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Comment Re:what Snowden has done is like... (Score 1) 254

Ever since Putin shot down this plane over Ukraine we do not have any doubts anymore about anything US does: free trade agreement that is so good that it has to be kept secret from the people it concerns, spying everybody, supporting evil regimes )hey they are our bastards), extrajudicial killings, extended interrogation techniques etc. all this forgotten because of Putin. We even got humanitarian bombing in Iraq which if the place was not messed up by US few years back would be the first ethical thing in years that US military actually did.

Come to think of it Putin is the best thing that happened to US for quite some time. And the best thing is that the French and Germans cannot do new business with Ruskis. I still do not understand why this all is happening - is this a PR stunt by NSA or some other deepshits or what exactly that is done for?

Comment Re:Not this again. (Score 1) 637

Memory management is different in different programming environments and one has to do different things for different application types. Thus saying learn programming X is just silly especially as there is not many jobs that require assembler. I would say that using brain and having open mind with some basic skills would go a long way. But hey - go and teach people assembler for all the fame of finding code badly generated by gcc or 'knowing' how bare metal works. I learned quite early that coding is only quite small part of my job as a software engineer. I thought that recent times changed that but after overcoming the assault of many gurus I came to a conclusion that common sense, communication skills and some sense of humour bring me further than any magic bullet that gurus sell.

Comment Re:minutes to midnight (Score 2) 252

Yea I remember that too - I just came back from shop where I bought my lunch and I had to stand in the line too - terrible!

Other than that - there is more media than back then but there is no more freedom of press now than it used to be - there is no state censorship but corporate one instead. Modern media are abused more than they server democracy and human rights.

What else - ah torture and extrajudicial killings by 'Securitate' - I recall the guys in the freedom movements were seriously pissed off by that - guess what - we still have that - progress has been made as people do not die accidentally during water boarding anymore, I have to give you that.

Och and overwhelming surveillance - yea communists did not do it right, did they? Incompetent idiots!

I can sue the government this much is true and I did and I won. Still when I went to a lawyer to get back the house that communists took from my grandpa he (the lawyer) said - I want your money but your case has no chance as your grandpa was of wrong nationality - so this much about rule of law and all this other shit in EU. It is still more than we had before. Elections albeit not rigged now can be seen for what they are - exercise in futility as govs do what they want anyway.

The real progress and there is no 'but' this time is in pr0n - I can watch as much as I want to albeit it is admittedly of bad quality. Still where we had to run a bit embarrassed to get video now we can just watch it directly.

Comment Re:Vaccine is coming (Score 2) 409

This epidemic problem is mostly one of education and capabilities. People in affected regions of Africa do not trust doctors and hospitals (for a good reason I think) and have traditions that help the virus spread like touching dead friends and family members to say good bye or eating the animals that tend to have the virus - these are exactly the wrong things to do. Belief in healers and lack of trust in helpers from the West makes things double problematic. The good thing that the virus is less lethal is problematic too as now instead of being killing almost directly ill people wander around and spread the virus. Lack of sanitation and basic medical supplies but also basic stuff like washing hands, means that virus is spread further and further. This all is tragic because the virus is very fragile and its transmission is easy to deal with by washing hands already. One may think that unless US army does not want to make experiments with it, then the transportation of this poor person back home is actually a good thing for this person and does not change anything for the rest of us. The reason for this are as listed already. If a scenario like from Dustin Hoffman movie, as unlikely as it may be, were to happen that this one transport makes no difference - we would all die as nobody can stop pandemic with a bomb like in the movie etc. If instead people see that we take good care of those that took great risks to help others than there is bigger chance of containing the disease where it is now. In other words - this is actually a good way to decrease chance of having ill people traveling to US or Europe. Me thinks.

Comment Re:Applies oversea or applies to local access? (Score 1) 502

I think, US authorities by coming to MS to get data from servers in Ireland, demand data not from individuals who own them (alleged criminals), but from organisation that owns the servers on which it is stored. The very reason why the bloody serves are in Ireland is to avoid such warrantless (in context of EU law) search yet that is exactly what US authorities demand. It may even be that because the legal system in US is so broken as to execute random people in extremely cruel and lengthy manner or put people in prison for life w/o parole for smoking a joint 3 times and this in prisons that are known for their violence and inhumane treatment of some prisoners, for all these reason it may be that courts in EU would be reluctant to let any data go. I am not saying that this would be the case of course - NSA may have enough on judges and politicians to make it happen anyway but it would be a cumbersome process that would let the world think that US authorities respect legal systems of other countries. This of course is not going to happen as US authorities do not have all too much respect for own legal system, for justice and some such abstract concepts so why they should show respect for legal systems or perception of justice in other countries? We know that US lawmakers and authorities think they have jurisdiction over all of the word (FATCA is one good example) and where that is not the case a silent drone can do the job too.

Quite frankly I am really surprised that MS is fighting it. It seems to me that either they are afraid of the financial consequences of bending over or EU for all its incompetence, overreaching and bureaucracy has some uses after all. Or as far reaching speculation that may be, MS is not all evil. I guess I stick with first two arguments as they are good enough.

Submission + - French fight the death of OpenVMS (computerworld.com) 1

dcblogs writes: An OpenVMS user group in France has posted an "open letter" to Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman urging her to reconsider HP's decision to begin pulling support for the operating system. The letter, written by OpenVMS consultant Gerard Calliet on behalf of user group HP-Interex France, explains the important role OpenVMS plays in running transportation systems, health services and even nuclear power plants in France. "These software products are the result of decades of precise programming, inscribed in precise coding imperative for such functional necessities," Calliet wrote. "A majority of them use functions specific to OpenVMS and still run on OpenVMS, as these custom features are hard to find elsewhere." The user group accuses HP of being unclear about its direction and creating confusion. In 2013, HP said it would not be validating OpenVMS on its latest Itanium-based systems.

Comment Re:Oh, bore off (Score 1) 582

yes indeed Iraq used chemical weapons against Kurds and earlier against Iran. There is some evidence that Iraq used smallpox i.e. biological agents against Iran during the war too. Yet the search for WMD after the second Iraq-US war did not yield any evidence and that is what we are talking about. The way the whole operation was started is already a pattern in US approach to military interventions - try to misinform as much as possible, make impossible claims and then say that because requests were not satisfactory fulfilled sends the marines. Outright lies to UN security council however are rare. Besides WMD there were also these claims that Iraq helps Al Qaida for which eventually there was no evidence either - FF to today and we see ISIS that seems to be more radical that al qaida that US tried to remove from Iraq.

Comment and Saddam had WMD and supported Osama (Score 1) 582

If US did use fabricated 'evidence' and lied to UN few years back maybe this time I would believe. I think it was Klausewitz that used term 'fog of war' I think today media are as valid weapon as they were before but this time we all swim in digital informational garbage. I wonder only what is the reason: incompetence, not having a hot conflict at the moment, need to think about European customers of shell gas from Murica, compassion for democratic and human rights loving government in Kiev??? Who knows.

I do not trust the autocrat in Moscow. I do not trust his military and I have a good reason for that. Yet I find it odd that our support for Kiev is so strong and without any conditions. Last time this happened in Europe - the results was a civil war in Yugoslavia and besides all the piles of corpses in Bosnia an ethnic cleansing of Krajina - something that nobody seems to remember anymore.

Comment Re:GET THIS CRAP OFF OF SLASHDOT! (Score 1) 582

you must admit that this military conflict is somewhat different from previous ones in that many sides to the conflict resort to media campaigns using interwebs etc that is the scale that I personally have not seen before. If not for any other reason it is interesting to have it on /. and run statistics on he bitching from each side....

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