Civil servants have a lot of control not over policy but over outcomes.

That's a difference that matters only if the people at the top of the civil service have no opinions on what constitutes a desirable outcome. I would say that's effectively impossible.

Ciaran Martin, a former senior civil servant with past involvement in vetting work, who is a close friend of Robbins, told the BBC that the sacked official appeared to have been made a scapegoat.

He said vetting had been wrongly presented as a simple pass or fail, when it was instead a “risk assessment”, and that it was entirely standard for officials to decide whether the balance of risk was acceptable.

“There is no abuse of process, there is no failure of process. Not only is there no duty to disclose the details of a vetting case, there is a duty not to disclose them. The one thing you never do is tell ministers of any kind, because otherwise the vetting system would collapse,” he said.

I'm sorry...WHAT?!?!?! How can civil servants hold that level of judgement. I've long thought that the civil service has too much power over policy, resulting in the Home Office and Foreign Office having minimal change in policy no matter who is Home/Foreign secretary.

If this is really the case then hopefully this is a catalyst for a change in how the civil service operates and where decision making really lies.

Often what they want is just plain old automation of basic tasks, but they've been told by "Big Government Contractors Corporation" that AI will do that for them. Of course, BGCC has an AI division happy to help them.

No cyber security professional worth anything will stand there and say this is a good solution "for the children". They all know it's a bullshit solution to a problem of education. Therefore the only people that will bid for the work will be grifters.

Governments tend to just defer to "industry experts", which basically means 'big dumb idiot corporation that verifies their robustness via a human centipede of paid consultants

"Industry experts" that are trying to stay on the money train of government contracts, because they know that they're not going to be held accountable when the shit hits the fan.

Best thing we could do to kerb government spending would be removing contractors from previous failed projects from the bidding process.

Oh they did lie, but not about America. They lied about Iran.

Name of another similar tool, prefixed with the language it was rewritten in.

Even someone with no training would put the USB port in a better position.

It's started something on a terminal. It is assuming it's vim, but it's not operating like vim. I'm questioning it's assumption. If it had fired up nano, for example, sending vim key sequences isn't going to work. Seeing as it seems to be doing stuff with git too, it may not have started this editor explicitly. It will be using whatever git is configured to use.

He's saying AIPAC, the Israeli government and similar groups that hide behind the anti-Semitism defence are not acting in the interests of the Jewish people, and are therefore anti-Semites.

I think it might not be vim.

The Eagles called it Hotel California.