Perhaps we could, I don't know, wait until David Cameron actually announces this policy, rather than just believing everything you read in the Daily Mail, particularly as the Daily Mail are so hilariously biased on this subject in the place. Not to mention it's the Daily Mail.

This is like this news stories you see where they tell you what someone is going to "announce" later. If we already know what they're going to say, why are you telling me before they've said it?

Whack job zealots? This is the UK. Most people quietly giggled at this, then went and did something more interesting, like Christmas shopping or the pub.

The only people who'll pretend to be outraged by this will be the Daily Mail, and we'll all giggle at them when someone makes a joke about them on Have I Got News For You.

The census is supposed to be an accurate snapshot of the state of Britain, if people lie on it, they should be prosecuted.

Does that include all the people who insist on putting "Church of England" but haven't been inside a church their entire adult life and don't even know if they were ever baptised?

They wouldn't, obviously. Linux has tools like Puppet & Chef.

I use FreeBSD on NTP servers as it keeps time better than Linux, but damn it makes me wretch every time I have to use the utterly hateful FreeBSD installer.

I couldn't get FreeBSD 9.0 to boot via. iLO virtual media either.

Are you kidding? "Region free" hacks for DVD players were there from the very beginning. The very first player I bought (and it turns out the only one I ever bought, and which I still have!), back in something like 1997, was a Samsung DVD 709. I bought it specifically because it was trivial to put it into "regionless" mode and play Region 1 DVD's even though I'm in Region 2 (Bless you, Play247.com).

These days it's even easier; you can walk into a supermarket and pick up a cheap Asian player that can be put into "regionless" mode with the remote that's in the box. Hell, sometimes they're even advertised as such.

The good reason not too is that I don't need to log in at 3am to type the root password and watch it fsck should it need an unclean reboot. Use XFS.

Roast beef should never, ever, be well done. Any more than a fillet steak should never be well done. A roast joint of beef should be as pink in the centre as a rare steak.

Not since POSIX invented time_t. time_t is 64 bit long on most systems these days. You'll only be in trouble if you're still running a UNIX with a 32bit time_t in 2038; the chances seem remote.

The license is non-transferable but AMD as a legal entity is. Not only that, but Intel rely so heavily on patents owned by AMD that they'd never even consider attempting to revoke the x86 license.

I can't see anyone touching them with a ten foot pole unless the price is REALLY beneficial.

You can't see why anyone might be interested in acquiring their vast patent portfolio, x86 license and cross-licensing agreement with Intel?

Let's all just hope they don't do a Lucent and the patents end up being held by a mysteriously well funded holding company...

If everyone wants to live in South East, what's the point of building a high speed rail to a place where people don't want to live?

Because then you increase the probably that people will want to live in those places rather than the South East, and that businesses will want to establish offices in places other than London.

If it really is beneficial to have more people live in Manchester and Birmingham rather than South East (and use the train), then they'll be willing to pay for the location change in one way or another.

Which they will, through ticket sales. However your simplistic reasoning doesn't take a lot of factors into account. If the UK government don't make it attractive for people to live and work in places outside of the South East, they're going to have invest heavily in infrastructure in the South East: transport, power generation, water and housing being the obvious ones. That infrastructure will have to be paid for. Will it cost less, or more, than HS2?

Think of reducing pressure on London and the South East as a "loss leader" to break the vicious circle of investing huge amounts of money in the South East to the detriment of the rest of the UK, which then makes the South East a more attractive place to live, which then increases the demand for investment in infrastructure in the South East, which...

You asked about High Speed Rail, not the specific (apparently extremely brain dead) plans in the United States. Perhaps a better question is why is the USA now failing to implement major infrastructure projects?

I've never fully understood this concept that you build infrastructure to make money directly. That's crazy. Infrastructure is a sunk cost that has secondary benefits; for example, building HS2 will allow more people to live in places like Manchester & Birmingham instead of the South East, which reduces the pressures on infrastructure in the South East, which means you don't need to invest so heavily in things like transport, housing, water and power in an already densely populated area.