You foolish and naive individual. You don't hire marketing undergraduates. They'll suck cock for the networking opportunities.

Now, does Herr Ballmer have lipstick somewhere incriminating, or a rash from a five-o-clock shadow?

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

That is an example of obsessive reuse of code, and repurposing it for something for which it was never intended.

You, despite the claim to an exalted position within Christianity, are a fucking idiot.

The police generally have my sympathies when required to work street protests. However, many of the arrogant bastards seem to think you do not have the right to protest. This is where you see use of agent-provocateurs within a protesting crowd to give the police the excuse to deploy whatever today's definition of "reasonable force" is. Yes, that just might end up being armour piercing bullets, because there will be a protester/police arms race, and when the protesters start using homemade body armour in response to rubber bullets it will go that way.

I personally don't have a huge amount of sympathy for a lot of the anti-globalisation or environmental causes - there has been little to no effort to think through the consequences were their demands met; we would have to give up most of the modern conveniences we are so used to. That, however, does not give those in authority the right to adopt some of the aggressive techniques for crowd control and dispersal we see discussed here recently.

The British National Party got a candidate elected to the European Parliament, where proportional representation is used.

The UK Parliament is first past the post, and the devolved assemblies and governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have, IIRC, some form of PR.

You have that rather backwards. In all too many cases, it is the media who control the politicians.

Yes. And the worst offender is Rupert Murdoch.

Look at the lengths this man will go to in order to have control of the media, he took American citizenship so he could buy a TV station in the country. Now, you have Fox News.

To Mr Murdoch it is about power. His control over media - on a near-global scale - makes politicians his playthings. If you are suspicious of government, then perhaps you should not be ignoring the man behind the curtain. Nobody fucking elected him.

Uh, no. You could have 25% of the entire voting population support you - you would still get zero representation. That's what first past the post means.

Several other European countries have a proportional representation system. In that you can still get seats/representation without actually outright winning a district or constituency.

They can prevent it - or at least make it orders of magnitude more difficult for would-be thieves.

It's a really simple security principle, something you know , and something you have .

The what you know bit is what we're all used to, the username and password.

The what you have is some physical device that generates an additional security key - or a digital signature for your transaction. What I got from ING was a DigiPass. You need to know a five digit PIN to use the device, at login you push the "I" button, are prompted for the PIN, and it generates a login key. To finalise a transaction, the website gives you a challenge code, you push the "S" button, enter the PIN and the challenge code, the DigiPass signs it, and you enter the generated signature.

I suppose there may be some way to mount a man-in-the-middle attack on this, but you'd also have to get a valid SSL cert or compromise the user's PC so badly that the browser stopped giving cert errors.

Er, no. The fucktards that connect water, power, or sewage systems to the public Internet need to be taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot in the back of the head.

And for those who don't get the reference, but repeatedly label everything as "Orwellian", Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which paper burns.

If you're not a bookish sort, I do recommend the movie. Yes, it's old, and the attempt at a futuristic look is a little dated, but the idea is well expressed. Just as the "Boot stamping on a face forever" meme of 1984 is one we must be vigilant against, so too is the idea that books can be dangerous and should be banned.

There are some dangerous books though, the first one that springs to mind for me is The Bible. It only becomes truly terrifying in the hands of the bigots who think it is the only book you need.

You know, that "Innocent until proven guilty" idea sounds pretty good.

On the other hand, I have already weighed the evidence and I declare the mainstream music industry guilty of crimes against humanity. I have the proof - I lived through the eighties.

You will have to enlighten me as to what the acronym "FYFY" means. I also do not appreciate my comments being willfully edited to imply that the United States is the only country in the world responsible for food aid. It isn't.

And, just for the record, the third world does not have a monopoly on stupid, ignorant nutcases .

Marx Brothers did some real comic genius.

"I've had a wonderful evening, but this wasn't it."
"I find television highly educational; whenever someone turns it on, I go and read a book."

Everyone would have been perfectly happy if they just came out and said, "yes, it will support streaming porn."

That's all we need to hear, right?