Yeah their tech support guys strongly suggested they would charge me if I sent my hard discs back under warranty so I said screw them and have avoided them since. If they are not getting into the ssd market proper it suits me as I'll mainly only buy SSDs from now on.

Is the fundamental issue that people are sick of using shitty computers with shitty locked down versions of windows all day at work, so they don't want more of the same bullshit for their personal devices?

Many of those players would have had 5 drones (mini robot spaceships) so that's potentially 24000 moving entities.

It is simulating a few more objects than those muds though. For example, each player is likely to have 5 drones (mini robot spaceships), which takes the number of moving entities that have to be simulated up to 24000...

If you are an intermediate level programmer as you say then you can easily learn to use a new programming paradigm. There is a coursera course https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero which is ok and should do for your purposes.

VP8 implementation in chrome is a bit buggy and periodically crashes a tab - I suspect it doesn't get widely used or these issues would get solved more quickly.

Lets deal with protocol fragmentation by introducing another protocol.

Industry is irrelvant, if your customers are being actively exploited you are or ought to be liable if you don't fix it as fast as possible

Its exactly that kind of stuff that got me into chemistry in the first place

I just tried to find some more info about it and found this page (http://wiki.debian.org/MultimediaCodecs) which doesn't really answer my question, but it amused me how much they're at pains to point out that you might have problems if you use unofficial codecs (3 times in a few cms of text).

At the bottom of that document is http://www.debian.org/legal/patent, which says "Debian will not knowingly distribute software encumbered by patents". But debian apparently distribute mp3 and h264 codecs and I'm completely certain that these are encumbered by patents, which is in direct contradiction to that statement.

So who knows what they're up to?

Have they finally come up with a free solution for media playback? Or have they compromised on their principles?

It irritates me that Microsoft, having consistently failed to innovate a phone that anybody wanted to use, is now able to extract money out of other people's efforts. Its an innovation tax. Don't bother innovating, as failed innovators will help themselves to the profits of your innovation.

Incorrect.

The X application that you run remotely has no clue that it is going over an ssh connection. It looks at the DISPLAY variable as normal, then it finds that it points to a particular local port. This port has been opened by ssh which also set up the DISPLAY variable in your shell. ssh -X does the magic but it wouldn't be possible without a network transparent protocol.

Arthur Scargill is currently gets an expensive house in London paid for by the dwindling numbers of the mine workers union so there is no doubt some truth in what you say.

On the other hand the unions are the only real prospect of wage negotiation available to the majority of employees so regardless of their faults they provide a necessary role that doesn't otherwise exist. Sure its possible to leave your job if you don't like your salary, but there are many reasons you might not want to, such as commute distance. I see employers as price-setters and employees mostly as price takers which pretty much means the wage will tend to be on the low side.