To the uninitiated observer from a distant galaxy, it might appear incongruous that the right to possess lethal manufactured goods (leading to 30,000 deaths per year) is sacrosanct, whereas the possession of naturally-occuring plant material (leading to 0 deaths per year) is severely punished.

It's might seem odder that the main reason advanced for the right to bear lethal manufactured goods is to ensure that the right to bear lethal manufactured goods continues. And that the possession of naturally-occuring plant material is allegedly punished to prevent thousands of deaths occurring.

However, it explains pretty much everything you need to know about the human race.

Well, apart from the fact that #3 was arguably necessary to buy time owing to the lack of military preparedness compared with Germany, the result of an accommodation between the UK and Germany (on which Hitler was quite keen) would have been the division of Europe with a large area under totalitarian control and the widespread extermination of civilians considered "undesirable". Whereas the result of failing to settle an accommodation was the division of Europe with a large area under totalitarian control and the widespread extermination of civilians considered "undesirable" - alongside the massive loss of life and economic damage.

Of course this is all a matter of hindsight, but the problem with war is that everyone enters with the expectation that it won't last.

>The tech industry is not responsible for driving up housing prices

Yes it is. The tech industry is supposed to have made location an irrelevant criterion.

The tech industry is not only refusing to eat its own dog food, it's wilfully jacking up its costs and risk by insisting on stockpiling its live meat in one location.

Actually, if 3rd party insurance were provided by the state and funded from fuel taxes, we could ensure everyone was insured, everyone's premiums were lower, save a fortune on IT and not have to track anyone.

Of course that would be too convenient and remove authoriteh from too many jobsworths.

It's not just about earning money. Don't underestimate the desire of people to perform. There's a well-organised programme of community music where I live and there are many hundreds of people participating in live music - choirs, small jazz and folk groups, community orchestras etc - and they're paying to take part (to cover professional teachers/conductors/accompanists/venues...). Most of the live bands you find in pubs will not be covering their costs, but they do it because they enjoy it.

Of course, in terms of technical quality, synthesisers would beat many of these performances hands down - but that's not really the point.

What is a more interesting question is whether the lack of career opportunities for merely competent jobbing instrumentalists leads to a lack of infrastructure to develop the talent of the exceptional performers that people will still want to pay to hear play.

Given that musicians have in the past had better career options than most authors or painters - and we hardly seem short of the latter even now, though of course it's much easier to be a individual contributor as an author than as a viola player - I don't see an imminent shortage of soloists. And I still see plenty of young faces in orchestras (or at least they seem young to me...), certainly young enough to have grown up with electronic music.

VMS was mostly written in BLISS, although there were chunks of Macro-32, particularly in the drivers. The big challenge in the Alpha port was effectively cross-compiling the Macro-32 code for Alpha hardware. Towards the end of Digital as an independent company, more development work was done in C.

An early decision in the design of VAX/VMS was the definition of the "VAX Procedure Calling Standard" that dictated the instructions and mechanisms to be used for calling procedures, passing parameters and returning values, independent of language. All the compilers were expected to use this mechanism so that you could, for example, call a procedure written in VAX COBOL from VAX FORTRAN. This worked to a large extent, but it wasn't explicitly defined (and couldn't really be defined) whether compilers should use call-by-value, call-by-reference or call-by-descriptor for particular data types so additional semantic cruft was required to sort out the deails of parameter-passing. VAX C would sometimes pass a double-word argument in violation of the standard. The standard also had nothing to say about meta issues like run time initialisation, memory and thread usage, etc.

That said, it was a revelation coming from an IBM world in which you'd sometimes have to write Assembler shims to patch up the calling conventions if you needed to get one language talking to another.

Listen up. Any news that casts an unfavourable light on the economy is a risk to your economic security. It must therefore be kept strictly secret. Anyone found spreading this unpatriotic propaganda is going to find themselves in a re-education camp.

Yours sincerely,

The government of North Korea^W^Wthe USA.

Same answer as always: You've Got to Be Carefully Taught.

As far as this foreigner is aware, there isn't a "US" Healthcare System, though a rather feeble one is in the process of emerging, rabid Republicans permitting. There are a lot of private companies - in relationships which are more co-parasitic than symbiotic - which puport to offer a "system", but in fact are fighting amongst themselves over the division of the spoils. If this war results in mutually-assured destruction, you haven't lost a Healthcare System, you've lost an obstacle to the establishment of a Healthcare System.

Cybersecurity doesn't necessarily mean surveillance. There's a more attractive side, too - you could spend your entire life running change control on a library of hundred-page procedure documents and reviewing firewall logs. Now, what kid could turn down *that* opportunity?

Or possibly, the discovery of such a mechanism would conveniently distract attention from the possibility of, say, a backdoor in the processor itself by means of which an unlikely but valid instruction stream might, for example, give kernel privileges to a program running in user mode. An open source software exploit might be intended to be found, and removed, thus restoring your false sense of security in your possibly compromised hardware.

Newspapers really messed up by continuing to produce paper with yesterday's news on it. Newspapers were once a disruptive technical force - a combination of large-scale printing and national distribution by rail transformed the way people received information. But new disruptive technical forces have emerged. The only things that really kept papers going once radio and then television came along was broadcast regulation and the absence of any other outlet for low-cost advertising (radio and TV adverts being outside most peoples' price range).

The interesting question is whether you can have serious, in-depth, journalism without print - there's a reason Snowden went to the papers and not to a TV station - but you're not going to answer it with engineers.

I'm not sure in a debate about privatistation how it's possible to compare two private ISPs and then infer that a non-existent nationalised ISP would somehow be better.

I'm comparing the service offered by BT in the few years after privatisation with that offered by the GPO before. That's actually a feasible comparison to make. It's you that's making the argument that 30 years on, a hypothetical nationalised telco would be better than the private providers - and you're not providing a shread of evidence for that hypothesis.

And digital wasn't "still in the labs" at the point of BT privatisation - the first System X exchange was installed before privatisation was complete and dogged BT for years after with increased potential costs because of the decision (likely taken in the Treasury) to develop a British digital exchange and support British exchange manufacturers rather than just buy a solution off the shelf in the end left BT with a single supplier of equipment and spares as STC, Plessey and GEC either pulled out of the project or merged. That's not a decision a commercial company is likely to have made.

Er, no. I'm comparing the service provided by BT shortly after privatisation with the service provided by the GPO shortly before privatisation. Those two things can reasonably be compared and I was actually there to experience them at first hand. Believe me, BT, for all its faults, was a breath of fresh air. It's you who's trying to compare the service of today with a hypothetical service that you believe might have existed if BT had not been privatised, and that's a comparison that can only be made in your fantasies since there's no way to make it in the real world. I've no doubt that today's utilities are deficient in many ways, but I suspect you didn't actually experience the nightmare paternalistic bureaucracy of the GPO, the Electricity Boards or indeed the grim lottery of British Leyland QA or you'd realise that your petty squabbles with EDF are a walk in the park by comparison.

If you really believe that the service provided by BT (and the cost to the end user of that service) is as bad or worse as that provided by the GPO (rationing of connections, waiting lists of months or years for installations, widespread "party" lines, the need to rent one of a small number of approved telephone handsets, botched, costly exchange equipment development in cosy arrangements with uncompetitive UK suppliers and daytime call charges beyond the reach even of those people who could afford phone lines), then it's your ideology (or perhaps your rose-tinted memory) that needs readjusting. A more interesting question is why companies in which the French and German Governments have a significant stake (eg EDF, Orange and DB Regio) are apparently more successful at operating utilities in the UK than the UK government has been.