The entry fee 1998 for beating up the competition and securing a top spot was microscopic compared to today. Google had a good idea to begin with, but I doubt it would have been enough without the timing.

You can use Intel Threading Building Blocks for example, but you _should_ muck around with threads, locks and their type of bugs (dead locks, race conditions etc) so you know whats happening under the hood.

http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/

Its not easy and it costs _allot_ of money, in Sweden there is a research organization with the sole purpose to find a secure way to store the wast created by Swedens reactors.

http://www.skb.se/Templates/Standard____24109.aspx

Easy, stop wasting energy. Governments are too relaxed about "standby modes" on devices and general consumption. I bet you can "find" 10 Nuclear plants within the general consumptions if you wanted.

I think its a good plan, I just a bit worried if private sector can handle the risks [with manned space flight], or if everything will grind to a halt when the first fatal accident comes. Seeing how "the market" works in other sectors when something bad happens.

I 'm guessing "Depends who's paying for the books"

The Russian company Convers (controlled by billionaire Vladimir Antonov) was bought out before the purchase was made by an Dutch investor (via. the Spyker CEO Muller), because it was one of the deal breakers for GM. Cant find a English article to back it up, but it was all over Swedish TV last night.

pre-filled tax forms that you only have to sign and return have worked well here in Sweden for years, no conflict of interest at all. A couple of years ago, they even started with an SMS option, where you just can "ok" your pre filled tax form with an SMS code.

If you want to add information, you can just fill in your own form and send it in, but I think its pretty common to just use the pre-filled tax form.

Yea, its fantastic, instead of a solid public school system that teaches essential knowledge such as math, languages etc, we got private schools that sees everything as a popularity contest, coming up with more and more useless "educations", sucking the money away from the public school system.

All in all its a grand failure.

"The amateur radio operators are absolutely essential in a place where most of the communications structure has failed"

I dont know, maybe in the 70's they where. Ericsson pretty quickly sent a team (Ericsson Response) to restore the GSM network and distributed 5000 GSM phones among help works.

http://www.ericsson.com/article/100121_haiti_20100121111142

http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBUGZ/

Its great, its simple, it also cost a bit of money, but its worth every cent.

They need smart people more then ever, but maybe not CS majors....

If I where to run that big company, with 99% of their income from one product (adwords et al), I would hire all the smart people in the world to figure out how to diversify myself successfully (No, google apps & Sketchup Pro wont save them).

You might say the same thing about other companies, like Microsoft, but its far far easier for customers to flee an advertising model en masse , than over night switch their IT infrastructure.

Considering that adwords becomes more expensive and more crowded by the day, Google needs to do something ...

Alternatives is good even if they are bad. If BBC was to turn a blind spot on a important matter, you would never know without alternatives. But I agree with you, BBC is very good source for news.

It sure is a doubled edged sword, but there is allot of success stories also, patents is a mechanism to keep competition "fair".

Without patents, it would be even easier for medium/large/mega cooperation to prey on small companies inventions, I write even because just having a patent today do not mean that your immune against this behavior.

Its possible that article duping activity could sustain at least three Slashdot sites, that actually cover the same events, with no additional work.