I don't know how asses even come into play here.

They still beat wireless through a 2' load-bearing stone (or brick) wall. Which is the GP's point.

Don't worry. They're just as bad in many other european countries too.

Fortunately for him, Terry Gilliam appears to be still alive. Terribly selfish that, not dying on you just so that you could lazily use a cliché like that.

Technically, it's about ensuring that you get what you think you have paid for and ensuring that you can use what you have paid for for whatever you want to. These things are absolutely fundamental to a free market even being possible.

I know it's enterprise software, but you're really not supposed to shove it up your ass each time you use it.

The way to deal with these people is to ignore whether they have the second hostage (assume he's already dead, even if that's technically premature) and to bomb the area, preferably with something like white phosphorous incendiaries. It also needs to be done soon, because people regard such actions less favourably when it is longer from the event which the punishment is being meted out for. Make it very clear that once someone starts killing hostages, reprisals will come. If you don't, the next damn terrorist group will think they can get away with this sort of thing too; you're not protecting those already captured, you're protecting everyone else.

It's a shame, but being this nasty is the only way of hammering home to idiots that fucking with is a seriously bad idea (unless you can act with more precision and kill just the terrorists). And it does work: it's been proved to work over and over throughout history. It probably needs to be accompanied with a full apology to any innocents caught up in the crossfire to mitigate incidental downstream trouble.

But you can use it to store energy, and this has indeed been done and it is an important part of how the Grid works. Look up pumped storage hydroelectricity some time.

It's backed by the fact that the government can shoot people until everyone agrees that it is valid. We could beat around the bush a lot more, but the threat of force (together with the ability to pay taxes that follows from that) is a key thing in making a currency valid.

That would be a very large table indeed, as there are a lot of critical nuances and a lot of languages (even if we exclude the ones without the ability to do a useful subset of all system calls).

If you're lucky, the scripts are in Lua (or possibly even one of the other embeddable scripting languages). If you're unlucky, they're in something custom...

Almost certainly Tcl; the right engineers knew it at the time, but JS managed to get to a shipping browser slightly sooner.

The English power consumption profile is winter-biased, and that's when loss of power can really cause trouble. Politicians think it is better (in electoral terms) to over-spend than to have the lights (and heating!) go out; they may be right on that.

What's more, the total amount of silver required by world industry has been dropping a lot recently due to the switch to digital photography. Silver availability really isn't a problem.