chr15p

I was about to laugh at you for not realising that Netflix's House Of Cards is actually a remake of a BBC series from 1990, but on reflection that probably adds to your point.

Many British films of the 1950's and 60's (also being non-rigorous!) are morally very black and white, lots of war movies, but also things like the early James Bond films have an absolute faith that Britain was a world power, maybe alongside the US and USSR, but still important, whereas by the late 1980's that self confidence had pretty much gone and instead you get the shades of grey and cynicism of things like House Of Cards.

Of course Britain's loss of empire was much more definitive then any US decline, which is mostly a post-9/11 post-iraq war loss of confidence but there is an interesting parallel.

Most programmes are a commentary on the time they are made, not the time they are set so I agree deep reads can be very revealing.

If you've not seen "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" the film is well worth it, although if you can get hold of the BBC TV series of that and "Smiley's People" . To me Alec Guinness just is George Smiley, far more then he is Ben Kenobi.

Plus as a bonus the books were still excellent reading even after knowing what happens.

Its a possibility certainly but its also possible that the cause of death is not yet know, and wont be until an autopsy is carried.

Given other people are talking about other erratic behaviour over the last few days then an aggressive brain tumour or bleeding into the brain would also be possibilities. Best not to jump to conclusions too early (the same is also true for those suggesting police brutality as the cause)

Its paid for by the Crown (via its administrative arm, the UK government) so its the property of the Crown.

The truth is that 99.99% of the billion plus Muslims in the world go for the non-violent path, and 0.01% go for violence so you implication that Islam is a religion of violence so your interpretation of the "true nature" of Islam is kind of irrelevant, except that your (and Mikeb85's) implication that Islam==Violence makes about as much sense as saying christianity==violence because of the crusades 800 years ago. Its pretty much crossed the line from reality into prejudice.

> The elephant in the room that many refuse to address is that terrorism exists anywhere Islam does, there are insurgencies in nearly every country where Muslims are a sizeable minority.

I think there's a significant danger of seeing correlation and assuming causation, groups like FARC, the IRA, or the Tamil Tigers (inventors of the suicide bomber vest) are terrorist groups that existed in places that Islam didn't.

If we take the longer view many (most?) terrorist organizations have been based around nationalism often coupled with anti-colonialism, or on a marginalised group taking up arms against their (perceived) oppressors often coupled with some strain of communist ideology. Its only recently terrorism based on Islam has become a thing.

I agree that its not poverty which leads people to commit terrorism though. At least not just poverty. Its a complicated mixture of feeling marginalised from a society (which can be poverty or can be a bunch of other things), believing they have a grievance against it, plus an ideology that focuses that into violence.

Because they see their friends, family, neighbours etc live their entire lives in social and economic deprivation and want to help them maybe?

Red Hat has a history of buying closed source software and releasing it as Open Source (KVM, Gluster, Cloudforms etc) so I would expect Tower to be open sourced. Assuming Ansible have the rights to all the code of course and dont license it from someone else of course.

Its not a fork of Puppet, Satellite ships with its own copy of Puppet (3.6 iirc) which it integrates to provide the configuration management side of the product but its stock un-modified puppet.

In fact the puppet side of Satellite is built around Foreman (http://theforeman.org/) which is an open source project that isn;t Red Hat controlled so even if Red Hat wanted to move 100% to Ansible it would be very hard work for little gain. It would also be a really bad commercial idea Puppet is by far the market leader and most of their customers buy satellite precisely because it integrates with their existing puppet manifiests.

So I expect Puppet to stay as Red Hat's goto configuration management tool, and ansible to be used more for its ad-hoc remote execution capabilities where puppet is nowhere near as good. RH already uses ansible in the installer for Open Shift for example because it can set up multiple boxes without needing an agent pre-installed.

(I dont know much about Kissinger so putting him aside)

I think you misunderstand the purpose of the prize. Its not about "these are saintly people who have never hurt a fly" nor is it "here are organizations whose politics we agree with".

Its a real world reward for people and organizations that try to pull peace from the midst of violence. It shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of the people who get it have been heavily involved in violence simply because those are the people that have the power to change the path they and their followers are on.

Yasser Arafat shared it with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, tried to move the Israel/Palestine situation onto the road for peace, they may not have achieved it but for a while it appeared they might, and at least they showed that an agreement wasn't entirely impossible.

The EU was set up to prevent war in western Europe (cradle of two world wars in less then 30 years), form that point of view it was entirely successful, if only because we spent the next 50 years discussing the exact definition of a banana.

The UN has been the place every country in the world goes to to present its case against other countries, arms is now no longer the only resort in a dispute. Its also the place where peace is negotiated and that provides neutral 3rd party troops to enforce it. Sure its not prevented every war ever but its done a lot better job then anything else in the history of the world ever.

The weakest case is for Barack Obama but people all over the world looked at him and said "look, a non-white man is the most powerful man in the world, maybe there is hope for a fairer world after all!" and so as an example to people world wide who know nothing about US politics and care less, that a fairer more equal world might be acheivable he is still not a bad choice.

It also shouldn't be a surprise that sometimes the recipients fail, the world is a messy place, but its not about rewarding perfection its about rewarding the trying, and through the reward encouraging others to do the same.

Don't think of the prize as being for believing in peace, think of it as being a reward for having the guts to try and change the old ways of violence and it makes much more sense.

Of course sometimes they get it wrong, but at least the prize committee tries.

Depends on the single event that led to their victory but you could easily argue that the British Empire would have been better off if it had never gone to war with Germany in 1939. Its a war that basically bankrupted Britain, caused the collapse of the empire, pushed Britain from being the major superpower into second division status, led to the dominance of its major rival (America), and has generally blighted the last 60 years of British history.

Humanity is better off because Germany lost, but Britain? Not so much.

That's really awesome!

Although the nitpicker in me has to point out that the film is heavily edited to fit the dialogue (there's a shot at about 3'25" where you can see them bombing a paper cross pinned to the cliff which is taken from earlier in the film when 633 squadron are training in the Scottish highlands).

I remember reading somewhere that many of the dog fights in Star Wars were copied from the film The Battle Of Britain, but then that, 633 Squadron and many other classic British war movies were made by people who actually fought in the war. If you want a film to look realistic, and you weren't there yourself, copying from films made by those who were is probably the next best thing.

Quantity and time, some of these dumps have well over 10,000 tonnes (the largest point looks to have 200,000 tonnes). Loading them on ships and scuttling them out in the ocean is quick, the alternative is having them all sitting around in warehouses for years while they're slowly decommissioned, and hoping an accident or terrorist doesn't bathe half the country in mustard gas.

The ones around Britain and the North sea look close to shore but mostly seem to be tens of miles out at depths of 1600ft or more (the ones between Denmark and Norway are 2100ft+) so the chances of people kids swimming near them or even pulling them up in fishing nets are pretty much zero.

So if its 1946 and you have to dispose of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of chemical weapons sitting around taking them out further seems like a waste of time and resources.

It very much depends on who's performing and what they're performing. When I used to go we'd start queuing maybe an hour before the doors opened but we were normally fairly near the front. The one time we struggled to get in was something like famous enough to get played on Classic FM (Grieg?).

If you're not sure get there a couple of hours early, have a look at the queue and if its non-existant pop down to the Science Museum for a bit, or The Natural History Museum, or the V&A, they're all within 5 minutes walk of the Albert Hall, all free, and all worth the trip by themselves.

I'm not really a classical music fan but I would certainly recommend going to the Proms at least once just for the experience.

Serious question: in what ways would you want systemd commands to be composable? I'm struggling to think of a use case for being able to pipe a service name into systemctl (or "service" for that matter) and its output is reasonably grepable for running|failed etc (and more consistant the old SysV scripts)

I'm guessing you want more then that though right?

One of the major reasons for the cancellation of the space program was Britain was at the same time developing Concorde (with the French). There was only enough money for one of them and it was decided concorde was more likely to be commercially successful.

Other people think concorde is an masterpice of engineering but I'd have preferred the rockets.

On the other hand a lot of the research and technology went into the European Space Agency so it wasn't a total waste.

yes, if piping cat into grep into awk into grep again is a Jedi like trick its no wonder the Republic collapsed.

You could condense the first three stages: cat /var/log/nginx-access.log | grep "GET" | awk -F'"' '{print $6}'

down into: awk -F'"' '/GET/{print $6}' /var/log/nginx-access.log as well.

Or with the fourth stage (cut -d" " -f1): awk -F'"' '/GET/{split($6,a," ");print a[0]}' /var/log/nginx-access.log

Add the fifth stage (grep -E "^[[:alnum:]]) by doing:

awk -F'"' '/GET/{split($6,a," ");if(a[0]~/^[[:alnum:]]/){print a[0]}}' /var/log/nginx-access.log

And the 6th and 7th (sort | uniq -c):

awk -F'"' '/GET/{split($6,a," ");if(a[0]~/^[[:alnum:]]/){b[a[0]]++}}END{for(i in b){print b[i} " " i}}' /var/log/nginx-access.log | sort -rn

Which is still just about a one liner and a lot faster then the original. Actually you could make it shorter, even faster, and more awky by tinkering with the field-separator to get rid of the split() and if:

awk -F'[[:space:]]|"' '/GET/ && $17~/^[[:alnum:]]/{a[$17]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn

And then replace the last sort with awk's builtin asort() function but thats left as an exercise for the student ;)

But why learn the basics when you can be do Big Data and be buzz word compliant instead.

It struck me that the two women and a child at the Cenotaph at about 2'20" were quite possibly remembering husbands and fathers killed in the First World War (9 years earlier).

Yes a wonderful piece of film.

You're seeing the article as being about the US, but if you see the (modern) US as (1914) Britain, then its other countries warmongering that can draw you in (1914 Britain didn't care at all about a war in the Balkans, but once Belgium and France were invaded they (we) pretty much had to be involved (Britain guaranteed Belgian neutrality and German domination of the french channel ports would have been very dangerous to British security no matter how "natural" the alliance).

History never happens the same way twice, the article is more a warning that the wrong spark in the wrong place could lead to chain of events resulting in a war between US and China whatever their intentions, just as the assassination of an Austrian by a Serb in Bosnia led to Britain (and eventually the US) into a war with Germany 100 years ago.

I'm currently watching the commemorations from London live on BBC1, and the ambassadors from the various countries of the ex-British empire countries (including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, various Caribbean countries etc) are laying wreaths of poppies at the Cenotaph (the war memorial in the centre of london).

In order of precedence they lay their wreaths after the royals and the heads of the UK political parties, but before the heads of the UK armed forces.

I've seen Polish, Irish, and Dutch ex-soldiers today and probably other nations march in the past as well. Oh and the Gurkhas obviously (who are Nepalese, but part of the British Army).

So not only British soldiers get commemorated, maybe many people only remember the soldiers of their own country but that certainly doesn't lead to the conclusion that others aren't worth commemorating, only that people think of things that are close to home first.

>> terrorist organizations reflexively reject compromise proposals offering significant policy concessions by the target government1;

> This is just game theory. You have the game "Chicken"

I think it's often more subtle then that, there seems to be a psychosis in small, radical, groups where people get more respect in the group by being (or at least sounding) more radical which then feeds back on itself until any hint of compromise becomes heresy and can literally get you killed.

I suspect the most politically successful terrorist groups are the ones where the leadership manage to break out of the cycle and compromise some demands to achieve the rest without their followers killing them.

But yeah, the People's Front of Judea are the real enemy. Splitters! :)

Given he's speaking in general terms about terrorist groups and not specifically Al Qaeda I dont think I see your point.

Al Qaeda's activities in Afgahanistan dont tell us a lot about the motivations of the various incarnations of the IRA, or ETA, or FARC, or the RAF, or November 17, or the Red Brigades, or the Tamil Tigers etc etc etc. Unless your suggesting that Al Qaeda s the only terrorist group ever, in which case your just wrong.

And even if we limit ourselves to talking about one terrorist group, Al Qaeda have not been successful in achieving their stated political goals beyond the Russian retreat from Afghanistan, so the 7 puzzles about why they actually bother are still legitimate questions.

If I remember the story correctly Stallman saw the new features of the Symbolics software, re-coded them and handed them to Lisp Machines Inc.

So I guess your thesis is that by allowing LMI to maintain feature parity, that fragmented the market meaning neither company could survive? (We're ignoring the Xerox and Texas Instruments lisp machines obviously)

But this is ignoring the point that while this was happening the Mac and the PC were already in the market at a tenth of the price of any of the lisp machines and were selling by the bucket load. Essentially the PC revolution was already well underway before Stallman even started his hacking.

Lisp machines failed because they were selling high end limited use hardware running software that was good for a narrow range of highly specialised uses, but far too resource heavy to be economically viable for most users. The VAX for example was a far better machine for nearly every real world task except at running a single niche programming language.

If you really think single programmer stopped a $70,000 single user machine from derailing the PC revolution and kick-starting whole new world of computing heaven then you and I have a very different definition of "cheap" and without cheap computing we wouldn't be 50 years ahead, we'd be 40 years behind.

> He should really justify why he is doing this..

Why?

If he wants to work on mod_python and make it support python3 why shouldn't he?

> I don't want my python code running within the Apache process.

Good for you but no ones forcing you to use it for your code, so you do your thing and if hacking on mod_python makes him happy why shouldn't he?

Now if he was working on mod_cobol you'd have a point... :)

I think the article is pretty misleading given that the British carried out their first nuclear bomb test in 1952 and the French in 1960, it was pretty obvious already that other countries could build a bomb.

Reading the original report they assumed a reactor capable of producing plutonium was available so I'd say the real reasons for the experiment is to answer questions like, "if we sell countries reactors how big a step would it be for them to build a bomb". Given smart (but not Einstein smart) trained physicists with access to the publicly available literature, the answer they come to is 3 man years. Thats for an implosion device, a gun design would have been "finished much sooner".

Reading between the lines I guess there was also an element of trying to figure out how much of other countries nuclear programmes was based on espionage (the British were partners in the Manhattan Project, and the Soviets had had several spies there). They conclude that "its not surprising China has progressed so rapidly".

Finally its also worth noting that the reviewers were less confident in the design then the scientists were, they dont say it wouldn't work, just that it would need testing to work out the kinks (which the designers also say they just seem to expect less bugs :)

For thousands of years the best way for a working class man to support his family had been to learn a trade, and set up his own business and if you had skill and worked hard you'd live a comfortable life.

And then within a generation or so this was pretty much swept away and the average man went from being his own boss living by his own skill, to being an employee working long hours (12-14hrs a day), for low wages (operating the machines was unskilled work), in horrible conditions (no health and safety laws), with the constant threat of unemployment if the factory owner decided he wasn't making enough profit (leaving the very real threat of starvation for you and your family).

So progress was taking their jobs and making their lives worse, and while from the 21st century point of view we can see it as inevitable economic change, and the march of progress as predicted by economic theory (and hey on the grand scale you're right), they were more interested in feeding their children.

Or to put it another way "short-sighted" depends on your point of view...