Posts by John Smith 19

@Matt 75

Voted up for putting your name on your experience.

Re: meh

"A Google engineer is probably more trust worthy than any PR company and 99.9% of the entire civil service."

So about 0.01% as trustworthy as a normal human being?

Some days it's just too hard to pass them up.

@Martin Gregorie

"4) Rewrite RIPA to severely limit the people who can use it or, better yet, scrap it entirely as unfit for (any) purpose."

Actually RIPA is the only UK law that puts any limits on govt behavior.

But it needs a hell of a lot of work to put any serious limits on "national security" "needs."

@h4rm0ny

"ell New Labour led the way on demolishing privacy in the NHS. The "Spine", "Connecting for Health" and the rest was all their baby. So there's that whole area. Honestly, I thought I could smell hypocrisy when I opened the browser, and then I saw the headline."

That being one of their less Orwellian plans.

How quickly people forget the National Identity Register AKA the cradle-to-grave monitoring database.

Re: Prat-and-rot Voyeurism

"What your typical, sheeple, paranoiad-delusional bleating fails to grasp is that a voyeur's prime goal is the sexual gratification of the act, whilst the prime goal of the NSA and GCHQ is to preserve the rights that idiots like you have to self-delude yourself."

What a delightfully innocent little creature you are if you actually believed that. :)

"It's rather ironic that you are able to post your dribblings with almost certain safety from terrorist attack due to the same actions that you mindlessly attack."

I think that's a variation of the "We fought a war for the likes of you blah blah."

Are you terrified this group of SEL's could actually win an election? LMFAO at that idea.

Sounding a bit paranoid there Mattie, if you don't mind me saying so.

IRL The real reason most people in the UK live free of the fear of islamist terrorists is because there are actually so damm few of them to begin with. In 2007 MI5 said they were watching 2000 suspects. The 2010 UK population was 62.3million

That's 0.003% of the UK population who might possibly, maybe, perhaps actually do something, eventually. Ever heard the phrase "Freedom is the right to be uncomfortable?"

It's not just disproportionate to the size of the threat it's grossly disproportionate to actual threat.

More damage and probably more lives will be lost in the next 10 years of extreme weather in the UK than by any real terrorist incidents. In fact the total of UK terrorist deaths 2000-2012 was 59, less than the number of people who die in botched DIY annually Lee Rigby's death would bring that up to 60 in 14 years.

I don't expect those figures to change your mind. The only question left is why won't they change your mind?

Re: Underage nudie pics?

"So how many of those nude pics were of minors? Ah the perverted GCHQ, at least now we know where all those pedi's are getting their pics from!"

And remember kiddies the UK CP laws are possession. There are no "extenuating circumstances."

Anyone at GCHQ who has seen them is therefor liable for an entry in another govt database. The SOR.

Re: Cue Matt Bryant's forceful explanation on how this is all necessary...

"... and how we would've been blown to shreds by them terrorists long ago had it not been for the crucial intel tool that is Yahoo! Messenger! Intercept!"

You'll need to include some support for Israel and the superiority of HP Itanium servers as well.

It's been a while since we've heard from Mattie boy.

Do trolls go on holiday? Or has he crossed one line too many and got banned?

@Bartholemew

" Me personally I feel terrorized by governments who have given themselves this right."

You should. It's not paranoia.

Re: Why all the fear?

"The security services are there to protect the nation and thus you. You must really have an inflated ego if you think any spy gives two craps about you. All the data is aggregated and only those thought to be doing something wrong are flagged."

Irrelevant.

The storage and processing have grown so cheap that it's possible to snoop on everyone

So the do.

@JeffyPoooh

"So, essentially, exactly like an iPhone then."

Complete with rounded corners.

Cue the fruity firms legal rottweilers

Re: auto-parrallelise code?

"20 years ago, I worked for a company which made image processing boards based around Transputers. You could have as many chips as your wallet could stand, and the code would indeed auto-parrallelise, and scale nicely. If the principles were well-known then, why can't this still be done?"

Obvious question. Was it written in Occam?

A language designed for fine grained parallelism (IIRC each statement was conceptually a process, so it looked like a regular computer language but had some subtle features).

@photobod

"Well, perhaps not a lady in this case, but a spy telling everyone not to bother to take any defensive actions, because they'll just bypass them anyway, does sound just a bit like someone trying to control with misinformation."

Yes. It's a variation on an old psychop speech I used to give.

My punchline was whenever someone tells you this why are they telling you this?

@Will Godfrey

"There are very many SF stories going back decades based around the idea of America isolating itself from the rest of the world. They are all looking rather prophetic now."

"The Cold Peace" is the backdrop to Vol 1 of James Blish's "Cities in Flight" series.

A totalitarian theocracy in the US is a key feature of RA Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100," which given the SEL nature of some of these jokers is starting to look like a real piece of "future history."

Re: the old our nukes are bigger than your nukes argument

"- The Iraq WMD lie basically killed whatever goodwill was left in the remaining part of the world that didn't have a grudge against the US. Dubya's Administration foreign policy brought hatred to the US and the whole NSA/PRISM thing was just the finishing touch to all that."

You missed the estimated $13T (that's a 13 with 12 0x) that the US is estimated to have stolen from the Iraqi economy.

Starting with the cost plus sole supplier contract award by "Gin Rummy" Rumsfeld through a trusted stooge subordinate when he was SecDef.

Would I be p**sed off if I was an Iraqui growing up in post invasion liberation Irqaq?

F**k yeah.