"Not a match for culture" from a group that has a similar cultural background to yourself is code for "We think you're an asshole."

Love the food. The culture, not so much. A culture which promotes obedience and subservience, particularly of women, is not one for me.

The market has nothing to do with fair! It's supply and demand! Applying moral considerations to pricing would be communism!

More seriously, what makes 60 hours a week of labour from a nurse less valuable than 40 hours from a CEO? Nothing. To the people they care for, their labour is far more valuable. They'd rather have the nurse, than the CEO, who probably won't change a bedpan and has no sympathy for someone who can't get out of bed on their own. The only thing that differs is the CEO has the ability to control what he is paid.

We're all part of a vast enterprise that uses the resources of the Earth to sustain the human race. A fair rate would be for us all to get enough to live on comfortably.

Hahahahaha.

£5.5M won't even scratch the surface.

We're talking an enterprise with around a million computers, running a vast swathe of different, obscure, an

Running things without support agreements brings managers out in hives, particularly an arena as risk-averse as a health service.

Something you paid for fucks up? It's the supplier's fault.

Something you didn't pay for fucks up? It's YOUR fault.

Therefore there's no real advantage, from the POV of licensing costs.

The real reason they've not migrated from WinXP has to be considered. The NHS is a mire of vast depth full of crufty software. They have so many pieces of old software it's not true. It's really diverse environment, with a high "institutional knowledge" factor where many systems just aren't adequately documented outside the heads of those who implement them.

Ironically, some of the oldest stuff is the easiest to migrate - because it's got a VT-100 terminal interface and runs on an AS/400 in a broom cupboard. You could even say that Linux would be it's natural environment, because any standard terminal will work.

But the next level...

You have :-

* 16-bit applications

I know of at least one hospital pharmacy management system still in use in the UK that's a 16-bit application. You can run it on 32-bit Windows, but not 64-bit, because it doesn't come with the 32-to-16-bit thunking layer.

* Old device drivers

There are plenty of devices with no drivers for Windows 7 and up.

* Badly written applications

Lots of programs on Windows got away with really bad habits like writing files in their own install folder for a long time. Windows 7 is somewhat stricter about this. Of course, on Linux, applications have mostly been grown up about this for some time.

And of course

* What if it breaks?

It's actually a very real risk. A lot of the software used in the NHS is of distinctly amateur quality and do things in eccentric and old-fashioned ways. I've seen software broken just because someone upgraded it's file server from NT to 2000 - it didn't play nice with some of the new optimizations on SMB (SMB optimizes single-user access to files by pre-emptively write-locking the file on the server. Which is not what you want when it's actually a multi-user data store.)

It's gone this way for as long as it has because like everything else in the NHS, the budget has been cut to the bone. There just isn't enough slack to institute change - but change is essential for improvement to occur.

It should be the poster-child for the advantages of FOSS though. Linux software tends to be more portable, and if you have the source, you've got more chance of porting it.

60 BUCKS?!?!?!

Would probably be overvaluing the company...

Too true.

We don't have legislation capping drug prices AFAIK - our relatively cheap prices come from the power of having that single payer. If you have to choose between serving a market of 65 million people in one of the richest nations on Earth, and not serving that market, you're prepared to compromise a little on price.

It also helps that we have a blanket policy of using generic vs brand named drugs where possible, and we also have a body who's job it is to rate the effectiveness of treatments - we don't have the same pressure to use branded drugs just because they are newer and possibly-maybe marginally more effective (but 10x the price because they moved an atom to put it back on patent).

It's harder (7.7) than Gorilla Glass (6.5), and much more shatter resistant than sapphire crystal, as well as sounding much cheaper to manufacture (no finicky crystal growth, can be made in the shape you require, no need to cut AND polish, maybe just polish).

Gorilla Glass is pretty darn good. I've had a Nexus 4 for some years and it has one tiny, almost imperceptible scratch on the screen (as in : I know it's there, I have to tilt the screen to reflect light and actively look for it to see it). Something even harder, that's still shatter resistant? Sign me up.

It doesn't shatter easily because it's a sintered polycrystalline. Rather than being like the single grown sapphire crystals that Apple rejected for the iPhone which shatter easily along crystal fault lines, it's lots of crystals all jumbled together. Crack propagation doesn't happen so much. According to TFA, it chips, but it doesn't shatter.

As a citizen of the democracy with the "best healthcare system in the world", (the UK NHS) we already worked out how to afford everything - have a single-payer system that can negotiate a sensible price, and don't waste money on all that insurance bureaucracy.

We spend less than half what the USA does, and get better outcomes.

The problem is that the medical-industrial complex has worked out that obviously, people are willing to spend a lot more, and have contrived with our politicians to try and destroy the NHS so that they can profit.

Incidentally, if there are any Yanks reading : the British National Formulary is an excellent reference for just how hard you're being shafted by your medical industry ; the prices listed are what the NHS pays for these drugs.

A 200-dose inhaler of that stuff costs £1.50 ($2.30) - I hear it's more like $100 in the states.

These are the prices you can get if you have a single-payer healthcare system negotiating on your behalf. Socialized medicine, the great evil!

The drug most often used, salbutamol, is a dirt cheap generic, you can get get 20 x 2.5 mg nebuliser vials for around £2 ($3)

The main reason hearing aids are expensive is twofold

i) They need to be individually calibrated to the user's hearing loss spectrum

This means skilled audiometric testing. Skilled labour costs money in any economy.

ii) The miniaturization

In 2 generations hearing aids have gone from a cumbersome box you carry around on a strap, to something that sits behind your ear, to something that sits in your ear.

The box type could be built very cheaply now. You could probably write a smartphone app that did a reasonable job.

It doesn't make the right emphasis

Should be "a symmetric key generated from details of the user's machine".

It's a design trade-off.

Their method means they don't have to maintain a repository of the keys that their infected machines have generated. They don't need a server receiving key transmissions, which means no server to attack, and also means their software is simpler, fewer moving parts, less to go wrong.

Unfortunately it suffers from the same problems as consumer media DRM - the user has both the encrypted data, and everything they need to generate the decryption key, it's just the algorithm that's "private". Security though obscurity.

Money is happiness, up to a certain point - that point is probably about $44k per year in the United States. The point at which you start to see diminishing returns is the point at which you no longer have to worry about money, where you have all the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy under control and can work on the top end.

Sure, it matters not to me that he has a yacht and a lease on a Lear jet. I work (indirectly) for a similar billionaire entrepreneur. I earn a good wage, my mortgage is paid, I live within my means, I live in a country with a good social healthcare system (for now..). I don't have to struggle to survive. In the status quo, the impact on my personal life is minimal.

But there are plenty of people who do have to struggle. The people working two or three jobs and still not keeping their head above water. The people who live in the richest nation on Earth but have a healthcare condition that makes them choose between food and medicine. They are the people who see that yacht and Lear jet and see red. The phrase always trotted out here is "the politics of envy". This is bullshit. They don't envy him his jet and his yacht - they wouldn't know what the fuck to do with them. They are angry, not envious, that he has so much, and they, the people who work for businesses that pass enormous wealth to the few are struggling to survive.

The marginal use of the plutocrat's income may diminish the more he has, but the flipside is also true - the marginal value of his labour is even smaller. Nick says it himself - he's not particularly clever or educated. The qualities that put him where he is today are a high tolerance for risk and a large dose of luck. His labour adds value to the businesses he is involved in, but it doesn't create most of the value. His workers do.