Posts by Matt Bryant

Want Edward Snowden pardoned? You're in the minority, say pollsters

Re: Sir Runcible Loon Re: I'd like to see a trial.

"....Didn't he make the information available to journalists who did that all on their own?" Yes and no. The sharing of such data with unauthorised individuals is the illegal act, whether they are journos or not. Snowjob himself is also alleged to have gained access to some of the data by fooling others into giving him their passwords, which implies he was also not authorised to have the data in the first place, which would seem an act of espionage. He also lost his claim to not having said anything to anyone except journos when he started doing video links to the whacktivist conventions and discussing his "revelations".

Re: Marsbarbrian Re: @Esme - AC If you only watch Faux News and CNN....

".....It seems he's finally found a set of goalposts he likes..." Seeing as you routinely fail to meet any request for proof in any discussion it's not hard to see why you are happier making snide remarks about the matter than actually providing any of the requested proof.

Re: Steve Doper Re: Axis of weasel

"....Snowden seems to like places that don't suck on America's balls and thus would sell his arse to them at the first opportunity...." Yeah, which happen to be those places which have littler egard for privacy, freedom or dissent.

Re: Marsbarbrain Re: @Matt Bryant - XonEarth Would you believe?

"....American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs...." Ah, but your contention is that there were NO weapons of mass destruction at all, and the fact that troops were still injured by them shows they were viable and dangerous weapons. Weapons do not stop being dangerous simply because they are stored or hidden, if Saddam really had no interest in his WMDs he would have taken the chance to destroy them all under UN supervision long before 2003. Thanks for proving my point.

"....American troops began encountering old chemical munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs...." 2,500 chemical rockets in one hidden cache is not a few "old chemical munitions". Indeed, after the invasion the Allies found complete factory complexes dedicated to biological and chemical weapon production which had not been decommissioned or destroyed as Saddam had committed to after 1991 and were illegal under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

".....All had been manufactured before 1991." And are still dangerous today. Even the artillery shells, though they might have degraded to the point where they are not be able to withstand the shock of being fired from an artillery piece, they can still be used in IEDs or simply farmed for their deadly chemicals. Trying to pretend chemical or biological weapons become harmless if they are left on the shelf for a few years is the height of deliberate stupidity. But, even more stupidly, your insistence that their stockpiling after 1991 is of no note is in complete ignorance of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which made the caches illegal.

Re: AC Re: If you only watch Faux News and CNN....

".....If they actually knew (or were told) what this "debate" is costing the world in economic, civil and human terms...." Glad you brought that up! I assume you can provide some actual proof of the "harm" you want to claim the "eeeeeevil NSA" is supposedly doing to "all of us"? What's the bet - just as always before when such grandiose claims of "harm" are made in these forums - you are unable to actual provide any quantifiable evidence of any harm whatsoever?

Re: XonEarth Re: Would you believe?

"And how many still believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify the U.S. invasion?...." Please go do some actual reading instead of rebleating whatever they have been spoonfeeding the flock - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html

Re:AC Re: @ 6x7=42

"....If 26% of stupid assholes support him...." As the article pointed out - ".....Feelings against Snowden only increased with educational level......" - it does explain a lot about Snowjob's fervant supporters on these forums.

Re: RedneckMother Re: @ 6x7=42

"....He did the only thing he could do to expose the Constitutional violations (he was a contractor, wasn't protected by whistle blower laws, and tried to raise flags with his superiors)....." Not true in the slightest. Apart from the fact he had options for pursuing matters through the correct channels, Snowjob has long-since admitted he went for the job with the intent to gather classified information and "expose it" (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/06/24/edward-snowden-nsa-leaker-russia-cuba-flight-asylum-ecuador/2451403/), in deliberate breach of both his contract and the law.

Mozilla-Microsoft spat latest: Firefox yanks Cortana away from Bing

Re: elDog

Er, is anyone actually still using Firefox?

Clueless do-gooders make Africa's conflict mineral mines even more dangerous

Re: Esme

"makes me wonder whether it might've been a better idea to offer the bandits one price with things just as they are, but a higher price if they lay off the worst excesses against civilians. Repeat at intervals until the bandits have transmogrified into an elected government." Yes, that type of "bribery" is called international aid, but is a rather hit'n'miss affair that often just leads to massive corruption

Re: DHJ

".....And are we to believe that these militia's will continue fighting to the same degree when there are smaller financial returns, and, probably as a result, fewer weapons available?" You really need to go read up on the history of Mozambique as a perfect example of how the militias will carry on with fighting long after there is virtually nothing left to fight over. Even when the returns are small they will continue the easier lifestyle of banditry over the much harder and "less manly" but peaceful pursuits of being farmers or fishermen. I would recommend "A Complicated War" by William Finnegan to give an insight into how banditry can become the norm.

In London I once met a Rhodesian who used to train Renamo "freedom fighters". As he put it they never had to force anyone to join Renamo, just told them an AK-47 meant they would be able to grab whatever food, drink, women and consumer junk they wanted without having to actually work hard for it. Sometimes the do-gooders just don't realise how hard life is in the Third World, especially Africa, and that banditry can often offer a much better return than the daily grind of hard farming, where you can work as many hours of the day as you can and your family still starves to death. Simply assuming that if you make being a bandit (or blood diamond/mineral dealer/slaver) slightly harder it will drive former bandits to turning over a new leaf is the height of obtuseness.

Now listen, Gartner – virtualisation and containers ARE different

Re: AC Re: Nate Amsden containers are the future

"....The "C" in RAC is "cluster"...." No shit Sherlock!"

".....You can also, of course, create multiple RAC installations by creating multiple containers on each server...." Not if you want to get resilience. You may want to go do a LOT more reading on HA.

".....Maybe if you actually learned anough (sic) about Solaris to be competent...." LOL at the aggrieved Sunshiner! Bit late for you to be whining, the horse has not just long since bolted but died a death.

Re: thames Re: Nate Amsden containers are the future

"..... It's part of a change in design towards using "microservices"....." <Yawn> Ever heard of mainframes? And containers in general is just a re-rehash of resource management software that's been in proprietary UNIX for over a decade.

".....Redundancy and reliability are supposed to be designed into the application system from the ground up, rather than something which is tacked onto the outside afterwards by an administrator...." Which sounds like exactly the schpiel the VMware reps used to spout, and how many flaky VMware implementations are there in the Real World?

".....As for whatever limitations you may think Solaris containers may have, that's not really relevant to this discussion because nobody is talking about Solaris in this discussion...." Slowaris Constrainers was mentioned in the article - duh!

Apologies if you have fallen for the hype (or maybe you're just peddling the hype) but there is really nothing new in containers at all.

Re: Nate Amsden Re: containers are the future

".....Containers have their use cases...." Definitely, as in "what is the cheap way to stack existing hard systems?" They cannot replace hypervisored VMs for one very simple reason - containers share far too much of the underlying OS to ensure one container misbehaving cannot affect other containers. Sure, they claim they can by portioning out disk I/O, RAM, CPU time, etc., but VMs using individual OS instances are therefore more resilient and will always be more attractive for high-availability solutions. Pottie mentioned Slowaris Constrainers (sic), maybe he should read the following Oracle best practices for RAC as it points out very early on that real HA and containers means dumping all the stacking advantages of containers; "....Provision one Oracle Solaris Container per node or server....." - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/systems-hardware-architecture/deploying-rac-in-containers-168438.pdf

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

Re: Tim Jenkins Re: I sort of agree

".....Drone with large pin?" How about a drone with a spraycan of paint, fly it up to intercept the pervcopter and spray out its camera. Or just a jammer - the minute the drone is over your land you flip the switch, jam it, and watch it fly off uselessly into the distance. Then again, blasting it out of the sky does sound more fun.

HP slaps dress code on R&D geeks: Bin that T-shirt, put on this tie

Re: Bill Wiggle

"....Megatron...." Still giggle every time I hear that! Mind you, I'm on the outside so it's probably a funnier perspective.

"....the HPE real estate plan....." Hmmmm, I heard a story that hp was cash-rich in the tail-end of the last century so went on a spending spree to avoid being bought. One of the assets they bought was a lot of real estate, so much they became one of the biggest real estate holders in certain parts of California and other parts of the World, and then they added to that by buying Compaq and gaiing a lot of Compaq real estate. Not sure of the veracity of the story or if hp has held on to all that real estate, but if you have offices sitting empty you'd probably want to shuffle some figures from one budget column to another and tell staff to use them.

Re: Whineslydale Re: @ Matt Bryant

"....You missed the point of the article entirely. It is about developers who are not in a customer facing role being asked to dress as if they were...." So you didn't read the article then. The whole point is to dress appropriately, and for customer-facing staff that means smart clothes. And it specifically mentions customer-facing staff.

One of the greatest examples of this I can give you is how a company I was working with won a major contract from an international customer we actually thought we didn't have a chance at. Just to be clear, there was virtually nothing technically or pricing-wise between the bids, and the customer had a long history of using SUN kit. But the customer asked for a tour of the support centers from the two vendors (yes, a customer with a clue!!!) that were being proposed, hp and SUN. The customer's CIO and senior techies came back from the SUN visit muttering about "wierdos" with (I kid you not) "sci-fi contact lens and BO". After an hour talking to the (carefully screened) hp staff they said they were much happier with the idea of trusting their business to hp. Now, that's not to say the SUN engineers were any less capable than the hp ones, it's just hp were a lot smarter about how they presented themselves. SUN, for all their honesty, stuffed their partner and blew the deal by not thinking about how their staff would be perceived.

Re: JustaCLOT Re: " ... dressing well improves the holistic ambiance of a brain....."

".....Physical comfort and a total absence of management and their drones are what are needed....." Wow, did you even read the article? It's talking about customer-facing staff, not everyone. Just like every other company, HP wants to project an image, and they want their desired image to be professional seeing as that is what their customers expect. When I represent a company I dress as they want dependent on the level of employee/customer I am meeting - when it is decision-makers and management I dress smartly, and when it is techies I may choose jeans and a polo-shirt. I don't wear a suit and tie when crawling through a datacenter but I sure do when I'm in the boardroom.

So what the BLINKING BONKERS has gone wrong in the eurozone?

Re: x 7 Re: PghMike HOW IT WORKS *

"....Are you trying to claim "the generals" were GOOD government????" No, I am saying that every Greek government since the Generals have spent too much time (and money) playing popularist politics and buying votes. At least the Generals ran a tight budget and did not run up the debts (indeed, they usually had a surplus). Ironically, the "evil" Generals would have been socially-unacceptable to the EU, but their economics would have made them much better EU members.

Re: disgustedoftunbridgewells

"....Germany was hit so hard by reparations that it raised the resentment which allowed the Nazi's to take power." Er, not exactly. Whilst Hitler railed on about the "harsh and unfair" reparations (in almost exactly the same way as Syriza has in Greece) to stir national sentiment, what drove the Nazis into power in Germany in the first place was the reaction to the attempts of the Communists to seize power in the Novermber Revolution and the Spartacist Uprising of 1919. The German army and establishment were so horrified by the prospect of a Bolshevik revolt (and not at all fond of the socialists' idea of the Weimar Republic) that they virtually turned a blind eye to Nazi violence against Socialists and Communists. Heck, Hitler actually tried to rise a Nazi revolt in 1923 only for the army to grudgingly stop him, yet the army still backed him the minute he was released from his short stay in prison!

Re: PghMike Re: HOW IT WORKS *

"The US has *political* union...." Well, it does, but not by invitation. Just like with the UK, the US union came about by force of arms when the North effectively conquered the South in the American Civil War and stamped federal authority on the South. That was a two-way commitment - the South had to take on Northern law (no slaves) but got the unexpected bonus of economic stability through union (which, ironically, was what most Southerners thought they were losing in the Civil War). The UK example is even more stark in that the English invaded their neighbours. A more complex arrangement is how the countries of Europe formed from individual principalities and states, but did so usually through one party dominating the other. China did not really get itself sorted as a country until after WW2 when Mao's dictatorship came to power.

The big problem with the EU is that no-one has the authority to smack bad governments (like every Greek one since the Generals got kicked out) and impose real financial rules and control. As already pointed out, the current hikes in Greek taxes are pointless as long as the Greeks are doing the tax collecting, and the same goes for the privatisation of Greek assets (which is why the Greeks fought to control that process, they have zero intention of completing the sales). The last time someone tried to establish overall authority over Europe it was some chap called Adolf, and he wasn't really interested in a Greater Europe only a Greater Germany uber alles.....

Windows 10 in head-on crash with Nvidia drivers as world watches launch

Re: Mage Re: Update Clash

"....MS has lost the plot on Windows." Seeing as MS had already explained the policy on driver updates and it was an nVidia app (their awful Experience non-tool) that screwed up, I would say it is more nVidia that has lost the plot.

Chat about Safe Harbour all you like, the NSA's still the stumbling block

LOL @ Shrem.

The really ironic thing about the whole Shrem case is it highlights the fact that people will willingly give companies like Faecesbook their private data in return for free services without stopping to think for a second what happens to that data! The answer - stop being dumb and using marketing-driven tools like Faecesbook! If you are stupid enough to put all your secrets on Faecesbook then you really only have yourself to blame.

Ashley Madison invites red-faced cheats to bolt stable door for free

Ooop!

Few years ago, as a prank, we signed one of our particularly annoying PHBs up to one of these dating sites after she was silly enough to leave her credit card number on view. I can't remember if it was Ashley Madison, it may have been Adult FriendFinder, I can't remember, but I hope she hasn't gotten hitched in the meantime or this could be a hefty does of Karma winging her way!

Goodbye Vulcan: Blighty's nuclear bomber retires for the last time

Re: x 7 Re: A beautiful aircraft though

"....But in reality, what was the V-bomber fleet worth?...." All through the '80s and '90s the US Air Force was regularly embarrassed during NATO Red Flag exercises by the almost-as-old and subsonic Blackburn Buccaneer, which had a nasty habit of cruising so fast and so low that, even when US fighters like the F-15 or F-16 could find one, they ran too low on fuel chasing the Buc to get within missile firing range. Indeed, it was a considerable point of glee amongst RAF Buc crews that the only other type to have previously scored better against the USAF in such exercises was - drumroll - the Vulcan. Considering that the USAF from the '60s onwards had a significant technological advantage over the Soviets, it stands to reason that the Vulcan (and the Buccaneer) would have done much better than you might think.

Re: Steve Evans Re: Aiming Error

".....TBH they could have sent one down to the Falklands with no bombs and an aux fuel tank in the bay instead and just given the airfield a fly past at 200 feet..." The Argentinians got a lot of noisy and old British kit thrown at them! The Royal Navy had HMS Glamorgan providing high-altitude and long-range air defence with the Sea Slug SAM, a rather ironic name for a very deadly missile in its day. Unfortunately, the Argentinians decided to not be accommodating and flew their air attacks in at low level, rendering the Sea Slugs virtually useless. But Sea Slug had an interesting trick in that it could also be command-guided as well as radar-beam-guided, and in the Falklands it was used by HMS Glamorgan as an impromptu cruise missile against a radar site and the airfield. The job meant flying the Sea Slugs horizontally low over the Argentinian positions to the area of the target, then commanding the Sea Slug to tip over into a dive. Whilst its warhead wasn't really that big and they weren't used against the general Argentine soldier's positions, the incredible racket of its rocket motor as the big missile screamed low overhead was said to scare the Argentinians silly! They had nothing that could shoot the low- and fast-flying Sea Slugs down with and their soldiers were convinced that the RN had a whole fleet of ships with a large stock of Sea Slugs they could use against them, when the reality was the RN only had two ships (Antrim and Glamorgan) armed with Sea Slug. Luckily the Argentine Navy didn't see fit to pass on their intelligence to their army and the Argentines remained terrified of the Sea Slug right up until their surrender.

Citizenfour director Laura Poitras sues US for years of border security harassment

Re: Marsbarbrain Re: @LucreLout - iLuddite the more things change...

"....you're not Matt's sock puppet...." Unlike you I do not need sock puppets.

Re: LoudMouth Re: iLuddite the more things change...

"....I might add that I don't know if she actually has a legal case or not...." Try a little background reading then. She has admitted to assisting if not planning in the distribution of Snowden's pilfered documents, a fact that makes it frankly amazing that she is still allowed to enter the US without arrest.

Re; iDullite Re: Matt Bryant "champagne socialist"

".....where innuendo and secret information rule...." Hardly. By her own admission (breathlessly repeated in such rags as The Guardian), she was instrumental in not only distributing the documents Snowden stole (that makes her an accessory to the act under the Espionage Act) but has a previous record of associating with terrorists (good enough to go on a watchlist and an actual crime in the UK), and also of funding at least one terror group. Oh, and she's not actually a proper journalist and has no journalistic accreditations, so cannot hide behind the freedom-of-the-press claim.

Re: iLuddite Re: the more things change...

"....the new 'commies'...." Oh, there's nothing new about Poitras, she's just another champagne socialist. I bet she's funding the sueball with more money from her rich parents.

FireEye intern nailed in Darkode downfall was VXer, say the Feds

Hey, wannabes, did you take note?

All the wannabe black hats and script kiddies should read and take note - Morgan Culbertson is probably much more intelligent and skilled than you'll ever be, but he got caught. Go find something useful to do instead.

Brit teen who unleashed 'biggest ever distributed denial-of-service blast' walks free from court

Re: PheebSplash Re: it's all true

"....He picked the right time...." LOL, like he had any say in when the coppers kicked his door in.

".....lucrative career...." Dream on, he got caught with kiddie porn so he's going to monitored for the rest of his life. Any serious career criminal will avoid him like the plague, and that's before they start wondering if he grassed up his chums (which the further arrests mentioned in the article suggests he did). Similarly, since he didn't do any original work on the exploit and just used downloaded tools, the white hat companies will not be interested. His chance of a career in computing probably extend to changing toner at best.

Wow, another NSA leak: Network security code appears on GitHub

Re: Spaceman Spiff

"....Naturally Stupid Assholes?" If you had bothered to read up on the matter, you might have known that the NSA employs more Maths grads than NASA. Definitely Not Stupid Assholes it would seem.

Re: elDog Re: Please, be the first to take advantage of this fine product

"What's not to like about a gov't funded product that gets full control of your system?...." It's now open source code, anyone can review it. Well apart from those too blinded by the foil wrapped round their heads, it seems.

China wants to build a 200km-long undersea tunnel to America

Re: TheVogon Re: Well, okay...

"....Makes sense...." Hardly. It's just another marketing ego-fart from the Chinese engineering companies, big on hype and without any actual planning to back it up. I reckon they make one of these silly, big-up-China announcements at least once-a-quarter just to try and give the impression that the Chinese are capable of more than just copying Western and Russian engineering. Not surprisingly, this one right after the Chinese stock market (including all those Chinese engineering companies) lost $3tn in a single day's panic.

Assange™'s emotional plea for asylum in France rejected

Re: AC Re: France...

"The "feminazi" comment referred to a specific police officer involved in the reinstatement of the case, noted for her very strong positions on radical feminist matters. This is not a contentious statement" So why not call her a "femistalinist" or femimaoist"? Actually much more likely given the political musings of most "radical" feminists. Besides which, I suspect Marianne Ny has only been labelled a "feminazi" by the lefties since she "turned on" their "hero" A$$nut, just as how the lefties went from adoring support of Anna Ardin to shrieking smears about her "being a CIA agent". Prior to Dickileaks/Condomgate the lefties probably thought Marianne Ny was "progressive".

Re: IMG Re: @ Matt ... Seriously, WTF?

"....did you ever stop to consider that the UK government might turn a blind eye if he wanted to attempt to sneak out... just to be rid of him?...." I think, especially after the "cost of additional policing" media storm, no-one in authority would want to risk turning a blind eye now. Much better for the Met top cops and politicians that the coppers collar him if he tries to escape and stick him on a jet to Sweden. Even the London whacktivists are probably praying A$$nut eventually goes to Sweden as he's just an embarrassment to them and "The Cause" now (I hear that even Jemima Goldsmith has turned on A$$nut after the money she put up for his bail was forfeited by his flight to Correa's London Hotel For The Politically Dodgy).

Seriously, WTF?

Did A$$nut seriously think that;

(a) the French would just forget about the EWA?

(b) the coppers would just stand idly bye when A$$nut came trotting out of his Ecuadorean hideyhole?

I've long held that A$$nut is deluded as to his own importance and/or receiving really bad advice, but this could be a sign that Correa is getting tired of his guest.

'The server broke and so did my back on the flight to fix it'

Re: Paul 129 Re: Oh dear.

"Downvote for being "The LUCKY Bastard"!" Understandable. I forgot to mention the irony of how the company manglement was going through one of its regular cost-cutting spasms at the time - "no unnecessary travel, bla bla bla".

Oh dear.

Now I do feel (slightly) guilty that JT's story seems to prove the theory of Yin and Yang in that my tale has no suffering, quite the opposite! In short, whilst working on a worldwide project, I was asked at very short notice to fly to the States to fix a problem I had already told them how to fix. Their "expert" CIO didn't believe in my simple fix. (Un)fortunately, it being the height of the season, the only seat available at short notice was first class on Virgin, limo at both ends! To make matters more "terrible", the flights and hotel booking were non-refundable. I arrived after a very pleasant flight to find the fix had been implemented successfully an hour before my takeoff by a local sysadmin, but the "expert" local CIO had forgotten to inform the UK office. I was therefore "stuck" with being paid for a week of traipsing round the sights in Washington DC, complete with five-star hotel room (yup, all that was available at short notice at the height of the season), all expenses paid, before actually receiving an apology for the "inconvenience" when I returned to the UK. Sorry JT, it seems you got the Yin for my Yang!

Apple Watch sales in death dive after mega launch, claims study

Re: Charlie iFan Re: Life Buoy.

"....and market leader in the segment....." Read the links in the article - it's being outsold by other "smartwatches" (and no doubt massively by "dumbwatches").

‘Clandestines' prompt British border blockade in France

Re: Potty Re: @Destroy All Monsters

".....the French resistance refined the concept of a resistance movement into a fine science....." Kind of. The French resistance was made up of roughly two parts - the Free French loyalists and the Communists. The loyalists were largely pre-War French serving men and civil servants who could not escape the German invasion in 1940 and so did what they could. Over time, small groups were contacted by MI6 and involved in British spying missions, eventually moving to more active sabotage roles. However, the Communists were much more organized and already working in cells in 1940, having done so for most of the Thirties whilst they sabotaged French efforts to re-arm. The Communists, on the orders of Stalin, did NOTHING to impede the German invasion, often deliberately impeding the efforts of their own armed forces and occasionally actively assisting the Nazi invaders. That was the Communist policy until the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, after which the Communists acted again only on Stalin's orders, spending a lot of time and effort on hunting down Free French loyalists instead.

"Refugees"

These are not refugees in any shape or form, they are economic migrants. To get to France itself they would have to have traversed other safe EU states having entered Europe via southern EU states such as Greece, Italy and Spain. If they were really refugees they would have stopped there, instead they are making for the UK for purely economic reasons. As such they do not deserve any special treatment, and that is a fact under EU and international law, even the fruitcakes at The Guardian have been forced to admit so (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/sep/21/claim-asylum-uk-legal-position). Any "refugee" currently camped in Calais should have been processed as such by the French and either accepted into France or sent back to the first legally safe country they came via on their way to France.

Quel surpris!

The Fwench yet again letting strikers get away with criminal activity and failing to protect British goods vehicles transiting their territory. I hope we're sending the bill for the barrier deployment and the cost of delaying British vehicles to the Hôtel Matignon.

NSA continues mass slurping of Americans' phone metadata

Re: auburnman

"They probably arrange for one of those spam robocall companies to call any two numbers they want to link...." Or just arrange a line test....

Orange hurls €90m at Israel's Partner to end political bunfight

Re: Velv Re: Geee... I wonder who is behind this lawsuit?

"....When you have different classes of citizen who have different rights...." I suggest you go do some actual reading on the matter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel#Politics). Arab Israeli citizens, both Christian and Muslim, have full rights as Israeli citizens and can vote in all Israeli elections, and Arab-Israelis have been elected to the Israeli parliament.

Silly Google's Photos app labelled black people as gorillas

Re: John Robson Re: Question?

Welcome to the World of Agile! Letting users find your embarrassing bugs in the name of "flexibility".

Look out, law abiding folk: UK’s Counter-Extremism Bill slithers into view

Re: Condumbdumb Re: And it gets worse

".....I sometimes wonder if Guido Fawkes had the right idea." Then you need to read some history. Fawkes wasn't some great "freedom-loving leader of the oppressed", he was the bottom-of-the-wrung groupie for a bunch that wanted to re-impose totalitarian rule by a Catholic church-appointed monarch, against the will of the majority of Englishmen. His claim to fame was being caught as the night guard of the explosives, not being some great thinker or leader.

Re: Boring Bernie Re: captain veg as long as you obey the letter of the law.....

"Because Anjem Choudray, as objectionable as I find him, has not broken the law....." Yes, despite his open support for terrorism and his encouragement of others to get their jihad on, hence the new law to tighten up on what Choudray and chums can say and do. And before you spout off about the right to freedom of speech, it does not remove the obligation to consider the consequences of that speech. The new law will either make Choudray shut up or send him to prison.

"....perhaps we should imprison Roy "Chubby" Brown...." Sorry, failing to see a down side there. I assume that, in your self-deluding, "salt-of-the-Earth, downtrodden, common man" self-limitations, you believe Mr Brown to be some form of cultural and comedic icon? Put him a cell with Choudray for all I care!

".....we can clearly see by the downvotes over the years...." Dear oh dear, you're still making that same old mistake of stupidly extrapolating the number of the baaaaahlievers from here into some national level of representation of your dim views! How tragic! Do I need to remind you yet again of the recent election result? LMAO!

Oracle confirms David Donatelli hired to head hardware unit

Fun thought for the day.

OK, mad moment at the watercooler - why would Mad Larry grab another hardware guy (and Dave can't have been cheap) when his hardware biz is going nowhere? Does it signal the intent to really go into converged and whole-stack-in the-box systems in a big way? Is Mad Larry thinking of making another hardware buy? I wonder if Mad Larry would finally ditch SPARC and look at troubled AMD's server chips biz..... (http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2015/06/24/amd_break_up_denial/?_ga=1.215789719.1498558827.1435157380)