allow it.
People often cherry pick cases where it protects the bad as well as the good, but it has to, because once you start differentiating between people on fundamental rights it's not long before everyone falls into some exception category rendering the whole thing useless. But it was a good idea, pushed through with good intentions, by people who saw genuine horrors that even they knew must never be repeated. It's for that reason that we should not take it for granted, or belittle it, or claim it as a trap by the elite - on the contrary we should be pushing to keep upholding it and fighting to reclaim it as a charter for everyone, all the time, not just as something that governments can pick up and put down as and when it suits.
What's gliberish? Is it like an elven language or something?
"Just like smoking causes cancer, which isn't anything the smokers actually want, Islam causes violence and grief without its adepts really wanting it."
This implies that you believe all 1.2 billion muslims are violent, because if that's what Islam causes then it follows that all muslims must be victim of it.
Of course, that's not true, because all we need is one single peaceful adherent to prove it, of which we infact have a billion or more, so your argument is broken from the very outset. The fact that you can't follow this basic logical point doesn't bode well for painting yourself as a rational person, you're clearly not if you can't see how broken your argument is - to follow your argument as you have requires one to throw logic out the window.
"Where is a free, prosperous Islamic state?"
Kurdistan? Qatar? UAE?
"They are all host of no end of calamities and disgusting cruelty. Why?"
Mostly because of foreign intervention having kept them down for many centuries.
Why not just come out and say you're an Islamophobe and fear those who are different? You'd save yourself of an awful lot of words to tell us the exact same thing you're telling us anyway.
"You have a very naive view of the effort needed to track and monitor several thousand people."
I don't suffer from naivety, the problem is you're make the same false arguments the intelligence services make to try and pursue their power grab.
"There are estimates of over 2000 British people fighting for ISIS. That doesn't include anybody being naughty elsewhere in the world, or in the UK."
So fucking what? MI5 need not care in the slightest. That's MI6's job. What have people fighting for ISIS got to do with internal security? If they're not inside the country they're not currently a threat to the country. MI5 does not need to monitor a single one of these people whilst they remain in Syria/Iraq. Your argument is so fundamentally broken it should be obvious, but apparently to you, it's not. I can only guess you don't even know what MI5's job is, despite your insistence on defending it.
"You think it's possible to keep tabs on all 2000 when they return to the UK just by monitoring their twitter feeds? You accuse the security services of incompetence and you clearly don't have even the most basic of clues about what they do."
Again, you're so desperate to try and salvage what tatters remain of your argument you've just resorted to simply making things up. Ignoring the fact that all 2000 wont return because some are already dead, how do you know with apparent certainty that the rest will return? No you don't need to just monitor their Twitter feeds, but regardless, doing so would still be a step up from where we are now - which is to not monitor them, and allow attacks through, which is precisely the point. Yes, you need to do other stuff as well, yes, it's not even just MI5, we need to to improve efforts in terms of social work with these people to deradicalise them. None of which changes the fact that this isn't happening now and MI5s failures are a part of that.
"By the way, I'd appreciate you not calling me an apologist."
Well what else would you prefer? A pro-MI5 zealot? I don't really know what else to suggest when apologist fits perfectly.
I mean, when you have to resort to making up scenarios such as the return of 2000 jihadists from the middle east what else fits? Anyone who wasn't an apologist wouldn't need to make stuff up to try and fix their broken argument - I notice you completely ignore the point about why are MI5 asking for more data collection powers if manpower is the issue.
So yes, you're an apologist. Don't make stuff up and ignore things you can't answer because you know full well they make a mockery of your failed argument.
How many of them are there? Why do we have to worry about them leaving the country? Even then it's not like we're talking thousands.
The problem is that we let them back in and let them act as if they haven't just been trained by the likes of al Qaeda and ISIS.
Once they're out of the country that's MI6s job and the rest of the foreign security services they bypass on the way to wherever they're going. But why does MI5 and internal security of countries like the US, Canada, France, Australia do fuck all when known terrorists return? Even here a good number of those returning learnt the hard way that ISIS aren't nice people and that it's completely turned them around. There are a number of ex-wannabe jihadis that now preach against going over, so of those returning some actually become reformed by the brutal experience alone so of the small number returning it's not like they're even all threats. Sure some could be putting on a front, but that's the sort you can let slip through - these French guys didn't even put on a front, it was open and blatant that they still supported al Qaeda post-return.
"Even if you do know someone went to Chechnya, that's not actually illegal. You want a team of 8 people tracking that individual 24/7 just in case they're being naughty?"
Why 8 people? what is the relevance of that arbitrary arse plucking you've created other than to try and justify your point without actually having any basis on which to justify it. Some of these folks have even posted on Twitter and Facebook before they've done what they've done - if nothing else have a single person monitoring the tens of Twitter/Facebook feeds of these people, you'd only need one or two people doing that for many suspects and even that would be a big step up from where we are now. But if you think their job isn't to monitor such suspects then what exactly do you think they are there for? to just sit on their arse and get paid? Are you really claiming there are so many people coming back to the UK et. al. after having attended terrorist training camps and with warnings slapped on them by overseas agencies that we can't monitor all ten of them? If so I'd suggest you have a warped view of the numbers involved. We're not even talking thousands here, and we're barely talking hundreds.
Worse, you like others are making the claim that they're understaffed. If that's true why are they gathering so much irrelevant data? Why are they begging for more powers not more staff? If they're simply understaffed then they need to ask for more staff. Capturing even more data when the implication of your argument is that they can't even act on what they already have even though what they already have is sufficient enough that every single terrorist threat since 9/11 has been known to them then how will more powers help at all?
It's one thing going to Chechnya, it's another going there and having the Russian authorities tell you they've been mingling with extremists and engaging in training and that they're a threat and then not monitoring them at all.
It seems your argument is basically that it's okay to completely ignore blatant threats because bless MI5 et. al. their jobs are so hard and they couldn't possibly be incompetent, it must just be bad luck and we should leave them alone because there's no way they could improve ever.
On what do you base that premise? Why do you think they're perfect? Why given that they pay low do you think they're somehow miraculously staffed with highly competent people? What do you think makes them special that they don't suffer high levels of incompetence like many other parts of public sector?
This is precisely the problem I have - we've got no evidence the security services are doing a good job, we have examples of high levels of incompetence yet apologists like you come along and declare them as untouchable, that we shouldn't ever criticise them, that they couldn't be doing anything other than their best. It's stupid. It's a sure fire way to create and protect an environment where incompetence thrives, and that puts us all at risk.
There aren't several million leads in each country. The UK has a population of 65 million. We do not have a significant proportion of the population even close to showing signs of interest in terrorism. We have a few thousand at best.
Of those few thousand you can quite quickly see which ones are most troubled and which have convictions for violence. Once you've narrowed it down there it becomes even easier to cross reference against those that have traveled to known areas of concern for terrorist training like Yemen and Pakistan.
By the time you've done this basic filtering, you're left with maybe a couple of thousand at worst, most likely a few hundred in practice.
It's the same names over and over, one of the guys that did this in France had been convicted for helping fund terrorism, he had convictions for violence, he was on two terror watch lists, he was known to have travelled to Yemen to an al Qaeda training camp. How many people do you think there are that fit this bill in France? I'd wager it's no more than maybe the very low tens at most.
Once again the Lee Rigby killers fit the same profile - albeit with attempts to go play jihad with al Shabab instead.
I'd sympathise with your point if we were talking about these sorts of people having done nothing other than posted sympathies for al Qaeda in Facebook but we're talking about more than that, we're talking time and time again about people who have travelled to fucking training camps with the security services knowing about it and nothing is done. The people actually carrying out the attacks show very clear signs of escalating and obvious intent. They're not going from Facebook posting to terrorism, they're slowly becoming more and more radicalised and more and more serious, the security services know but fail to believe it's worth acting on.
In this case he went to Yemen and they knew themselves, in Rigby's case they tried to go to Somalia and the Kenyans alerted them, in the Boston bombing case they went to Chechnya and were warned by the Russians, in the Canada parliament shooting he'd tried to get to Syria.
It's become quite clear that if someone is wanting to go to an Islamic terrorist training/fighting hotspot that maybe it's worth taking serious notice. The only people who don't seem to have figured this out are Western security services.
"Is there really anything MI5 could have done to prevent that?"
Yes an awful lot given that MI5 had been told by Kenyan authorities about how they'd tried to cross into Somalia to take part in Al Shabab's jihad there and so knew full well what a risk to the public those two were.
Of course you could argue as others do that "they can't keep an eye on everyone", but if that's the case they might as well just give up and go home right now.
"Lack of resources mean that they cannot be physically watching every suspect all the time"
So if they're so short on resources why have they been expending so much time monitoring people who aren't suspects and aren't even threats?
Let's take the Lee Rigby case an example. The security services have been harvesting the communications of each and every citizen in the UK as far as possible, they claim this is to help detect threats. Given this, why do you believe that whilst this implies they have the capacity to determine amongst the communications of 64 million citizens those which are and aren't threats and yet they don't have the resources and manpower to determine if two guys who tried to join a violent jihadist organisation in Somali and were extradited back from Kenya as a result are or aren't threats?
Do you not see the silliness of your argument? You believe they're under resourced, but if that's the case and they don't even have the resources to determine threats that are blatant and put right in front of them by the Kenyan security services et. al. then how will giving them even more powers to gather even more information help exactly?
If resourcing was the problem wouldn't they be asking for more resources rather than more powers?
I don't think you've really thought your argument through.
Haven't you just disproved your own point? that if the vast majority of victims of Islam are innocent victims then the problem isn't actually with Islam but simply violent thugs?
If the problem is with Islam itself then it seems odd that literally about a billion other muslims manage to practice it entirely peacefully. A problem with the religion itself would imply that all muslims would be effected by it, but they're clearly not, so instead we need to understand what the differentiating trait amongst the subset who are actually problematic is.
It may be that it's another trait in conjunction with the religion itself that's the problem, sure, but it's not clear that it's definitely the religion itself, and it seems very clear that it's not wholly the fault of the religion due to the massive majority that aren't impacted.
Note that I'm not defending religion per-se, I think it's unhelpful and demands people opt for ignorance over evidence, and maybe that is the problem - it makes them vulnerable to extremism, but I think it's clear we can't wholly blame religion, again, given how many peaceful followers of Islam there are - over 10% of the entire world's population in fact.
"Surveilling them is not free, and is not without consequences in itself."
Regardless, it's a far better step up from surveilling everybody and makes the data set of targets for more detailed analysis far more manageable.
It's ultimately a question of whether profiling is ever acceptable. I believe it has to be acceptable at some point else you might as well just disband the security services altogether. In terms of human rights I don't think narrowing the surveillance set from "everyone" to "violent criminals with jihadist sympathies" is a particularly unfair trade off.
I'm not recommend we profile based on skin colour, I'm not recommending we profile based on religion. But profiling based on a history of violence and/or terrorist activity such as funding and recruitment of groups overseas all coupled with a hatred for the society in which they live as a starting point for investigation? I don't think that's unreasonable.
Those edge cases that are borderline troubled teens not yet truly radicalised can be passed off to anti-extremism programmes and any lack of progress reported back to enabled continued monitoring.
But when you've got two guys on no fly lists, who were previously in court for supporting jihadis, and one of which has a history of violence both managing to get hold of AK-47s and reportedly even an RPG-7 and getting them all the way to central paris? Something is going very fucking wrong in the intelligence world and it simply cannot be excused as anything other than outright incompetence - it's a level of failure that would get anyone else fired from their job and yet instead we're told "Oh they're doing a tough job, we shouldn't be too hard on them. They're heroes, we can't possible suggest otherwise!" whilst their bosses tell us they need more powers to snoop on even more people in even more invasive ways as if that's somehow going to change anything at all.
It doesn't have to be. It's good enough to have caught the most atrocious attacks since 9/11 and that's drastically better than what we have now which is apparently just gathering more data without the slightest clue how or if it's possible to make any kind of use of it all.
There's always going to be terrorists that will slip through the net, I agree with that assessment by MI5's chief. The problem is we're not even dealing with the ones for which there's no reason they should be slipping through the net because they can trivially be categorised as threats - in fact, in some cases they've already been categorised as threats by foreign intelligence agencies and then that advice ignored by the agencies of the countries they move to.
We'll never achieve perfection, but achieving a marked improvement doesn't look too difficult relative to the sheer ineptitude we seem to have right now.
That's exactly the problem, they shouldn't be monitoring tens of millions in the first place because there aren't tens of millions that are a threat. My point exactly was that they only need to monitor the few hundred or few thousand that match real actual threat criteria.
The fact they're monitoring tens of millions is precisely the ineptitude that needs calling out and dealing with. There aren't tens of millions of real actual threats present within each country, there are a few hundred or maybe a few thousand at best. You don't need to monitor anyone abroad, that's the job of external security like MI6 and your foreign partners to do. MI5 can't keep track of internal threats precisely because they're too busy snooping and gathering mountains of data on non-threats.
As I've said before, instead of working on becoming better at finding the needle in the haystack, all MI5, GCHQ, and it's counterparts overseas seem to do now is build a bigger haystack so that even when their counterparts from overseas say to them "Hey, you've got a bunch of terrorist threats here" they seem to just respond "Sorry, too busy with head buried in massive haystack to care".
Personally I think there's two ways of looking at it, I think you can either believe that religion is the cause, or you can believe it's the excuse.
I think there are good arguments either way and so I'm not about to disagree with your viewpoint. I do however still sit on the fence on the issue and think it's worth considering that it may just be an excuse.
Consider this, if religion is the cause of the problem, then how do we explain away the other 1 billion muslims that aren't engaging in any such terrorism and are living lives no less peaceful than that of your typical atheist?
Another interesting example is that of Buddhists in Burma who have been massacring muslims Rohingyas in recent years. Buddhism teaches non-violence as one of it's core tenets and is often cited as the most peaceful religion known to man. If the teachings of a religion are relevant in determining what a person does or doesn't do then how do we explain this sort of situation given that these people have been preached non-violence to more so than pretty much any other group of people on earth?
As an atheist I do have a negative view of religion, I think it's pointless and encourages poor thinking and ignorance. But I'm not wholly convinced that that poor thinking leads to terrorism. I think terrorism exists by itself as a result of people being poor and disenfranchised amongst other things, and terrorists just look for a cause to try and justify and excuse their actions.
Yes, here's the actual problem, map of alcohol consumption by country where darker colours are more alcohol consumption and lighter colours are less and grey is no data:
Long story short, is that Russia's driving accidents problem is almost wholly down to the fact that it's a nation of rampant alcholics. The rest comes down to poorly maintained cars and roads and a nation with weather that results in terrible driving conditions for half the year.
So absolutely nothing in this new law will fix the problem it purports to fix, hence, it's safe to assume that it's in fact wholly about minority oppression.
It doesn't really matter what they are, it's bad regardless.
Why? because if we've learnt anything from terrorist incidents since 9/11 is that the perpetrators were all already known to the authorities.
- Lee Rigby killers? Already detained trying to head to support Al Shabab by Kenyan authorities and sent back to the UK with MI5 informed
- Boston Bombings? Russia already alerted the FBI to the fact they'd been hanging with Chechnyan extremists and were a threat.
- Australian hostage taker? Already on trial for violent crimes and with a history of support for Islamic extremism
- These guys? Already on the US no fly list. Already known to French authorities for extremist sympathies. At least one already had been in trouble with police for violent crimes.
It seems to me that a taboo needs to be broken, that the general public needs to stop assuming the security services are competent. It's clear they're not and it's clear that no new powers are needed because in each and every case of terrorism that comes about the perpetrators are already known to the authorities.
All that's needed is for the authorities to start better determining threats from the data they have, they don't need new data. If they simply started monitoring based on the following two criteria then all of the above would've been prevented:
1) Does the person have extremist sympathies?
2) Does the person have a violent disposition / have they been arrested and convicted of a violent crime?
Simply monitoring on these two criteria alone would've prevented all of the above. No new data needed, no new powers needed. It's not rocket science but apparently the likes of MI5 are so entirely inept that they can't even figure out the basics.
"The IRA weren't ever trying to set up a catholic state, just an independent one."
Of course they were, in fact, Northern Ireland today is grossly at odds with the rest of the UK on a number of laws precisely to appease the IRA as part of the peace plan. For example in Northern Ireland it's illegal to have an abortion even if you were raped and this is wholly to satisfy the IRA's Catholic pro-life dogma.
"Nothing of what I said was to indicate a problem with C# itself. It was to showcase why HR departments would be hesitant to hire someone who presumably hasn't touched C# in a professional environment in the last 2 years; especially when you consider that going into an interview you are directly competing with people who have (supposedly) been in the thick of C# and rolling with its changes consistently for the past 5-10."
I've worked in Java, C#, C++ and PHP roles and I understand what you're saying here, but honestly I never found moving back to C# (which is what I tend to gravitate back towards each time I end up on jobs that don't use it) to be a problem - if I know I'm applying for C# roles and haven't touched it in a couple of years then an hour or two of reading is plenty enough to get you upto speed, but you do need that strong pre-requisite knowledge of C# in the first place.
In fact, last time I was asked to do one of the upto 3 hour long IKM tests on C# 4.0 for a recruitment test I scored 99.6%, despite having been working on a PHP project for 18 months prior.
It's worth reading books like C# in Depth for anyone working with C# because it gives you the background and evolution of the language - if you're comfortable with that, then learning what the latest version adds is trivial. The same extends to all the frameworks like MVC which I've used since it was in beta when I was initially evaluating frameworks. It's changed, but it's really not changed that much or enough to cause any particular headaches. I had my own implementation of Areas before they came along officially and you just choose to stick with your implementation or port over, neither was a particularly big deal but I tend to prefer sticking to the official path in a framework where possible so I switched over.
But we're not talking about putting an individual on trial, we're talking about geopolitics.
There's absolutely nothing anywhere that says that nation states get the same benefits of proper use of the justice system as individuals do.
Given the murky world of espionage and so forth that makes sense too. When your opponent is explicitly using the instruments of a nation state to avoid minimising evidence whilst denying you access to key witnesses (i.e. the accused actors for the state) then you'd never be able to respond to any attack ever.
"Its also a little too convenient that a country which outright bans american films and that would never have to tolerate its citizenry watching it, happens to care enough to make a retaliatory strike against what for all intents and purposes is a nonthreat."
Apparently dodgy Chinese DVD copies regularly make their way into North Korea, and a number of Hollywood Films are quite popular regardless of their actual legality so I think you're wrong about that. See this story going back to 2012 for example:
Frankly I'm getting a little tired of the "security experts" who decry the claim that it's North Korea because all they seem to be doing is saying "No it wasn't" without providing any counter evidence and simultaneously contradicting each other. We've got some telling us GOP didn't claim to be doing it over the Interview until a little while after the leak as if it was just taking advantage of that as misdirection, and now it turns out some North Korea IPs were involved we're being told that that's not evidence because anyone could hack North Korean IPs. Which is it? was it planned to be pinned on North Korea or not? The "security experts" need to start providing a bit more meat to their counter claims rather than just putting out a whole bunch of contradictory and sometimes outright nonsensical speculation. They're all coming up with different stories, none of which has any evidence, and all of which stop making sense at various points (generally ranging from lack of motive through to inconsistency of argument).
I agree the information released by the US to date is a little poor but I don't see it as particularly out of the ordinary. Maybe the FBI don't want to give away their methods, maybe it was a trivial hack and Sony doesn't want to be embarassed. Maybe it was an advanced hack and the FBI is worried about others figuring it out. Maybe they just don't care enough about internet conspiracy theorists to really give a shit that they even need to.
But I prefer to go by what the people involved have said. First we have the North Korean regime bitching about the film, then the hack happens, when asked if they did it North Korea says "Wait and see", then GOP comes along and takes credit, and then seeing the flack they got North Korea denies it, then when Sony finally cancels the release and as a result the US government gets involved and starts counter-striking North Korea suddenly GOP goes all quiet.
Given that North Korea is the only place that gives two shits about the film, I don't see it as being a particularly far fetched scenario that North Korea actually did it, realised in the face of non-stop media reports creating a Streisand effect it had maybe gone a little far and made the problem worse and so washed it's hands of it. Maybe they didn't even do it themselves, maybe they paid someone. Maybe you're right, maybe they didn't do it at all, but right now no one's providing any evidence and I don't frankly see any reason to disbelieve the North Korean theory, they're the only ones with any real motive and there's nothing to make the story unbelievable. If you don't think North Korea would care about a film like this then you're wholly naive about how important to the North Korean leadership maintaining Kim's image as a magical deity is.
The fact the US authorities have lied so many times about so many things doesn't mean we should instantly disbelieve everything they say. God only knows if we're going on who to trust based on lies told then I've no idea why you'd favour North Korea's very delayed claim of innocence - this is the country that's claimed it's leader has cured AIDs and found unicorns or whatever the fuck they've come up with lately. As lies go North Korea's have always been more blatant, more obvious, and often more fantastical than anything the US has told. Why believe that's changed now?
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Yes, you're right Woosh. I totally didn't see it coming that you'd try and pass off your stupid comment as a joke in a desperate attempt to stave off your own embarrassment that you posted something so wrong in the first place.
You know Woosh isn't just a thing you get to post to make yourself no longer an idiot after you posted something stupid right? You know you're still clearly the idiot here yes?
"Python - No way in hell .. the language has to bend to my will, not me bending to its will."
Few languages bend to your will, some learning is always required. I'm not terribly convinced the learning curve for Python is less than for PHP/Javascript given that those two have so many dangerous nuances that it takes years to truly understand them and develop with them without falling victim to their countless pitfalls. If you don't like the syntax of Python that's fine, but it's hardly a compelling technical argument not to use it over PHP and Javascript.
"Java - Antiquated and full of perversions, along with the spectre of Oracle hanging over you."
Java is antiquated? It was first released in 1995. That's the same year that both PHP and Javascript turned up you realise?
As for perversions, what perversions exactly? It's a pure OO language and sticks to that properly. Compared to Javascript that really doesn't know what it is and has functionality that's basically broken like closures because it tried to do away with explicit pass by value and pass by reference meaning you need to do horrible hacks to force creation of a new scope if you want to pass by value into a closure rather than have a variable captured.
PHP? It's about as perverted as you can get. It started out basically like C for the web, but without the difficult stuff. Then it did exactly like C++ and tried to glue OO on top, only C++ kinda worked because it was done by a competent computer scientist whilst PHP had it's OO tacked on by a mob of wannabes.
Out of the 3, Java is no older, and is the only one that actually determined and stuck with a consistent and planned design philosophy. Your criticism therefore seems to be wholly nonsensical in the context of comparison against Javascript and PHP. The very fact that Javascript was rushed out with a similar name in the same year as Java to cash in on it's hype should at least tell you something about the quality of Javascript as a language if nothing else.
"C/C++ - I know it is done, but would you?"
It really depends what you're doing and how competent you are.
"C#/VBV.Net - Even with MS opening up things .. "It's a trap" /Ackbar"
If it's a trap then it's a pretty poor one because they keep on open sourcing more and more of it. First they go and make the language a real actual standard, and then they start open sourcing the framework whilst giving Mono their explicit blessing.
Microsoft now isn't Microsoft the 90s, it has realised that it needs C# to be runnable in as many places as possible like Java, hence why they opened up the core and plan to open up more and more of it. Nadella knows they lost the smartphone war, and he knows that Windows Server hasn't taken over the server world. He knows that the only way to get a foothold in these areas is to at least take what it does well there - development tools and technologies. The newest version of Visual Studio even supports Android development.
You seem to have pulled together a list of pretty weak criticisms of each language and pretended that's justification not to use them over PHP and Javascript despite PHP and Javascript both having glaring deficiencies that make the negative considerations you pass off as fact above wholly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
Each technology has it's merits, but saying I'm going to use a technology with 100 deficiencies because the alternative has 1 deficiency seems to me to be a bit short sighted (no zealots, please don't take the 100 to 1 literally, it's intentional hyperbole to make a point).
At the end of the day we're stuck with Javascript on the client for the foreseeable future and that doesn't bother me too much. But why use it or PHP on the server when there genuinely are just all around better alternatives for that particular case?
I don't even buy the Javascript on the server because you can share code with the client thing either - your server objects automat
"Of the 32.6%, 97% said humans were responsible, which yields 31.6% believe humans are causing global warming, or less than one-third."
You've made a classic attempt to distort the figures. One could just as equally make an equally valid loaded claim such as:
97.8% of scientific papers that expressed a position on climate change believe it is real. Of those 94.8% claim it is man made.
This is correct based on the 32.6% vs. 0.7% divide you suggest amongst those who have take up a position.
This is ultimately similar to the election polling problem, sure the don't knows are a largely unknown quantity but unless there's sufficient reason to believe the unknowns would tend towards rejection of climate change if they had to make a choice then the most likely outcome is that the don't knows would follow the same trend with a few percent margin of error and you'd end up with a fairly similar final result.
Of course the meta-study is based on outcomes of formal scientific papers which is different to the opinion of scientists themselves. Just because someone is erring on the side of caution in a formal scientific paper doesn't mean that they don't believe that the actual weight of evidence suggests one outcome more than the other.
So sure his 99.9% may be made up, but it'd appear plausible that it's a whole lot closer to the actual figure than the alternative theory that there are plenty of scientists against would pose. Given the figures it seems statistically highly unlikely to expect a massive swing towards anything more than around 10% of scientists believing global warming is not a man made problem.
It's pretty clear however you spin it that scientific consensus tends far more towards climate change being real, and likely man made than it does any other outcome.
And why do you feel that defeating cancer isn't already part of the research into helping us live longer?
You can make the same argument about all of it, the longer you live the more likely you are to catch any deadly disease. The longer you live the more likely your heart is to give in. The longer you live the more likely you are to suffer a stroke. The longer you live the more likely you are to go deaf and lose your vision.
Cancer is no different, increasing age increases the chance of suffering all these things. Part of living older is defeating or delaying each and every one of these possible threats. What makes you think that cancer is somehow a distinctly different problem on the way to the same goal as the rest of it that means that it should be singled out and held up as a possible problem of increasing age more than anything else?
"Given I've already told you in this thread that I've contacted my MP to raise concerns over surveillance powers available to the security service your continued claims that I'm an apologist merely expose your own ignorance and blindness to bitter realities."
Well no actually, if anything it just demonstrates that you're either a very contradictory person or you're simply full of shit. Whether you've written to your MP or not makes no difference to the fact you're making apologies for MI5 and defending it's request for more powers whilst inadvertently admitting that if they need anything it's not more powers, it's more staff, because they already can't get through the data they harvest with the powers they have as is.
"No. Do I want ubiquitous surveillance? No."
It may not be what you want, but it's exactly what you're defending and asking for. You're saying it's okay that MI5 wants more power because their job is difficult whilst arguing that what they actually need is more manpower.
"Is the answer to pretend that the collective security services don't need the ability to monitor communications? Join the real world you idiotic twat."
Okay I can see this is beginning to make you cry now, you're obviously one of those irrational types who just no matter what cannot admit they've made stupid arguments. But here's what's odd, you create a great long rant about how you don't want ubiquitous surveillance and you then say it's somehow necessary in the real world, so what you're saying is you do want ubiquitous surveillance, that is the only logical conclusion of your argument.
It's the logical conclusion of your argument you see, because security services already monitor all communications, they already have the power to invade the privacy of suspects to whatever degree they require, and that's okay, because that's what they need to do. They can already do all this - targeted surveillance of threats to national security isn't illegal and isn't what they're asking for.
What they're asking for is the ability to access every digital communication of every person in the country at will, regardless of whether they're a suspect or not. You're defending their request for something you previously said you're wholly against. This is why between all your bile spewing you also come across as not only completely out of control of your emotions, but wholly confused also.
So there's one of two conclusions we can reach here:
1) You're making contradictory statements because you seem to admit you've no idea what the job of the security services are, and because you clearly have no idea what they're asking for given that you're defending their request whilst arguing you don't want what they're requesting
2) You do actually finally concede that you were wrong, but are one of those people who just can't say it, no matter how much bile they start spewing and how much nonsensical rubbish they keep throwing out which makes them look more and more irrational and crazed so continue to spout falsehoods and nonsense alongside comments that agree with everything I've been saying all along
But whichever doesn't really matter, the point is that you've highlighted full and well that you were wrong either way. Spewing bile everywhere and contradicting yourself doesn't change that, and if you think that you doing that is somehow my problem rather than yours, well, I genuinely feel sorry for you - you clearly have anger management issues.
"but then that really is a can of worms, and a lot of the people who pushed for Amendment 1 or Article 10 to protect their right to express their views really don't want to eat their own dogfood"
This shows a complete ignorance of historic context and is a rather unfair portrayal. The European Convention on Human Rights was drafted in the years that followed World War II and the lessons learnt from that. It was put together explicitly to try to prevent a repeat of things like the persecution of the Jews.
There was an explicit recognition at the time that much of what happened in Nazi Germany happened because the Jews had no external recourse against their own fascist government. The government's word was supreme and there was no higher international power they could appeal to in the face of wrongdoing by government. There was a belief that if you could give the people a last resort against government, a higher international order that held oppressive governments to account, that you could prevent a repeat of Nazi Germany's concentration camps.
Just because that has been perverted somewhat now and attempts at further perversion are growing doesn't mean those in charge have always succumbed to modern authoritarianism. Post-war was a period of relative political enlightenment in the West, but unfortunately due to the weight of the cold war, it was far too short lived. The ideas and intentions of leaders at the time were genuinely quite noble - look at the reasons behind the creation of the European Court of Human Rights too for example, it was all part of the same noble goal - to attempt to give the oppressed by government a voice against government.
It wasn't a complete failure, the European Court of Human Rights still does a great job in many cases of upholding the rights of citizens against overbearing government and corporations using the convention as it's guiding principles. It's imperfect but we can thank it for putting things like Phorm in the UK to death for example calling it out as the blatant widespread invasion of privacy that it was after the government refused to deal with it and instead opted to allow it.
People often cherry pick cases where it protects the bad as well as the good, but it has to, because once you start differentiating between people on fundamental rights it's not long before everyone falls into some exception category rendering the whole thing useless. But it was a good idea, pushed through with good intentions, by people who saw genuine horrors that even they knew must never be repeated. It's for that reason that we should not take it for granted, or belittle it, or claim it as a trap by the elite - on the contrary we should be pushing to keep upholding it and fighting to reclaim it as a charter for everyone, all the time, not just as something that governments can pick up and put down as and when it suits.
"Your sentence is gliberish"
What's gliberish? Is it like an elven language or something?
"Just like smoking causes cancer, which isn't anything the smokers actually want, Islam causes violence and grief without its adepts really wanting it."
This implies that you believe all 1.2 billion muslims are violent, because if that's what Islam causes then it follows that all muslims must be victim of it.
Of course, that's not true, because all we need is one single peaceful adherent to prove it, of which we infact have a billion or more, so your argument is broken from the very outset. The fact that you can't follow this basic logical point doesn't bode well for painting yourself as a rational person, you're clearly not if you can't see how broken your argument is - to follow your argument as you have requires one to throw logic out the window.
"Where is a free, prosperous Islamic state?"
Kurdistan? Qatar? UAE?
"They are all host of no end of calamities and disgusting cruelty. Why?"
Mostly because of foreign intervention having kept them down for many centuries.
Why not just come out and say you're an Islamophobe and fear those who are different? You'd save yourself of an awful lot of words to tell us the exact same thing you're telling us anyway.
"You have a very naive view of the effort needed to track and monitor several thousand people."
I don't suffer from naivety, the problem is you're make the same false arguments the intelligence services make to try and pursue their power grab.
"There are estimates of over 2000 British people fighting for ISIS. That doesn't include anybody being naughty elsewhere in the world, or in the UK."
So fucking what? MI5 need not care in the slightest. That's MI6's job. What have people fighting for ISIS got to do with internal security? If they're not inside the country they're not currently a threat to the country. MI5 does not need to monitor a single one of these people whilst they remain in Syria/Iraq. Your argument is so fundamentally broken it should be obvious, but apparently to you, it's not. I can only guess you don't even know what MI5's job is, despite your insistence on defending it.
"You think it's possible to keep tabs on all 2000 when they return to the UK just by monitoring their twitter feeds? You accuse the security services of incompetence and you clearly don't have even the most basic of clues about what they do."
Again, you're so desperate to try and salvage what tatters remain of your argument you've just resorted to simply making things up. Ignoring the fact that all 2000 wont return because some are already dead, how do you know with apparent certainty that the rest will return? No you don't need to just monitor their Twitter feeds, but regardless, doing so would still be a step up from where we are now - which is to not monitor them, and allow attacks through, which is precisely the point. Yes, you need to do other stuff as well, yes, it's not even just MI5, we need to to improve efforts in terms of social work with these people to deradicalise them. None of which changes the fact that this isn't happening now and MI5s failures are a part of that.
"By the way, I'd appreciate you not calling me an apologist."
Well what else would you prefer? A pro-MI5 zealot? I don't really know what else to suggest when apologist fits perfectly.
I mean, when you have to resort to making up scenarios such as the return of 2000 jihadists from the middle east what else fits? Anyone who wasn't an apologist wouldn't need to make stuff up to try and fix their broken argument - I notice you completely ignore the point about why are MI5 asking for more data collection powers if manpower is the issue.
So yes, you're an apologist. Don't make stuff up and ignore things you can't answer because you know full well they make a mockery of your failed argument.
How many of them are there? Why do we have to worry about them leaving the country? Even then it's not like we're talking thousands.
The problem is that we let them back in and let them act as if they haven't just been trained by the likes of al Qaeda and ISIS.
Once they're out of the country that's MI6s job and the rest of the foreign security services they bypass on the way to wherever they're going. But why does MI5 and internal security of countries like the US, Canada, France, Australia do fuck all when known terrorists return? Even here a good number of those returning learnt the hard way that ISIS aren't nice people and that it's completely turned them around. There are a number of ex-wannabe jihadis that now preach against going over, so of those returning some actually become reformed by the brutal experience alone so of the small number returning it's not like they're even all threats. Sure some could be putting on a front, but that's the sort you can let slip through - these French guys didn't even put on a front, it was open and blatant that they still supported al Qaeda post-return.
"Even if you do know someone went to Chechnya, that's not actually illegal. You want a team of 8 people tracking that individual 24/7 just in case they're being naughty?"
Why 8 people? what is the relevance of that arbitrary arse plucking you've created other than to try and justify your point without actually having any basis on which to justify it. Some of these folks have even posted on Twitter and Facebook before they've done what they've done - if nothing else have a single person monitoring the tens of Twitter/Facebook feeds of these people, you'd only need one or two people doing that for many suspects and even that would be a big step up from where we are now. But if you think their job isn't to monitor such suspects then what exactly do you think they are there for? to just sit on their arse and get paid? Are you really claiming there are so many people coming back to the UK et. al. after having attended terrorist training camps and with warnings slapped on them by overseas agencies that we can't monitor all ten of them? If so I'd suggest you have a warped view of the numbers involved. We're not even talking thousands here, and we're barely talking hundreds.
Worse, you like others are making the claim that they're understaffed. If that's true why are they gathering so much irrelevant data? Why are they begging for more powers not more staff? If they're simply understaffed then they need to ask for more staff. Capturing even more data when the implication of your argument is that they can't even act on what they already have even though what they already have is sufficient enough that every single terrorist threat since 9/11 has been known to them then how will more powers help at all?
It's one thing going to Chechnya, it's another going there and having the Russian authorities tell you they've been mingling with extremists and engaging in training and that they're a threat and then not monitoring them at all.
It seems your argument is basically that it's okay to completely ignore blatant threats because bless MI5 et. al. their jobs are so hard and they couldn't possibly be incompetent, it must just be bad luck and we should leave them alone because there's no way they could improve ever.
On what do you base that premise? Why do you think they're perfect? Why given that they pay low do you think they're somehow miraculously staffed with highly competent people? What do you think makes them special that they don't suffer high levels of incompetence like many other parts of public sector?
This is precisely the problem I have - we've got no evidence the security services are doing a good job, we have examples of high levels of incompetence yet apologists like you come along and declare them as untouchable, that we shouldn't ever criticise them, that they couldn't be doing anything other than their best. It's stupid. It's a sure fire way to create and protect an environment where incompetence thrives, and that puts us all at risk.
There aren't several million leads in each country. The UK has a population of 65 million. We do not have a significant proportion of the population even close to showing signs of interest in terrorism. We have a few thousand at best.
Of those few thousand you can quite quickly see which ones are most troubled and which have convictions for violence. Once you've narrowed it down there it becomes even easier to cross reference against those that have traveled to known areas of concern for terrorist training like Yemen and Pakistan.
By the time you've done this basic filtering, you're left with maybe a couple of thousand at worst, most likely a few hundred in practice.
It's the same names over and over, one of the guys that did this in France had been convicted for helping fund terrorism, he had convictions for violence, he was on two terror watch lists, he was known to have travelled to Yemen to an al Qaeda training camp. How many people do you think there are that fit this bill in France? I'd wager it's no more than maybe the very low tens at most.
Once again the Lee Rigby killers fit the same profile - albeit with attempts to go play jihad with al Shabab instead.
I'd sympathise with your point if we were talking about these sorts of people having done nothing other than posted sympathies for al Qaeda in Facebook but we're talking about more than that, we're talking time and time again about people who have travelled to fucking training camps with the security services knowing about it and nothing is done. The people actually carrying out the attacks show very clear signs of escalating and obvious intent. They're not going from Facebook posting to terrorism, they're slowly becoming more and more radicalised and more and more serious, the security services know but fail to believe it's worth acting on.
In this case he went to Yemen and they knew themselves, in Rigby's case they tried to go to Somalia and the Kenyans alerted them, in the Boston bombing case they went to Chechnya and were warned by the Russians, in the Canada parliament shooting he'd tried to get to Syria.
It's become quite clear that if someone is wanting to go to an Islamic terrorist training/fighting hotspot that maybe it's worth taking serious notice. The only people who don't seem to have figured this out are Western security services.
"Is there really anything MI5 could have done to prevent that?"
Yes an awful lot given that MI5 had been told by Kenyan authorities about how they'd tried to cross into Somalia to take part in Al Shabab's jihad there and so knew full well what a risk to the public those two were.
Of course you could argue as others do that "they can't keep an eye on everyone", but if that's the case they might as well just give up and go home right now.
"All of those Christians and Jews that post online videos of themselves beheading their captive hostages, lining up villagers and gunning them down"
You mean like this?
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/...
"Lack of resources mean that they cannot be physically watching every suspect all the time"
So if they're so short on resources why have they been expending so much time monitoring people who aren't suspects and aren't even threats?
Let's take the Lee Rigby case an example. The security services have been harvesting the communications of each and every citizen in the UK as far as possible, they claim this is to help detect threats. Given this, why do you believe that whilst this implies they have the capacity to determine amongst the communications of 64 million citizens those which are and aren't threats and yet they don't have the resources and manpower to determine if two guys who tried to join a violent jihadist organisation in Somali and were extradited back from Kenya as a result are or aren't threats?
Do you not see the silliness of your argument? You believe they're under resourced, but if that's the case and they don't even have the resources to determine threats that are blatant and put right in front of them by the Kenyan security services et. al. then how will giving them even more powers to gather even more information help exactly?
If resourcing was the problem wouldn't they be asking for more resources rather than more powers?
I don't think you've really thought your argument through.
Haven't you just disproved your own point? that if the vast majority of victims of Islam are innocent victims then the problem isn't actually with Islam but simply violent thugs?
If the problem is with Islam itself then it seems odd that literally about a billion other muslims manage to practice it entirely peacefully. A problem with the religion itself would imply that all muslims would be effected by it, but they're clearly not, so instead we need to understand what the differentiating trait amongst the subset who are actually problematic is.
It may be that it's another trait in conjunction with the religion itself that's the problem, sure, but it's not clear that it's definitely the religion itself, and it seems very clear that it's not wholly the fault of the religion due to the massive majority that aren't impacted.
Note that I'm not defending religion per-se, I think it's unhelpful and demands people opt for ignorance over evidence, and maybe that is the problem - it makes them vulnerable to extremism, but I think it's clear we can't wholly blame religion, again, given how many peaceful followers of Islam there are - over 10% of the entire world's population in fact.
"Surveilling them is not free, and is not without consequences in itself."
Regardless, it's a far better step up from surveilling everybody and makes the data set of targets for more detailed analysis far more manageable.
It's ultimately a question of whether profiling is ever acceptable. I believe it has to be acceptable at some point else you might as well just disband the security services altogether. In terms of human rights I don't think narrowing the surveillance set from "everyone" to "violent criminals with jihadist sympathies" is a particularly unfair trade off.
I'm not recommend we profile based on skin colour, I'm not recommending we profile based on religion. But profiling based on a history of violence and/or terrorist activity such as funding and recruitment of groups overseas all coupled with a hatred for the society in which they live as a starting point for investigation? I don't think that's unreasonable.
Those edge cases that are borderline troubled teens not yet truly radicalised can be passed off to anti-extremism programmes and any lack of progress reported back to enabled continued monitoring.
But when you've got two guys on no fly lists, who were previously in court for supporting jihadis, and one of which has a history of violence both managing to get hold of AK-47s and reportedly even an RPG-7 and getting them all the way to central paris? Something is going very fucking wrong in the intelligence world and it simply cannot be excused as anything other than outright incompetence - it's a level of failure that would get anyone else fired from their job and yet instead we're told "Oh they're doing a tough job, we shouldn't be too hard on them. They're heroes, we can't possible suggest otherwise!" whilst their bosses tell us they need more powers to snoop on even more people in even more invasive ways as if that's somehow going to change anything at all.
It doesn't have to be. It's good enough to have caught the most atrocious attacks since 9/11 and that's drastically better than what we have now which is apparently just gathering more data without the slightest clue how or if it's possible to make any kind of use of it all.
There's always going to be terrorists that will slip through the net, I agree with that assessment by MI5's chief. The problem is we're not even dealing with the ones for which there's no reason they should be slipping through the net because they can trivially be categorised as threats - in fact, in some cases they've already been categorised as threats by foreign intelligence agencies and then that advice ignored by the agencies of the countries they move to.
We'll never achieve perfection, but achieving a marked improvement doesn't look too difficult relative to the sheer ineptitude we seem to have right now.
That's exactly the problem, they shouldn't be monitoring tens of millions in the first place because there aren't tens of millions that are a threat. My point exactly was that they only need to monitor the few hundred or few thousand that match real actual threat criteria.
The fact they're monitoring tens of millions is precisely the ineptitude that needs calling out and dealing with. There aren't tens of millions of real actual threats present within each country, there are a few hundred or maybe a few thousand at best. You don't need to monitor anyone abroad, that's the job of external security like MI6 and your foreign partners to do. MI5 can't keep track of internal threats precisely because they're too busy snooping and gathering mountains of data on non-threats.
As I've said before, instead of working on becoming better at finding the needle in the haystack, all MI5, GCHQ, and it's counterparts overseas seem to do now is build a bigger haystack so that even when their counterparts from overseas say to them "Hey, you've got a bunch of terrorist threats here" they seem to just respond "Sorry, too busy with head buried in massive haystack to care".
Personally I think there's two ways of looking at it, I think you can either believe that religion is the cause, or you can believe it's the excuse.
I think there are good arguments either way and so I'm not about to disagree with your viewpoint. I do however still sit on the fence on the issue and think it's worth considering that it may just be an excuse.
Consider this, if religion is the cause of the problem, then how do we explain away the other 1 billion muslims that aren't engaging in any such terrorism and are living lives no less peaceful than that of your typical atheist?
Another interesting example is that of Buddhists in Burma who have been massacring muslims Rohingyas in recent years. Buddhism teaches non-violence as one of it's core tenets and is often cited as the most peaceful religion known to man. If the teachings of a religion are relevant in determining what a person does or doesn't do then how do we explain this sort of situation given that these people have been preached non-violence to more so than pretty much any other group of people on earth?
As an atheist I do have a negative view of religion, I think it's pointless and encourages poor thinking and ignorance. But I'm not wholly convinced that that poor thinking leads to terrorism. I think terrorism exists by itself as a result of people being poor and disenfranchised amongst other things, and terrorists just look for a cause to try and justify and excuse their actions.
Yes, here's the actual problem, map of alcohol consumption by country where darker colours are more alcohol consumption and lighter colours are less and grey is no data:
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/news/...
Original article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal...
Long story short, is that Russia's driving accidents problem is almost wholly down to the fact that it's a nation of rampant alcholics. The rest comes down to poorly maintained cars and roads and a nation with weather that results in terrible driving conditions for half the year.
So absolutely nothing in this new law will fix the problem it purports to fix, hence, it's safe to assume that it's in fact wholly about minority oppression.
It doesn't really matter what they are, it's bad regardless.
Why? because if we've learnt anything from terrorist incidents since 9/11 is that the perpetrators were all already known to the authorities.
- Lee Rigby killers? Already detained trying to head to support Al Shabab by Kenyan authorities and sent back to the UK with MI5 informed
- Boston Bombings? Russia already alerted the FBI to the fact they'd been hanging with Chechnyan extremists and were a threat.
- Australian hostage taker? Already on trial for violent crimes and with a history of support for Islamic extremism
- These guys? Already on the US no fly list. Already known to French authorities for extremist sympathies. At least one already had been in trouble with police for violent crimes.
It seems to me that a taboo needs to be broken, that the general public needs to stop assuming the security services are competent. It's clear they're not and it's clear that no new powers are needed because in each and every case of terrorism that comes about the perpetrators are already known to the authorities.
All that's needed is for the authorities to start better determining threats from the data they have, they don't need new data. If they simply started monitoring based on the following two criteria then all of the above would've been prevented:
1) Does the person have extremist sympathies?
2) Does the person have a violent disposition / have they been arrested and convicted of a violent crime?
Simply monitoring on these two criteria alone would've prevented all of the above. No new data needed, no new powers needed. It's not rocket science but apparently the likes of MI5 are so entirely inept that they can't even figure out the basics.
"The IRA weren't ever trying to set up a catholic state, just an independent one."
Of course they were, in fact, Northern Ireland today is grossly at odds with the rest of the UK on a number of laws precisely to appease the IRA as part of the peace plan. For example in Northern Ireland it's illegal to have an abortion even if you were raped and this is wholly to satisfy the IRA's Catholic pro-life dogma.
Anyone who murders their child is not "normal". There is evidence of Patricide in every walk of life.
"Nothing of what I said was to indicate a problem with C# itself. It was to showcase why HR departments would be hesitant to hire someone who presumably hasn't touched C# in a professional environment in the last 2 years; especially when you consider that going into an interview you are directly competing with people who have (supposedly) been in the thick of C# and rolling with its changes consistently for the past 5-10."
I've worked in Java, C#, C++ and PHP roles and I understand what you're saying here, but honestly I never found moving back to C# (which is what I tend to gravitate back towards each time I end up on jobs that don't use it) to be a problem - if I know I'm applying for C# roles and haven't touched it in a couple of years then an hour or two of reading is plenty enough to get you upto speed, but you do need that strong pre-requisite knowledge of C# in the first place.
In fact, last time I was asked to do one of the upto 3 hour long IKM tests on C# 4.0 for a recruitment test I scored 99.6%, despite having been working on a PHP project for 18 months prior.
It's worth reading books like C# in Depth for anyone working with C# because it gives you the background and evolution of the language - if you're comfortable with that, then learning what the latest version adds is trivial. The same extends to all the frameworks like MVC which I've used since it was in beta when I was initially evaluating frameworks. It's changed, but it's really not changed that much or enough to cause any particular headaches. I had my own implementation of Areas before they came along officially and you just choose to stick with your implementation or port over, neither was a particularly big deal but I tend to prefer sticking to the official path in a framework where possible so I switched over.
But we're not talking about putting an individual on trial, we're talking about geopolitics.
There's absolutely nothing anywhere that says that nation states get the same benefits of proper use of the justice system as individuals do.
Given the murky world of espionage and so forth that makes sense too. When your opponent is explicitly using the instruments of a nation state to avoid minimising evidence whilst denying you access to key witnesses (i.e. the accused actors for the state) then you'd never be able to respond to any attack ever.
"Its also a little too convenient that a country which outright bans american films and that would never have to tolerate its citizenry watching it, happens to care enough to make a retaliatory strike against what for all intents and purposes is a nonthreat."
Apparently dodgy Chinese DVD copies regularly make their way into North Korea, and a number of Hollywood Films are quite popular regardless of their actual legality so I think you're wrong about that. See this story going back to 2012 for example:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
This page explains how it happens quite well:
http://www.libertyinnorthkorea...
Frankly I'm getting a little tired of the "security experts" who decry the claim that it's North Korea because all they seem to be doing is saying "No it wasn't" without providing any counter evidence and simultaneously contradicting each other. We've got some telling us GOP didn't claim to be doing it over the Interview until a little while after the leak as if it was just taking advantage of that as misdirection, and now it turns out some North Korea IPs were involved we're being told that that's not evidence because anyone could hack North Korean IPs. Which is it? was it planned to be pinned on North Korea or not? The "security experts" need to start providing a bit more meat to their counter claims rather than just putting out a whole bunch of contradictory and sometimes outright nonsensical speculation. They're all coming up with different stories, none of which has any evidence, and all of which stop making sense at various points (generally ranging from lack of motive through to inconsistency of argument).
I agree the information released by the US to date is a little poor but I don't see it as particularly out of the ordinary. Maybe the FBI don't want to give away their methods, maybe it was a trivial hack and Sony doesn't want to be embarassed. Maybe it was an advanced hack and the FBI is worried about others figuring it out. Maybe they just don't care enough about internet conspiracy theorists to really give a shit that they even need to.
But I prefer to go by what the people involved have said. First we have the North Korean regime bitching about the film, then the hack happens, when asked if they did it North Korea says "Wait and see", then GOP comes along and takes credit, and then seeing the flack they got North Korea denies it, then when Sony finally cancels the release and as a result the US government gets involved and starts counter-striking North Korea suddenly GOP goes all quiet.
Given that North Korea is the only place that gives two shits about the film, I don't see it as being a particularly far fetched scenario that North Korea actually did it, realised in the face of non-stop media reports creating a Streisand effect it had maybe gone a little far and made the problem worse and so washed it's hands of it. Maybe they didn't even do it themselves, maybe they paid someone. Maybe you're right, maybe they didn't do it at all, but right now no one's providing any evidence and I don't frankly see any reason to disbelieve the North Korean theory, they're the only ones with any real motive and there's nothing to make the story unbelievable. If you don't think North Korea would care about a film like this then you're wholly naive about how important to the North Korean leadership maintaining Kim's image as a magical deity is.
The fact the US authorities have lied so many times about so many things doesn't mean we should instantly disbelieve everything they say. God only knows if we're going on who to trust based on lies told then I've no idea why you'd favour North Korea's very delayed claim of innocence - this is the country that's claimed it's leader has cured AIDs and found unicorns or whatever the fuck they've come up with lately. As lies go North Korea's have always been more blatant, more obvious, and often more fantastical than anything the US has told. Why believe that's changed now?