My line is a BT line, so Be are most likely betting that their Pro subscribers won't use more than ( 40 - X ) pounds worth of bandwidth on average per month, where X is Be's profit margin and costs. It also explains the much higher cost of the server compared to most providers - the possibility of landing Be with a huge charge is more likely (especially given the larger than normal upstream speed).
Living in the People's Republic of London I was unaware that Be was limited to major urban areas, though it makes sense. Why service less populated areas when the fixed cost of introducing ADSL to an exchange is so high? It's only because the Government wields the big stick of regulation that postal, utility and phone services are even available to some parts of the UK. To expect an unregulated industry to expand in to the country when there's still room for growth in the high density population centres is somewhat unrealistic.
Be's Pro service (24/2.5) is allegedly uncapped. However I've only been using it for a short while and even Bulldog were pretty good for the first year. It's more expensive than most ADSL2 plans, 40 GBP per month, but hopefully it's a case of getting what you pay for.
You don't need to start your own business to live a comfortable life; simply paying sufficient attention at school to become literate and numerate, combined with enough application to find and hold down a job (not difficult in the UK where even semi-skilled labour is in short supply) is enough to stop someone spending their entire life rotting in a council house with nothing to look forward to other than next weeks dole payment.
I'm not talking about people being upwardly mobile, there's nothing wrong with being working class. I'm talking about the people for whom working class would be a huge step forward as it would actually involve work of some sort. Given your baseball references I'm assuming you're an American and I have no idea how comprehensive welfare support is there. But in the UK we have families that haven't worked in generations: they breed early and often, with no means of support other than (fairly generous given the circumstances) Government hand-outs. There are some council estates with thousands of households who have never held a job and whose children are growing up without knowing a single employed person.
Now the UK is fairly wealthy and can (just about) afford to support these people with free housing, health care, education (which is largely ignored, ridiculed or actively discouraged) and money. However even a relatively low skilled, low paid job will provide vastly superior standard of living and vast sums of money are spent trying to help/encourage people to help themselves. There's thirteen years of free schooling (with low interest, minimum income repayment loans for an additional four years of university), adult education courses, free apprenticeships (which for trades like plumbing can result in incomes well above the national average) and other vocational training. Yet despite this there are literally millions of people in Britain who refuse to lift a finger to help themselves; content to subsist on state handouts and (in some cases) petty crime.
The size of Britain's underclass isn't due to racism (as most of the UK's non-working poor are white) and it's most certainly not due to a lack of help; it's because many of those at the bottom simply can't be arsed to improve their lot. Preferring to blame anyone (the Government, immigrants, "big business", more immigrants) but themselves. This isn't "moral judgment", it's a tragic and well documented face. One that political party in the UK is willing to face up to.
I don't think the article was suggesting that poor people are inherently lazy (or stupid). Rather, the pre-industrial revolution middle-upper classes had (in general) cultural values that were conducive to capitalism eg. the propensity to save, thrift, non-violence etc.
The difficulty comes with determining whether traits that are being passed from parent to child are genotypical or phenotypical. It's clear that much of the "poverty" that exists in developed countries is caused by the underclass possessing values that are not conducive to financial success. Primary amongst this is the prioritisation of immediate satisfaction over, potentially far greater, future satisfaction. Most financially successful people (excepting the small minority who inherited their wealth) are willing to make short term sacrifices (not going out this weekend and studying instead, not buying the most expensive car they can get credit for and investing the money) in order to achieve longer term success (a degree with which they can earn more money, a good return on their original investment). By comparison the poorest members of society compound their problems by squandering what money they have and rejecting the opportunities available to improve their lot in favour of activities that provide immediate pleasure.
The question is: are these traits inherited via their genes or via parental/social environment in which they grow up. I favour the second explanation - poor parenting and social pressures (from Government and peers) encourage people to fail. The huge social bias against education that exists in poor parts of the UK is evidence of this. You'd think poor families would latch on to free education as a ticket out of poverty (if not in to riches, at least to a secure and comfortable standard of living), instead they actively shun and undermine the education system in favour of pipe dreams that require minimal hard work.
This is not a problem that can be solved though. Not without a massive rethink of our social support networks and a willingness to "blame the victim" in situations when the "victim" is largely to blame.
Ukraine returned all of its nuclear weapons to Russia over a decade ago and has never had a domestic nuclear weapons programme. Brazil cancelled its nuclear weapons development in 1990 having never constructed (much less tested) a warhead. Additionally the South Koreans have a very advanced rocketry programme that should be launching later this year but never come any closer than a statement of intent (rescinded in the 70's) towards development of a nuclear warhead.
The development of orbit capable rockets is much easier than the development of effective nuclear weapons. There's no international restrictions of the spread of rocket technology and as such you can buy an old Russian design, whack your national flag on the side and start launching (i.e. the Chinese approach). Other nations get a lot more annoyed when nuclear weapons technology is transferred around (though apparently it's fine when the US and UK share a programme, or the UK helps the French) and the raw materials required are more difficult to acquire/refine. Yes, there's a link between the acquisition/development of both capabilities; the big five derive require both to field globally deliverable nuclear weapons. However there are many reasons why a nation may develop satellite delivery systems without first having developed nukes (e.g. to make money on commercial launches) and vice-versa (e.g. the only countries they'd want to nuke are next door to them).
Don't you ever find it odd that the only nations that are space-based are also nuclear-missile equipped?
The Japanese, Brazilians and Ukrainians have started fielding nuclear tipped ICBMs?! They kept that quiet; which is strange as it would totally negate the point of possessing a nuclear deterrent.
If you're a skilled worker it's fairly easy. You simply get a job with a multinational that's based in a foreign office: they'll handle your visa, help you find accommodation and pay for your move. There's serious shortage of skilled software developers in most developed countries (and the UK); which means anyone with a good computer science grounding, experience in a couple of major languages (C++, Java, C#) and good problem solving skills is in very high demand at the moment.
As an American your best bet would be Japan or somewhere in the EU. European and American banks are always looking for staff for their Japanese branches as the locals prefer to work for domestic banks. The EU is quite handy as most countries have fairly short residency periods before you can apply for citizenship, it's also home to large number of American corporations.
Obviously you do have to posses actual skills. Too many people in the industry seem to think that a total lack of interpersonal skills and the ability to hack Ruby on Rails makes them a useful asset. The best employers want people who combine computer science and programming ability, as well as rudimentary social skills.
Churchill's job was to win the war and ensure that the British interests were treated favourably in the aftermath; while Operation Chastise didn't do much for the former it was a helpful boost of towards achieving the latter. There's also the propaganda value of such a media friendly attack, important after three years of war without any major offensive victories outside of North Africa. Far more people and capital have been sacrificed for far less reward.
I'm English and I want the ban on guns reversed; for the same reason that I want all drugs legalised, the ban on smoking in enclosed private premises revoked, the ban on fox hunting removed, the end of any and all Government censorship of media, all progress towards ID cards to be stopped, the ban on protesting around Whitehall revoked and national education planning to be transferred to an independent body. I happen to care about civil liberties, and not just the ones that I exercise or would like to exercise. Once upon a time Britain was the home of liberal thought (by which I mean the original meaning of liberal, not the modern bastardisation) - it sickens me that my home has thrown away hundreds of years of progress in search of temporary comfort and the illusion of safety.
Too many "liberals" are quick to call for bans on anything they disagree with. They don't have to like it, they certainly don't have to do it, and they're free to condemn it; but the moment they start clamoring for their moral code to be enforced by law they lose the right to call themselves liberals. After all, there are much more accurate terms for hypocritical authoritarians.
Rubbish - I fly a Cessna 152 and it's far safer than driving. Primarily because pilots are trained to a high standard and car drivers are not. A trimmed aircraft, even an ageing heap like a 152, will fly quite safely with very limited pilot input (basic rudder control); you'd have to be the worst pilot in the world to stall while in level flight. Obviously there are times when a high degree of concentration is required, from short final to landing for example. However you should not be using the radio during these manoeuvres and, even in an emergency, the order of priority is always Aviate, Navigate, Communicate.
The danger inherent in driving comes from other road users. Any fool can drive do a ton down an empty motorway while talking on the phone. Far fewer people can talk on the phone while driving down a busy street and still maintain awareness of every potential hazard. There's also the minor issue that pilots make short, standardised calls which are related to the matter in hand; while drivers engage in rambling conversations concerning everything but collision avoidance.
VHF radios are used to make flying more safe and in an environment which involves controlled interaction with other aircraft. Cellphones provide no safety aspect for someone driving a car, most drivers aren't trained to drive while using a phone and interactions with other road users are chaotic. You cannot use aviation as a defence for driving whilst on the phone.
Floppy disks? Pah. My computer used the obligatory audio cassettes and the frankly awesome Microdrive. Not only did it store an amazing 80K (a 100K on the QL) but they were so loud you could tell when a program had finished loading from the other side of the house. They're pretty robust to, I've got a QL and a load of working cartridges,despite them being over 20 years old.
It's a tax. The level is set by the Secretary of State for Culture, the money collected is paid in to a Government fund and non-payment is a criminal offence. It's no more a licence than my council tax is a licence to live the in the borough of Wandsworth.
Since the advent of local-loop unbundling there are a myriad of operators who provide free UK calls. Most of the larger broadband providers do so, including the big pay TV providers: Sky and Virgin media.
Really? I couldn't find any on their website and have never heard of IA-32/64 architecture being pushed that far. According to their products site only their POWER based machines are 64-way, their Intel/AMD units are four socket (16 cores at most).
Unlikely. The Cell is PPC, not Sparc. And Sun already has their own highly parallel designs - Niagara (eights cores) and Rock (four cores with four processing engines each).
The Cell is being looked at by large banks and they are sufficiently interested to set up specialist teams to see how the architecture can be best used. The Niagara is a toy with laughable floating point performance; the example unit we got sent ended up as a foot-rest. Rock is much more useful (each of the four cores having a dedicated FPU) but the IC design has only just been finalised and the first servers won't be shipping for another year. There's also the problem that it's an extension of the UltraSparc architecture rather than "cool" and new like the Cell. Sadly this is often the deciding factor with IT managers at the very large banks.
The Cell's designed, with one PPE and a number of SPEs is very suited to a number of pricing calculations. Many instruments are priced in an iterative manner or by use of monte-carlo. The lack of DMA for the SPEs is not really a problem in these cases as the inputs for each iteration/simulation don't change that much and (in most cases) could be wedged in to the 256K available to each element. You're assertion that Cell is best deployed only for a limited task set is correct, but banking contains such tasks and the Cell appears to be well suited to the role.
Funny, because I see it as a rush to centre. Both the major parties are in favour of maintaining the current high tax, higher spend policy of Brown (left wing); while simultaneously selling anything that isn't nailed down (right wing). Both parties have policies (if not members) that are broadly pro-American (right wing) and pro-EU centralisation (left wing). Neither party wants to spend much money on the military (left wing) or be overly welcoming to immigrants (right wing). Both parties believe that problems with crime, the NHS, infrastructure and education can be solved with media friendly sound-bites and nothing as scary as major shifts in policy. The only difference is that Labour hates liberty in general while the Tories restrict their hate for people who are poor, black, gay or a drug user.
Which in a two party system, leaves voters with a choice between reactionary puritanical racists and authoritarian power-obsessed fascists.
I spose there's still people working with Sun/Solaris
Yes, such as the entire banking industry and almost all it's associated software vendors. Admittedly there's been a move towards Solaris/x86 but there's still a huge market for UltraSparc machines; not all jobs can efficiently distributed across multiple machines and Intel architecture can't provide more than 16 cores. The Cell processor is attracting a lot of attention as a potential replacement for Sparc and requires specialist development machines. You can't really test your new Cell optimised uber-parallel pricing model on a four core Intel.
For most open source software you're completely correct - it'll never run on anything more exotic than a Core Duo. But if you're developing something other than desktop applications (e.g. programming languages, libraries, frameworks, etc) and you want your software to be used by the widest possible audience; you need to test it on as many architectures and operating systems as possible.
The EU is incredibly corruptible and already incredibly corrupt as the only people who really matter are the EU commissioners. They occupy the same position as medieval lords: appointed by their respective heads of government, unaccountable to the common man and essentially untouchable*. Bribe a couple of influential commissioners (ideally French or German as they are the only ones that true matter) and you're good to go. If the voting masses cause any problems, like not voting for your proposal, you simply keep asking them the same question but in an increasingly loaded manner.
Within a few years we'll have a referendum along the lines of:
Would you like:
EU members to allow the patenting of algorithms used in software products. OR
EU members to allow the use of EU citizens in invasive medical testing without consent.
* Even when they resign due to massive incompetence they're usually reappointed with a couple of years.
...Show me a "hacker" who never did anything "blackhat"... Alexander Graham Bell. The same Alexander Graham Bell who won his most famous patent by bribing a patent office employee? Clearly the very paragon of virtue!
Carter's mistakes - maybe funding the Afghanistan resistance, which gave us Bin Ladin.
It was the stationing of American troops in Saudi (i.e. the holy land) and American support for Israel that pissed off Bin Laden, not the existence of America in general or anything Carter did. Anyway the weapons and money provided to the Taliban during the Soviet occupation was long gone by the time the USS Cole and Kenyan Embassy bombings occurred. The Taliban fought the Soviets with Stinger missiles and LAWs - the attacks against American targets involved rubber dinghies, home made explosives and box cutters. Had Bin Laden been killed by the Russians in the eighties the attacks against the US would still have occurred, there'd just be a different bogeyman as the focus of blame.
I always thought Anarchism was grouping of political theories that advocated the no-coercion principle. Basically any system that uses force or the threat of force for any purpose other than self-defence is not Anarchism. As such you could have an Anarchist Government, but you have to allow anyone and everyone who wishes to secede from the Government's oversight. Obviously this can become more complicated depending on how you view property; is it an extension of the person (and so something one can own and use to force to defend) or not? However that's an argument for another, more on topic, thread.
The film was never supposed to be true to the book. Verhoven was working on a bug blasting movie that satirised gung-ho militarism when someone pointed out the similarity between his plot and that of Starship Troopers. Verhoven read the first half of the book, hated it, then simply pasted the people and places from the novel in to his script. Given that the book is an essay on politics and social sciences, occasionally interspersed with hard science fiction; I found the movie's satirical take quite fitting. Not that I'm knocking the book, a must read for fans of hard sci-fi - along with The Forever War.
"Work" is the eight hours out of the day when you do things you'd rather not be doing so you can pay for things like food and rent.
No, work is a process by which a person produces products and or services. In developed countries this is usually done for an employer in return for monetary compensation. In most vaguely liberal countries this employer/employee relationship is the result of a voluntary contract which can be terminated by either party.
No-one is forcing you to do a job you hate. It is perfectly possible to have a job that you enjoy, even if you're not self-employed. I won't work for a company that restricts outgoing internet access and I've had no problem finding well paid programming jobs. Children should be taught to find a job they enjoy and not follow in the footsteps of the boomers; spending 50 hours a week doing something they hate.
For British voters there's the UK Independence Party. They are non-existant in domestic politics but well represented in the European Parliment. They have long been opposed to Software Patents and are an alternative to the Greens for the anti-patent vote.
Bank owned ATMs in the UK provide free balance/withdrawal services to customers from other banks, and the banks still have human tellers in their branches. Note that no law was passed to force this - it was in response to widespread public outcry over charges. Obviously the stand-alone ATMs (the kind you get in corner shops and pubs) still charge fees to everyone - but then they are provided as a money making scheme, rather than a service to bank customers.
Slashdot Mirror
My line is a BT line, so Be are most likely betting that their Pro subscribers won't use more than ( 40 - X ) pounds worth of bandwidth on average per month, where X is Be's profit margin and costs. It also explains the much higher cost of the server compared to most providers - the possibility of landing Be with a huge charge is more likely (especially given the larger than normal upstream speed).
Living in the People's Republic of London I was unaware that Be was limited to major urban areas, though it makes sense. Why service less populated areas when the fixed cost of introducing ADSL to an exchange is so high? It's only because the Government wields the big stick of regulation that postal, utility and phone services are even available to some parts of the UK. To expect an unregulated industry to expand in to the country when there's still room for growth in the high density population centres is somewhat unrealistic.
Be's Pro service (24/2.5) is allegedly uncapped. However I've only been using it for a short while and even Bulldog were pretty good for the first year. It's more expensive than most ADSL2 plans, 40 GBP per month, but hopefully it's a case of getting what you pay for.
You don't need to start your own business to live a comfortable life; simply paying sufficient attention at school to become literate and numerate, combined with enough application to find and hold down a job (not difficult in the UK where even semi-skilled labour is in short supply) is enough to stop someone spending their entire life rotting in a council house with nothing to look forward to other than next weeks dole payment.
I'm not talking about people being upwardly mobile, there's nothing wrong with being working class. I'm talking about the people for whom working class would be a huge step forward as it would actually involve work of some sort. Given your baseball references I'm assuming you're an American and I have no idea how comprehensive welfare support is there. But in the UK we have families that haven't worked in generations: they breed early and often, with no means of support other than (fairly generous given the circumstances) Government hand-outs. There are some council estates with thousands of households who have never held a job and whose children are growing up without knowing a single employed person.
Now the UK is fairly wealthy and can (just about) afford to support these people with free housing, health care, education (which is largely ignored, ridiculed or actively discouraged) and money. However even a relatively low skilled, low paid job will provide vastly superior standard of living and vast sums of money are spent trying to help/encourage people to help themselves. There's thirteen years of free schooling (with low interest, minimum income repayment loans for an additional four years of university), adult education courses, free apprenticeships (which for trades like plumbing can result in incomes well above the national average) and other vocational training. Yet despite this there are literally millions of people in Britain who refuse to lift a finger to help themselves; content to subsist on state handouts and (in some cases) petty crime.
The size of Britain's underclass isn't due to racism (as most of the UK's non-working poor are white) and it's most certainly not due to a lack of help; it's because many of those at the bottom simply can't be arsed to improve their lot. Preferring to blame anyone (the Government, immigrants, "big business", more immigrants) but themselves. This isn't "moral judgment", it's a tragic and well documented face. One that political party in the UK is willing to face up to.
The difficulty comes with determining whether traits that are being passed from parent to child are genotypical or phenotypical. It's clear that much of the "poverty" that exists in developed countries is caused by the underclass possessing values that are not conducive to financial success. Primary amongst this is the prioritisation of immediate satisfaction over, potentially far greater, future satisfaction. Most financially successful people (excepting the small minority who inherited their wealth) are willing to make short term sacrifices (not going out this weekend and studying instead, not buying the most expensive car they can get credit for and investing the money) in order to achieve longer term success (a degree with which they can earn more money, a good return on their original investment). By comparison the poorest members of society compound their problems by squandering what money they have and rejecting the opportunities available to improve their lot in favour of activities that provide immediate pleasure.
The question is: are these traits inherited via their genes or via parental/social environment in which they grow up. I favour the second explanation - poor parenting and social pressures (from Government and peers) encourage people to fail. The huge social bias against education that exists in poor parts of the UK is evidence of this. You'd think poor families would latch on to free education as a ticket out of poverty (if not in to riches, at least to a secure and comfortable standard of living), instead they actively shun and undermine the education system in favour of pipe dreams that require minimal hard work.
This is not a problem that can be solved though. Not without a massive rethink of our social support networks and a willingness to "blame the victim" in situations when the "victim" is largely to blame.
Ukraine returned all of its nuclear weapons to Russia over a decade ago and has never had a domestic nuclear weapons programme. Brazil cancelled its nuclear weapons development in 1990 having never constructed (much less tested) a warhead. Additionally the South Koreans have a very advanced rocketry programme that should be launching later this year but never come any closer than a statement of intent (rescinded in the 70's) towards development of a nuclear warhead.
The development of orbit capable rockets is much easier than the development of effective nuclear weapons. There's no international restrictions of the spread of rocket technology and as such you can buy an old Russian design, whack your national flag on the side and start launching (i.e. the Chinese approach). Other nations get a lot more annoyed when nuclear weapons technology is transferred around (though apparently it's fine when the US and UK share a programme, or the UK helps the French) and the raw materials required are more difficult to acquire/refine. Yes, there's a link between the acquisition/development of both capabilities; the big five derive require both to field globally deliverable nuclear weapons. However there are many reasons why a nation may develop satellite delivery systems without first having developed nukes (e.g. to make money on commercial launches) and vice-versa (e.g. the only countries they'd want to nuke are next door to them).
If you're a skilled worker it's fairly easy. You simply get a job with a multinational that's based in a foreign office: they'll handle your visa, help you find accommodation and pay for your move. There's serious shortage of skilled software developers in most developed countries (and the UK); which means anyone with a good computer science grounding, experience in a couple of major languages (C++, Java, C#) and good problem solving skills is in very high demand at the moment.
As an American your best bet would be Japan or somewhere in the EU. European and American banks are always looking for staff for their Japanese branches as the locals prefer to work for domestic banks. The EU is quite handy as most countries have fairly short residency periods before you can apply for citizenship, it's also home to large number of American corporations.
Obviously you do have to posses actual skills. Too many people in the industry seem to think that a total lack of interpersonal skills and the ability to hack Ruby on Rails makes them a useful asset. The best employers want people who combine computer science and programming ability, as well as rudimentary social skills.
Churchill's job was to win the war and ensure that the British interests were treated favourably in the aftermath; while Operation Chastise didn't do much for the former it was a helpful boost of towards achieving the latter. There's also the propaganda value of such a media friendly attack, important after three years of war without any major offensive victories outside of North Africa. Far more people and capital have been sacrificed for far less reward.
Too many "liberals" are quick to call for bans on anything they disagree with. They don't have to like it, they certainly don't have to do it, and they're free to condemn it; but the moment they start clamoring for their moral code to be enforced by law they lose the right to call themselves liberals. After all, there are much more accurate terms for hypocritical authoritarians.
The danger inherent in driving comes from other road users. Any fool can drive do a ton down an empty motorway while talking on the phone. Far fewer people can talk on the phone while driving down a busy street and still maintain awareness of every potential hazard. There's also the minor issue that pilots make short, standardised calls which are related to the matter in hand; while drivers engage in rambling conversations concerning everything but collision avoidance.
VHF radios are used to make flying more safe and in an environment which involves controlled interaction with other aircraft. Cellphones provide no safety aspect for someone driving a car, most drivers aren't trained to drive while using a phone and interactions with other road users are chaotic. You cannot use aviation as a defence for driving whilst on the phone.
Floppy disks? Pah. My computer used the obligatory audio cassettes and the frankly awesome Microdrive. Not only did it store an amazing 80K (a 100K on the QL) but they were so loud you could tell when a program had finished loading from the other side of the house. They're pretty robust to, I've got a QL and a load of working cartridges ,despite them being over 20 years old.
It's a tax. The level is set by the Secretary of State for Culture, the money collected is paid in to a Government fund and non-payment is a criminal offence. It's no more a licence than my council tax is a licence to live the in the borough of Wandsworth.
Since the advent of local-loop unbundling there are a myriad of operators who provide free UK calls. Most of the larger broadband providers do so, including the big pay TV providers: Sky and Virgin media.
Really? I couldn't find any on their website and have never heard of IA-32/64 architecture being pushed that far. According to their products site only their POWER based machines are 64-way, their Intel/AMD units are four socket (16 cores at most).
The Cell is being looked at by large banks and they are sufficiently interested to set up specialist teams to see how the architecture can be best used. The Niagara is a toy with laughable floating point performance; the example unit we got sent ended up as a foot-rest. Rock is much more useful (each of the four cores having a dedicated FPU) but the IC design has only just been finalised and the first servers won't be shipping for another year. There's also the problem that it's an extension of the UltraSparc architecture rather than "cool" and new like the Cell. Sadly this is often the deciding factor with IT managers at the very large banks.
The Cell's designed, with one PPE and a number of SPEs is very suited to a number of pricing calculations. Many instruments are priced in an iterative manner or by use of monte-carlo. The lack of DMA for the SPEs is not really a problem in these cases as the inputs for each iteration/simulation don't change that much and (in most cases) could be wedged in to the 256K available to each element. You're assertion that Cell is best deployed only for a limited task set is correct, but banking contains such tasks and the Cell appears to be well suited to the role.
Funny, because I see it as a rush to centre. Both the major parties are in favour of maintaining the current high tax, higher spend policy of Brown (left wing); while simultaneously selling anything that isn't nailed down (right wing). Both parties have policies (if not members) that are broadly pro-American (right wing) and pro-EU centralisation (left wing). Neither party wants to spend much money on the military (left wing) or be overly welcoming to immigrants (right wing). Both parties believe that problems with crime, the NHS, infrastructure and education can be solved with media friendly sound-bites and nothing as scary as major shifts in policy. The only difference is that Labour hates liberty in general while the Tories restrict their hate for people who are poor, black, gay or a drug user.
Which in a two party system, leaves voters with a choice between reactionary puritanical racists and authoritarian power-obsessed fascists.
Another victory for first past the post voting!
For most open source software you're completely correct - it'll never run on anything more exotic than a Core Duo. But if you're developing something other than desktop applications (e.g. programming languages, libraries, frameworks, etc) and you want your software to be used by the widest possible audience; you need to test it on as many architectures and operating systems as possible.
Within a few years we'll have a referendum along the lines of:
Would you like:
EU members to allow the patenting of algorithms used in software products.
OR
EU members to allow the use of EU citizens in invasive medical testing without consent.
* Even when they resign due to massive incompetence they're usually reappointed with a couple of years.
Buckingham's on the Great Ouse, not the Thames.
...Show me a "hacker" who never did anything "blackhat"... Alexander Graham Bell. The same Alexander Graham Bell who won his most famous patent by bribing a patent office employee? Clearly the very paragon of virtue!I always thought Anarchism was grouping of political theories that advocated the no-coercion principle. Basically any system that uses force or the threat of force for any purpose other than self-defence is not Anarchism. As such you could have an Anarchist Government, but you have to allow anyone and everyone who wishes to secede from the Government's oversight. Obviously this can become more complicated depending on how you view property; is it an extension of the person (and so something one can own and use to force to defend) or not? However that's an argument for another, more on topic, thread.
The film was never supposed to be true to the book. Verhoven was working on a bug blasting movie that satirised gung-ho militarism when someone pointed out the similarity between his plot and that of Starship Troopers. Verhoven read the first half of the book, hated it, then simply pasted the people and places from the novel in to his script. Given that the book is an essay on politics and social sciences, occasionally interspersed with hard science fiction; I found the movie's satirical take quite fitting. Not that I'm knocking the book, a must read for fans of hard sci-fi - along with The Forever War.
No, work is a process by which a person produces products and or services. In developed countries this is usually done for an employer in return for monetary compensation. In most vaguely liberal countries this employer/employee relationship is the result of a voluntary contract which can be terminated by either party.
No-one is forcing you to do a job you hate. It is perfectly possible to have a job that you enjoy, even if you're not self-employed. I won't work for a company that restricts outgoing internet access and I've had no problem finding well paid programming jobs. Children should be taught to find a job they enjoy and not follow in the footsteps of the boomers; spending 50 hours a week doing something they hate.
For British voters there's the UK Independence Party. They are non-existant in domestic politics but well represented in the European Parliment. They have long been opposed to Software Patents and are an alternative to the Greens for the anti-patent vote.
Bank owned ATMs in the UK provide free balance/withdrawal services to customers from other banks, and the banks still have human tellers in their branches. Note that no law was passed to force this - it was in response to widespread public outcry over charges. Obviously the stand-alone ATMs (the kind you get in corner shops and pubs) still charge fees to everyone - but then they are provided as a money making scheme, rather than a service to bank customers.