Posts by MarkW 18 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2007
Matt,
congratulations for having the most thumbs down post here.
Your post can be summed up neatly: let's kill more dark skinned people and steal their land.
If they complain, we'll just blow them to pieces with a UAV missile strike operated by some jar-head in a control room in Qatar (or, perhaps Dallas).
Lewis,
great article.
You forgot the key results:
Tabloid TV gets more advertising revenue
'Security experts' get paid more commissions. They naturally conclude that you need more security, guaranteeing their existence
The defence [sic] industry makes more money from selling overpriced scanners
Government ministers line up another company to whose board they will shortly be sitting (come May this year)
Government gets to collect more data on its citizens
I'll get my coat...
@Matt
''She is on record as saying such touching drivel as; "I'm just baffled that in the 21st century we as human beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a means to resolve issues." Whilst her heart is in the right place, it shows a marked lack of insight into the modern World.''
And how is that 'drivel'?
The UK certainly got a lot out of bombing Iraq, didn't it?
Look at all those non-existent WMDs kept out of harm's way.
(And please, don't say, 'everyone believed they were there', because that's just not true).
Had there been a few more Katherine Gunns, Elizabeth Wilmshursts and Downing Street memo whistle blowers about, a lot of lives would have been saved, including British lives.
But when did the British political elites ever care about poor squaddies, tube passengers or Johnny Foreigners getting blown to smithereens?
"HAMAS gets the majority of their funds and weapons from Iran, which established HAMAS in 1987".
Shia Iran had nothing to do with the formation of Sunni Hamas.
Hamas was formed out of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Hamas is largely funder by Saudi Arabia (also Sunni). Iran supports Hamas out of animosity towards Israel.
"Look at the broader picture. In 1948, it was all desert and they moved in a bunch of displaced Jews. "
No historian believes this myth.
If the Israeli state chose to build on the land to which they are legally entitled, they wouldn't require fortified bulldozers. Perhaps a better use for them is to help clear 500,000 cluster munitions from Southern Lebanon?
A 10 year old would provide a more sensible report.
With the UK being partly responsible for an excess death toll of 1,000,000 people in Iraq, this crowd could only mutter that it "was done the wrong way". Downing Street memo anyone?
International law. Nah, we'll only apply that to our enemies.
A group of ex-military, police and politicians asking for the UK to behave like a civilised country would be like the proverbial turkeys voting for Christmas.
should be spent on health and education.
Already, we are seeing an emergence of a society more polarised than ever.
Biometric passports, ID cards, no-fly lists, DNA databases are all tools directed firmly at the have nots whilst the merchant bankers (remember them?) fly off to their Dubai pad for the weekend.
If it isn't brought in by the UK parliament, the excuse is that is it will be a directive from the appointed European Commission.
"It's to fight terrorism" is the government mantra.
If they wanted to reduce terrorism, they would address the causes and stop fighting illegal wars and supporting repressive regimes and dictatorships.
When it comes to "national security", the British police (for once) seem to have judged this case well. The same can not be said of the US authorities who should be thanking McKinnon.
By a strange coincidence all 96 computers had exactly $1,000 worth of "damage", which is the threshold for prosecution.
Did McKinnon actually alter any data or just gain access, retrieve data and leave messages?
If the machines were insecure, it wasn't McKinnon's fault.
Anyway, how hard is it to find blocks of IP address assigned to .mil domains and then run a few scripts against them?
<rant>
"The West" needs enemies to fuel the spiralling costs of keeping the rich, rich and poor, poor. Lewis is spot on. You military fan boys and girls can enlist and serve a few terms in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The UK should get off its high horse as she supplies dozens of repressive regimes with high-tech weaponry. Every penny wasted on upgrading the Trident white elephant, new aircraft carriers and secret military training camps* in Wales is a penny not spent on health and education.
</rant>
* http://www.no2militaryacademy.com/
Carbon trading is just another scheme (so beloved of Tony Blair) which doesn't reduce the amount of CO2 output but makes a lot of carbon "brokers" very rich indeed.
Carbon reduced in the EU + carbon offset in Africa = constant
It's like asking a thin friend to diet for you.
http://risingtide.org.uk/resources/factsheets/carbontrading
http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=710
Of course, Google is just keeping the logs "to improve their service to consumers".
If Google ever had a "do no evil" rule, its logs would be purged nightly.
If you think Google wouldn't hand over your search histories, YouTube visits and any other IP data it has harvested to any government agency that asked, then you're living in cloud cuckoo land.
Nice to see resources pouring into the security FUD black hole.
You are more likely to be killed by one of Lembit Opik's asteroids.
It's about time Alex (Lord) Carlile crossed to NuLabour as he sounds less like a Lib Dem every day.
He supported the infamous "control orders" and extending the detention without charge legislation.
"Personally, unpleasant though this subject is, I'd have preferred if the Reliable Replacement Warhead project had got approval. Dial-a-yeild [sic], safe to handle and long lived."
Wouldn't that violate the NPT?
Just get rid of the weapons and use the petaflop to search for better cancer drugs.
AFAIK and I'm sure El Reg readers will tell me if I'm wrong, but aren't jobs in the "defence" industry heavily subsidised?
Anyway, those Saudis are lovely. They supplied the majority of 11th Sept hijackers and women shouldn't be voting or driving cars anyway. Not to mention those British citizens who were fitted-up for a crime, tortured and made to confess publicly.
Please Mr. Sheik, buy some more defensive Tornados.
Tell that to the family of Jean Charles de Menezes.
In addition, from the aforementioned http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0919/p01s08-usju.html :-
"In December 2003, German citizen Khaled el-Masri boarded a bus in Germany for a holiday in Skopje, Macedonia.
Instead of a restful vacation, the Muslim man of Lebanese heritage says he ended up in a Central Intelligence Agency isolation cell in Afghanistan as a suspected terrorist. He was released after five months of interrogation with no explanation justifying the action or apology if it was a mistake."
The standard talking point is that those in Guantanámo were "lifted from the battlefield". The reality is that more than half were captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance and exchanged for CIA cash.
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