Mastodawn

@paulb3017 @IndyRichard
Reform want guns in circulation, part of their racism plans. Also money from gun manufacturers

Many* years ago (approximately 27 in fact), when I was a Unix sysadmin at BHP-IT in Newcastle, we had one of our periodic "blame the network" events where suddenly all our systems went offline.

I, and another Unix sysadmin bolted to the network team's office to let them know there was a significant outage.

And so did admins from the NT team.

And so did admins from the VMS team.

And so did admins from the Tandem team.

And then, admins from the Mainframe team arrived.

***OH SHIT***

So we all piled downstairs to see the emergency lights on in the datacentre, and a very sheepish looking $telco engineer being escorted from the next-door operations centre from one of the senior operators.

And that was the moment it dawned on folks that having an unshielded "Emergency Stop" button right next to the "Open Door" button, both the same colour, was perhaps not the best of ideas. Particularly when neither were labelled.

It was also my first lesson that causes for major outages don't have to be highly esoteric or technical. The simple fact is that so many outages are caused by sheer mundanity. The mundanity of some bean counter refusing to pay for a small perspex cover. The mundanity of leaving a human – subject to human error – being left in the wrong place unattended. The mundanity of not putting labels on buttons.

Neil Martin Nov 12

Andrea Junker

Nov 11

If you still support Trump, I don’t judge you for your choice of political party.

I judge you for your lack of morals, ethics, compassion & humanity.

I judge you for your support of racism, misogyny, pedophilia, homophobia, treason & fascism.

So will others. So will history.

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Neil Martin Oct 27

@RejoinEU The BBC is not and probably never was a National broadcaster. It is a propaganda outlet for some rich folk, I guess one or more Think Tanks. Living in Scotland after the states it has these days more than a passing resemblance to Fox News.

What we see in Thames Water is not just the failure of one company - it's the fundamental unsuitability of private ownership to what must be public services.

There are particular cases, like Thames, of irresponsible management - and there looks to me to be a strong case to prosecute its past directors for wrongful trading - but there is also the bigger question of what it was expected would happen to a private enterprise that cannot remain both viable and within the law ?

The privatisation of water, energy, and any other national infrastructure on which people depend for their lives, and to which they have no reasonable alternative, was never going to work. It is unworkable not just in fact, but in principle. That is the nettle the UK government needs to grasp.

Neil Martin Sep 25