Presumably any country which already has a centralized the monitoring of its own communications is going to be much easier to attack. Those communications will be available all in one place, and will be full of back-doors to subvert.

Which is an interesting lesson for the United States itself.

I think you missed one of the most important things about using a framework (or, indeed, a GUI builder, a library or even an SQL database): using a framework does not excuse you - or, at least, your team - from understanding and being responsible for the behaviour of your application as a whole, and indeed system as a whole. Hibernate, for example, is not a way to avoid knowing how a database works, what normalization is, how locking/MVCC is handled, the pros and cons of indexes, how queries are planned, how a write-ahead-log works, what disk access patterns you might be creating and so on. There's a bit of a bad sign in the original question: he's been working on stuff for a long time but not had the curiosity or felt responsible for finding out how they work as he goes along.

Indeed not. I've only had a little rather indirect contact with those sorts of communities in London, but as I understand it they also tend to shun proper education - university level especially because that's where a lot of people leave their communities - have low income levels and be dependent on state benefits in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Personally, I have no problem funding appropriately limited benefits for people who are unlucky, disabled, not educated properly by their parents and so on....but when a whole community is dependent on forced charity in a self-perpetuating cultural cycle but the problem is considered untouchable because 'religion' then I think it needs to be dealt with a little better. Requiring a proper education would be a good start (and being prepared to help children who want to go to university against their parents' wishes could be a good second thing).

People don't usually believe stuff like that from a careful consideration of the facts available, though. People believe it because it's socially expected that they believe it, because it's a group marker, because they're raised to consider 'belief', and these beliefs in particular, a moral good. And so parents strive to create an environment for their child in which the social expectations and moral requirements are ones they approve of. Many religious cultures essentially require this, and personally I think it's likely that this is the biggest means of transmission of religions and a big requirement for the success of a religion.

Of course, some people - like Darwin himself - will abandon their beliefs when presented with inescapable evidence that they're wrong. But not everyone is prepared to pay the social cost, and not everyone is really all that motivated by understanding the world better (rather than, say, by social status).

That Northern Ireland/Ireland border is not an EU border - and I would presume that England and Scotland would prefer the goods could move freely just as they do now. The EU imposes certain tariffs on everything entering the EU, and all countries in the EU have to impose them (eg, 12% on plums, 8.8% on knitted gloves, 7.6% on non-knitted gloves, etc. to the level of your worst bureaucratic nightmare.). If there's an EU border between England and Scotland then that means either a dispute with the EU, or border posts, paperwork and tariff payments for probably both sides. Think of the effect on supply chains, too.

Which leads to an interesting possibility: an EU border (with EU tariffs) between England and Scotland, followed by the Scots joining the EU and the rUK leaving so that the border reverses. But at least it might give rUK voters a foretaste of what leaving the EU would mean to help inform their votes...

He's Portuguese. And, IIRC, he'll be gone before it matters.

Without risk there wouldn't BE an insurance industry. Suppose there was a test which could determine exactly all of your future medical care costs and when you were going to die. There would be no financial risk at all. Health insurance would become, essentially, a savings plan. There'd be no profit any more.

This is also why a pure insurance model is always likely to be unacceptable in places like the UK. People here - and, I would guess, in most of the world - don't want just a way to make future healthcare costs predictable by pooling risk (and if you can predict that you'll die through being unable to fund it then that's exactly what happens). They want a way to provide an adequate level of healthcare to the whole population, whatever their income.

That's not necessarily true. There are many high-income professions which are male dominated.

I think that there's a great deal of interrelationship between the way men and women treat each other, and the way people treat each other at work and outside it. And one of aspect of that that I think is not looked at often enough is the way people make their sexual choices. Women can feel under pressure to be thin and beautiful with large chests because of men's preferences, but men come under pressure, too - under pressure to have high status jobs earning a lot of money (or, at least, to be higher status and higher earning than their prospective partner - one ex-partner told me that she wouldn't have considered me if I had earnt less than her). Inevitably, this will push more men than women in to making the sacrifices to their personal well-being to gain those things. In doing so, they make the labour market and working environment more competitive, political and hostile, and so less attractive to everyone. But that disproportionately puts off women, who don't need to deal with that to find the 'best' partners.

The impact of the working environment doesn't just come from hostility, though. Take an organization - or any social group, really - and you're going to find it shaped by and for the people who are actually in it. If it's stuffed full of 22 year old men then you're going to find social expectations that you go out and get drunk with colleagues, and sympathy for people who turn up in the morning with a hangover. If it's stuffed full of 35 year old women you're more likely to find company provided childcare and sympathy for people who have to stay at home with sick children. There may be no hostility or different treatment of men and women whatsoever, and it's hard to say it's anyone's fault, but that doesn't make it go away.

I don't believe this can explain the whole of gender imbalances across industries, possibly not even a large part of it. There are no doubt many reasons. However, it is one of those causes that can be attacked using positive discrimination (though I don't agree with that, personally...I think that if you want equal treatment for each gender on principle, then you need to stick to that principle).

I'd hazard a guess that Rolls Royce might make engines which require less maintenance than usual, or maintenance which can be carried out quickly at each port, and so have come up with this idea because it would help turn that in to a competitive advantage. I also notice they mention the Baltic as a first place to try something, which I assume implies quite short voyages.

Because this sort of politics is not based on using rational understanding of the world to make good governmental decisions to achieve some goal, it's based on group dynamics. Look at how the US and 'saboteurs' are blamed for everything, and how people are prepared to attack others for mere membership or association with the other group. It's about orchestrating an us and a them, creating insiders to fight and to hate for you to defend your tribe, so the powerful can keep themselves there.

It seems like some people can't see politics or government any other way. Look at the partisan hatred in the US, or those who respond to climate change arguments by ignoring the science and concentrating on defining 'scientists' as a group and questioning their motivation. It's everywhere, from more benign forms to the extreme, from biology teaching in schools to traditional religious wars to nazism and the soviets, and extreme politicians always make it their weapon.

Not sure how it works in the US, but there's another option: The victim is whoever is owed money by the company when it closes, because the liquidators appointed to close it will bill many hours of accountants' time at huge rates to the company for handling this, far exceeding any amount they'll ever recover for creditors.

Obviously, I have no idea if this is the case here. But people who close companies can have an incentive to investigate every little thing in order to inflate their own fees.

Umm, I wouldn't wish to bet on that. And definitely not on the US needing to deter their militaries, especially China's. Think of Taiwan, the Japan/China disputes and Russia's tendency to invade states it thinks it ought to still own when they don't do what they're told.

Still, it's obviously not the only threat.

Indeed it can be argued - but there still needs to be a law saying they can. A law subject to democratic (well, ish) and judicial oversight, a law that everyone can see and argue over.