In Europe the news was exactly the other way around... with the US spying for Boeing on Airbus.

Not directly, but at least my expectation of a first world country would include excellent public transport. In the US public transport has been killed by privatisation and corporate lobbying.

Poor public services are an indication of a third world country however, the way things seems to be going in the US is that the only thing that's going to be 'first world' quality is the military.

Not only happening in the US though in Europe the neo-liberalist governments are killing affordable public transport, housing, healthcare and education as well. That does seem to happen due to influences from the US government; EU politicians trying to be more like the US.

At this point in time I couldn't care less about Sony or what they 'invent'. The only reason I actually bothered to check out the story at all, was to look at responses; it appears I am not the only person totally uninterested in Sony anymore.

Terrorist. Grab the dolphin lover.

Humans are the only sub-sapient species on this planet. The proof is all around us.

That's just not true. BP gave it good go just fairly recently.

Republicans vs Democrats

Who ever wins, we lose.

Why does everyone get this wrong?

It's supposed to be 'innocent UNLESS proven guilty'.

Although in this decade you're probably correct. Alphabet Soup agencies dig until they're able to prove you're guilty of something

Brothel owners need to be discreet to stay in business and have, depending on the brothel, probably quite a lot of high ranking officials visiting. So, yes, I do believe that would be quite reliable. Although I live in a part of the world where prostitution is not necessarily a crime, so that might colour my view. Then again if you live somewhere where it does equate to being a crime, that'll probably colour your view as well.

I thought Bing was just scraping Google results?

And that attack vector can completely be negated by having the BIOS read-only by default, while only enabling updates when the user toggles a physical switch when the BIOS needs an update.

For now, anyway.

And that's exactly the same thing for the people you're complaining about. They're doing their job to the full extent of what policy allows them to provide. If you don't like it, you either change policy or ask for exemption of the policy. The things you're complaining about needs to go through management, who should fix policy or give you an exemption, it then trickles down to the IT people actually implementing the changed policy/exemption, so you can do your job. It does look like you are complaining mostly and not addressing the issues that are keeping you from doing your work (i.e. get management involved to change policy).

So which part of that is the sysadmins fault (that is if it *is* indeed policy and not an excuse). In a lot of companies willfully disregarding policy is a fireable offence. You apparently think it's reasonable to place someone in such a position, because it's convenient for you to have IMAP. If this is indeed policy and you're not happy with it, you talk to the implementer of the policy to get the policy changed, you don't blame a co worker for actually adhering to policy.

Again. If you need this, you go to the person who can actually sign off on you having a wireless network for testing purposes. You don't set up your own and connect it to the company network, because it's convenient and if you do set up yourself, you should have a good talk with HR.

That's essentially rubbish, but again; this may be policy; if you don't agree with the policy discuss policy changes with the policy makers.

From my point of view, it looks like you're blaming people who follow policy for following policy. If policy is idiotic or if you need an exemption, you go through someone who can change policy or give you the exemption, probably not the persons you're complaining about.

That does sound like your IT department is not understaffed and evaluated on the 'number of tickets closed'. This approach probably does not fare that well in a company where the bean counters have taken over.

Again, I know this is quite selfish, but if I wrote code and I had the choice of writing code that's used by a smaller user group whose members have the same ethics and getting something back in return in the form of improvements OR writing code that's used by a huge group of users without ever getting anything (not even kudos) back *ever*, I'd go for option number one. Getting something back with BSD is not a requirement for companies, companies' only goal is to make money, ergo the time that a company actually does give something back is because it's cheaper to give something back than to keep it in-house.

Option number one is not to 'no one's benefit' it's to the benefit of members of a like minded group, with that group growing once the benefits become clearer to people outside that group, the alternative is benefit to corporations ONLY, without them ever being required to give anything back.

The actual divide in mindset deciding between GPL and BSD licencing, is priorities; BSD minded people probably believe that furthering technology is more important than freedom. I would rather not have cool technology if it meant that it's completely closed off and non-free.