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.

The UK Tories under Cameron are indeed appalling. It is hard to decide if they are merely incompetent or malicious. Their actions of late point to the latter. Indeed one could only speculate how bad it would have been without the LibDems.

The UK political scene has always been a bit foreign to my German tastes. A backbench MP suggesting that feckless fathers should be dragged to work in chains in defense of the badly executed bedroom-tax would have been forced to apologize in German politics. And he would have lost his seat come the next election. The comically idiotic ads targeting "illegal" immigrants to turn themselves in are both malicious and incompetent. And even now there is another push to introduce the "snooper's charta" which in the light of the recent revelations about the GCHQ isn't even needed for them to do what they do.

The other paries in the UK look good in comparison because of the unmitigated disaster that is the current Tory crop. Thatcher was bad but potentially a necessary evil due to the unmaintainability of the Postwar Dream. But think as I may I can't begin to fathom where to start to look for a justification for that cabinet, that PM and that party. They do not even have the use of a compass needle that permanently points to the south. You can't say "let's do the opposite of what they are suggesting" due to the utter confusion that is their politics.

How many of those are privately operated and how many of those are courtesy of Theresa May?

The privately operated CCTVs are mostly unwatched and the businesses will only look at them when there is a need because honestly, they don't make money. They are propably writing over the same tape over and over again and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the material were completely useless.

They are a bit like a backup process a company has set up a couple of years ago and nobody testing the actual backups or even looking at the logs. When push comes to shove they propably are useless. Unless of course the London Underground ones. The ones pointing at a bus stop in Derby most likely are useless.

"Non-toxic taste carriers" is such a sexy term for junk/fast food.

Have you ever considered to move into marketing?

There I do agree. Windows never made anything better. Windows 7/7.5 Mobe had the air of exclusivity(because everybody already had abandoned it) so I guess that's what sold it to Nokia. Don't forget that Nokia's phone division thought themselves to be special and better than the rest. So going with the flow was really against corporate culture. They had their own reality distortion field just without the clever marketing.

It's a crying shame because I heard good things about their latest crop.