First four books of Ben Aaronvitch's 'Rivers of London'. I've just finished Banks' 'Consider Phlebas' and it didn't really grab me; the section with Fwi-Song nearly made me throw up and while the rest of it barrelled along at a decent clip, the end felt forced. I might pick up some of the others in the series if they appear in a sale.

On my e-reader ATM are...
Fiction:
The Randall Garrett Omnibus (a freebie), The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (freebie), Ghost Stories by M R James (freebie), a couple of H P Lovecraft compendiums (free; my paperbacks have long disappeared, possibly to Yuggoth), and Slaughterhouse Five. The Way of Wyrd has a permanent place on my virtual bookshelf by virtue of it representing a time and place that were pivotal in my life.

Non-fiction:
A Life in Brain Surgery / Henry Marsh, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers / Paul Kennedy, and The Happy Brain / Dean Burnett. Bruce Dickinson's 'What Does This Button Do?' is worth a read, though it could have done with some more careful editing; Bruce himself can be far more iconoclastic and scattershot than the book implies, so I'm hoping for a sequel that's more true to the man himself.

Much as I love all the Discworld books (and, of course, Good Omens; I am hoping the televised version of that due next year is worthy of the source), Small Gods is my favourite. I don't think Pratchett ever topped it, although Thud! came close and both Night Watch and Unseen Academicals remain close to my heart. If you're reading through the series in any order, do yourself a favour and leave Raising Steam until last or just skip it entirely; it's fairly clear that by that time, Pratchett had been overtaken by his "embuggerance" and the book has the appearance of being completed from crib notes. The latter period - from Thud! onward - mark a notably darker tone; Snuff is pretty unpleasant in places, and while most of Raising Steam is Discworld-by-numbers there are some hints of what it might have been had Pratchett not been overcome and it is *dark*.

He's the same tool that thinks the UK should a) bomb foreign hackers (because they wouldn't obfuscate their location, of course) and b) the UK would authorise the first use of nuclear weapons in a war (thereby running counter to every other government the UK has had with nuclear capability). This disingenuous sack of shit is spouting this tripe in a poor attempt to smear the Labour Party as being dangerous on national security. How many terrorist attacks did our existing Trident fleet stop? I believe that would be none. The likelihood of a war in which Trident activation would be "warranted" is pretty slim, mostly because it wouldn't be profitable. There's far more profit in pissant skirmishes against terrorist groups you fund yourself, after all; that way you can sell arms to both sides.

To ensure our safety - inasmuch as that's possible - try funnelling 10% of the initial cost of replacing Trident to the armed forces, then spend some of the remainder on the emergency services and education; that would be a great deal more effective in protecting national security than replacing 4 nuclear submarines that would only be of use once the UK is a radioactive wasteland. People checking passports/criminal records can't be used as a weapon against the opposition though, can they? Never mind that it's as much use as a weapon as a flaccid penis; he has to give it a go because the Conservatives tanked at the last election and are continuing to nosedive.

I am hoping against hope that enough people have finally woken up to the fact that the Conservatives couldn't care less about you if you aren't wealthy; any small crumbs thrown at you are solely to bribe you for your vote, a vote that will allow them to continue cutting taxes for their donors and their families.

It's not the first time an unwelcome trump has polluted the air.

If you are a UK resident, do not vote Conservative. There are soldiers on UK streets instead of police because we don't have enough police to do the job! The government that slashed police numbers, meaning they were and are effectively crippled? That would be the Conservatives and their Home Secretary at the time, Mrs Theresa May. There is blood on May's hands for this event yet the tabloid press will not report it. She was an incompetent Home Secretary and is an incompetent Prime Minister, but her tabloid lapdogs continue to point everywhere but to the person with whom the blame should rest.

Vote these Tory idiots out before Daesh turn the country into a smoking ruin.

The Stormont Agreement was signed 3 years before the September 11th attacks. The IRA had a crystal ball, did they?

...no steenking UPS!

I used to work as network admin for a small web-hosting company. The guy who owned that company also owned a cybercafe and I was expected to deal with all the problems there too. Anyway, I go in one morning and he proudly shows me this light-up sign that looks like he's found it in a skip. We had no UPS on the web servers, despite me repeatedly asking him to buy one, so I ask him not to plug this thing in until he's at least tested it with a multimeter; he knows how to do this, so I think it'll be safe to leave him in the building on his own when I left work later that day.

I go in the next morning and he's flapping around the place like a chicken with its head cut off because all the power is out. It transpires he'd plugged the damn thing in and turned it on just before I'd arrived, flipping the breaker and after I'd corrected that, the Sun box subsequently shit itself on reboot. A Red Hat box slowly went through its recovery boot while I babysat that other PoS; this was a long time pre-ZFS so it required some careful prodding to get it working again. I eventually get it all up and running after several hours, then made him promise not to plug it in again and to *buy a UPS* so *when* the power failed, I wouldn't have to do this again.

You can guess what happened the following morning: the blithering idiot had done it again, allegedly after "testing and repairing" it. We were a couple of floors up so I suggested he take a walk while I repaired it in case I kicked him through the window. I'm not a big bloke and seldom believe violence is the answer to any problem, so he goes for a walk in full knowledge that I am very angry indeed at having this entirely preventable problem occur twice in the space of two days.

A couple of days later I sign for delivery of two shiny new UPSs.

Then there was the time I was accused of stealing from a safe I'd refused to accept the code for. I walked out not long after that, unsurprisingly.

...would be to look through 40 years of landfill. You'll get the same conclusions and will have contact with less filth.

I admit to the same reaction. If one of these muppets pops up and starts squawking then I just close the page down and forget about it. Anyone who runs a message board and sees this kind of idiot start posting, please delete the entire thread, delete the account of the professionally offended and IP ban them. The only way to win is not to play. Close the windows, bolt the doors, and for the sake of your sanity do not engage with them.

My partner commented on the story to me earlier. Her question? "Do none of these people have jobs?"

Jesus Christ, Emmeline Pankhurst would have punched him in the mouth for even implying that this was an issue!

Another thank you for that link. I live in the UK but we have our own version of this bollocks hanging over our heads. For the record, I don't think Corbyn (leader of Labour, the other party of our own two-party "democracy") has much of a clue, though hiring a pretty decent team of economists helps, but Cameron, Osborne and company will pay a few cheap bribes to their loyal voters (OAPs, mainly. They also make noises about immigration to deter people from voting UKIP (aka The Pull-up-the-drawbridge Party)) to keep themselves in power and able to enact bigger bribes for their corporate mates (see Rupert Murdoch, aka Mr Fox News; he also owns a large chunk of the UK print and TV press and uses that to influence voters to vote Conservative, thereby completing the circle). I also work for the NHS, so I'm doubly screwed.

Trump is centre-left? Christ, no wonder the majority of US commenters on here seem to think that socialism=communism. Most other places in the world, Trump would be extreme right, next-door to the "kick all the foreigners out and burn their houses to the ground" type!

Another agreement here.

I work in the NHS and we have to change passwords on OS login and most applications every 28 days (passwords must be 8+ characters (IIRC), must contain at least one number amongst those and must also contain at least one upper case letter). This results in either a) people writing their passwords down and keeping them handy or b) using the same password every month and changing two digits to account for the month (I use option B as it should be marginally more secure, assuming our IT staff have a clue (they don't, for the most part; most of those IT staff are either relatives of someone else who works there and couldn't get a job elsewhere but can program a PVR (rank and file staff) or are ex-nurses who couldn't manage the hand-washing instructions (managers, and I *know* you'll think I'm joking here. I assure you that I am not))).

I've suggested quite a few times that being too secure is actually being less secure, namely that because if it's too complex to have an allowed password then people will just circumvent/trivialise it, but as I'm not working in IT these days (long story, and despite attempts by former colleagues to convince me to go back, it is not happening) then I'm just ignored. The entire hospital trust is rapidly circling the pan anyway, so I'm just doomg what I'm paid to do until it goes under and the rest can go to hell. Whether we get all our patient records cloned and sold in the meantime is no longer my concern; I've done my bit and no-one cares.

Auto-immune/genetic disorder? There are several which could cause this, e.g. Ehlers-Danlos, Marfan syndrome, etc. They can be of varying degrees of severity so if he does have one of them, he may be at the "lucky" end of the scale (skinny, can't really gain much weight, hypermobile joints).

Just an additional possibility.

...our hospital is being downsized: so we can pay for another gold toilet for Larry Ellison.

What was that joke about porn on the internet? Something like: If you got rid of all the porn on the internet, there'd be a single page left reading "Bring back the porn" ? The other concern is that ATM, we have a committee of arseholes (Jack Straw is amongst them, need I say more?) examining the Freedom of Information Act to see how best to gut it, so we won't be able to check what non-work network requests are going out from parliament (given the current stories about a very high-level paedophile group in parliament, some of that shit could be very dodgy indeed). Cameron (and another Tory genius, Theresa May) also think they can ban encryption without banning encryption. No, I don't know either, but look on the bright side: aliens may invade and take them all away somewhere for questioning. That scenario is more likely than a sensible, humane, well-researched and fully-costed proposal coming from this group of utter numpties.