Posts by BitEagle 36 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2017
It seems more than a little sad that your aversion to unelected billionaires and barely-elected demagogues determining both who may indulge in free speech and what they may say comes to the fore only when the comfortable consensus among the powerful is disrupted.
Do you ever consider that perhaps the consensus was manufactured to advance the specific interests of those wealthy individuals who control the "consensus"?
In a debate over the quality of microchips for weapon building, it might seem trivial to some to point out that the "gray market" is not a British term - our own market, much like the faces of Conservative politicians, is grey, even if the amount of destruction caused by each may be approximately equal...
...and if we avoid the world "slave", will African-Americans decide that the debt owing to them is paid and the slate is now wiped clean?
What about those the Romans took into servitude in tribute from their empire? What will we call them? Involuntary employees?
This is just another empty example of virtue signalling.
As warming as it may be to the cockles of your heart (or the heart of your cockles, if you are so inclined) to imagine BoJo receiving some rough justice from an armed robber in Wormwood Scrubs, the reality is that he did nothing wrong in proroguing parliament, it was in accordance with precedent, in accordance with the advice of the government's senior law officers, and his freedom to commit those actions was sanctioned in the High Court, by three of the senior judges in the country.
Let's try and avoid adding petrol to the flames...
I doubt that this one is going safely under the rug...
The negative publicity that the aircraft has attracted and warranted, allied to that old favourite "instead of fixing it, let's change the name!" (known as the Windscale Waltz for those old enough to remember pre-Sellafield nuclear power) should be enough to hole Boeing's sales plans fatally beneath the waterline...
Expect Ryanair to make a killing on acquiring some very reasonably in the near future!
The entire point of war is NOT to kill people, but to achieve your objectives (strategic, political, economic etc). The killing of people is entirely by-the-by, necessary perhaps to reduce your enemy's resistance, but not the main aim unless you are in a genocidal conflict (Germany in WW2, Serbia in the Balkans, Japan in China).
It's not just that the US has ageing infrastructure, any infrastructure spend is enormous when your country is the size of a continent. That's why the USA typically under invests in infrastructure, their businesses typically compete on price and conditions, not performance, hence all the shabby airports etc.
That's not the way security works on an inter-nation basis. Saying that it feels like we are in a cyber conflict just tells the other side what they already know - they're doing stuff and we know. Going beyond this, which is fine if you're looking to prosecute a criminal, means that you tell the other side which bits of what they're doing aren't working, and by extension which bits are.
That's just foolish as it tells them where to put their future efforts.
It's clear that the EU is looking to impose a strict interpretation of its own rules on the departing UK, as is it's right and as was in all truth eminently predictable.
It's equally clear that UK politicians of all hues expected, and in some particularly deluded cases continue to expect, that the EU will come to a comfortable political arrangement, of the type that governments typically agree when their mutual interests align. Since it is now clear that this will not happen it would behove the UK government to start negotiating from a position of strict legal obligation and contractual commitment.
Anything above this should be reserved for an eventual Free Trade Agreement when we have left the EU.
When polititians and security wonks complain that encryption makes their life harder I wonder if they will ban thought on the basis that the contents of your brain can't be checked against a database of naughtiness...
Just how much information do they require or believe they should have access to? Any security built on knowing everything is doomed to failure.
Not to dismiss any of the technical possibilities that have been discussed here, the single most likely reason for such a catastrophic outage is that IT budgets have been shaved consistently over a period of years to a point where all the senior IT managers understood that their staffing levels, processes and infrastructure were probably going to be inadequate to survive a catastrophic failure or series of failures, but were equally aware that telling their finance and operational colleagues this would probably result in their being side-lined, fired, down-sized or moved to "special projects"...
For an organisation in this state of denial the quarterly bottom-line is everything, and long-term is only the next quarter. You could reasonably argue that this sort of failure is possibly the only way BA's IT investment could ever increase to address the long-term failure to invest responsibly
The problem is that the privacy provisions of the EU and the USA, and the legal restrictions around them, are not designed to protect anyone's privacy - they are actually there to create the impression that there is privacy whilst at the same time facilitating access for the state and its agents.
This is intended to suppress the desire for effective privacy by undermining the public perception and any technologies that might make privacy effective.
This can clearly be seen in the rush to enable the US to bypass EU privacy provisions under equivalency rules, where no meaningful or enforceable equivalent exists.
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