That's exactly the problem, they shouldn't be monitoring tens of millions in the first place because there aren't tens of millions that are a threat. My point exactly was that they only need to monitor the few hundred or few thousand that match real actual threat criteria.

The fact they're monitoring tens of millions is precisely the ineptitude that needs calling out and dealing with. There aren't tens of millions of real actual threats present within each country, there are a few hundred or maybe a few thousand at best. You don't need to monitor anyone abroad, that's the job of external security like MI6 and your foreign partners to do. MI5 can't keep track of internal threats precisely because they're too busy snooping and gathering mountains of data on non-threats.

As I've said before, instead of working on becoming better at finding the needle in the haystack, all MI5, GCHQ, and it's counterparts overseas seem to do now is build a bigger haystack so that even when their counterparts from overseas say to them "Hey, you've got a bunch of terrorist threats here" they seem to just respond "Sorry, too busy with head buried in massive haystack to care".

Personally I think there's two ways of looking at it, I think you can either believe that religion is the cause, or you can believe it's the excuse.

I think there are good arguments either way and so I'm not about to disagree with your viewpoint. I do however still sit on the fence on the issue and think it's worth considering that it may just be an excuse.

Consider this, if religion is the cause of the problem, then how do we explain away the other 1 billion muslims that aren't engaging in any such terrorism and are living lives no less peaceful than that of your typical atheist?

Another interesting example is that of Buddhists in Burma who have been massacring muslims Rohingyas in recent years. Buddhism teaches non-violence as one of it's core tenets and is often cited as the most peaceful religion known to man. If the teachings of a religion are relevant in determining what a person does or doesn't do then how do we explain this sort of situation given that these people have been preached non-violence to more so than pretty much any other group of people on earth?

As an atheist I do have a negative view of religion, I think it's pointless and encourages poor thinking and ignorance. But I'm not wholly convinced that that poor thinking leads to terrorism. I think terrorism exists by itself as a result of people being poor and disenfranchised amongst other things, and terrorists just look for a cause to try and justify and excuse their actions.

Yes, here's the actual problem, map of alcohol consumption by country where darker colours are more alcohol consumption and lighter colours are less and grey is no data:

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/news/...

Original article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal...

Long story short, is that Russia's driving accidents problem is almost wholly down to the fact that it's a nation of rampant alcholics. The rest comes down to poorly maintained cars and roads and a nation with weather that results in terrible driving conditions for half the year.

So absolutely nothing in this new law will fix the problem it purports to fix, hence, it's safe to assume that it's in fact wholly about minority oppression.

It doesn't really matter what they are, it's bad regardless.

Why? because if we've learnt anything from terrorist incidents since 9/11 is that the perpetrators were all already known to the authorities.

- Lee Rigby killers? Already detained trying to head to support Al Shabab by Kenyan authorities and sent back to the UK with MI5 informed

- Boston Bombings? Russia already alerted the FBI to the fact they'd been hanging with Chechnyan extremists and were a threat.

- Australian hostage taker? Already on trial for violent crimes and with a history of support for Islamic extremism

- These guys? Already on the US no fly list. Already known to French authorities for extremist sympathies. At least one already had been in trouble with police for violent crimes.

It seems to me that a taboo needs to be broken, that the general public needs to stop assuming the security services are competent. It's clear they're not and it's clear that no new powers are needed because in each and every case of terrorism that comes about the perpetrators are already known to the authorities.

All that's needed is for the authorities to start better determining threats from the data they have, they don't need new data. If they simply started monitoring based on the following two criteria then all of the above would've been prevented:

1) Does the person have extremist sympathies?

2) Does the person have a violent disposition / have they been arrested and convicted of a violent crime?

Simply monitoring on these two criteria alone would've prevented all of the above. No new data needed, no new powers needed. It's not rocket science but apparently the likes of MI5 are so entirely inept that they can't even figure out the basics.

"The IRA weren't ever trying to set up a catholic state, just an independent one."

Of course they were, in fact, Northern Ireland today is grossly at odds with the rest of the UK on a number of laws precisely to appease the IRA as part of the peace plan. For example in Northern Ireland it's illegal to have an abortion even if you were raped and this is wholly to satisfy the IRA's Catholic pro-life dogma.

Anyone who murders their child is not "normal". There is evidence of Patricide in every walk of life.

"Nothing of what I said was to indicate a problem with C# itself. It was to showcase why HR departments would be hesitant to hire someone who presumably hasn't touched C# in a professional environment in the last 2 years; especially when you consider that going into an interview you are directly competing with people who have (supposedly) been in the thick of C# and rolling with its changes consistently for the past 5-10."

I've worked in Java, C#, C++ and PHP roles and I understand what you're saying here, but honestly I never found moving back to C# (which is what I tend to gravitate back towards each time I end up on jobs that don't use it) to be a problem - if I know I'm applying for C# roles and haven't touched it in a couple of years then an hour or two of reading is plenty enough to get you upto speed, but you do need that strong pre-requisite knowledge of C# in the first place.

In fact, last time I was asked to do one of the upto 3 hour long IKM tests on C# 4.0 for a recruitment test I scored 99.6%, despite having been working on a PHP project for 18 months prior.

It's worth reading books like C# in Depth for anyone working with C# because it gives you the background and evolution of the language - if you're comfortable with that, then learning what the latest version adds is trivial. The same extends to all the frameworks like MVC which I've used since it was in beta when I was initially evaluating frameworks. It's changed, but it's really not changed that much or enough to cause any particular headaches. I had my own implementation of Areas before they came along officially and you just choose to stick with your implementation or port over, neither was a particularly big deal but I tend to prefer sticking to the official path in a framework where possible so I switched over.

But we're not talking about putting an individual on trial, we're talking about geopolitics.

There's absolutely nothing anywhere that says that nation states get the same benefits of proper use of the justice system as individuals do.

Given the murky world of espionage and so forth that makes sense too. When your opponent is explicitly using the instruments of a nation state to avoid minimising evidence whilst denying you access to key witnesses (i.e. the accused actors for the state) then you'd never be able to respond to any attack ever.

"Its also a little too convenient that a country which outright bans american films and that would never have to tolerate its citizenry watching it, happens to care enough to make a retaliatory strike against what for all intents and purposes is a nonthreat."

Apparently dodgy Chinese DVD copies regularly make their way into North Korea, and a number of Hollywood Films are quite popular regardless of their actual legality so I think you're wrong about that. See this story going back to 2012 for example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

This page explains how it happens quite well:

http://www.libertyinnorthkorea...

Frankly I'm getting a little tired of the "security experts" who decry the claim that it's North Korea because all they seem to be doing is saying "No it wasn't" without providing any counter evidence and simultaneously contradicting each other. We've got some telling us GOP didn't claim to be doing it over the Interview until a little while after the leak as if it was just taking advantage of that as misdirection, and now it turns out some North Korea IPs were involved we're being told that that's not evidence because anyone could hack North Korean IPs. Which is it? was it planned to be pinned on North Korea or not? The "security experts" need to start providing a bit more meat to their counter claims rather than just putting out a whole bunch of contradictory and sometimes outright nonsensical speculation. They're all coming up with different stories, none of which has any evidence, and all of which stop making sense at various points (generally ranging from lack of motive through to inconsistency of argument).

I agree the information released by the US to date is a little poor but I don't see it as particularly out of the ordinary. Maybe the FBI don't want to give away their methods, maybe it was a trivial hack and Sony doesn't want to be embarassed. Maybe it was an advanced hack and the FBI is worried about others figuring it out. Maybe they just don't care enough about internet conspiracy theorists to really give a shit that they even need to.

But I prefer to go by what the people involved have said. First we have the North Korean regime bitching about the film, then the hack happens, when asked if they did it North Korea says "Wait and see", then GOP comes along and takes credit, and then seeing the flack they got North Korea denies it, then when Sony finally cancels the release and as a result the US government gets involved and starts counter-striking North Korea suddenly GOP goes all quiet.

Given that North Korea is the only place that gives two shits about the film, I don't see it as being a particularly far fetched scenario that North Korea actually did it, realised in the face of non-stop media reports creating a Streisand effect it had maybe gone a little far and made the problem worse and so washed it's hands of it. Maybe they didn't even do it themselves, maybe they paid someone. Maybe you're right, maybe they didn't do it at all, but right now no one's providing any evidence and I don't frankly see any reason to disbelieve the North Korean theory, they're the only ones with any real motive and there's nothing to make the story unbelievable. If you don't think North Korea would care about a film like this then you're wholly naive about how important to the North Korean leadership maintaining Kim's image as a magical deity is.

The fact the US authorities have lied so many times about so many things doesn't mean we should instantly disbelieve everything they say. God only knows if we're going on who to trust based on lies told then I've no idea why you'd favour North Korea's very delayed claim of innocence - this is the country that's claimed it's leader has cured AIDs and found unicorns or whatever the fuck they've come up with lately. As lies go North Korea's have always been more blatant, more obvious, and often more fantastical than anything the US has told. Why believe that's changed now?

It seems to be a broader pattern, even on my now abandoned Galaxy Nexus stuck on 4.3 I find Google apps have become drastically lower quality. The other day I was trying to get to navigation in Google maps and I suffered 3 crashes at varying points - one typing in the location, another selecting it from the results when I tried again, and a third when I finally tried again and got past that point when I clicked the button to take me to navigation.

I'm also finding that Google keyboard is getting a bit poor now - the suggestions seem to have largely disappeared only turning up arbitrarily once every few words. It also struggles figuring out when I've moved from one word to the next more than it used to.

So even without the OS update and just suffering app updates things have gotten worse anyway.

I'm having a hard time understanding why your company has a counter productive set of business rules that force you to not be able to test a new version of a prototype R&D system for 2 weeks is a C# problem. Though your estimate of 2 days to do the code changes seems a little steep given that retargetting to .NET is normally just a case of changing a drop down list option and that that's sufficient for 99.9999% of projects unless you do some weird and unusual things.

I'm also not sure how it's C#'s fault that your company has decided to change it's database abstraction layer for seemingly no other reason than because it's funny is a C# problem too.

MVC? sure, but what's new about having to decide about sticking with an old stable version and selecting a new version with new features, but requiring some code updates? That describes 99% of frameworks out there.

It sounds like your company is stuck in a transition period where it's trying to move forward but is in many ways failing to manage it well, jumping ahead to the latest and greatest simply for the sake of it. It sounds like you don't like change, and wish you could still just COBOL and C++ away until retirement without ever having to learn anything.

The problem is even the folks behind C++ realise it's gotta change, and if you hadn't hidden under a rock you'd know that C++ has changed more in the last 5 years than even C# has.

Unfortunately it's the price of progress. You either live with it and deal with it, or you get left behind. Just please stop telling people that being left behind is somehow good for their careers. It's not, it's really just not.

But a point you made is worth addressing a bit more thoroughly:

"The technologies packed around C# and .NET in general are targets that move so fast that if you're out of the game for 2 years, even though you could probably pick up and run with the new stuff within a week or less, you're likely going to be competing with hundreds of applicants that are fresh and in the game with the current tech already and will (in theory) be off and running on the first day at their desk."

I agree, and I've seen this too. But realise that not all companies are this stupid, and those that are aren't the ones you want to work for. Is it annoying that you have your time wasted by them because they're looking for someone who called a single method in an exact way in a framework with thousands of functions last week and may not know anything about the rest of the framework whilst foregoing the candidate that knows 90% of the rest of the framework inside out and so is infinitely more qualified but has been felled by a stupid interview mechanism? Yeah it is. But it's just part of job hunting and some companies are just shit at recruiting and have no idea how to spot talent - don't count it as your loss, it's their problem and their loss, they're the ones that the odds are will end up with countless highly inept people.

Yeah they wrote off support for my Galaxy Nexus after only 18 months so it's still on what, 4.3 I think.

My Nexus 7 still hasn't received 5.0.

So if people aren't upgrading it may not be because they don't want to but because Google is sloppy on even it's own brand devices at rolling it out.

People wont go out their way to upgrade, if it doesn't come OTA to them then most just wont bother.

"It's a common mistake to look at the IRA murders, bombing, etc in a religious light - as you said, the sides were largely drawn across Catholic/Protestant lines, but what the IRA did was never in the name of religion, it was in the name of nationalism."

You can make the exact same argument about the varying factions including ISIS in Syria right now, so I'm not really sure what your point is unless you're implying we should apply double standards against Muslim conflicts as compared to Christian conflicts.

You could twist the argument in exactly the same way by claiming ISIS' battle is as much about wanting their own sovereign state as it is about religion so it's silly to say it's a religious battle.

But really all you're doing is making excuses for your own misguided prejudices, which, given your firm Christian views probably isn't too surprising that you'd suggest that in one case it wasn't about religion when Christianity is involved but in another it obviously is.

Like it or not, the IRA's campaign was primarily one of Catholics against Protestants. It had no more and no less of a religious angle to it over a sovereignty angle as ISIS currently does. Fact is battles for sovereignty and religion often go hand in hand, but you can't excuse it in one case and not in another just to try and suit your anti-Islamic prejudice.

Oh I don't know about that. This guy makes kind of a good point:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indep...

And really, even the whole ISIS/Iraq/Syria thing doesn't hold much of a finger up to the Rwanda genocide which was primarily orchestrated by Christians.

Hell, in the Yugoslav wars Christian Orthodox Serbs massacred 10,000 Bosniak muslims in one sitting at Srebrenica.