Never, ever get on the wrong side of the argument with Bruce Schneier. At all. Ever. In any capacity.

Strictly speaking, no you do not. All you need are a routable IP block and access to the network. But that doesn't imply what most people consider an ISP. You could, for example, easily establish a dedicated line to an IXP and buy transit straight from a provider. Or just piggyback on someone else's connection.

I'm not suggesting that it's easy—or even remotely reasonable for grandad—but what I am suggesting is that there are other models open to exploitation besides the hierarchical, centralised model we've got today.

(And to all of Vint Cerf's grandchildren: My sincere apologies for stereotyping.)

Says the geek who's never heard of a content distribution network.

Tell that to William Sessions, who was asked to resign, and did not, requiring Bill Clinton to fire him. Those are two very distinct actions.

But the point is that the people calling for his resignation were not in the same group as the people who ultimately fired him. They didn't have the power to make him step down.

But he did break the rules, which is the fundamental point here. To claim that a letter to a Congressional Comittee was private and that it never entered Comey's mind that it might be leaked is utterly disingenuous. All he had to do was wait a week or so. His rationale was that there would be a political furore if it came out that he knew this information before the election. That's weak. He made assertions about the emails that were not borne out by the facts, and which took only a few more days to determine. I'm not saying he was lying; I'm saying that he spoke before he knew the facts.

For someone whom you defend as being good at making tough decisions, that's a bit of a rookie error. The most generous conclusion is that part of making tough decisions is living with their consequences, and that breaking precedent about non-interference with elections was an historically momentous decision. In hindsight, there was nothing in the actual emails that justified the decision. So he broke the rules, and he was wrong to do it. Whether he could have known in advance what the impact would be is moot. It's precisely because the results of such actions are unpredictable that Justice Department employees have a policy of simply not making statements about ongoing investigations—such as the Russia probe, for example—during an election campaign.

You can portray it as a partisan issue, but no other FBI director—not even Hoover, who was no wilting lily when it came to political shenanigans—ever actively intervened in a Presidential election. Ever.

There is strong empirical evidence that, had he not spoken up, the election could easily have gone the other way. The FBI are required to be non-partisan and apolitical. That is a fundamental precept of virtually all of the Justice Department's activities. Yes, Lynch made a mistake in allowing Bill Clinton onto the plane that day, but to revisit grammar school ethics for a moment: Two wrongs don't make a right.

I'm not butthurt, by the way. I don't even have a dog in this fight. I'm just deeply saddened that people are willing to play the same stupid fucking political games while your republic's democratic institutions circle the toilet. The point, you may recall, is not only whether Comey did right or wrong, but whether the President was right to fire him for what he did. And my point, as you might recall, is that the President was wrong to do so, even if, as the Justice Department memo claims, he handled the Clinton case in a way that undermined the integrity of the FBI as an apolitical and non-partisan organisation.

If the only way you can conceive of a differing opinion is in terms of butthurt partisanism... then I'm very sorry for you. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Yep, no argument from me. You're more or less making my point, which is that how long an investigation takes is no indication—one way or the other—of its outcome. I have no opinion on the likelihood of Donald Trump's personal involvement in corrupt collusion with a foreign power. I believe he's stupid enough to do it, but nobody has yet shown any plausible evidence that he actually did.

It can be perfectly consistent to say that someone should resign and then to object when someone fires them. If you can't imagine a scenario in which that makes sense, then we're not having a conversation; we're just talking at each other.

Look, just because someone is an asshole who doesn't play by the rules doesn't mean that the rules don't apply equally to them. That includes the protections they offer as well as the penalties they impose. James Comey broke the rules by circulating what turned out to be false news about a candidate during an election cycle. He shouldn't have done that. But the President was wrong to fire him, too, because Comey was actively investigating him for alleged corrupt ties to Russia.

So people in the media called foul in the first instance and called foul in the second. They're not defending the man; they're defending the notion that the FBI should be apolitical and independent. It would be inconsistent not to decry both abuses.

I'm so burned I might just have to gently place my coffee cup back in its holder and say, 'ow'.

Or not. Probably not.

Yes it has. Clinton fired the FBI Director for abusing the corporate jet to visit friends. That was the first and only time that I'm aware of, however.

The Watergate scandal took 26 months from the day the burglars were arrested to the President's resignation. Just because you watched it all in 140 minutes doesn't mean that's how it actually played out.

OH. EM. GEE. A contradiction!!!

My head! My poor poor head!! Someone said something to defend someone they don't like?!? I can't even

It's almost as if their morality isn't just for themselves and their friends! How could anyone defend someone they just called an asshole? What kind of a world would we be living in if there were some sort of... GAH!... objective morality that applies to everyone equally?!?

Oh the humanity! Next thing you know they'll be calling it justice!!

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Somewhere on the internet, someone is crowing over their world class wit, not realising even for an instant that they have just made exactly the opposite point from the one they intended.

The best part is, no matter how many times they read this reply, they're still not going to see the problem. But they'll spend the rest of the day vaguely anxious that maybe they really are the idiot that everyone knows them to be.

Flouted. The word you want is flouted. It means to defy unashamedly.

To flaunt something is to brandish it about. You could use it in a sentence like this:

Putin flaunted his cock to the world before holstering it triumphantly in Trump's gaping mouth.

Actually, I believe it began with Unity. That was when Canonical began pushing unripe features faster than they themselves could manage them, and the number of downstream bugs gave rise to what Shuttleworth calls the 'hate'. It wasn't hate. It was a bunch of us who just got tired of being rejected out of hand, and who couldn't get mission-critical bugs fixed through normal channels:

Canonical have stopped listening and – more importantly – working with the community. The number of defects is growing, but Canonical’s response is to make it harder for mere mortals to submit bugs. They seem to think that strong guidance is needed for their product to grow in new and interesting ways. Fair enough, but they’re confusing leadership with control. They’re simply imposing their views because they don’t value the discussion. They’re treating criticism as opposition and shutting themselves off from valid feedback.

Full disclosure: I was completely wrong in my estimation that this behaviour was going to kill the company quickly. I was not completely wrong that it rendered them irrelevant to a lot of us.

I would be totally cool with a working Netflix plugin for my linux-based Kodi installation. I have no problem handing Netflix a tenner every month just to get reliable access to the content they host.