For example: I have pattern matched this thread^Warticle^Wweb site and decided it was a repetitive waste of time.

Be fair. Only one of the things you list is infectious.

Which isn't to say that lobbying for diseases produces good outcomes.

AI is now trivial pattern matching.

It's also amazing how long a workforce can refuse to do a damn thing while protesting 'fascists' wanting them to actually work and pay taxes. e.g. Greece.

The devil is in the details. We can't treat China the same as Greece. That said there is little the Chinese could do to work any more aggressively. They are already turned up to 11.

It would/will take generations to get the Greeks to work hard and pay taxes. It took generations of Ottoman rule to train them to cheat and scam at everything.

It takes more then 3 years to train a single Engineer to entry level. Deep knowledge is measured in person-centuries.

Top 10 sellers? No doubt. Among the best 10? Not a chance.

More basically, I don't understand how anybody can trust them. The current version might no longer be properly called 'a virus', but they are still a former virus writing company. That can _never_ change.

They don't use the same antibiotics on animals they use on humans.

But don't let facts get in the way of a good rant.

McAfee makes new computers run like shit. Intel and AMD pay them. If Chinese computer users get more than 10% of the CPU they paid for McAfee has failed at their job.

One of the more amusing aspects of astrology is that the tables that they use were not accurate to start with, and didn't allow for precession, stellar movement, etc. Now 800 years later when "Jupiter is in Orion" according to their charts it probably isn't actually anywhere near it.

It's like we found the dumbest guy in the country and elected him president or something.

We in the US have a head start, we elected Reagan in 1980. His wife Nancy's astrologer seems to have had a say in a number of policy decisions, especially later in his second term when the Alzheimers was setting in.

What may not be apparent to others is that the UK system of parliamentary 'seats' and first past the post ballots can lead to situations like this.

A party gets into power. They then get the boundaries commission to look at population densities and 'correct anomalies' so that each set has roughly the same number of voters [this is their job]. Of course what they actually do is to ring-fence areas where there is a great deal of support for them and spread areas with largely opposition support amongst many seats to dilute their effectiveness.

  This leads to the concept of "safe seats" (where you could safely bet on an outcome because people would vote for a monkey if it had the right coloured rosette). In reality UK politics is decided by a relatively small number of 'marginal seats' where the outcome is less predictable.

What this means in practice is that the majority party in parliament rarely (almost never) has a majority of the popular vote (typically only around 35%). They are 'first past the post' in more seats but fewer supporting voters overall. It also means party officials can reward people with safe seats for following directions.

Two take away points:

1) Don't judge the British on the basis of the politicians we've got -- we are not all so inept/clueless

2) Even by the standards of most MPs this guy is seriously out of step with reality. He is in a party that would like to dismantle the NHS and farm it out to their chums in private medicine so it's no surprise he's on a committee that could cause sabotage.

I think the Gemalto response seems reasonable, actually. The documents suggest they weren't doing anything more sophisticated than snarfing FTP or email transfers of key files, which Gemalto say they started phasing out in 2010. And the documents themselves say they weren't always successful.

NSA/GCHQ are not magic. They do the same kind of hacking ordinary criminals have been doing for years, just more of it and they spend more time on it. If Gemalto are now taking much better precautions over transfer of key material and the keys are being generated on air gapped networks, then it seems quite plausible that NSA/GCHQ didn't get in. Not saying they could NEVER have got in that way, but these guys are like anyone else, they take the path of least resistance.

Besides, it's sort of hard for them to do something about a hypothetical hack of their core systems that they can't detect and which isn't mentioned in the docs.

These days they 'titrate' the pain level with many small doses until the pain is managed, even in a war zone.

Back then they shot them up with a 'good strong hit' and made a mark on their forehead (so they wouldn't get another and OD).

As you say this is old history and is pretty well understood. They tracked the vets that went through this and found a lot of them having opiate problems. Much more than similar vets without the injury and treatment.

I understand that. But overdose != fatal overdose.