Yes, WWI and the Sequel WWII are some of the prime motivators behind the European Union. It has grown far beyond that but the people who originated the EU were partially motivated by the idea of preventing future wars by increasing economic integration to the point where war had become a sport that was to expensive to indulge in. and for what little it seems to be worth to conservative anti EU tossers these days, hundreds of thousands of those reasons that are buried in Flanders, and whom the GP spoke of, are British.

Iceland exports in excess of 70% of it's manufactured goods to the EU. Iceland has enacted about 75-80% of the laws needed to join the EU and Icelandic politicians have proven them selves to be a bunch of incompetent nepotistic tosspots who cant keep the inflation graphs from looking like a set of sharks teeth. If you want to have a laugh compare the inflation graph for Iceland to that of Germany:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/iceland/inflation-cpi
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/inflation-cpi

Notice how the German figure hovers between 0 and 5%, now compare it to the Icelandic graph. You would laugh even harder if you could see data from before 1989. Inflation in Iceland since 1944 fluctuated between ~3% to as high as 25-30% and occasionally topped 100%. In 1979, these wankers that make up the Icelandic political class, finally had to index-link loans to inflation to motivate capital owners to start loaning money. What that means is that if your loan carries 6% interest and there is 8% inflation you are effectively paying 14% interests. Now try to imagine what happens when inflation hits 20% and you will understand why Icelanders are so angry they are spitting acid. Joining the EU would force their brainless politicos to... well... behave. And additionally when you export 70% of your manufactured goods to the EU it's kind of dumb to want to have no say in how the EU's inner market evolves which makes me wonder why the British, who depend on the EU for 50% or so of their exports want to leave the EU. It's kind of like robbing yourself of the ability to influence how your country is begin governed by voluntarily relinquishing your right to vote.

North Korea?

Right, until then it sucked and was awesome simultaneously.

It's more like:

If the display on your Fedora19 box is in sleep mode and you know that the Fedora 19 kernel panics once a day because of a poorly written kernel module you cannot know whether it OS has panicked until you wake the display. Until then all you can do is calculate the probability that the kernel has panicked as the sleep time of the display approaches 24 hours. Thus your Fedora 19 box is both in a state of kernel panic and running normally at the same time until you wake the display and 'fix its state'. The interesting thing is what happens if you try to cheat by pinging your Fedora 19 box from your laptop. Assuming you have a perfect network connection you can only tell whether the system is up or not, you cannot tell whether it's lack of response is due to a kernel panic or a segfault in the network daemon. You can only calculate the probability of the lack of response being due to a panic since, on your badly broken Fedora 19 box, panics happen more frequently than segfaults in inetd do. So you get closer to inferring the state of your Fedora 19 box but you cannot be entirely sure by simply pinging it, you need more information but not so much that you fix the state.

**Sigh** I'd explain the concept of inflation to you but I don't have the time. I'm busy loading shotgun shells with rock salt so I'll be prepared for the next time Larry Ellison makes the mistake of stepping onto my lawn.

Young man, I'll have you know that I was using UNIX long before Linux was a 115 kB compressed tarball on the funet.fi FTP server.

Amen!

It may only be an article but it says all that needs to be said. Oracle bought up MySQL and immediately dropped support for a range of systems that had previously been supported, probably in the hope it would drive scores of customers into the open arms of the Oracle sales team and their extortionate license prices. I now have to migrate several MySQL databases that previously lived a happy life on AIX 5 to something else and MariaDB is a welcome alternative because I'm sure as [Expletive deleted] not going to shell out thousands of $ for overpriced Oracle DBs with a pile of features that I don't need.

Why should predatory business practices be allowed behavior by default and the burden of guarding against them be placed on the consumer? Should real-estate fraud be allowed and should the onus of guarding against it be placed on the consumer? It's kind of convenient to have a police force who sees to it that the occurrence of real-estate fraud is minimized, even hard core free market fanatics admit that much. So if we can do something to crack down on people who have turned exploiting the economic naivete of children into a business model then we should do it. Suckering kids and teens into buying toys and other junk is one thing but some of these in-app game purchases are bordering on downright fraud.

Whether or not govt. 'monopolies' suck depends on what you mean by government monopoly. Is it the role of government to run an ISP? I'd say no unless it is to provide coverage to areas where private companies can't be bothered. Infrastructure is a different topic. Where I live we used to have a what you Yanks would call a 'socialist' ISP run by the govt. and this same ISP also owned and ran the infrastructure. They ended up getting caught using the pricing for access to their network infrastructure to make life hard for competitors. Eventually this company was split up into an ISP part that was privatised and the infrastructure part that is still owned by the government and municipalities and it is now relatively easy for small time ISPs to set up shop and compete with the bigger boys. The lesson is that the owner of infrastructure should have no economic ties to those that use it or you'll quickly start to see anti-competitive behaviour unless multiple competing infrastructure companies build their own duplicateinfrastructure which is wasteful and does not entirely solve the problem of anti-competitive activity. I'm fine with the current system we have here where governmnent builds infrastructure and ensures that everybody has truly equal access to it.

Pffft... Stripes? Flames? I covered my PC box with that newfangled paper thin screen material. Now I have ANIMATED flames, or anything else I want (including topless dancers). I even installed cameras in the PC box and now, when I leave the apartment, the computer goes into adaptive camouflage mode and melds into the furniture rendering it invisible to burglars. If they still find it, my fallback is a weapons grade laser. Mind you... that thing still has a few bugs, it fried the neighbours cat as it walked past the living-room window the other day.

Really? I've had SSDs in my machines for the last 3 years and I've never cast a nostalgic backward glance. My current laptop drive is a 480Gb SSD and I'm not going back to mechanical any time soon. If you really think mechanical disks are going to trump SSDs you should get together with the people that told me 15-20 years ago that digital photography would never push film cameras off the stage. I dunno about what pros have done in terms of digital vs film cameras but It's been a loooooooooooooooooooong time since I last saw a person with a film camera.

Ditto :-) If data recovery after a catastrophic hard drive failure is your preferred backup strategy they you have a point. Myself I do regular backups to external storage so It's not an issue for me.

That does not mean that Google should get off the hook, IIRC Microsoft got some heavy fines and so should Google if they are being Anti-Competitive.

The Belkin and Matrox docks have been out for a while now. The Belkin dock was "Temporarily out of stock" at Amazon despite the $299 price tag the last time I checked I checked (about 60 seconds ago). There are no drive enclosures available (unfortunately), only ready made external drives which only make sense if you have an SSD to really take advantage of Thunderbolt's speed and a capacity of at least 128gb which makes them extra expensive. Buying a Thunderbolt enabled mechanical drive only makes sense if you are stuck with a machine that has a Thunderbolt connector and USB2 connectors since you get no speed advantage to speak of over USB3. For my purposes external drives start getting interesting at 500gb since I use them mostly for backups and to store tons of photographs, Photoshop files and e-books. There is also a SATA adapter from Seagate (Although strangely enough no SSD disks), a string of really interesting and ridiculously expensive RAID solutions and a few adapters for FW800, GigaBit ethernet., Video etc... What is keeping Thunderbolt down is the price of high capacity SSDs and the fact you can't get any empty enclosures. As the price of SSDs starts to fall and mechanical disks go the way of the dodo (not shedding any tears) and Thunderbolt stands a good chance to compete with USB3 as long as it can keep a speed advantage because I'll buy what ever gets me as close to native SSD+SATA speeds as possible when I'm making large data transfers. Another thing to consider with Thunderbolt is that the display connector usually doubles as a Thunderbolt connector. Since some machines like the MacBook AIr only have one connector you'll either have to unplug the display every time you want to plug in a Thunderbolt device or put your display on the end of the daisy chain so never buy a TB device that does not support daisy chaining. The other option is to buy a machine with two TB ports like the MacBook Pro which is what I did. It's only marginally heavier than a MBA and has way more connector options.

Stop ruining our patent bashing session with 'facts' ...