physical network infrastructure, whether it be for roads, water, rail, electricity or data, will always be inherently monopolistic, since it does not make sense to build multiple parallel networks.
The physical network is best built and run b the government, with services run on top of the networks by multiple competing providers who pay a maintenance fee for use of the network.
If you think the physical internet infrastructure is better off built by private companies, then do you also think road networks and water networks should be 100% privately owned?

There can indeed be extreme atheism.
I have no belief, but I don't care what religion you believe in, as long as it doesn't infringe on my life. An extremist, atheist or otherwise, would persecute or kill those with differing views.

A lot of the issues point to bad management by the town planners - there are several mentions of overspending in the article, such as for ladder firetrucks when the town has nothing over 3 storeys high, town water to even the most outlying rural surrounding areas, new sports uniforms every year, etc etc.
Much of the tax burden would be to service some of the debt that was incurred while times were good, or support maintenance on excessively built out infrastructure - otherwise there's no need for tax to be proportionally higher than any other place.

I don't think $451,000 is unreasonable pay for someone who has to look up diseased arses all day to help prevent their owners dying a horrible death - with the prospect of being sued into oblivion if you make a mistake? Sure it's s lot of money, and definitely on the high side, but I think I'd still rather be a programmer earning less than 1/4 of that compared to doing that job. You thik the goatse guy is bad? I reckon a day in the office looking over a proctologist's shoulder would make it look like kittens.

The tens of millions paid for company executives in charge of companies that take a nose dive and have to be bailed out by taxes? Now that's unreasonable.

If you are printing and firing guns made of plastic, you are more likely to encounter Darwin's law before you see any benefit from Moore's law...

You could call it the tomanja - I'm sure it'd do even better than tomacco!

it can be, but isn't - at least not in most smelters in operation today - so obviously this incurs additional costs, that make smelting less profitable, or they would already be doing it. It is not fair to count the transmission losses costs of electricity in the efficiency equation for rechargeable batteries, unless you are also including the gather/redistribute and also lone losses for the smelter plant.
Finally, do you really want your energy system tied to a distribution means that would basically still put you at the mercy of whatever cartel was in control of aluminium battery plate distribution?

Bad analogy - there is almost no solution where the Bugatti is the right vehicle for the job.

When driving anywhere except for a racetrack, the Bugatti is massively over engineered, wasteful of fuel and basically an exercise in excess.
Even driving around a racetrack, it's not the best choice, because if your objective is to go as fast as possible around a circuit, you'd be better off with a formula 1 car.
The only thing the Bugatti is really good for, is showing how rich you are - and if you have managed to accumulate enough wealth to afford one, yet still have such crushing insecurities, your money would perhaps be better spent with a psychiatrist.

Photoshop is at least practical and useful for what it does - but like the Bugatti, is overkill for most users. I do think the GIMP's name holds it back - and I hate how the select modes work. I do wish these two areas were improved, because other than that, it does nearly everything I need.

Such a proposed system would quicly train motorists to rush red lights even more than they already do, because they could supposedly depend on the system stopping motorists coming the other way. Problem is, if a red light isn't stopping a guy running a red light in one diection, what's going to stop a like minded driver in the other direction?

The cost wold probably be not a lot more than about 1000 deaths a year, based on http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=118914&page=1 but it would have the bonus of selectively knocking off the idiots that think it's ok to run red lights, as more safety concious drivers will be safely stopped.

Dollars wise? probably not too much given the hardware is already mostly in place.

That feeling is the knowledge that you have just burnt hours of your life that you will never get back - that feeling is trying to tell you to do something worthwhile.

I got that feeling not after a sudden in-game loss in WoW - but rather after many many hours grinding for materials to make some rather insignificant upgrade to my gear. I just woke up one day and decided I'd rather be improving myself by learning new real world skills like playing the piano, kitesurfing and spending more time keeping my technical skills up to date.
I definitely don't regret letting that go..

Its the pain of feeling a year of your life sucked away. Hopefully you have learnt from it before the machine gets cranked to 50...

Scene: Data Models 101... 22 year ago.

Lecturer: "Today we taak abou daita modw and tupw cacuwus"
                              (followed by long string of chinese to the front row of foreign students)
Students, row 1: lots of head nodding
Students, rows 2 .. n: WTF!!?

80% of us failed that subject - which was really just basic SQL and database normalisation design etc. I scraped through but just barely - while getting distinctions and HD's in other subjects. Went well in the assignments, but you didn't pass the exam it was instant fail, regardless of your assignmnent marks. - and it didn't help that a good chunk of the exam was on stuff only in the lectures, not in the book.

Enough people failed that they went to the dean and tried to get the guy thrown out of teaching the course. Unfortunately there was no other chump willing to work for lecturers salary when those same skills were so much better paid out in industry, so they got the same guy the next year.

Fact is, having foreign lecturers is nothing new, and I went on to successfully catch up on the stuff I should have learnt in those lectures - so it didn't hurt in the long run, infact, when working in industry overseas later, it was a lot easier to work with and understand other nationalities better, having already had a fair bit of exposure to heavy accents. God knows my foreign language skills aren't exactly awesome, so you got to cut the lecturer some slack.

Main thing, is if you have a lecturer you really can't understand properly, *insist* on getting access to decent written lecture notes from him, or recordings that you can go through again later. One thing that lecturer was right about though - having good knowledge of SQL and database design really pays off.in industry.

I am pretty sure the memory effect has long been debunked - it was a phenomenon that affected NiCads on satellites, where the charge and discharge cycle was very periodic and the discharge amount each time was almost exactly the same, as the craft orbited the earth. If there is much variation in the charge/discharge cycle, the memory effect does not occur.
From that fount of eternal wisdom and knowledge, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_effect: The memory effect can not occur if:
* Batteries achieve full overcharge.
* Discharge is not exactly the same each cycle, within plus or minus 3%
* Discharge is to less than 1.0 volt per cell.[2]

Overcharging is going to be a much bigger cause of the batteries becoming cactus, because of formation of crystals.
There's more info in the wilipedia article about that too - but in summary, don't leave your NiCad devices charging all day and night, if you want them to keep good battery life.

Seriously, whats wrong with you people? What kind of twisted mind comes up with this stuff in the first place?

Unity does suck though - there's no denying that.
If rolling releases mean that I can keep upgrading the installed packages (including KDE but NOT including Unity) with the new better shinier versions of the software without ever having to do another major upgrade, reconfigure for the window manager I want and ditch Unity yet again, I am all for it.

However if rolling upgrades means that you might suddenly have Unity (or something similarly horrible) forced on you with a regular upgrade, then I am dead against it.

Before Unity, my pet peeve with Ubuntu was the forcing of Pulseaudio onto the system, before it was anything like stable enough to work properly. Unity isn't the only thing that Ubuntu has dunped on users before it was really ready.
If rolling releases do more of that kind of thing, it will be a disaster for Ubuntu.

Actually the most efficient way to heat somewhere, is to move heat fro where it is not needed (like outside) to where it is needed (ie. inside) instead of creating it from scratch.
Heat pumps, such as reverse cycle air conditioners do this, and it turns out that actually it uses much less energy to do so. Heat pumps have a Coefficient of Performance (COP), which relates their performance compared to resistive heating, for a given change in temperature.

it's not going to work for you if you experience -40 degree temperatures (damned cold in both C and F) but for more moderate temperature reigimes, such as around 0 degrees C in the UK, they can happily provide a temperature lift about 3 to 4 times more efficiently compared to resistive heating.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Reversible_heat_pumps