oh shit. that means all those devices are stuffed full of unpatched vulnerabilities.

I think you're believing the Oracle hype they sell you in the installer. Most devices are written in C.

which is, ironically, exactly how Java got to be so popular in the first place.

Hey! Can I myself also claim that I paid my share through the taxes paid by the companies who made a profit with my money?

But they don't pay taxes, remember, the argument is that taxes are paid by you because of the money you earn thanks to the companies just being there.

So I rather think that its more like that if I've already paid Microsoft's taxes via my salary then I can consider it perfectly ok to take as much of Microsoft products for free.

including every transaction made on the stock markets which counts in the hundreds of millions if not billions a day

sure about that? The LSE says about 500,000 transaction per day (about £3bn per day but the proposal was per transaction)

Visa says about 200 million txns per day., with Mastercard (100m) and Amex (14m) you're still way off "trillions".

so overall, I make that less than 400 million - $4m in tax revenue per day, still quite a bit short.

(other stat I found said 26.2 billion credit card transactions per year in the US alone.)

because they don't pay tax on it there either.

We do have precedent - Czechoslovakia is now 2 countries, as is Sudan and Yugoslavia.

I just hope Scottish independance goes better than the latter two.

Scotland may have some issue if they decide to get out of the nuclear game, mainly because of the number of jobs that will be lost when the base (and supporting businesses) gets closed.

At that point, Britain will almost certainly move the base to somewhere else in the UK, probably somewhere with lots of unemployed, ex-heavy industrial workers. As a result, they do have very good political value.

There is talk of just scrapping it completely, and relying on nuclear cruise missiles and bombers instead. I'm not sure how practical this is, but given the relatively stable state of nuclear politics (ie who would we potentially nuke today with our deterrent?) it doesn't seem so bad an option. The money could be funneled into traditional forces that end up being heavily used for peace keeping and humanitarian purposes.

Salmond thinks exactly one thing would change on independence - he'd become king.

I think this is the reason he has zero alternative plans, he's too busy running this wet dream over in his head.

Spain for one will stop Scotland joining the EU, they don't want to give the Basque and Catalan regions any ideas.

Its true, and the reason that happens is (partly) because those devices are pretty fixed hardware, hence pretty fixed device driver requirements.

When you go to most desktops you have to support a lot of different bits of kit, which Linux does support, but the lack of a stable kernel interface for drivers makes vendor support difficult (to them), and as a result, you get sub-standard drivers for a lot of devices

the PC became popular because you could mix and match whatever you wanted to put in there, upgrades for everything. Until you can go to the shops and buy a new graphics card and install the driver that came with it (because the vendor refuses to open source their driver) then Linux will never be fully ready for the desktop.

Well, I'm slightly disappointed he side-stepped the issue of an ABI as I think its probably the most unglamourous but most essential aspects of a platform. Its not a cool language feature, but for big software comprising lots of modules, it would make life much easier and I think C++ adoption more popular.

I work with C# as well, which has such a thing as an ABI, and using libraries is a real doddle - just drop the assembly dll in the bin directory, add a reference to it with a corresponding #import in the source files you want to use it... and you're done. C++ lacks this, though I would be fine having to include a header file too, its the ubiquity of dynamically loaded modules that could be written in any language (or more likely, they calling into my c++ library).

When you have several hundred modules in your program, you realise how nice it would be.

The issue of vendors is a non-issue I think. I recall building a program using Sun's compiler, then we upgraded and nothing would link - because Sun had changed their ABI between versions. I think Microsoft doesn't change it, but only because its stable, not for any other reason. Standardising wouldn't be much of an issue anyway - they'd probably have a flag that said "generate old or new" exports and leave it up to the user if they wanted the old, compatible ones (doubt it, most people recompile everything every time anyway due to the lack of an ABI!).

Meanwhile Microsoft comes up with their own versions (first COM, now WinRT) and they're inferior, being based on a funny sort of C for the first, and a funny sort of C# for the latter, leaving C++ binaries only practically accessible to other C++ programs.

except it hasn't gone that way.. however the junkets and freebies.. that's true.

From an ArsTechnica comment its just some remark by the Mayor who has been involved in Microsoft's decision to move its HQ to Munich.

Only to a point, if all you have is solar for example, then any demand after sunset isn't going to help, no matter how much you attempt to manipulate demand.

As it is, solar helps with businesses during the day, though you still have to manage the difference between peak output and cloudy days, plus wind that might work best on the coast at around sunset and sunrise. We do need more renewable energy sources that are always-on, wave for example (the moon disappears or we stop rotating, we've got bigger problems). The trouble is that it is way more expensive than wind or solar which is probably why its not been implemented in any large scale system.

I think you're getting engineer confused with self-opinionated hipster who wants to pretend they are businessmen and engineer without having the skill or talent to be either.

See "Startup" for more details.

Unfortunately, not, none of the idiots who spout rape and death threats against someone would actually do it in reality. When you see them finally prosecuted you see them for what they are: sad little individuals who obviously find an outlet for their internal impotence by being "big men" on the internet and making these threats.

So that's the definition of a troll in my book.

Now I imagine the police and authorities already have the powers to ask for the details of anyone on the web already, its just a time consuming process that many just don;t bother - not unless it gets really bad, and/or affects someone in the public eye (ie us ordinary plebs will not get the cops to do anything about online abuse). Making the process easier doesn't affect anyones rights as the police already have that power. I just hope that making it easier would make them use it more effectively (not forgetting that any prosecution still has all the judicial checks in place to go anywhere) or at least remind the trolls that they can be held accountable for what they say online just as if they'd said it to someone's face.

I got it wrong though, the original quote I was recalling is:

Over the Internet, you can pretend to be anyone or anything.
I'm amazed that so many people choose to be complete twats.

I assumed the trolls we're talking about are the ones who are a bit more obnoxious than just saying "Bing is the best search engine ever, I use it and so should you". The ones who are issuing rape and death threats on twitter, for example.