There is no law in any country mandating that a private company has to use their resources to give you a platform to air your views, the idea is utterly absurd. As much as I'm a fan of Merkel, she is completely wrong on this issue. That said, I do agree there is a discussion to be had about the power of social media and tech companies in society.

There's a fantastic video on the subject by a guy called Dylan Beattie. My wife is not into computer science or maths and she thought it was amazing.

It starts at 4:20. The rest of this video is also well worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U&t=260s

You sound like a man who's played a fair bit of XCOM

Is that some weird racist thing you're doing?

I know what the differences are between C and C++ as I've been a C and C++ developer for 30 years, dickhead.

High level does not refer to the sophistication of a language, it refers to whether or not it is an abstraction of machine language.

High and low are not relative concepts, perhaps you're thinking in terms of language generations? C and C++ are inarguably high level languages.

I don't want to trivialise your problem, but I spent 90% of this year with a pain very similar to the one you are describing. A dull and constant pain in the right side of my head that would really flare up after a while (particularly when working) and become an all-consuming agony. Painkillers took the edge off, but that was all. The pain was unbearable when I coughed, sneezed or bent down. I thought I had brain cancer or high blood pressure or something else seriously wrong with me.

In my case, it turned out there's a problem with the C0/C1 joints in my neck, caused by years of staring at screens with my head extended forward. I went to a physiotherapist for help after my Doctor asked me to rotate my head and found I couldn't quite turn it all the way to the right. He suggested the origin of the pain might be my neck.

Fixing it was as simple as a physio manipulating my neck and me doing neck exercises each morning. Within a few weeks it was much better. It's not perfect, some days the pain comes back briefly, but a couple of neck rotations and it soon goes away again and I can forget about it. Anyway, if you haven't already looked into it, see if your symptoms fit cervicogenic headaches.

I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

We called it self-modifying code. It was really useful for handling interrupts on low end chips like the 6502. In the same sort of way you described, you could STA/STX/STY the register values in the bytes after the LDA/LDY/LDX opcodes at the end of the interrupt handler to save intermediate storage.

What utter shite. The opposition produced a costed manifesto, showing that improving healthcare, abolition of student fees, etc would cost around 46bn. They showed exactly where that 46bn would come from - largely by undoing the Tory reductions to corporation tax and partly by removing the charity status of very rich private schools. I wonder why the right wing press didn't report that?

Quality argument, guess you have no rebuttal over the usual "I don't use GNOME yet it makes me mad enough to spout irrational bilge". I don't need to take a UI design class as I've designed UIs professionally for 20 years. Design is subjective. Also lookup syncopates, cretin.

Sensitive much? Who did I ridicule and what problems did I deny? Is GNOME dying? How do you know that the overwhelming majority of users hate GNOME3? Do you have any sources to back up those assertions?

I find it annoying that whenever there's a GNOME story that instead of talking about the story (in this case, a new settings dialog), there are many comments from people stating that they dislike GNOME and what they're using instead. It's irrelevant and nothing to do with the story.

To stay on-topic, it seems like a step in the right direction - the tree/selection on the left with a panel on the right is much more intuitive than the OSX-style settings panel GNOME currently has where clicking an icon loads the panel in place over the top of the available options. The existing scheme means you need an extra click to return to the available settings.

I like GNOME, I think the devs are doing a great job. I'm sure other people like GNOME. If you don't like GNOME then please stop whining about it and use something you do like. It really pisses me off that every time there's a GNOME story, the comments just get filled with off-topic moaning (yes, like this post).

Are you serious? Google are great if you just want a few mailboxes, but they are not even *close* to a replacement for flexible mail aliases, transports, procmail and data privacy.

He said he paid no income tax.

If he's in the UK, he probably has a small limited company and he'll pay himself his personal tax-free allowance as income and the remainder as a dividend. He's still paying 20% corporation tax on the profits, plus 22.5% on dividends that take him over 35k. Not as much as he would have paid in income tax, but he's hardly a non-taxpayer - it's just good planning if you can do it.

... or he could be using a tax avoidance scheme where he "invests" all his salary in an overseas scheme who then "loan" the money back to him. In which case, yes, that's pretty dodgy.