There are a lot of Hindus who would like to erect shrines to their couple of tens of thousands of gods right next to yours.
Space may become an issue but faith overcomes all.

I might be even able to round up a couple of Buddhists to join in with their demands. But they are mostly awefully nice people and there is a statistical chance the Hindus already have that one covered. Which might also be true for Lord Jeebus, Mohammed, Moses and Geoff the God of Biscuits.

Those nutters who allowed that religious monument on public space can't have it both ways. Geoff will not be denied!

Just because it is so doesn't make it true! You lovely heretic!
Please report to the POEE. They will reeducate you properly and convert you to the beliefs you currently hold. For the greater good. Or not.

I found people who studied philosophy make very good project managers and decision-makers. Must have something to do with reading about all those different approaches and methodologies to solve those dilemmas or indeed know when they are propably not solvable. MBAs simply apply the models they don't understand and hunt for KPIs to optimize without even thinking what they try to achieve, if this is the right way to do it and lacking an appropriate metric to measure the rate of their failure.

They tend to have very strong opinions and very weak understanding of the systems they try to administrate.

Believe me, whatever Munich does stays in Munich. It will not be adopted by the Bavarian gov since even if they are seated in Munich they hate the city administration with a passion. Opposing parties. OTOH the mayor of Munich ran for office in Bavaria and failed as he was expected to. And even if Bavaria adopted LiMUX it wouldn't be used on a German federal level. But this time not because of opposing parties. It's something even worse: sister parties.

Ain't highly federal gov structures a hilarious thing? Honestly, who needs imported sitcoms if you have politics.

Nope. Those were in Pakistan. Even if they had been in Afghanistan this was long ofter the war had officially ended and the mopping up process against "insurgents" had started.
The US laws here are completely irrelevant. This is against international laws, against anything that is right and decent and there is a reason why the US(and the Norks and other dodgy states) doesn't hand over their alleged war criminals to The Hague because there international law will be applied. It must be awefully bad press if your own soldiers sit on the same bench as Milosevic instead of a sympathetic US military tribunal.

Simple: The conservative party who were the only ones to vote against this were in the minority. The centre-left party, the green party and the GLBT folks voted for the Linux transition. It was a vote for long-term indipendence against short-term planning and a matter of principle.

I had dealings with the LHM back then and I do fully believe they haven't saved a single cent on the transition. There were hordes of IBM and SuSE consultants stampeding through the halls and they hired a bunch of permanent employees for this. In fact MS made them a couple of offers which as it turned out they could refuse. They hadn't planned on saving money so special deals by MS were not that juicy.

The frustration of the MS sales reps(there were even rumors monkey boy himself traveled to Munich) must have been immense. Munich back then was still running NT and a lot of their servers were Suns. In short it must have been the big cahuna back then.

I am in two minds concerning this.

First of all police officers need to be much more transparent. Their accountability needs to be improved. Police brutality and esprit de corps types of cover-up of malfeasance is a problem worldwide. Not only in the US, but Germany and the UK, too. There are conflicting reports about the amount of force used during arrests. Too many detainees(the majority of which aren't hardened criminals) have suffered injuries while a band of coppers declared unisono that they fell down a flight of stairs, resisted arrests and the usual nonesense. I'd dearly like to see recordings for everything they do.

On the other hand we shouldn't forget that coppers are also persons with a right to privacy and that the ones who pick up drunks, get called to petty disputes and car accidents are notoriously underappreciated, underpaid and overworked with a high risk for burn-out. They do deserve our appreciation for that.


So I'd say that yes, we should do any type of recording including video, sound and GPS data. But we also need PROPER ways to protect the individual rights of the coppers. If the GPS data is needed for statistical analysis then we should store it anonymously and in bulk with no way to tie it back to individual officers. If we OTOH need that data for accountability purposes then it needs to be sealed away and only be accessed by court order. A proper court. Not a FISA kangaroo court.



You crack your little doughnut shop based jokes but if you spend some thought on a problem then you will find that it isn't so easy to solve in a world that stubbornly refuses to be black&white and where stereotypes hardly happen. This is not a third rate The Simpsons episode.

Surely those drone strikes have produced more deaths than that. Unless these so called "surgical strikes" involve explosions that do only affect the intended target instead of everybody in the blast area. Sure, you can keep the number of extrajudically killed "targets" low if you only list those you intentionally killed. This kind of fiddling with the figures for the press and the voters at home is especially cynical if it involves human beings blwn to smithereens. What about the family of Uzman Wasir who was killed in a drone strike while he was off selling fruit? His two kids, his brother and his wife makes four deaths. But that wasn't an extra judicial killing but a "'orrible, 'orrible misunderstanding".

Dear Sirs,

Would you kindly fuck yourselves.

Kind regards,
The Rest of the World

Precisely. The amount of jingoism in the US is nearly without peer. In fact it is a bit frowned upon in Europe since this was precisely what led to one of the most pointless and bloody wars that ever devastated a whole continent. Afterwards nobody really knew what WW1 was really about. Some toff getting shot? Imperialistic bastards(which describes absolutely everybody involved) getting uppity? At the beginning it was considered a bit of a sports event by Joe Public. We'll have this match won before Christmas because we are the best.

...and Spike Milligan.

Dang. So much for Inspector Clouseau. You need to be of the right age and from the right continent to catch that one.

Ok, how about Spike Milligan instead?
I TOLD YOU THEY WOULD SPY! In loving peace and looking ab-so-lutely fab!

Hah! You and your inferior aluminum. Use aluminium, that's the real shtuff.

So little green men give you lengthy and well orchestrated blow-jobs of the brown-nosed variety? That's a better deal than the Yanks/Brits are giving. All they have is a five party circle-jerk. So that makes this proposal rather tempting. What are the French offering?

Heh. Everybody involved in THAT movie was a bit appalled that the yuppies started wearing suspenders to work. A typical situation of "you didn't quite get the point".

Some awefully clever chap in The Grauniad speculated the lack of noise from the UK might come from misplaced pride stemming from Bletchley Park and 007. That or the dearly beloved island monkeys wear so much wool it's easy to pull over their eyes. God bless their tiny little toes. Fee-fie-foe-fum, I smell a bloodless Englishman.

I shouldn't rock the boat too much since the German authorities seem not so much miffed at the spying but that they weren't playing any significant part in it. Although there was some GCHQ praise for the BND capabilities. The official response to that seems to have been "Gosh! Jolly! That's an awefully nice thing to say, isn't it?". Mutti is rather upset she hadn't been properly and officially notified the Yanks had been naughty nosy little boys.

All in all it seems nobody refrained from spying on everybody. Interestingly only the Mossad remains with not more than the usual egg on face. It's so beautiful I might break into song at any given minute. Something about model generals should be appropriate.

Let's not forget the recent findings that gov outsourcing isn't too hot either.
Seems like they outsourced entire bureaucracies to G4S and their ilk(most of the contracts go to 4 megacorps) without any kind of oversight. And then, suddenly, olympics and the armed forces have to step in due to G4S not being able to provide security. Also the embarrassment of the outsourced fit-for-work assessment centres produce lawsuit after lawsuit. The total saving seem to eat up the entire budget of a couple of ministries.

Jim Hacker would be proud.