"it was also taken for granted before the vote that there was a large majority for secession"
No it wasn't, the only polls from before Russia invaded showed that there was a distinct lack of support for joining Russia with the highest proportion of support being at only 41%:
There was slightly higher support for outright independence (i.e. no attachment to either country) at 51% but that can hardly be called a "large majority", it's a majority of 1%.
So these leaked figures are actually pretty reasonable - they're a more realistic swing (especially given Russia's military occupation of the place) by way of a 26% swing away from support for joining Russia, compared to Putin's claimed results which suggest a 42% swing towards joining Russia.
Sorry but whether you were there 18 months ago or not, what you say has more of a tone of the typical hipster "stick it to the man" nonsense ideology on Ukraine, rather than what Crimeans actually felt. You're parroting widely discredited nonsense, which is trivially rubbished by things such as the poll done above before shit kicked off that hence gives us a far more reasonable view of what Crimeans actually wanted - hint, it was far closer to these supposed leaked results, than it was Putin's claimed actual results.
"You do realize stopping the flow of gas to Europe would hurt Europe more than it would Russia, don't you?"
No it wouldn't. Russia's entire economy is founded on it to the point it simply cannot service it's debts without it and so would default resulting in a collapse of it's economy. Europe in contrast can get gas from elsewhere, including fellow European countries like Norway.
The reason Europe hasn't stopped buying Russian gas yet is two fold:
1) Causing economic collapse of Russia is a last ditch option, Putin is, if nothing else, a known quantity. If Russia collapses who takes over the world's largest/second largest nuclear arsenal? Who makes sure Russian commanders don't go shipping nukes off to batshit crazy lands like North Korea to make themselves insanely rich? It's probably containable, but it's a risk that shouldn't be taken if necessary.
2) Although Europe can live without Russian gas it would cost more to switch suddenly to other suppliers, that would reduce economic competitiveness to a degree and reduce the disposable income of Europeans due to higher fuelling costs. This wouldn't cause economic collapse in Europe like it would Russia but it would leave people unhappy as it'd likely mean a few more years of recession or negligible growth until supplies of gas to increase competition and reduce prices again came online such as that to start being shipped from the US.
Europe has the power to crush Russia and bankrupt it, but right now it's an option that has risks and has burdens that people do not want to suffer unless absolutely necessary.
See here for how utterly dependant on trade with Europe Russia is:
In contrast Europe isn't as dependent on Russia for trade, it can easily live without it. In fact, only one or two countries in Europe actually make more from Russia than Russia makes from the (again, largely because of Russian energy imports), one of those countries is the UK who now has one of the strongest Western economies and could most afford to foot the loss anyway.
The difference is that Americans are smothered in disaposable income being one of the most wealthy countries in the world, whereas the equipment the guys in Ukraine are using would cost between 10 and 20 years of your average Ukrainian's salary.
And no, the anti-aircraft missiles aren't feasible - Syrian rebels have been trying to acquire these for years and have had the explicit support of Qatar, Turkey and others yet have still failed to acquire them. Even the Taliban that outright used to have them having been given stingers by the Americans to use against the Russians in the 80s have only been able to get a handful operation, and have shot at most one helicopter down with them.
Also, many of the weapons we're talking about weren't even in existence in the sorts of wars where people tend to source such equipment, such as the Yugoslav wars which have been a major source of hand grenades and so forth. The weapons are just too modern to have come from the fall of the USSR, or from any major war since. The only place you're going to get stuff that new is straight from the factory.
This is false. Even if you don't believe any of the agent provocateurs in Eastern Ukraine are Russian, Putin himself has now come out and admitted the guys in Crimea that it previously said were simply activists were in fact Russian troops, and that it did so to protect Russian people there.
At this point there's simply no question - Russian troops have been engaged in an invasion of Ukraine as admitted now by Putin himself.
The only remaining question now that is unanswered is whether Eastern Ukrainian rebels are in fact Russian soldiers. Russia obviously says no, but given that some of the faces there are the same folks that did the same thing in Crimea that Russia now admitted were Russian forces it seems silly to believe Russia is not also in Eastern Ukraine.
Besides, the recent shooting down of 3 Ukrainian military helicopters suggests they are. Keep in mind that Syrian rebels have been explicitly supported by Turkey and Qatar militarily now for 3 years and even they haven't been able to get hold of ManPADs and succesfully shoot down Syrian helicopters it's nonsense to believe the trouble makers in Eastern Ukraine are anything other than professional military. Their equipment alone costs more than over a decade of Ukrainian salary and isn't the sort of shit you can just pick up in an army surplus store, not even in Ukraine with it's post-soviet military sell offs. This stuff is modern, advanced, and expensive.
Honestly you're dead right, contrary to whining by the unions many jobs in local councils are grossly overpaid - your minimum wage secretary gets the national average wage, which is about two fold increase on the private sector going rate for the largely unskilled role.
As I say, IT support guys get as much as 32k for the bottom of the rung jobs that get only about 18k in private sector.
This is before you factor in the massive amounts of out and out wastage.
This is why it makes me really annoyed when we see shit like "Oh, well, we've got to cut down on collecting your bins because we want to upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010 this year". Of course they don't say that last bit, but that's exactly what they fucking mean.
The problem is there's zero accountability in councils, you can literally blow £1million on a pet project, completely and utterly fail, and still get a promotion a week later. I'm not pretending this shit doesn't happen in private sector sometimes too, of course it does, but the magnitude of the problem in British councils is such that you could cut council tax and central government council funding in half, possibly more, and still not require any reduction whatsoever in services IF, and it's a big if you can do something about the vast amount of idiots, and the massive amounts of wastage and overpayment.
I think this needs further investigation. I bet I could easily find funding for a paper entitled "Does gamifying war make soldiers better, more efficient killers?".
Yeah because nothing screams "great idea" like setting up your tanks so that they're a trivial DDOS away from being surrounded, captured, and taken by the enemy.
Maybe the Occulus setup in these tanks makes score numbers fly out of people's corpses when you gun them down and if you get multi kills throws up text like "RAMPAGE", and "KILLING SPREE" in the middle of the display?
Intel is about ten times as big as AMD by every metric (except the negative profit metric - Intel actually makes $10bn profit a year, AMD is just losing money).
AMD is tiny, it's an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. Pretending no one would notice Intel's demise whilst AMD will be around long after is comical. Anyway, AMD doesn't even make half the chips you're on about, that's companies like Samsung and Motorola.
"During the P4 days AMD was ahead in almost every category in the benchmarks"
It was ahead in many categories off the benchmarks too.
Like how quickly it heats your room up, and how much power it drained.
I had one but my god in the summer months did I wish I'd gone Intel as I was sat sweltering from the heat of that computer on top of the already high ambient temperature.
I don't think there are really many small councils left, most have been merged into larger ones. The one I worked for wasn't exactly a major one, it was on the smaller end of the scale.
Also, perhaps somewhat perversely, you tend to find the smaller areas have a higher proportion of public sector workers anyway. In some places the councils are effectively used to create jobs to try and reduce unemployment in the area with the government implicitly backing in (because reduced unemployment, no matter how artificially is apparently good for getting re-elected as it also reduces crime etc.).
Whilst a council area of population 1 million might have 80,000 staff, you'll find an area of population 100,000 may still have about 20,000 staff. These numbers are pulled from thin air of course, but you get the idea. I know at least that the percentage of workers in some smaller population areas is drastically disproportionate to the population compared to other areas of the country.
Yeah, most of which is by offering services over BT's often painfully slow DSL network using LLU.
Virgin only really covers inner city areas for the most part. They're scared of going beyond that because it would class them as a major network operator, which results in greater scrutiny from Ofcom and greater responsibilities (i.e. opening up their network to other operators). There are a number of places around here with dark Virgin fibre where they did the work, rolled it out and then abandoned it when the laws came into place putting a bigger burden on major infrastructure operators than Virgin was willing to accept. The cabinets are just sat rusting.
That's also why they haven't really paid much interest to all the government handouts floating around to role fibre out more widely even though they're the one other supplier that could do it.
They cover the low hanging fruit, but that's it, and they have no intention of going further than that. Mostly they're content just being an ISP on BT's network, and keeping their actual infrastructure operations as big as they can get away with without suffering greater legislative burden but no more.
To be fair where I worked we did have a few Unix folk, although it was some ancient proprietary version. We did make some effort to use FOSS, but it all went out the Window when Mr Corrupt at the top took his Microsoft backhander or whatever and signed them up to Microsoft's software assurance programme. I was already gone by that point though.
Portugal is a fairly small country though, and as with Sweden, Norway, Finland and so forth it's far easier to get high speed connections to people than it is a larger country.
Britain has one of the better fibre broadband penetrations now since billions have been spent on rolling it out this last few years but there are still literally millions of people who are lucky to even see 2mbps, let alone, 5mbps, or 10mbps. 100mbps is still a far way off dream in terms of availability and/or affordability for maybe 95% of the population.
You really don't have the slightest clue about what a council does or how big it's operations are do you?
I used to work for a council doing IT support. There are many things wrong with working for a council in terms of the fact it will sap your soul as you watch people get promoted based on whether they're over 60 and need to be given a higher paying job to pump up their final salary pension, or whether you generally just give a shit about doing a good job and get that beaten out of you because anyone who suggests improvements is shot down as a shit stirrer.
But I'll give them credit, one thing they're not is small operations, and if I took absolutely nothing else away from working there I did at least take away the fact that it was one of the more interesting networks I ever got to work on for it's sheer scale. Few private sector businesses give you the experience of scale and number of distributed sites and the level of network management that goes with that as a local council can.
We had around 10,000 desktop computers and laptops to support, we had a network that spanned many hundreds of distributed, and sometimes quite distant sites. You had fairly complex active directory setups because there was originally (later amalgamated) multiple IT teams - one for education, one for central services, one for social housing and so forth with a forest containing a top level domain run by central services and the other departments own domains branching off that. We had 100mbps pipes running from 170 schools to a central location that had it's own connection to the internet as well as a link to janet. You had links to youth centres, satellite offices for social services, for social housing and so on and so forth. Infrastructure for handling customer complaints, for managing property boundary data of every house in the district, for managing the births and deaths registers, for running elections and god knows what else.
As an aside, well, actually, more on topic, Microsoft invests a lot of time and money into wooing councils because they are such massive customers. 10,000 Windows and Office licenses and a hundred or more Windows server licenses as well as tons of exchange and SQL server licenses amongst other things is nothing to scoff at. Especially when there are hundreds of such local authorities in the UK meaning the net worth to Microsoft of capturing as much of UK public sector as possible is in the many hundreds of millions range at very least. I overheard our head of IT joking with a Microsoft salesman once about how they both fiddle expenses buying themselves more expensive meals and hotel rooms and services than necessary. My boss was set on a trip to Reading where Microsoft entertained them at a bar, with good time girl stood around using the sexual desperation of your average old boys club council manager to buy them over. Yes this shit really does actually happen.
A quick Google shows Hampshire County Council has around 40,000 employees. Some of these will be folks like bin men, but this larger than the council I worked for even, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have around 20,000 - 30,000 computers for those staff.
Councils are offloading a lot of services to private sector now, either selling them off, or just outsourcing the services. But the majority of councils still do IT in house.
I'm a developer nowadays working in private sector and am far happier for it, but if there's one thing local councils IT departments are generally not, it's small backroom operations.
I really don't give a shit what you have. The fact remains that you're cherry picking stats to favour apple.
Given that people have pointed this out to you and you still persist on parroting those stats then how can I reasonably assume you're anything other than a fanboy?
There's no rational reason to cherry pick misleading stats as you have when others tell a more objective story other than having an underlying will to favour Apple.
You're still missing the point, no one's making malware specifically for the US market - they're making it for the global market, that means when you examine just the US marketshare it appears to show a skew. So I'll explain it again, if you're desperate to know the impact of the US market you need to find out what malware has been developed and targetted specifically at devices in the US market. I doubt any such malware exists though precisely because it's easier to target the global market by default.
We don't know, that's why it's fruitless and meaningless to go down your path of desperate clawing at the USA stats because they're the only ones that come even remotely close to satisfying your fanboy desires to see Apple on top.
Why not just stick to the global stats and have done with it other than the fact you don't like the global stats because they're unfortunate for your strong fanboy bias towards Apple?
"That's quite an exaggeration. There is currently a shortage of Ruby programmers right now. I know, because I am one, and I have been having to fight off job offers with a stick. (Many of them would give me a significant raise, too, but I don't particularly feel like living in San Francisco, or Palo Alto, or Dallas, or Chicago.) "
I actually agree with you, the problem is that that's true of every language, there's just a programming shortage in general right now (contrary to the old farts who didn't keep with the times and cry and moan that there's no jobs - there are, just not for shit lazy people) and that's why I'm skeptical that people are really looking for Ruby more than anything else right now - certainly I see far less Ruby job adverts than I do.NET and Java. This doesn't mean Ruby developers don't have their pick of jobs, but I believe it simply means that.NET, Java, and C++ developers have an even greater pool to pick from again.
But what this means is that an influx of hundreds of Ruby developers would probably leave Ruby with more developers than jobs, but an influx of.NET, C++, or Java developers would still leave more of those jobs than there are developers.
This is of course just personal opinion, but it's based on having a lot of good recruitment contacts and keeping an eye on the jobs market in many major cities by regularly checking jobs listings, hence why I'm fairly confident that this hunch is correct based on that data.
"British people are generally awesome even if intolerant brutes like Cameron exist (who's seems to be having an identity crisis and takes it out on immigrants)."
When you understand the politics that have been almost tearing apart the Conservatives for years you begin to understand that identity crisis. The problem is that it's a party sharply divided by the right/extreme right old guard, and the younger, more modern minded centre-right liberal conservatives. There isn't enough strength behind Cameron's younger more liberal side of the party to oust the old guard yet, and so the old guard remains essential to them getting elected but the pendulum has long been swinging in their favour because the old guard and their supporters are slowly dying off.
So whilst Cameron is inherently centre-right and liberally minded, he risks being overthrown and the party being taken back (at least temporarily) by the old guard which is even worse. So he has little choice to passify them with things he personally doesn't want - like anti-immigration and anti-EU policies.
If the Tories were comprised wholly of people with the leaning of people like David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne it would not actually be a bad centre-right leaning party, it'd put most liberal parties across the globe to shame. But the reality is it's not that, it's a party where the old guard still have too much power, it's just a case of fending them off until they die off.
When you look at him and what his party does now you'll probably better understand the contradictions and the reasons why, and why Cameron is vague about some issues - he doesn't support them but has to to stop his party falling apart. This is a problem the Tories have been wrestling with since Thatcher, and is why Thatcher was ousted. In this respect the rise of UKIP is probably doing the Tories some good - all the extremists are fucking off their until they die, leaving the Conservative Party to the more liberal and centrist elements.
FWIW I personally identify most closely with the centre and centre-left so probably wouldn't vote for the Tories even if the non centre-right elements had fucked off. Unless of course the alternative was a completely lame centre/centre-left like current Labour.
"Cameron is clearly a xenophobe for allowing xenophobic elements in his party."
This just highlights your ignorance of politics. A leader (thankfully) of a party doesn't have full reign to do everything he wants without question, he's accountable to his party and it's members. Whilst as I said there are some far right members of his party, that doesn't mean all of them are. The Tory party has long been in a battle between the more liberal, and the far right, people like Cameron and Osborne have been pushing to the more liberal side, the fact he is party leader means that a majority of Tories sit at the liberal end of the spectrum.
But he also can't simply remove the less desirable members, nor can he ignore them because if he does there's a risk he loses his leadership post and a far-right Tory leader gets in in his place. Politics is a tough balancing game, and what you're asking for is a liberal dictator - one that highlights your views and ignores others, that is not what Cameron is and that is not how British politics work.
Could he walk away from the party in protest? Sure, but I like the idea of one of the UK's only two electable parties being handed entirely to the far right. Most of the far right in the party are of the older, baby boomer generation. In a decade many of these people will be dead. Better to keep fighting them until then when their ideas die off.
"Lets remember he's also the paranoid nationalist fanatic that gave clearance to the GHCQ to do things like violate people's privacy "
Actually that was the far-left Labour government, did he continue it? sure, but most of this started under Blair (centre right Labour) and escalated under Brown and his cronies (far left). This is also something that other governments have engaged in from Canada's Conservatives, to Australia's "Liberals", to America's Democrats. Putting it at the foot of the UK is a joke when it's endemic throughout the five eyes nations, and a number of others to boot.
"Trying to associate British nationalist extremists like Cameron as being as tolerant to multiculturalism in Canada is absurd."
Calling Cameron an extremist is absurd. It highlights the fact you don't have the slightest inkling as to what an extremist is. If Cameron is an extremist what does that make people like Liam Fox? Sarah Palin? Osama Bin Laden? If you start calling the centre-left or centre-right extremists then you've nothing to label the left, right, extreme left, and extreme right. It just makes you out as a bile fuelled idiot who can't talk rationally on the subject.
"Most Canadians can't stand Harper."
Yet time and time again you guys keep voting for him. How many times now have you handed the largest party status to him? How many elections have you had? What's the tally at now, 3, 4? even higher?
"There is no ethnic Canadian identity."
What complete and utter nonsense, Canada equally has it's race based gangs that simply do not integrate well such as the Vietnamese gangs running growhouses in Vancouver, the large Chinese contingent in Toronto, the Somali groupings in Ottawa, to the people who view themselves as ethnically French in Quebec and the Inuit who have been shit on ever since everyone else started arriving on their shores. I find it astounding that I don't live their but understand Canada better than you - perhaps you need to actually step outside of your basement sometimes or something? Diversity is still greater in Britain largely because of our long history - we have more people from more places than Canada (we have double the population for starters).
All that's before the numerous times Canadian politicians have raised concerns about the loss of Canada's historically Western European foundings to large influxes of Asian immigrants and suggestions Canada should examine prioritising applications from Western European immigrants (and statistical evidence suggesting it does).
"You try to pawn yourself off an anti-nationalist but given your defence of extreme nationalists
I'm a bit baffled by your post. I actually agree the UK has a major problem with nationalism - hence the rise in the UKIP vote, but I'm struggling to see how David Cameron can be framed particularly as a nationalist or a racist, and I'm not sure what wars your referring to, when is the last time we had a war? the short skirmish in Libya? We've been pulling out of and scaling down military intervention drastically in recent years - what you accuse him of is more a trait of two prime ministers past - Tony Blair.
Camerons party does have some frustrating nationalist and far right elements, but he's on the more liberal end of it.
But your post gets even more baffling when you talk about being Canadian - Harper is far more right leaning than Cameron ever has been.
I'm really not convinced you know much about British politics or even your own politics as your spouting terms like ultra-nationalism and racism at someone who can be accused of neither. It's the likes of Liam Fox and pretty much the entirety of UKIP that can be accused of that, but not Cameron, not Osborne, not Boris and the like, and certainly not the likes of current Labour or the Lib Dems, or the Greens. The vast majority of British politicians do not share the far right view that the worst elements of the Tory party and UKIP do, whilst far right Tories like Liam Fox are pretty much identically aligned to people like your PM - Harper. If you genuinely think the British Conservatives are racist, or nationalist then you've clearly not been paying attention to what's been going on in your own back yard - the UK's current Conservatives are pretty tame compared to Canada's conservatives, which is a shame, because it was you putting us to shame when you used to have more liberal leadership. We've had a role reversal since then - whilst the US and UK moved away from Bush/Blair era politics you guys seemed to move towards them.
Erm, I worked as a network administrator for 7 years before I became a developer professionally. The whole reason I made the jump was because it just wasn't challenging.
In terms of complexity of problem solving, software development is way further up the chain of complexity than running a network. It's just inherently far more complex having to know how to design systems, having to develop configuration schemes, having to implement, and test and maintain them, than it is to just do one small facet of that - the configuration the developer has to produce and understand anyway.
I'm not assuming the other guy's job is easy, I know it's fucking easy because I used to do it - that's not an assumption, it's a statement of fact. There's a reason IT support roles and software development roles have been going in opposite directions for the last decade with IT support roles seeing declining wages and development roles seeing rising wages. Development is simply a much more highly skilled task.
I agree that I'm grateful it's someone elses job though. I'd be bored shitless continuing to do such a monotonously simple job otherwise nowadays.
Sure but GCHQ is only part of the intelligence picture, MI6 is one of the single greatest HUMINT organisations in the world, putting the CIA to shame, and second only to perhaps the likes of Israel's Mossad.
Britain's immigrant built cultural links with countries like Pakistan and previous laissez faire attitude to middle eastern and asian terrorist organisers living in exile has allowed it to build up impressive intelligence assets that many countries could only dream of. The equation changed slightly since al qaeda affiliates decided to bite the hand that fed it, but it's far from over. There's a reason groups like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is based in London and comes up with perhaps the most accurate analysis of casualties in the world in the conflict there. Although the likes of Mossad's tradecraft skills tend to outweigh those of MI6, the network of activists, and agents MI6 has contacts with and links to is pretty much unparalleled.
This isn't to say the CIA hasn't made massive in-roads since 9/11, and didn't have areas of expertise before (like in Afghanistan, vs. the soviets - but guess who helped get the CIA in touch with the jihadis back then in Pakistan in the first place?).
The foundations of MI6 and it's broad and pretty much unrivalled network can be put down to the idea that whilst Britain's empire involved a break up with other nations, it still made sure it never lost contact on the ground.
Britain still has a lot of value to the US, the US would be far more prone to internal terrorist attacks without human intelligence from MI5, and MI6 through their broad network of contact with activists living in the UK. Part the reason that the Boston bombings were a succesful attack is because Chechnya is one of the few areas where Britain doesn't have such substantial ability to cooperate.
Regarding GCHQ specifically though, the UK is a major global telecommunications hub, for the NSA programmes to be effective it needs support from major hubs in every continent. The UK is their European partner, they'd struggle to find another with both the willingness, resources, and telecommunications links. To have the European aspect of their global spying program go dark would be a massively crippling blow to the whole programme so even there there is still some hefty leverage.
Slashdot Mirror
"it was also taken for granted before the vote that there was a large majority for secession"
No it wasn't, the only polls from before Russia invaded showed that there was a distinct lack of support for joining Russia with the highest proportion of support being at only 41%:
http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...
There was slightly higher support for outright independence (i.e. no attachment to either country) at 51% but that can hardly be called a "large majority", it's a majority of 1%.
So these leaked figures are actually pretty reasonable - they're a more realistic swing (especially given Russia's military occupation of the place) by way of a 26% swing away from support for joining Russia, compared to Putin's claimed results which suggest a 42% swing towards joining Russia.
Sorry but whether you were there 18 months ago or not, what you say has more of a tone of the typical hipster "stick it to the man" nonsense ideology on Ukraine, rather than what Crimeans actually felt. You're parroting widely discredited nonsense, which is trivially rubbished by things such as the poll done above before shit kicked off that hence gives us a far more reasonable view of what Crimeans actually wanted - hint, it was far closer to these supposed leaked results, than it was Putin's claimed actual results.
"You do realize stopping the flow of gas to Europe would hurt Europe more than it would Russia, don't you?"
No it wouldn't. Russia's entire economy is founded on it to the point it simply cannot service it's debts without it and so would default resulting in a collapse of it's economy. Europe in contrast can get gas from elsewhere, including fellow European countries like Norway.
The reason Europe hasn't stopped buying Russian gas yet is two fold:
1) Causing economic collapse of Russia is a last ditch option, Putin is, if nothing else, a known quantity. If Russia collapses who takes over the world's largest/second largest nuclear arsenal? Who makes sure Russian commanders don't go shipping nukes off to batshit crazy lands like North Korea to make themselves insanely rich? It's probably containable, but it's a risk that shouldn't be taken if necessary.
2) Although Europe can live without Russian gas it would cost more to switch suddenly to other suppliers, that would reduce economic competitiveness to a degree and reduce the disposable income of Europeans due to higher fuelling costs. This wouldn't cause economic collapse in Europe like it would Russia but it would leave people unhappy as it'd likely mean a few more years of recession or negligible growth until supplies of gas to increase competition and reduce prices again came online such as that to start being shipped from the US.
Europe has the power to crush Russia and bankrupt it, but right now it's an option that has risks and has burdens that people do not want to suffer unless absolutely necessary.
See here for how utterly dependant on trade with Europe Russia is:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
In contrast Europe isn't as dependent on Russia for trade, it can easily live without it. In fact, only one or two countries in Europe actually make more from Russia than Russia makes from the (again, largely because of Russian energy imports), one of those countries is the UK who now has one of the strongest Western economies and could most afford to foot the loss anyway.
The difference is that Americans are smothered in disaposable income being one of the most wealthy countries in the world, whereas the equipment the guys in Ukraine are using would cost between 10 and 20 years of your average Ukrainian's salary.
And no, the anti-aircraft missiles aren't feasible - Syrian rebels have been trying to acquire these for years and have had the explicit support of Qatar, Turkey and others yet have still failed to acquire them. Even the Taliban that outright used to have them having been given stingers by the Americans to use against the Russians in the 80s have only been able to get a handful operation, and have shot at most one helicopter down with them.
Also, many of the weapons we're talking about weren't even in existence in the sorts of wars where people tend to source such equipment, such as the Yugoslav wars which have been a major source of hand grenades and so forth. The weapons are just too modern to have come from the fall of the USSR, or from any major war since. The only place you're going to get stuff that new is straight from the factory.
"Russia itself has not invaded Ukraine."
This is false. Even if you don't believe any of the agent provocateurs in Eastern Ukraine are Russian, Putin himself has now come out and admitted the guys in Crimea that it previously said were simply activists were in fact Russian troops, and that it did so to protect Russian people there.
At this point there's simply no question - Russian troops have been engaged in an invasion of Ukraine as admitted now by Putin himself.
The only remaining question now that is unanswered is whether Eastern Ukrainian rebels are in fact Russian soldiers. Russia obviously says no, but given that some of the faces there are the same folks that did the same thing in Crimea that Russia now admitted were Russian forces it seems silly to believe Russia is not also in Eastern Ukraine.
Besides, the recent shooting down of 3 Ukrainian military helicopters suggests they are. Keep in mind that Syrian rebels have been explicitly supported by Turkey and Qatar militarily now for 3 years and even they haven't been able to get hold of ManPADs and succesfully shoot down Syrian helicopters it's nonsense to believe the trouble makers in Eastern Ukraine are anything other than professional military. Their equipment alone costs more than over a decade of Ukrainian salary and isn't the sort of shit you can just pick up in an army surplus store, not even in Ukraine with it's post-soviet military sell offs. This stuff is modern, advanced, and expensive.
Honestly you're dead right, contrary to whining by the unions many jobs in local councils are grossly overpaid - your minimum wage secretary gets the national average wage, which is about two fold increase on the private sector going rate for the largely unskilled role.
As I say, IT support guys get as much as 32k for the bottom of the rung jobs that get only about 18k in private sector.
This is before you factor in the massive amounts of out and out wastage.
This is why it makes me really annoyed when we see shit like "Oh, well, we've got to cut down on collecting your bins because we want to upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010 this year". Of course they don't say that last bit, but that's exactly what they fucking mean.
The problem is there's zero accountability in councils, you can literally blow £1million on a pet project, completely and utterly fail, and still get a promotion a week later. I'm not pretending this shit doesn't happen in private sector sometimes too, of course it does, but the magnitude of the problem in British councils is such that you could cut council tax and central government council funding in half, possibly more, and still not require any reduction whatsoever in services IF, and it's a big if you can do something about the vast amount of idiots, and the massive amounts of wastage and overpayment.
I think this needs further investigation. I bet I could easily find funding for a paper entitled "Does gamifying war make soldiers better, more efficient killers?".
Yeah because nothing screams "great idea" like setting up your tanks so that they're a trivial DDOS away from being surrounded, captured, and taken by the enemy.
Maybe the Occulus setup in these tanks makes score numbers fly out of people's corpses when you gun them down and if you get multi kills throws up text like "RAMPAGE", and "KILLING SPREE" in the middle of the display?
AMD, assets: $4.3bn, employees: ~10,000, profit: -$83million
Intel, assets: $92.4bn, employees: ~107,000, profit: $9.62bn
Intel is about ten times as big as AMD by every metric (except the negative profit metric - Intel actually makes $10bn profit a year, AMD is just losing money).
AMD is tiny, it's an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. Pretending no one would notice Intel's demise whilst AMD will be around long after is comical. Anyway, AMD doesn't even make half the chips you're on about, that's companies like Samsung and Motorola.
"During the P4 days AMD was ahead in almost every category in the benchmarks"
It was ahead in many categories off the benchmarks too.
Like how quickly it heats your room up, and how much power it drained.
I had one but my god in the summer months did I wish I'd gone Intel as I was sat sweltering from the heat of that computer on top of the already high ambient temperature.
I don't think there are really many small councils left, most have been merged into larger ones. The one I worked for wasn't exactly a major one, it was on the smaller end of the scale.
Also, perhaps somewhat perversely, you tend to find the smaller areas have a higher proportion of public sector workers anyway. In some places the councils are effectively used to create jobs to try and reduce unemployment in the area with the government implicitly backing in (because reduced unemployment, no matter how artificially is apparently good for getting re-elected as it also reduces crime etc.).
Whilst a council area of population 1 million might have 80,000 staff, you'll find an area of population 100,000 may still have about 20,000 staff. These numbers are pulled from thin air of course, but you get the idea. I know at least that the percentage of workers in some smaller population areas is drastically disproportionate to the population compared to other areas of the country.
Yeah, most of which is by offering services over BT's often painfully slow DSL network using LLU.
Virgin only really covers inner city areas for the most part. They're scared of going beyond that because it would class them as a major network operator, which results in greater scrutiny from Ofcom and greater responsibilities (i.e. opening up their network to other operators). There are a number of places around here with dark Virgin fibre where they did the work, rolled it out and then abandoned it when the laws came into place putting a bigger burden on major infrastructure operators than Virgin was willing to accept. The cabinets are just sat rusting.
That's also why they haven't really paid much interest to all the government handouts floating around to role fibre out more widely even though they're the one other supplier that could do it.
They cover the low hanging fruit, but that's it, and they have no intention of going further than that. Mostly they're content just being an ISP on BT's network, and keeping their actual infrastructure operations as big as they can get away with without suffering greater legislative burden but no more.
To be fair where I worked we did have a few Unix folk, although it was some ancient proprietary version. We did make some effort to use FOSS, but it all went out the Window when Mr Corrupt at the top took his Microsoft backhander or whatever and signed them up to Microsoft's software assurance programme. I was already gone by that point though.
Portugal is a fairly small country though, and as with Sweden, Norway, Finland and so forth it's far easier to get high speed connections to people than it is a larger country.
Britain has one of the better fibre broadband penetrations now since billions have been spent on rolling it out this last few years but there are still literally millions of people who are lucky to even see 2mbps, let alone, 5mbps, or 10mbps. 100mbps is still a far way off dream in terms of availability and/or affordability for maybe 95% of the population.
You really don't have the slightest clue about what a council does or how big it's operations are do you?
I used to work for a council doing IT support. There are many things wrong with working for a council in terms of the fact it will sap your soul as you watch people get promoted based on whether they're over 60 and need to be given a higher paying job to pump up their final salary pension, or whether you generally just give a shit about doing a good job and get that beaten out of you because anyone who suggests improvements is shot down as a shit stirrer.
But I'll give them credit, one thing they're not is small operations, and if I took absolutely nothing else away from working there I did at least take away the fact that it was one of the more interesting networks I ever got to work on for it's sheer scale. Few private sector businesses give you the experience of scale and number of distributed sites and the level of network management that goes with that as a local council can.
We had around 10,000 desktop computers and laptops to support, we had a network that spanned many hundreds of distributed, and sometimes quite distant sites. You had fairly complex active directory setups because there was originally (later amalgamated) multiple IT teams - one for education, one for central services, one for social housing and so forth with a forest containing a top level domain run by central services and the other departments own domains branching off that. We had 100mbps pipes running from 170 schools to a central location that had it's own connection to the internet as well as a link to janet. You had links to youth centres, satellite offices for social services, for social housing and so on and so forth. Infrastructure for handling customer complaints, for managing property boundary data of every house in the district, for managing the births and deaths registers, for running elections and god knows what else.
As an aside, well, actually, more on topic, Microsoft invests a lot of time and money into wooing councils because they are such massive customers. 10,000 Windows and Office licenses and a hundred or more Windows server licenses as well as tons of exchange and SQL server licenses amongst other things is nothing to scoff at. Especially when there are hundreds of such local authorities in the UK meaning the net worth to Microsoft of capturing as much of UK public sector as possible is in the many hundreds of millions range at very least. I overheard our head of IT joking with a Microsoft salesman once about how they both fiddle expenses buying themselves more expensive meals and hotel rooms and services than necessary. My boss was set on a trip to Reading where Microsoft entertained them at a bar, with good time girl stood around using the sexual desperation of your average old boys club council manager to buy them over. Yes this shit really does actually happen.
A quick Google shows Hampshire County Council has around 40,000 employees. Some of these will be folks like bin men, but this larger than the council I worked for even, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have around 20,000 - 30,000 computers for those staff.
Councils are offloading a lot of services to private sector now, either selling them off, or just outsourcing the services. But the majority of councils still do IT in house.
I'm a developer nowadays working in private sector and am far happier for it, but if there's one thing local councils IT departments are generally not, it's small backroom operations.
I really don't give a shit what you have. The fact remains that you're cherry picking stats to favour apple.
Given that people have pointed this out to you and you still persist on parroting those stats then how can I reasonably assume you're anything other than a fanboy?
There's no rational reason to cherry pick misleading stats as you have when others tell a more objective story other than having an underlying will to favour Apple.
You're still missing the point, no one's making malware specifically for the US market - they're making it for the global market, that means when you examine just the US marketshare it appears to show a skew. So I'll explain it again, if you're desperate to know the impact of the US market you need to find out what malware has been developed and targetted specifically at devices in the US market. I doubt any such malware exists though precisely because it's easier to target the global market by default.
We don't know, that's why it's fruitless and meaningless to go down your path of desperate clawing at the USA stats because they're the only ones that come even remotely close to satisfying your fanboy desires to see Apple on top.
Why not just stick to the global stats and have done with it other than the fact you don't like the global stats because they're unfortunate for your strong fanboy bias towards Apple?
"That's quite an exaggeration. There is currently a shortage of Ruby programmers right now. I know, because I am one, and I have been having to fight off job offers with a stick. (Many of them would give me a significant raise, too, but I don't particularly feel like living in San Francisco, or Palo Alto, or Dallas, or Chicago.) "
I actually agree with you, the problem is that that's true of every language, there's just a programming shortage in general right now (contrary to the old farts who didn't keep with the times and cry and moan that there's no jobs - there are, just not for shit lazy people) and that's why I'm skeptical that people are really looking for Ruby more than anything else right now - certainly I see far less Ruby job adverts than I do .NET and Java. This doesn't mean Ruby developers don't have their pick of jobs, but I believe it simply means that .NET, Java, and C++ developers have an even greater pool to pick from again.
But what this means is that an influx of hundreds of Ruby developers would probably leave Ruby with more developers than jobs, but an influx of .NET, C++, or Java developers would still leave more of those jobs than there are developers.
This is of course just personal opinion, but it's based on having a lot of good recruitment contacts and keeping an eye on the jobs market in many major cities by regularly checking jobs listings, hence why I'm fairly confident that this hunch is correct based on that data.
"British people are generally awesome even if intolerant brutes like Cameron exist (who's seems to be having an identity crisis and takes it out on immigrants)."
When you understand the politics that have been almost tearing apart the Conservatives for years you begin to understand that identity crisis. The problem is that it's a party sharply divided by the right/extreme right old guard, and the younger, more modern minded centre-right liberal conservatives. There isn't enough strength behind Cameron's younger more liberal side of the party to oust the old guard yet, and so the old guard remains essential to them getting elected but the pendulum has long been swinging in their favour because the old guard and their supporters are slowly dying off.
So whilst Cameron is inherently centre-right and liberally minded, he risks being overthrown and the party being taken back (at least temporarily) by the old guard which is even worse. So he has little choice to passify them with things he personally doesn't want - like anti-immigration and anti-EU policies.
If the Tories were comprised wholly of people with the leaning of people like David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne it would not actually be a bad centre-right leaning party, it'd put most liberal parties across the globe to shame. But the reality is it's not that, it's a party where the old guard still have too much power, it's just a case of fending them off until they die off.
When you look at him and what his party does now you'll probably better understand the contradictions and the reasons why, and why Cameron is vague about some issues - he doesn't support them but has to to stop his party falling apart. This is a problem the Tories have been wrestling with since Thatcher, and is why Thatcher was ousted. In this respect the rise of UKIP is probably doing the Tories some good - all the extremists are fucking off their until they die, leaving the Conservative Party to the more liberal and centrist elements.
FWIW I personally identify most closely with the centre and centre-left so probably wouldn't vote for the Tories even if the non centre-right elements had fucked off. Unless of course the alternative was a completely lame centre/centre-left like current Labour.
"Cameron is clearly a xenophobe for allowing xenophobic elements in his party."
This just highlights your ignorance of politics. A leader (thankfully) of a party doesn't have full reign to do everything he wants without question, he's accountable to his party and it's members. Whilst as I said there are some far right members of his party, that doesn't mean all of them are. The Tory party has long been in a battle between the more liberal, and the far right, people like Cameron and Osborne have been pushing to the more liberal side, the fact he is party leader means that a majority of Tories sit at the liberal end of the spectrum.
But he also can't simply remove the less desirable members, nor can he ignore them because if he does there's a risk he loses his leadership post and a far-right Tory leader gets in in his place. Politics is a tough balancing game, and what you're asking for is a liberal dictator - one that highlights your views and ignores others, that is not what Cameron is and that is not how British politics work.
Could he walk away from the party in protest? Sure, but I like the idea of one of the UK's only two electable parties being handed entirely to the far right. Most of the far right in the party are of the older, baby boomer generation. In a decade many of these people will be dead. Better to keep fighting them until then when their ideas die off.
"Lets remember he's also the paranoid nationalist fanatic that gave clearance to the GHCQ to do things like violate people's privacy "
Actually that was the far-left Labour government, did he continue it? sure, but most of this started under Blair (centre right Labour) and escalated under Brown and his cronies (far left). This is also something that other governments have engaged in from Canada's Conservatives, to Australia's "Liberals", to America's Democrats. Putting it at the foot of the UK is a joke when it's endemic throughout the five eyes nations, and a number of others to boot.
"Trying to associate British nationalist extremists like Cameron as being as tolerant to multiculturalism in Canada is absurd."
Calling Cameron an extremist is absurd. It highlights the fact you don't have the slightest inkling as to what an extremist is. If Cameron is an extremist what does that make people like Liam Fox? Sarah Palin? Osama Bin Laden? If you start calling the centre-left or centre-right extremists then you've nothing to label the left, right, extreme left, and extreme right. It just makes you out as a bile fuelled idiot who can't talk rationally on the subject.
"Most Canadians can't stand Harper."
Yet time and time again you guys keep voting for him. How many times now have you handed the largest party status to him? How many elections have you had? What's the tally at now, 3, 4? even higher?
"There is no ethnic Canadian identity."
What complete and utter nonsense, Canada equally has it's race based gangs that simply do not integrate well such as the Vietnamese gangs running growhouses in Vancouver, the large Chinese contingent in Toronto, the Somali groupings in Ottawa, to the people who view themselves as ethnically French in Quebec and the Inuit who have been shit on ever since everyone else started arriving on their shores. I find it astounding that I don't live their but understand Canada better than you - perhaps you need to actually step outside of your basement sometimes or something? Diversity is still greater in Britain largely because of our long history - we have more people from more places than Canada (we have double the population for starters).
All that's before the numerous times Canadian politicians have raised concerns about the loss of Canada's historically Western European foundings to large influxes of Asian immigrants and suggestions Canada should examine prioritising applications from Western European immigrants (and statistical evidence suggesting it does).
"You try to pawn yourself off an anti-nationalist but given your defence of extreme nationalists
Um, my girlfriend and her family are Canadian, as are many of our friends. I seem to know more about it than you which should be embarassing.
I'm a bit baffled by your post. I actually agree the UK has a major problem with nationalism - hence the rise in the UKIP vote, but I'm struggling to see how David Cameron can be framed particularly as a nationalist or a racist, and I'm not sure what wars your referring to, when is the last time we had a war? the short skirmish in Libya? We've been pulling out of and scaling down military intervention drastically in recent years - what you accuse him of is more a trait of two prime ministers past - Tony Blair.
Camerons party does have some frustrating nationalist and far right elements, but he's on the more liberal end of it.
But your post gets even more baffling when you talk about being Canadian - Harper is far more right leaning than Cameron ever has been.
I'm really not convinced you know much about British politics or even your own politics as your spouting terms like ultra-nationalism and racism at someone who can be accused of neither. It's the likes of Liam Fox and pretty much the entirety of UKIP that can be accused of that, but not Cameron, not Osborne, not Boris and the like, and certainly not the likes of current Labour or the Lib Dems, or the Greens. The vast majority of British politicians do not share the far right view that the worst elements of the Tory party and UKIP do, whilst far right Tories like Liam Fox are pretty much identically aligned to people like your PM - Harper. If you genuinely think the British Conservatives are racist, or nationalist then you've clearly not been paying attention to what's been going on in your own back yard - the UK's current Conservatives are pretty tame compared to Canada's conservatives, which is a shame, because it was you putting us to shame when you used to have more liberal leadership. We've had a role reversal since then - whilst the US and UK moved away from Bush/Blair era politics you guys seemed to move towards them.
Erm, I worked as a network administrator for 7 years before I became a developer professionally. The whole reason I made the jump was because it just wasn't challenging.
In terms of complexity of problem solving, software development is way further up the chain of complexity than running a network. It's just inherently far more complex having to know how to design systems, having to develop configuration schemes, having to implement, and test and maintain them, than it is to just do one small facet of that - the configuration the developer has to produce and understand anyway.
I'm not assuming the other guy's job is easy, I know it's fucking easy because I used to do it - that's not an assumption, it's a statement of fact. There's a reason IT support roles and software development roles have been going in opposite directions for the last decade with IT support roles seeing declining wages and development roles seeing rising wages. Development is simply a much more highly skilled task.
I agree that I'm grateful it's someone elses job though. I'd be bored shitless continuing to do such a monotonously simple job otherwise nowadays.
"Second: they teach Ruby because that's what's in demand today."
In demand by whom and where?
Sure but GCHQ is only part of the intelligence picture, MI6 is one of the single greatest HUMINT organisations in the world, putting the CIA to shame, and second only to perhaps the likes of Israel's Mossad.
Britain's immigrant built cultural links with countries like Pakistan and previous laissez faire attitude to middle eastern and asian terrorist organisers living in exile has allowed it to build up impressive intelligence assets that many countries could only dream of. The equation changed slightly since al qaeda affiliates decided to bite the hand that fed it, but it's far from over. There's a reason groups like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is based in London and comes up with perhaps the most accurate analysis of casualties in the world in the conflict there. Although the likes of Mossad's tradecraft skills tend to outweigh those of MI6, the network of activists, and agents MI6 has contacts with and links to is pretty much unparalleled.
This isn't to say the CIA hasn't made massive in-roads since 9/11, and didn't have areas of expertise before (like in Afghanistan, vs. the soviets - but guess who helped get the CIA in touch with the jihadis back then in Pakistan in the first place?).
The foundations of MI6 and it's broad and pretty much unrivalled network can be put down to the idea that whilst Britain's empire involved a break up with other nations, it still made sure it never lost contact on the ground.
Britain still has a lot of value to the US, the US would be far more prone to internal terrorist attacks without human intelligence from MI5, and MI6 through their broad network of contact with activists living in the UK. Part the reason that the Boston bombings were a succesful attack is because Chechnya is one of the few areas where Britain doesn't have such substantial ability to cooperate.
Regarding GCHQ specifically though, the UK is a major global telecommunications hub, for the NSA programmes to be effective it needs support from major hubs in every continent. The UK is their European partner, they'd struggle to find another with both the willingness, resources, and telecommunications links. To have the European aspect of their global spying program go dark would be a massively crippling blow to the whole programme so even there there is still some hefty leverage.