In my experience, JNI is not significantly worse than similar wrappers, but the approach certainly would not be my first choice. I used JNI for an embedded Android app, where the performance of raw C and C++ was needed to do the heavy lifting. Good points with SWIG and the JVM overhead, though.

It is possible to use C++ with Java. Try to look at Java Native Interface (JNI). It comes with a performance penalty on each call across the interface, but if you are using it for networking, the penalty will be negligible.

If you are working on Windows, it is possible to do the same with C# using a CLI interface wrapper. I have no idea if that trick works on Linux/Mac.

Trivially removable would be to provide a dismiss item to the context menu. Having to figure out that it came with a windows update and which one to remove to get rid of the icon required actual work on my part. I agree that it is silly to suggest suing MS for a free upgrade, but I *do* find it to be bad manners on their part to not supply an easy way to remove their advertising from my desktop. Sort of like a guest not leaving her or his muddy shoes at the entrance to your home.

According to bbc, only 37% of the votes cast were for the tories. Blame the British first-past-the-post system for giving absolute majority to a party supported by only 37% of the voters.

You wrote "We are all the same, Milgram proved that". I just noted that 35% was not the same. 35% is also not a sole outlier, but a pretty large minority, so, going by the empirical evidence you cited, your statement is clearly false.

Where in my post did I write that organization is the same as a "big military machine"? Regarding your second point, I think that Islamic State and the Vietnamese Liberation Front qualifies as organizations.

They need to agree on what to do and do it. In my view that is organization, even if the structures are informal.

The total war scenario was enacted in Europe in two acts, showing that even with millions of armed men defending a country it was possible to invade and conquer if the invading army also had millions of armed men. Armed populations did, however, make it a lot more difficult for the Nazis to hold (e.g. Russia and Greece). But if we are looking at present day, nuclear weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles pretty much means an end to that kind of invasion. At least until one side manages to nullify the nuclear deterrent of the others. It is a MAD, MAD world :-(

No, Milgram did not prove that we are all the same. Quoting wikipedia:

So, 100% of the participants knew that they were doing something wrong and spoke up. Some 35% of the participants did stand up to the authority figure and refused to follow their orders. As I remember it, the initial experiment was conducted on white middle class college students, so I would be very hesitant to use it to generalize anything about the rest of us.

As I understand it, the 2nd Amendment was supposed to ensure against invasion from the British Empire by keeping the population armed, so any attempt at invasion would allow the armed population to spark a popular insurrection.

But it is really beside the point. A population is only able to stand up to oppression if it is organized, and in most advanced countries, governments and corporations are going to back down if an organized population demands change, e.g. Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s. In most cases governments and corporations will just be biding their time, waiting for people to go home and settle back down into their lives, so they can roll back the concessions. A recent example is Egypt. Sometimes they will fight, but it is extremely dangerous, as there is no telling where it will end, e.g. Syria and Libya, not to mention destructive.

Going back to the US, it should be clear for everyone that the US rulers have successfully managed to keep its population disorganized through a variety of techniques such as sowing distrust between its citizens, massive surveillance, union-busting, mass media and the stacked circus of democracy.

Not necessarily. As prices increase, number of sales decrease and profit per sale decreases. I'm sure Amazon has done a lot of studies into these relations in the ebook market, and found the sweet spot that maximizes their profit. Increasing prices to pay taxes may result in lower profit than paying the tax out of their own pocket ... or they may leverage their dominance in the (e)book market to force publishers to cover the tax. This notes that Amazon forced UK publishers to cover their 20% UK VAT in 2012, even though they actually only paid the Luxembourg 3% VAT, with Amazon pocketing the difference themselves.

They actually tried to avoid VAT on ebooks in most EU countries by setting up their servers in Luxemburg that had a 3% VAT on ebook sales, compared to e.g. 20% in UK. Other ebook sellers naturally followed Amazons lead, until it became public knowledge, e.g. as described in http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/24/amazon-tax-loophole-ebooks . The latest development is that VAT on ebooks and similar is paid depending on the location of the consumer, as described in http://www.thebookseller.com/news/e-book-prices-may-rise-vat-law-kicks.

It was about Jean Gray walking around and looking menacing. Magneto was the villain with an actual agency.

Most of those heroines were created and/or developed in the 70s and 80s by Chris Claremont, partially as a response to the extreme dominance of very powerful male heroes and villains. Hell, we still see that today at the movies, where the male superheroes dominate the silver screen. Just look at the first Avengers movie. The main cast are Iron man, Thor, Hulk, Captain America and the Black Widow, four of which had their own movie prior to the Avengers movie. Even in the X-Men universe, the stories are concentrated around Wolverine, Professor X and Magneto.

That guy also came with an adamantium skeleton and claws and exceptional hearing and smell, so that would be one guy with 4-5 superpowers. Also, did you ever hear of Franklin Richards? How about Nathan Summers/Cable/X-Man? Proteus?

If your society does not provide jobs that pay a living wage, you get revolution. The Arab Spring comes into mind as a recent example.