I still don't understand why the shareholders haven't called for an explanation of the mysterious investments that bankrolled this whole thing:

It's been pretty clear that Microsoft was involved in providing indirect financing for SCO - surely there are some investors who lost money and would want to expose these shady deals, and sue Microsoft for subverting SCO and turning it into a litigation vehicle, rather than the independent enterprise that the board claimed it to be?

I'd argue there is an even simpler explanation - popular culture has shifted. Reality TV and the "media studies" degrees it fuelled are no longer cool. Instead, the people who appear on reality TV shows are increasingly seen as losers; the new cool is startups and app stores, the young crowd hear stories of the people who became app store millionaires in 6 months, and dream of being the next Zuckerberg. I predict that this new wave of enthusiasm for computing won't last; we saw this cycle before with the .com millionaires, everyone wanted to be in the industry, but at some point the river of money begins to dry up and something else becomes the new cool.

The problem is that 17 year olds generally have no idea what skills are in demand in the workplace. Perhaps every university should be required to write a letter to each prospective student, informing them of the ratio of graduates from that university with that particular degree in the last 5 years who are employed/unemployed, and the median salary. The letter could also point out similar degrees with better prospects. That way student choice would be retained, but it would be more informed. Alternatively, we could go the China route, and only fund the top % of students to study in-demand degrees, and consign everyone else to a lifetime of manual labour (gaokao: for poor households, the 30 percent of China’s population living on less than $2 a day, the gaokao is like a lottery ticket — but one whose rewards come not by chance, but through blood, sweat, tears and toil. For them, gaokao doesn’t translate as “high exam,” it translates as “test you must ace so your life won’t suck.").

Lack of personal mobility has been cited as one of, if not the most important, factor in regional and youth unemployment. I have a number of old friends and acquaintances who relocated to find work - usually to a large city within the same country, but sometimes further afield, to other continents, EU to/from US, to places like Dubai, Sri Lanka, Amsterdam, Germany etc. There are immigrants to the U.S. and U.K. who have left their friends and families, travelled hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles, in search of work. Once they arrive, they compete in a jobs market where they are at a distinct disadvantage as they are not native speakers of the host nation's language - and yet, they find work.

On the other hand, I know people who moan that there are no jobs in their tiny village in the middle of nowhere, but are at the same time refuse to even consider relocating, because that would mean changing their lifestyle. Instead, these people continue to receive money from the tax payer to live in their location of choice, despite the probability of finding a job there being low. The government should, as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits, require people located in areas of high unemployment to relocate if there are appropriate jobs elsewhere.

U.S. embassies do not offer asylum, according this dissidents have to actually get into the U.S. before asylum can be applied:

It's not true that only Motorola can provide drivers - it is just *hard* for others to do so. Nouveau showed it was possible to reverse engineer a GPU driver; in the ARM a world open source Mali GPU driver and Adreno GPU driveris being worked on, which will hopefully cover a large proportion of the mobile devices out there.

Tablet Newspaper (1994). Note that the depicted design includes tablet with full-color reactive touchscreen (CRT, not LCD), it is not just "a piece of plastic with a print of a newspaper stuck to it". Also note that this case is about design patents, not functionality, and therefore the fact that Fidler didn't have a fully functional iPad in 1994 is irrelevant.

Great Britain and Germany, two Christian nations*, went to war twice in the last century, ultimately resulting in over 90 million people being killed. If you think that the people of any one religion have a monopoly on violence then you are a fool.

* (The official state religion of Britain was, and still is, Christianity. Surveys from that era show 95%+ population of both Germany and Britain reporting as Christian. Heck, some of the troops in World War I stopped fighting on Christmas Day and left the trenches to fraternise with the enemy. That's how Christian they were: they would kill each other on any other day of the year, but not Christmas day.)

Like Warren Anderson, who was charged with the culpable homicide of 8,000 people, left India and refused to come back until they said they wouldn't charge him, and who then jumped bail and left India after he was charged? Did the U.S. government respect the judicial authority of the Indian courts? No - it refused to extradite Anderson because they said there "wasn't enough evidence". And yet when the United States wanted to extradite bin Laden, and the government of Afghanistan requested evidence of his crimes, the U.S. government refused to provide it. When it comes to international politics and law, the U.S. is not afraid to apply double standards.

According to an article in the New York Times (which I can't find right now, otherwise I'd link to it), nobody outside of the U.S. government/military has ever been prosecuted for publishing information leaked from the U.S. government/military. The prosecution have always backed down because they know they would have to argue that the First Amendment right to publish information that you have obtained about the government does not apply to whoever they're prosecuting, and that a jury may well decide that the First Amendment actually does matter after all. Numerous newpapers have published leaked information, and the New York Times and others actually conspired with Assange to publish the diplomatic cables etc. However, in Assange's case, it's possible that they just plan to put him in front of a military court with a predetermined judge and outcome.

Oh, here's a reference: "No journalist has been prosecuted for publishing leaked information under the Espionage Act." Though it seems a new game is afoot: "Why the WikiLeaks Grand Jury is So Dangerous: Members of Congress Now Want to Prosecute New York Times Journalists Too"

Aviva employs some of the best actuaries in the world - don't you think that they are capable of developing statistical models that take rare incidents into account? One swerve in thousands of miles of driving is going to appear as noise, a fast turn with hard acceleration on every corner is going to appear as a substantial crash risk.

Statistically speaking, anyone who is regularly causing traffic crashes around them is highly likely to be involved in one or more of those crashes. It is the nature of being a reckless driver that, sooner or later, you will be in a crash.

Aviva is a huge business (sixth-largest insurance company in the world) - they employ some of the best actuaries in the world to figure out their risk models. They are going to be studying the statistics of driver behaviour in detail and will surely come up with more than just "driving too fast/slow" as a factor - I'd expect them to be developing models that take into account factors like use of acceleration, time of day, day of week, local weather conditions, type of road, road speed, road congestion, etc. At the moment, the main factors they use are type of car and age of driver, however this really penalises young drivers even if they drive carefully, because crashes are disproportionately caused by young drivers (primarily men).

Mass civil disobedience happens when people really care about something enough to put their own liberty and property in danger. People don't care that much about their insurance company lowering their premiums in exchange for monitoring their driving behaviour, in fact, most good drivers are going to welcome this (and everyone thinks they're a good driver).

And do you have a similar agreement signed by Google? There are many legal jurisdictions where lawful intercept requires the consent of both parties. The European Court has already upheld that employees have a right to privacy and the fact that communications are carried out at a work place does not void that right.

Most people are completely unaware. There are school educational authorities out there that intercept, decrypt and monitor the communications of thousands of people, including children (in many jurisdictions there are special laws that protect children from monitoring by their school), how many of those people release that this is going on? At some point, some employer is going to be monitoring his employees gmails and facebook messages, and he is going to use that information inappropriately, and then they will realise that this monitoring is going on and sue. But until it becomes an issue, nobody is going to bother.

That depends on the laws and legal jurisdiction. There are plenty of countries where companies aren't allowed to wiretap their employees private communications even when they used company property to make those communications. Under your "they own it and can do whatever they want" interpretation it would be completely legal for your employer to disclose your private medical and financial information if you accessed it over their network, since (according to your hypothesis) they came by this information in a completely legal way. In fact, it would be completely legal for them to disclose every email, every phone call, every web request and response that you ever made.