They wear glasses without any lenses, for crying out loud. No sane person would do something that fucking dumb.

No sane person would care if someone did.

I'm trying to think of a better word than "hypocrisy.

"Psychosis". That seems to be pretty much perfect description for condemning someone based on actions you imagined them taking.

Airbus, not the most efficient of global corporations, can remain a profitable concern only by making rational commercial decisions. If that means negotiating with a non-European supplier then the good French senator Alain Gournac ought to find out why Ariane 5 (or 6) were deficient and figure out how to make them competitive.

Airbus, a corporation, can only remain profitable by making rational commercial decisions. And France, a nation, can only remain prosperous by making rational political decisions. And since Airbus and France are not the same entity, their interests can and in this case do conflict. In this situation, the good French senator Alain Gournac is doing exactly what he ought: using the resources at his disposal to affect the outcome so it becomes more favorable to his nation. Whether the methods are ethical can be debated, as well as what, exactly speaking, constitutes the short, medium and long-term interests of France. However, simply asserting that Airbus's profitability should be an important concern for either Mr. Gournac, us, or anyone but Airbus stakeholders rises the question:

Why in blazes should a French senator put the interests of Airbus over France?

But that would require the Monsieur Gournac to pull his thumb outta his ass and do some real work.

He did. The very title says he "attacked" Airbus. That you don't agree about his methods doesn't mean they're not "real" work.

I work for a very large storage array manufacturer. Warranty length is *not* the only difference...

Thank you for clearly stating your biases. However, your statement is too vague to be either verified or taken into account in a decision-making process in any meaningful way. Either of these would require knowing at least some of the specific differences.

If I ran a secret tor service site thing, I'd had 5 moderators and 1 administrator and they'd all be me just to mess with people's heads. That would prevent moles.

If I ran a secret tor site, I wouldn't publicly post my security practices, especially on a non-Tor site that doesn't even use SSL. That's the most important security...

Oh, crap.

quite why we're assisting Sweden in this farce I have no idea

The UK is not assisting Sweden. Both you and Sweden are assisting the US, which is trying to get revenge on Assange for exposing its dirty secrets.

"If you sexually harass our students you're done, you're gone, and we don't give a damn whether you are the star quarterback, the uber geek or the processor emeritus."

How do trashed computers harass students? Through improperly wiped picture folder?

Governments can crash their currencies but they have a pretty big incentive not to. Bitcoin, no matter how big it gets, could crash just because anonymous18283@hotmail.com decides he wants to cash out and buy New Zealand.

Wall Street had every incentive to keep status quo intact, yet they crashed worldwide economy anyway. As long as you'll have markets, you'll have people who "win" and get into position to cause havoc. It's the very carrot/stick combo that drives capitalism and gives it efficiency: if you work hard, you might get to wield the whip rather than yield to it.

Tests can be devised to gauge many types or aspects of intelligence. You can measure an individuals aptitude and/or ability, and then use it to predict in a very general way how that individual will perform on various tasks that benefit from such intelligence.

You can measure how well someone performs a task, and use that to predict how well they'll do similar tasks in the future. But what has that to do with intelligence? Why does having this particular skill indicate intelligence, rather than practice?

Make it robotic. Don't have people control their character directly, but instead submit an AI routine to make the decisions. Then simply impose a time limit on the AI, and make the command "wait" if it's exceeded.

It is like someone who rants about the evil of capitalism, then charges people a lot of money to go to his lectures to listen to him rant about the evil of capitalism.

Or complaining about the uselessness of the government on government-invented Internet.

There's no such thing as free.

So how much did you get paid for your comment?

I downloaded a load of 'cracks' from Piratebay and ran them in a VM for kicks, there were some right nasty little buggers.

Problem is, this is nowadays true for software in general, no matter what the source, with perhaps the sole exception of gog.com. Even AMD display drivers tried to install some bundled crapware recently.

There is no reasoned point, no subtantiation, no reference, not even an anecdote that attempts to convince as to why 'one must note' this.

Why? Well, how else can one excuse ignoring this warning? Play for time until climate change goes beyond the point of no return, and then say it's too late to do anything. Status quo is god to a lot of people outside of fiction, too.

Well, the only problem with this version of the story is that Bush himself explicitly denies it. He claims he was well aware of what was going on, so he should go to prison for it.

Neither Bush nor anyone else should go to prison only because they confessed to a crime. If evidence shows he knew, fine; but him simply saying he did proves nothing.