makes the UK 40% tax for income over £40k look enormous!

That's 9% state income tax _on top of_ 35% federal income tax. And there are a bunch of other taxes too. It would still be less than California income tax, which tops out at over 10% state income tax (along with sales tax of up to about 9.5%).

Around half of US residents don't actually pay any income tax (family of 4 earning $50k (£32k-ish) - or thereabouts is the threshold before you pay anything), so there's a fairly heavy income tax burden on those who pay them in order to carry the rest.

I've heard good things about UmeVoice - http://www.theboom.com/v/products/index.html

Is it a license violation to use GPL code in a Windows program that's built with Visual Studio, given the author is unlikely to provide a copy of Visual Studio on request? You cannot rebuild the application, even given the entire source code, without access to a non-GPL piece of software you don't have access to.

You might not like it. You might even think it's against the spirit of something or other. But it's not a GPL violation.

You could argue that one difference is that Visual Studio is available to anyone prepared to pay for it. I'm sure that the build environment for the device you're talking about is also available to anyone prepared to pay for it. It likely costs more than you'd want to pay, though.

You're not mistaken that avoiding it is pretty trivial, but it's also probably tax fraud.

Most states require you to pay a "use tax" at the same rate as your state sales tax on anything you order from out of state and don't pay sales tax on. As with any other tax fraud you're fine until you get audited.

Oh, GCSE. You're in the UK. Maplin is worth a look.

Start with a kit, like these or these. See if you enjoy the practical end of putting something together. You'll need some basic tools - a soldering iron, sidecutters, solder.

If you enjoy that, then there's a bunch of different ways you can go, depending on what you're interested in. Microcontroller based systems, if you like software too, are easy enough to start working with. Or if you prefer analogue electronics, old school audio and radio, then you'll want to learn some more about the theory and practice and there are lots of good books there - I like The Art of Electronics but choose something that suits your style and covers the areas you want to start with.

But first see if you enjoy the mechanical end of putting a circuit board together.

The black box system does tell you that, in some cases at least. And it says that the driver is slamming their foot on the gas. I tend to believe the black box - but it's based on the same sensors and software that's supposedly at fault...

You'll want insurance. Also, you'll want insurance coverage without any break in it, ideally, or you can hit a range of problems.

There are several ways to do that. If you're really setting up on your own then you're already looking at incorporating or setting up as an LLC. As part of that, talk to a local business insurance broker about various things, including health insurance.

If you're a professional, check with your professional associations. The IEEE (which is a great organization for engineers, software or otherwise) offers group insurance to members, for example.

If your skills are individually valuable, rather than being a commodity, consider working part time for either your previous employer or a random startup. There are other advantages to doing that as you set up on your own (peers to bounce ideas off, access to resources, actual income) but group health insurance is one of them.

Don't skimp on preventative care - dental and optical in particular. If you're young and healthy and don't have kids then you can skimp on the health coverage, going for a high deductible plan and doing the risk modeling yourself - a common thing for individual insurance, which can be very expensive otherwise. But if you have kids, or are thinking about it, don't do that.

And, once you've asked slashdot, talk to your spouse. Unless (s)he is on the same page about this, as well as everything else about setting up on your own, then you're well and truly fucked, both in relationship and business terms.

Safari was released in early 2003.

Internet Explorer 6 was released in August 2001.

So the unfixed Internet Explorer bugs have been around quite a bit longer than Safari has. So Safari is unlikely have any bugs older than this IE bug, zero-day or otherwise.

(OK, there could be crusty KHTML era bugs left in the Safari code-base, but there's not much of that code left untouched)

I'll take Qt Creator over Visual Studio for C++ development any day.

If 9% of the list o' terrorists are also on the no-fly list, that means that the feds are happy with 91% of terrorists being on airplanes.

64 bit binaries consume more space than 32 bit binaries. That means they make less effective use of system memory and (just as importantly) CPU cache.

All other things being equal, a 64 bit binary will run slower, while using more system resources than a 32 bit binary, so it's something that you'd only want to do if you could actually make use of huge amounts of memory in your application directly.

All other things aren't equal, though, as x86 is rather a "special" architecture. There the 64 bit binary will get access to (amongst other things) more registers. It'll still consume more system resources (ram, disk, power), but may run faster, or slower.

So it's not as simple as "64 bit good, 32 bit bad".

But they've been mostly $0.99, up to maybe $2.99 and run on my iphone, rather than $50+ running on my PC.

Better than the $50 games, some of them, too.