The world is not a perfect place. The West does need spies and it does need an infrastructure to support them and gather intelligence.

However, we should remember who we actually need to be spying on. Nation states, failed states, and yes terrorist training camps and what not.

What we should not be engaging in is dragnet surveillance where everyone is entered in to some giant database. This is a really bad idea for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the databases are not really likely to be that useful. Prism didn't stop the Boston Marathon bombers. You might have every text, every phone call, every e-mail but if you can't spot the connections it doesn't help you.

Second, the massive database is a security risk in its own right. The NSA might think the Snowden leak is bad but it's child's play compared to what would happen if somebody leaks that database! You can bet your bottom dollar a shit-storm a 100% times the size would ensue. It might even threaten the agency's continued existence.

Third, the database could be hacked by a foreign governments. This in itself is a giant risk that dwarfs the one outlined in the second paragraph. China getting access to wiretaps on US businesses? Does no-one in the security community see what a giant hole they're making in the West's security?

This leads nicely to my fourth and final point. I do get the impression from the Snowden leaks that the competency of these organisations is being called in to question. It's clear they don't know what Snowden took; they don't know what he knows and what he doesn't. This is why he's catching them at so many lies. They make one statement, he leaks another document that shows them they're full of shit.

This final point is perhaps the most damning. They've built a giant system they can't audit! If they don't know what he took when he's just a fairly junior contractor, we have to assume other nation states have thoroughly penetrated the system and already stolen Western secrets!

They're clearly not competent enough to run such a system and it should be shut down on grounds of national security.

On the Internet, people often moan about how Western countries "don't make anything any more." The idea being that our service economy is built on a house of cards and the only true economic generator is the making and selling of stuff.

My view is that manufacturing is a bad choice of focus for our economies. The direction of travel is clear: it is very clearly a race to an ever descending race to the bottom which will end with completely automated factories. This race started with the industrial revolution and it will accelerate during our life times. The jobs are slowly but surely being eliminated and it might even have happened sooner if China hadn't been able to provide so much cheap labour. Those jobs are simply not safe in the long term.

But even the Chinese are not safe. Eventually, they'll all be replaced by machines and when they are, it won't matter where those machines are located. The machines will re-locate closer to the consumers to shorten supply lines.

The message is stark: any job that is repetitive risks being replaced by a robot.

Perhaps the most interesting of these is automated driving. It promises to completely transform our world. It will transform logistics in much the same way as containerisation did to shipping. It will transform everything but just think of the number of jobs that will be eliminated!

Then there are threats like 3D printers which threaten to completely remake the world as we know it.

The only sensible way to weather the next 100 years is through developing products and service that can not be automated. These are things like law, software development, media etc. etc.

Producing stuff is quickly becoming unprofitable. Service economies are our only hope.

Additionally, there are many passages in the Bible which indicate that anyone who heard the true voice or looked directly upon the face of God would perish because they could not withstand the awesome power. That's just the sort of indicator the faithful could logically use to support a metaphorical interpretation of scripture.

Yet there are other passages, such as Jesus appearing to hundreds of people, or God appearing to Abraham or Moses where this is not the case. To be honest with you, I always find this line of argument odd.

If God can't contact us because it was destroy our feeble minds, then how did his messiahs, prophets come to know about him? How did Paul receive his vision from the creator of the universe and not have his mind thoroughly destroyed. What about Noah or Moses? How did their minds take the strain?

It's another one of these absurd adhoc retreats from the fact there is basically no evidence of God talking to anyone, ever. If God really did exist and he cared about what we did, then we'd be able to discover what we wanted. Humans of all stripes, in all times, in all places would agree on what the message was. I'd be as discoverable as the value of PI, or the laws of Physics or Chemistry.

Yet, once again, this is not what we observe. What we observe is precisely what we'd expect if he didn't exist: complete and utter confusion.

Additionally, if the truth were apparent, then there would be no benefit to be had from the iterative and ongoing process of interpreting scripture or the fractious nature of the church, in any of its various schismatic forms.

I'm not sure how this confusion benefits anyone. It's like the old joke about standards from Tanenbaum; the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.

Likewise, the great thing about the "Words" of God is that there are so many different, mutually contradictory, "words" to choose from.

Why on earth would a God who cared about us allow this confusion to persist?

The idea that the Creation stories in Genesis are meant to literally describe how God created is another matter entirely, and it is the blind insistence upon this presupposition that results in so much hot air being expelled on both sides of the issue.

In practically every thread you get someone who tries to reconcile evolution with theism. They say, well, "God created the system of evolution. Tada!" or "God guides evolution. Tada!"

The truth is that when evolution is properly understood it is a complete replacement for the theistic creator hypothesis. It actually goes even further than this and give us yet more evidence that God doesn't not exist.

The problem with evolution is that it's not the kind of system a God that cared and loved us would design.

Does survival of the fittest seem righteous to you? Why should the most well adapted survive? Surely a better system would be one where people with kindness, co-operation and charity thrive and the selfish, brutish and dishonest perish? Yet we do not live in this world.

Theism as a whole has the problem that it makes a really bold claim: "God exists and he loves us." and then it has to retreat almost immediately behind a series of adhoc justifications for why the observed universe doesn't match what we'd expect if that claim were true.

If God really existed the universe would be hugely different to the one we currently live in. If God really existed science would have found him by now.

That's because that's what Christ said. "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." Mk 16:16

This is yet another problem with the theism. The complete and utter confusion about what God wants. You're sat in this thread quoting the Bible as if it were the word of God, yet there are literally thousands of independent strands of Christianity alone. I don't even mention that even there were 2 billion Christians, 71% of the words population think your view is a heresy. You would even be called a heretic by members of your own superstition.

Again, would this confusion about religion be expected if there was a God who loved us? Absolutely not.

It is a popular--and recent--misconception that faith and reasoning are incompatible. Many, if not most, of the great minds of the ages were believers in God or in other forms of religion. The idea that religious people are necessarily irrational fools is simply a lie; there are plenty of both religious and atheistic people who are irrational fools.

The people in previous times didn't have the weight of evidence we do today. Faith and reason are incompatible. Faith is based on truth by revelation; that is, that some people a long time ago had the "word" revealed to them and every one else is left in the dark. The only hope we have is to just trust them. Reason works by studying, debating and seeking out evidence. Anybody can critique that evidence, review it and discuss it.

These are diametrically opposed view of the universe and completely incompatible.

It should be obvious that the money didn't come from Microsoft. It came from the NSA.

They wanted to wiretap all Skype conversations. They got Microsoft to buy it for that end.

You'd be nuts in the post Snowdon world to assume anything else.

He's a traitor, he deserves it.

I don't think anyone can argue with the fact an offence was committed. But the punishment should fit the crime. It is on that basis I object to this sentence. The sentence is so long that I feel this punishment violates your constitution. It is cruel and unusual.

We're talking about locking this guy up longer many rapists or murderers. You're even talking about executing him. How is that a sensible level of punishment?

At the end of the day, nobody died from this leak. Nothing of any substance has changed in geo-politics either. The cable leaks had a tendency to show that US foreign policy behind closed doors was pretty much the same as it was on the public sphere. As a Brit, I thought they actually came out of it looking quite good. It was the other countries were made to look like asshats.

Manning is a bit of an idiot and should serve some time but taking his entire life in forfeit for his stupidity is totally disproportionate and in my view unconstitutional.

I've slowly started to come to the view that representative democracy has basically failed. It's time to try a new system.

What that system should be up for discussion but the idea of voting for representatives who then decide the policy has been tried and failed. It's too easy for corruption to take root and it's too easy for those people to grab power for power's sake.

I refuse to accept that there is no better solution than the status-quo. There must be a way to capture the will of the people, protect minorities, and protect the people from government overreach. There must be a way to have our cake and eat it.

Right across the free world we're told this these giant databases are there to keep us safe.

The question is more who is being kept safe who. Is the purpose of these databases to protect me or protect the politicians? Is to protect me or big business? Is it to protect my right to process or restrict it?

In my own country, William Hague said that it was unthinkable that GCHQ would be operating outside of the law. The problem is I don't believe you!

Practically every time the government has secrecy it abuses that power to its own ends. This is just the nature of power held in secret with a lack of transparency. The entire span of human history shows that kind of power is hugely destructive.

The cure is worse than the disease here. Honestly, I'd rather have more terrorist attacks that having my privacy systematically shredded for the greater good. All terrorists can ever do is kill people. It takes a government to kill a society.

The issue here is that he didn't have adequate disaster recovery procedures and policies.

The standard solution to this sort of problem is that you have a backup system that sits off site ready to take the load should something happen to primary. This backup system should be located in another data center, with a different ISP etc.

Moving to the cloud doesn't solve this, per se, if you move all your infrastructure to say Amazon you're still beholden to that company and its internal procedures. A system administration on their part could easily render you down for many hours.

The lesson hasn't been learnt.

Seriously. Write some code, publish it on Github. Spin up a single serving web page, does one interesting thing as soon as you arrive. Remember, everyone else with resumes could be pretending, you're actually doing stuff.

For work experience, sign up on freelancing sites like odesk. Take jobs just to do them. Nobody knows how old you are, there. Even if all you can do is sysadmin -- well, admin some cloud services!

Set up an amb for each square. Then use "require" with each regular expression defined across the grid.

Problem solved - generically - for all time!

It's not the most efficient solution in the world, but it'll probably still solve it faster than you?

We use Fizzbuzz and a short SQL test that take a total of 30 minutes for the first part of the test. If they fail this, we can them and don't give them an interview.

A surprising number of people fail this test.

We then have a larger problem with much more time allotted. Here we're looking for style and quality of construction.

That said, even with this longer test, the people we hire tend to get the same distance through the test. They're at least within the same half of an order of magnitude.

At the end of the day, in a paid position you can and do have a deadline to work to. You can't take forever building something. You have to produce the goods!

There's an opinion on-line that the UK is turning in to some sort oppressive totalitarian state. It seems like this summary was written with this view in mind. It makes a number of errors of omission.

The article says it's opt-in! It only applies to that web-site too. That's obviously a huge omission to make from the summary. The summary seems to imply that the government would snoop on all traffic of a job-seeker and it was mandatory.

Finally, people who are claiming Job Seekers allowance are requesting support from the government while they look for a job. It's not totalitarian to suggest that we ensure that they are actually looking for a job!

As a taxpayer and a liberal democrat, it's something I support!

God is quite capable of using DNA and RNA and quantum mechanics and other theories which we have yet to learn about to make people and the world.

Why would he though? He's God! He can just zap us in to existence! Surely, that's better than having distant cousins eat each other just so they can survive. We've defeated evolution to some degree. Evolution in its pure form is unimaginably brutal.

The religious suffer from a cognitive bias where they assume that any contradicting evidence is more proof of their man in the sky. The point of the Origin of Species was to give us a mental framework that required no man in the sky!

Science shows that your God tries very, very hard to look like the null hypothesis; which is, complete and total none-existence.

Evolution has been operating over hundreds of millions of years.

If we didn't need a foreskin, we wouldn't have one.