There speaks someone rather young and naive who didn't know the system used before the visa waiver program was introduced. the only issue I had with my US visa was that just before the US finally killed it off (several years after the visa waiver program was introduced) I was having to carry the cancelled passport before the last (which contained my visa) as well as my current passport. Note that the visa waiver program required me to state whether I had a visa or not, and if I had one to produce it.

The visa waiver programme is indeed quite new. It increased inconvenience enormously for those of us who previously had unlimited non-expiring multiple entry visas (the majority of British visitors to the US), and it certainly increased the queuing time on arrival in the US.

The visa waiver program on top of the appalling customer service provided by just about every US-based airline and the disgraceful standards of service at most American airnorts decided me to go there as infrequently as I could manage quite some time back.

Apart from the ill-mannered (and apparently very unintelligent) immigration staff and the utterly discourteous airport and airline personnel I quite liked the USA (well, the bits of it I went to, and this new ESTA thing probably won't make me go there any less.

But I find it sad to see that the US is suffering from the same sort of liberty-destroyng paranoia as does Britain these days, so that both countries are becoming more and more like one of the cold-war era eastern european states - with the sole difference that today's governments are far more successful at pulling the wool over their citizens' eyes.

The article is nothing but an English chauvinist rant - is the author trolling for reaction or is he really sufficiently stupid to think like that? Anyway, the title of this comment is quite a good description of the article's content, and of most of the earlier comments too.

It's a long time since I could get any Gaelic radio or TV, but back then Eorpa was the best current affairs programme on British TV in any language and according to friends who can get it it still is. That programme on its own would justify spending what is spent on Gaelic TV (about as much as a tasteless non-entity like Jonathan Ross gets paid for polluting the air); but of course it can be justified in many other ways.

I can't resist replying to this comment (from an AC, which suggests the author may be more sane than his comment suggests as not wanting to be known as the author of that comment is surely a sign of sanity):

"Gael's well tell you want a lovely language it is, and how you can't sware in Gaelic as it has no profanities. What they are not so keen on is the fact it is a fairly modern language, a cleaned up and transcribed version of the original Earse which had no written tradition. Earse meaning Irish."

Well, it would be nice if people would comment in English instead of whatever that is - but it's evidently some language fairly closely related to English as I can work out roughly what it means.

I can swear in Gàidhlig when I want to, so someone has been misleading that commenter.

Every language which has native speakers living today is a modern language - no-one speaks Early modern English, Middle English, AngloSaxon, proto-Germanic, or PIE any more. Perhaps the commenter would agree that English is just a cleaned up and transcribed version of Anglo-Saxon which had no written tradition (well, we have rather less written Old English than written Common Gaelic aka Old Irish)? I suspect the commenter would have more difficulty laying his hands on a copy of Beowulf than I would getting a copy of Compert Con Culainn

Of course no-one's ever heard of "Earse", he must means Erse (a word whose use would buy him a bunch of fives in most bars in Ireland, I think). Understanding that the relationship that Gaoluinn, Gaeilge, Gàidhlig, and Gaelk have with Common Gaqelic is much the same as the relationship that German, Dutch, Friesisch, Flemish, English and Scots have with Old Plat Deutsch is presumably beyond him. And he presumably isn't aware that it was the Gaels (not Augustine; and no greengrocer's apostrophe, please) who brought Christianity to barbarian England and who retained knowledge of classical and bilbical languages and classical literature when the rest of Europe was busy with its "dark ages", and brought that knowledge back to much of the rest of Europe.

I wonder if the anti-Scottish (and anti-Irish) and anti-Gaelic chauvinism shown so often by the English has a very simple reason: they hate us Gaels because we changed the English barbarians, free to rape and pillage to their hearts' content , into Christians who were expected to have a conscience so they couldn't have all that fun any more.

You say "We've got a possible range of nice to nasty of + 52 to – 95".

Well, no we haven't - the possible range is +80 to -123. That is, of course, a fail. A pretty dire fail. So it makes no difference to your argument. But it would have been nice to have the arithmetic right.

AC asked "May I ask what you dislike about prince2? Never used it, only heard of it recently."

Well, it's top heavy for most projects, it mandates too much paperwork (have a look at the templates at http://www.prince-officialsite.com/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lID=1284&sID=455) but not most of the paperwork that a proper software development project needs (that is OK if top management realises that it was not intended to tell you what domain-specific documentation you need, but top management types are often too thick to understand that), any project management method that requires 45 little processes grouped into 8 big processes and appears to have no dataflow from any other big process (not even the project startup process) into the planning process is obviously crazy, it tends to encourage senior management to think that they can know what products are required and what it will cost to develop them before any real design work or research has been done, it has "scalability" based on advice as to which bits of it are likely to be useful for your project but the advice is such that it often leads to what's known as PINO (Prince In Name Only) projects, and Prince 2 is the mechanism mandated by our government which has been used to manage every government IT catastrophe since 1996. But the best way to understand it is read the APM websites http://www.prince-officialsite.com/ and http://www.apmgroup.co.uk/PRINCE2/PRINCE2Home.asp and maybe the OMG prince website too, perhaps look at wikipedia first (note that I'm only suggesting that you look at websites written by Prince2 advocates) and then get trained on it - and I believe that after you have done that, if you are any good you will realise that this can't be the right way to manage a software development project.

"The first rule of project management is never ever take a project on that has already been started It will be running behind schedule and over budget and don't even dare review the requirements, that is if anyone can actually point you to the current version of them (if they even exist that is)"

There's no problem in taking on such a project provided you are prepared to fight to do the job right. Not a good idea to take on one of those as your first project management job, though (I'm really glad that when I got one of those it wasn't my first big project).

A few decades ago I was offered a project that had already been started (and just about completely screwed up) and had gone through several managers rather quickly with a brief to get it out of its hole. I took it on because the powers that were liked the previous projects I had managed for them and decided they wanted me in that slot enough to make it very much worth my while. It was hard work, and there was a fair bit of conflict with other managers who didn't like me telling them what they couldn't have, and didn't like me telling my developers that if they worked overtime or shifts they would get paid overtime or shifts (and to hell with the budget) - but it got there. So I know that recovering a broken project is not the impossible task you make it out to be.

The thing to avoid at all costs is taking on a project where the requirements are clearly unfeasible and also non-negotiable. No matter how much the MD flatters you, don't let him flatter you into accepting that one - don't fool yourself into believing it's feasible just because the big whte chief thinks it is. Trying to manage one like that is a real nightmare. Tony Hoare's comment that you should not offer to do something unless you understand how it can be done is very very true.

I'm surprised that this didn't come up on the list of requirements for good management: - and appalled.

The number 1 requirement for a software development manager is that he must be willing to keep it simple and ensure that the team does not bite off more than it can chew. That means having the will power to reject requirements that will result in bad quality or non-delivery. It also means that the manager must understand what the developers are doing and how they propose to fulfill the requirements - how else will (s)he know which requirements can not be met?

Maybe everyone who commented on the original article (and was quoted in this article) should read Tony Hoare's "The Emperor's Old Clothes" paper, as this fundamental concern of every good manager, which is not even mentioned in this register article, is very clearly explained there. It was his 1980 ACM Turing Award lecture.

Find it at http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/papers/coreos/Hoa81.pdf

If everyone follows that advice ("Always appoint or recruit a professional and experienced project manager") how does anyone ever become a professional and experienced project manager? We would run out of managers after a few decades of everyone doing that.

Sometimes it is right to go for someone inexperienced and have them learn on the job from an experienced colleague. A large proportion (actually 100%) of managers have no management experience of management before their first management job.

If you are looking at for someone with project management training, don't go for a Prince 2 expert unless he admits to hating Prince 2 and regarding it as dangerous nonsense. ITIL qualifications are actually useful, Prince qualifications are not (unless you are dealing with a customer who insists on Prince - that's where the man who is expert on it and understands what is wrong with it is really useful). And don't go for anyone who believes in any non-incremental development technique. And don't go for anyone who doesn't think that quality is a major concern right through from understanding and expressing requirements architecture to delivery, or claims that you can be certain of quality even if you do only minimal functional testing. And don't whatever you do go for someone who doesn't understand the importance of communication!

The AC who wrote "As a suggestion a good developer is worth 10 times more to you than a poor one, and 3 times more than an average one" is on roughly the right track but his numbers are wrong. A good developer is around 50 times as productive as an average one (he does in a week what the average guy takes a year on) and maybe -20 (the minus sign is NOT an error) times as good as a poor developer (he takes only a day to undo the damage done by the poor developer in a month - provided it's caught before it gets released, which unfortunately doesn't always happen).

There are surprisingly many good developers, but because most managers think (incorrectly, if they are in a sensible company - but in a sensible company they wouldn't be managers, would they) that their status is measured by the size of their team they recruit too many people and end up with more poor developers than good ones and far too many average developers, then encourage complexity and feature creep to justify the number of people - this results in unreliable and user-unfriendly software delivered late or not at all.

No criminal intent - that's nonsense. It's arrant nonsense. These police types know what criminal intent means. They know what section 8 of the Criminal Justice Act says, and it is disgraceful that they have chosen to disregard it completely.

BT and Phorm (or whatever they called themselves then) processed personal data (including sensitive personal data) without the knowledge or consent of the data subject. They intended to do that processing, they intended not to inform the data subject, and they intended not to obtain informed consent for the processing. That's criminal intent. They committed about 10000 offences with clear and obvious criminal intent.

BT and Phorm interecepted communications in the course of transmission by a public communications system without the consent of both parties to the communication. They intended to do that interception, and they intended not to obtain the consent of either party to the communication. That's criminal intent. They committed another many tens of thousand offences (one for each communication intercepted) with clear and obvious criminal intent.

Unless of course you want to believe that they didn't intend to do those things - that they did, for example (despite their clear admission that they did not) intend to obtain the consent of the people whose communications they intercepted and whose personal data they processed, or that they didn't actually that the data should be processed, or that they didn't intend to get hold of any communications while in transmission and make them available to someone for a purpose other than the purposes of a public communications system.

They even claim to have taken legal advice about what they were going to do - a pretty clear that they intended to do it. Apparently they got bad advice - but that doesn't remove the criminal intent, not for one moment.

They probably broke other parts of the data protection legislation (did they register this processing of personal data, as required by the act?) and (if they were using a cookie system to handle the classifications to select adverts) they were clearly (since they obviously knew how cookies worked) reckless as to whether sensitive personal data would be exposed to third parties (reckless as to the consequence of their action - that is enough to satisfy the requirement for mens rea if handing that sensitive personal information to the web sites involved is illegal) but let's just concentrate on the tens of thousands of big and nasty offences. and ignore the tens of thousands of minor ones.

Anyway, we now know what the data protection act means: It is an offence to process sensitive personal data without jumping through the appropriate hoops - unless of course the processor is one of the Establishment's friends in big business and the data subject is one of the common people.

And of course the RIP act means that it's an offence to intercept communications in certain circumstances, but those circumstances don't include any where the interceptor is one of the Establishment's friends in big business and at least one of the parties to the communication is one of the common people.

So all you guys who think that little Globe thing is the solution to all spelling correction problems think that the languages available include those required to correct sentences like "Cha chreid mi gu'm bi a chanuin so 'sa fon sin" or "Nish, ta Pobblyn Celtiagh kiarail sheeyney yn obbyr oc dys y çheer vooar Oarpagh"? Or you just think that people who use languages that the wonderful Apple hasn't inculded should have to put up with the auto-correction nonsense (and for our languages, it IS nonsense). Actually, the thing is probably hopless even in English: how many of "porpentine", "sleekit", "lauch" will it get right (just to pick three words that can be found in extremely well-known works). When I want to refer to a specific modern Q-Celtic language of dialect, instead of the generic "Gaelic" I am going to write "Gaidhlig" or "Gaeilge" or "Gaoluinn" or "Gaelk", and I'll bet the wrotten Apple phone screws up on those too.

The statement that there shouldn't be a way of turning autocorrect off is arrogant nonsense stemming from those narrow minded bigots who think that the languages they know about are the only ones in the world.

"V gwir y erbyn y byd - as Boudicca might have said."

If her tribe was the Iceni, not the Eponi, why would she have a "p" language instead of "c" one? Or did the Romans translate (not just transliterate) proper nouns?

The three phrases in the title are a pretty fair description of the authors of most of the comments above. Certainly pctechxp with his "you don't get put on remand for no reason so the same rules should apply" must be a bloody fool - maybe he's so bloody mindedly ignorant that he thinks the conviction rate of prisoners on remand is 100%? Has he been living in a different world - we know from well-publicised cases that we actually convict some completely innocent people of serious crimes, let alone remand them. I imagine most of the population of our prisons are less offensive to human decency than the Anonymous Coward who wrote "People in jail should only be allowed to phone their lawyers. No one else. Absolutely no one, ever. Children? Too bad. Dying mother? Too bad." - great, let's ensure that the whole family concludes that society is a bunch of vindictive shits so you can stuff your social contract- actually on the majority of comments here someone who reached that conclusion might well be right! It's quite clear that most of you are too damned thick to see that reducing the re-offending rate is more useful than gratifying a desire to behave as a vicious vengeance-oriented vigilante

If you lot are a representative sample of the human race, I'm ashamed to be a member of it.

Occitan in the South East would be a bit of a turn up for the books, I would expect to find it a long way West of there - West of the places where Provencal is still alive (or was last time I was there - a few decades ago) albeit not very alive.

It would be nice to have translations of EU documents into all those minority languages from France, and or course into Gaoluinn and Gaeilge and Gaidhlig and Gaelk and Welsh, also Cornish if there's even one person who speaks it well enough to translate this sort of stuff. Maybe I could get a job as a translator and give up this IT nonsense.

VM /370 the first commercial manifestation of virtualization? Sounds rather wrong to me, I seem to recall the both Burroughs and ICL had virtual machines well before VM/370 saw the light of day.