Santa's got to pay the danegeld like every one else. We're back, in case You didn't get the memo.

What EU really wants to achieve is to break America ...

Nice conspiracy theory but we can't even get along internally over here. Herding all the cats into a unified, secret attack on the US would require a coordinated act by several deities.

I'm afraid any break up is self inflicted. The US is already even more fractured than EU.

Not only that, but the EUSSR doesn't seem to understand that an American corporation has nothing to do with European communists. They should go and re-read their history books and remember how close all of Europe was to speaking either German or Russian.

I could have moderated your drivel to hell but that wouldn't help much.

The EU commision can't tell US companies to do anything but they can set conditions for allowing them to operate within the EU. It's called sovereignty and the US does it too all the time. Having a beef with virtual or actual monopolies is not exactly a communist thing either. A monopoly is a direct attack on the free market and therefore upsets true free market believers.

The US have a long, although not resent, history of cracking down on monopolies. The Standard Oil case is the poster child for this kind of policy.

It's a hard thing to say but people die on a regular basis when flying untested, high performance aircrafts. There is a reason why test pilots can't get life insurance.

He got the nickname Marco after he lost his horse. Before, it was just straight Polo ... and apparently it's his shirt I'm wearing.

I'm shocked, shocked that gambling is going on here!

Gotta watch Casablanca again on of these days.

I sat down with my 12 yo gamer son and watched the movie 'Hamburger Hill'. That took a lot of the glamour out of FPS games.

Next time, I'll try with 'Platoon'.

And Mussolini made the trains run on time?

Actually, he didn't. That myth have been repeatedly busted my historians.

If you want to catch up to ~1990 tech, then you need to remove the "A" in "CA."

Thanks for the insult. It hardly stung. I expect you to start the project shortly. I'll gladly donate to it on kickstarter.

A nice step ahead would be the establishment of a new set of root certificates and an accompanying authority that signs other peoples certificates. All located in a country that doesn't play ball with NSA and other thugs.

This would do a lot to dampen the routine man-in-the-middle we see these days.

Don't you need to keep the original file and the code you used to transform it, so that you have an audit trail which shows how you got the current data?

Only if it gets down to covering your ass and then you're fucked anyway. Nobody gives a shit how you contributed to a success.

That shit is almost ancient. Who gives a damn?

If something that old haven't burned your house down yet then it's likely to be safe.

Stupid gits.

The story of the loss of the Challenger is much more complicated than simply "stupid managers, saintly engineers", and there's a lot of blame to spread around all parties.

Sorry for using Challenger this way. It's borderline trolling/flamebait but an established, although incorrect example.

My point is that engineers need to take a stand. Our actions or inactions can put the public at risk and that is a burden we have to respect. We are the experts and we have to make certain that the best possible knowledge is put forth in a way that management can't dismiss easily.

You get a Challenger disaster.

In my experience, You have to use exactly these words in order to get management to take problems serious. Turns out it was because they put management in a legal bind.

Any engineer who follows GM's edict should be flogged. Bad stuff happens because good men do nothing.