It did lose its way. It clobbered Scientology - but since then its wandered a hit and miss road in terms of what it understands or recognises as good or bad, targetable, or not.

And when Hitler, or these fanaticals go from saying something, to enacting something - what then did Voltair say?

The Western world bends over backwards to almost a rediculous, silly degree to allow for religious, Political and even silly expression. Nothing Voltair said is in question. And indeed, its not people saying something in discussion in a philosophical way that is in question.

The Choudary idiot can't stop running his mouth, and he is given amazing latitude.

Anonymous originally (if I recollect rightly) came to a more public place originally when they choose to stand and have a fight with the cult of Scientology. And in doing so a level of fame was garnished. Not to mention fighting a good fight.

Since then, Anonymous has waged a lot of Ops and has hit various targets - and in my HO has lost its way.

Freedom and Liberty - generally even if it gets lost along its path sometimes is a Western Foundation. Millions of people leave other parts of the west to try and escape the terrible events taking place not in the west. There is a constant war where people in the west question themselves, their activities, their history.

But this is a form of war, first between Islamics and Islamics, the intolerant, and the tolerant, and the largesst numbers of people suffering in this war is generall Muslims.

People take affront at Islam being selected as a problem. An issue. It is. The Islamic world has some of the worst government, and where there is better government it is persistantly under threat - not from democracy, but usually henchmen and AK47s and the threat of sharia gangsterism. There are terrible things that take place, from the Saudi Blogger who is being brutally whipped for the next weeks by a so called 'Theocratic' Government of Saudi Arabia. There is widescale FGM and terrible treatment of women, and children are killed, have acid thrown over them, and there is a war on education, liberty and freedom. Most educated, well adjusted islamics who benefit from living in the west and make case defence for Islam have their view. They have a voice in the discussion, but it is not a view that can be accepted.

50+ states have attempted to enact UN level movement to try to inflict laws that would apply world wide and eliminate and reduce the free speech, free expression, and the age of enlightenment - explicitly a larger Charlie Hebdo political effort aimed at everyone. And its backed daily in all corners of the world by brutal men - no, not men, scumbags and physcopaths, sociopaths and idiots - who carry out a brutal drawling of lines in the sand agaist anyone who doesn't comply. Its maintained by limited education, brutality against women and repression, poverty and misery against everyone else.

This is a war. Its a war against lunatic elements of humanity who have decided in a new facism - one where their totalitarian view is the only view. This was carried out when they decided not to kill cartoonists in Paris. That was just a message. They sent a bigger message which is if you say anything, men will come to your door and execute you.

The answer was every single media outlet and paper should have published the cartoons. But no matter. The fact many did not was cowardice - but cowardice has been the path of Mass media for years. So, Charlie Hedbo was left exposed being a refusnik in this cowardice and now people are dead.

If anonymous was to enact what they have said, it would be their finest hour. In worthy cause, and in line with its original ideal. Whatever fights the world faces, Western governments and companies are generally a lower scale issue than the threat of lunatic islam. It has reached a point where Islam is creating no go areas in the west. Areas where threats of violence and intimidation have become the rhetoric of their view of democracy.

It is not enough to say it. Now is the time where action has to take place. Why should any islamic organisation of any kind that hates free speech and liberty be allowed to have any. They have created the rule base of their own reality. Now let them live it.

Unleash the dogs of war.

Yeah, its so open each phone tends to have issues on boot loaders and on getting root. And yet, despite that, its more open to the malware writers than to its users.

tut tut tut.

I got redirected once. Was once too often. For some reason the current process seems to think that content comes last, and fancy headers, deasign and pages mean more. They don't. The beta page wasted a ton of space, showed me less content, was less clear and more invasive. I did not like it, did not enjoy it.

Why is it somehow we have ended up with people who are making things like Slashdot beta, Microsoft Metro, the new IOS, Gnome. A bunch of people who came out of the worst design schools ever? A bad decade at the schools? We just got unlucky?

I like slashdot, and have been around for a long time. But I'm not your damn plaything. Mess with the site, content and my usage - be warned, I can go away. So can others.

Except that you can't keep throwing away whole eco-systems like its 2001. And .net didn't mess with the start menu or UI like this effort has.
And if you_do choose to change the oil tanker, know that incorrect course navigation isn't an accident.

Metro since very early on was clearly a disaster. Put aside the programming behind it, which may or may not be accepted, the rock solid base is that its broken the desktop. Its broken the back catalogue, and its just a very very poor desktop replacement. Its not a good touch environment. What is it good at ? Its not even good at replacing 'start'. Its just a galloping great mess, and everyone knows it. Rehashing isn't working, and the 8.1 is just a fantasy land throw of the dice.

Its probably not related. But when the world largest PC shipper(Lenovo) go Public with a 'well, if you are not going to fix this start menu disaster - we will' public PR and operational answer, and the CEO of MS resigns, you could claim to see a link. When your largest partners start issuing deep 'fuck you' responses, you know your project is failed.

No one - no one who matters - likes Metro. And customers absolutly hate it. You only need spend a short time in the customer env to really feel this.

Microsoft being broken up would break the things they have that are working. So their cloud/application linkage in azure would be broken up.
The area where the disaster has taken place is in Windows. By making 8 - they've irrepairably damaged 7, and 8.1 doesn't fix it. The cloud area they worked on has been destructive of on premise IT, which is dumb. You don't need that damage.

If you really kill windows, you're in very deep trouble on the server and application sides, and it requires a full rework.

Although at present Azure works and their cloud works, its so dependant on end user windows machines that they are no in a very deep hole. And Ballmer going I think echo's this.

Its a shame, because frankly there is some damn good stuff in the stable, and its inter operations work at a level nothing else does. Break up doesn't help that at all in any way.

BB remains the only handset/technical network that I can put users on a world wide tariff and provide a secure service at a reasonable cost. Period.
Sadly, Blackberry seems to be run by idiots, who don't understand their own strength, or their own product.

And yes, I can put my users on Iphones and on Android and I can cry my eyes out as soon as they leave the borders of the country they live in.

Even *if* they remodelled the business in software, they could still leveage BB core work and sell a really workable product. Yes, not for everyone, and yes, aimed at corp, business and gov - but they seem lost in terms of what they are.

Lying to the customer base is bad too and Thorsten Heinz needs to be fired. The Playbook isn't getting 10? Liar.

CEO's that lie or get their baseline facts wrong are worthless. They are worthless to whom they work for and worse for their customer. He had his shot - he should resign.

All I've seen in general is that Acer make average and poor PC equipment, knocked out generally at below market prices as their model, and with at best average support.
To be fair I've over generalising somewhat - but what I laid out applies to too much of the Acer family.

Moving to Chrome and Android will be a simpler model. The problem is that its a full on race to the bottom. Your value as Acer is null. Its in the OS. And beyond that, unless you are on the winning edge hardware wise and winning at review level, you'll face the full on might of Samsung and Google and Apple, and they will out device you anyway.

Just box shifting the edge, and on cost is heading to a level where only the huge vendors left standing will be left, and where the Soc costs leaves only enough margin for those vendors anyway.

Unless you are that vendor, you will be where you are in PC land in only months.

The only place in tech for smaller outfits is one of excellence and boutique level stuff. Acer needs to become something other than yet another box shifter, or its dead.

They should seek out being an alienware or Origin level vendor where their is a price premium and an extra service - but the problem is this is Acer.

why >?

I pay a fortune for very average healthcare, and I support myself and my children, and I live in a challenging and difficult knowledge based society where people are down to 2.4 Children generally and cannot affort to even buy a house unless they find £300,000, and where both people generally have to work just to pay for it.

Its not quite as fucking Elysium as you fucking paint.

I've grown more and more fed up of this kind of posturing from people like Gates.

While its nice that he is working on vaccines and is on a crusade for healthcare, the world has far deeper problems. We have entire failed states where stupid people have children that they simply cannot look after. They cannot feed them. They cannot educate them. This behaviour has become one where its rewarded and not penalised. This isn;t viable. It cannot work. Its_not going_to_work - They cannot economise the places where they live - and yet birth rates and economic collapse is only underwritten and fueled by people like Gates. Entire cities are now based around being refugees, and living off food aid and have no sustainable living capability at all - and are only maintained by wholly bankrupt operandai.

The human population on this planet is exploding. There are 7 billion, 103 Million, 448,849 people and its sky rocketting upwards. The numbers of people and growth are going to dwarf Gates vaccine programs, and food aid, and the numbers of people dying will upward curve, and I don't wish harm directly on anyone - but the fucking source of problems has to be faced.

For every child Gates saves, his program better be ten fold bigger to treat the children that will come from it. Same for food aid.

The programs that people like Gates are running paint a picture of fighting poverty. That is true. They fight short term poverty. They *do not* fight long term poverty, deprivation, or lack of healthcare. They create the fuel on which the next wave will burn.

At some point, the inhuman reality will have to be faced. Unsustainable human growth and failed states, on land that cannot sustain the populations, will run out of even generous people's large donations. Even if the most humanitarian people keep swinging, at some point round 12 billion, and even with advances in food, the reality is huge death tolls.

This can only be stopped now, and it can only be stopped now by harsher policies that at least focus people to behave and change their ways. Humans have for millenia realised that population control can become a scenario that cannot be avoided, except in our own population. Somehow this has become skewed to the degree that we refuse to believe it, and will avoid it no matter what the cost or logic.

Scale.
When people use services at scale, it creates focal points for collection or abuse. People have bought into Google,Yahoo, Microsoft. Lazy, cheap people - who have little or no values, little pointless rubber people who accepted the something for nothing offer, and now find that 'their' data - is no longer 'their' data. Suddenly people jump about like these guardian fuckheads.

The beauty of the internet - is that any person can use it. Any person can actually do what they like. You don't have to accept an NSA or FBI world, and you don't have to transit your data in clear text. Do you have to put in work on this? Sure. Does it have to be paid for? Off course.

I grew up in a world where the west larely blocked access to encryption, and todays world is just an extension of the world I've lived in. Do I think that Tempora is aimed at me? No, Its aimed at the islamic fuckheads who should not be inside the borders anyway. But if it was only aimed at them, its like the stop and search - its racist not to do everyone. Thats how twisted things have become.

The irony is that guardian readers operate in a world where they have for extended time operated with leftist bias. They want immigration. They want bad things. Then they want the immigrant seraches to stop 'because its racist'. Now - having supported the introduction of 5th column terrorism and enemies inside the gates, the latest wheeze is crying about big evil american corps and 'govt'. Touch shit. There was a time many years ago where it wasn't required. Now - because of the world the guardian believes in - it is.

I have little time for it. People need to grow up. If your mail was an issue from a privacy standpoint, why did you ever put it on other people servers. The same for Facebook, etc etc. This isn't free, and never was, and always has elements of 'deal with the devil'.

The answer is a simple one. Become a geek. Run your own servers. Run your own data. Its never been easier, nor so low cost to do this. And you can choose your own encryptions or systems. You think the people who built apple, MS, google, yahoo did not rail against the system before becoming part of it?

That its nice to see this. But Carmack isn't what he was. Nor is quakecon really. Recent ID stuff has'nt shone and the input isn't as valuable as it once was. I kinda have the feeling that ID and Carmack have settled. New upstarts don't have that hunger sated and this is the issue really I have with Carmack - nice guy that he is..

Thats exactly what I would do. I'd take the most insecure, badly run, malware and virus vector based language and embed deeply in sensitive and financial systems.
Why not? What can possibly go wrong.

I wonder when Java will be able to be updated by an admin account via a standard user account on Windows. But then I wonder when Oracle will wake up and smell the coffee.

I'd agree. But Android isn't getting there. Its kind of worse. If our computing ethos is to simply change one moniker (Microsoft) for (Google) and revert to a single user OS (windows 95) >> Android - and to go back to pretty much the worst security landscape imaginable (Hi Android circa 2013) - I'm sat here trying to establish that I've not just seen us move totally side ways and not forward.

Whats next I ponder - a google 'trustworthy computing moment?'

Maybe people are happy that MS has taken the hit and that Linux is on top (or is establishing itself there) - but I'm sat here thinking that most malware is pushed from Linux servers, and that things must be different than just clapping Linux wins for the sake of Linux wins..

I'm not writing this as an MS fan either, just as someone who look at the current state of things as being pretty fucking dire as they stand..