Few people are aware of this system. They believe that the churches actually pay for those institutions. The ones in the position to educate the people about the truth are those who benefit from keeping the status quo: conservative politicians.

Here in Germany the Catholic and Protestant Churches run many hospitals, kindergartens and other welfare services which are funded not by the churches but entirely by the public, yet they impose rules on their employees based on their respective faith, ie. people have lost their jobs for getting a divorce, remarrying, outing themselves as homosexuals etc. The churches make a shitload of money through this system, and because they can publicly claim that they run soandso many percent of welfare services they get to influence public policy and politics. This all works so well because as religious organisations the churches get preferred treatment with regard to taxation, exemption from labour regulations and union rates etc. so they can undercut the private-sector competition. And since they are so good at it there are areas where the churches have a quasi-monopoly in welfare services, leaving workers dependent on them. And as long as the Conservatives are in office this will not change, since the churches offer them, well, let us call it PR support in exchange for keeping their special status intact.

So many people in social industries essentially are forced to live by religious rules without actually being a member of those religions just to be able to get a job. And we all get to pay for it.

So essentially it mimics a drunk person? I have a suspicion I know how the idea for this research project first came up.

I am not familiar with Van Jones - or neomarxism, for that matter - but is that meant as criticism? If yes: What would you propose?

Bloody hell! Hitler was on to something there!

Firstly, the money is there already. It just would have to be redistributed. The net profits of certain industries could feed the world single-handedly. Requiring them to provide a modest contribution should not be overly draconian. We are talking about basic support - food, clothes, a roof over the head, healthcare etc. - not palaces for everyone.

Secondly, every cent spent on such measures pays back in savings elsewhere: Medical bills go down, crime goes down, education goes up, consumption goes up. Hell, even traffic accidents go down. It would be a smart investment.

Like Wine? Or ReactOS? Or replacements for individual components, like Samba or Mono? Microsoft needs competition within its ecosystem, if only to fend off antitrust investigations. Just not from an entity actually powerful enough to compete over paying customers. Like, say, Google.

Following power lines on Google Maps? OpenStreetMap, my friend. Some people have already gone to ridiculous levels of detail in mapping things that formerly would have gotten you a quick visit from your friendly domestic intelligence service. With many countries opening up their data this is only going to get worse, or better, depending on your point of view. And it is all - how fitting for the topic discussed in TFA - readily available on the Internet.

I have no racing experience but I am a rescue technician and medic, so I can only go by what is left or what is, well, not left of cars after such stunts on the open road. Here in Germany the rails at motorways are slammed in and hastily repaired so frequently that, were one to merge into it as proposed, one would be virtually guaranteed to hit some ill-fitting connector or some bar sticking out slightly - and those do horrible things even at relatively low speeds - or to have a bend in the rail hurl the car onto an unhealthy trajectory. Even with experience I am not sure I would take that risk unless all other options were exhausted.

TFS says the issues started at 60 mph. Even at that speed the slightest bump on the rail, a bar sticking out a bit, anything really would either rip half the car to shreds or send it hurling across the motorway. Doing it at 125? Only if you have a death wish.

I take it you have not seen Die Hard 3. Imagine for a second they had put out a message saying that a bomb had been hidden in an unspecified public building and that it would detonate in one hour. Mischief, huh? Mass panic at the push of a button.

Which is why Microsoft, SAP, Adobe and other highly lucrative companies only ship perfectly stable and solidly secure software. Oh, wait! They don't.

What makes quality software is a clear-cut development process including all phases from the drawing-board to QA as equal priorities. Which for commercial software translates to spending shitloads of money and for everyone in the industry including FOSS to kicking out the amateurs and employing proper software engineering from top to bottom, left to right.

This is becoming increasingly annoying: Why the hell is there so much hate for UEFI? I run Linux Mint and Windows 7 in a dual-boot setup and frankly I have come to love the speed at which my rig boots since switching to a pure UEFI setup. For whatever reason BIOS-based configurations on the same hardware took ages in comparison. I like UEFI. I do not want anyone to kill it.

Now, SecureBoot, that is a different beast. I see quite a few uses, eg. preventing 'bad people' from booting anything I did not preapprove on my machine. But as long as I cannot verify which keys and possible backdoors the manufacturer might have put in it is pretty much unusable. I am waiting for the UEFI equivalent of CoreBoot. That would be a real boon.

If a best practice turns out to be an impediment in solving one huge aspect of an enormous problem (namely joe jobs), then this practice has outlived its usefulness.

Do not spoof sender domains. It breaks mail.

That is what I do. It takes precious little time, and It Just Works. Both things I cannot say of Windows' network browsing.