Many of them. The BRZ is rear wheel drive (I just checked).

It should be noted that both Audi and Sabaru both have plenty of experience of creating cars that are designed with good traction and speed, since they both build cars for rally racing - sure not all of the design elements go into production models, but the experience is there.

Though, given that steel rusts, is the lifespan of an aluminium ground based vehicle any shorter than that of a steel based one? Steel has been improved over time, such that it is less brittle than in the past; has there not also been similar improvements when it comes to aluminium?

It should also be mentioned that traditionally Europeans buy stuff to keep a long time. That means while a Land Rover is expensive (it is less expensive in Europe), it can be seen as an investment, since it will be kept for as long as possible.

An example of different buying decisions is that taxis in Belgium and Germany are typically diesel Mercedes Benz, since they are more fuel efficient, compared to petrol and tend to last a fair amount of time.

There are, but when you are likely to get brushed under the rug, other approaches need to be used. He essentially blew a hole through the rug, meaning there was no way to hide his message.

Was the way he did things the best way, it is hard to say, since I don't fully grasp the workings of the agency, but I suspect that there are too many people with vested interests in hiding their and the agencies failings? Sometimes in politics you need someone to put their neck on the line for the greater good, but it has to be done with care since otherwise to have collateral damage and possibly a miscommunicated message. IMHO Snowdon probably did something many people would have wanted to do, in the sense of causing change, but are too stuck in the political labyrinth to achieve anything. Don't underestimate the weight of government and bureaucracy to block real change. Too many stake holders who either have vested interests or don't want to experience change.

However you look at things, Snowdon was brave, but he did follow his convictions to the end. I think many of us would be too coward to do what he did.

I have to agree to that, though that doesn't mean that they shouldn't expect a public backlash. Free speech is not without consequence, but that consequence should not be arrest. The problem with free speech is that there will always be someone who decides they are offended by something said by someone else, but if we are don't exist in a society where we can debate the views of others, then it is very troubling.

I wonder what Orwell would have to say?

I can easily agree with 'race' here and probably replace it with 'genetic descent', but gender!? Physical difference in gender do make a difference. The male of the species are not capable of giving birth and the female of the species is not capable of producing a child without the male of the species providing semen (there may be exceptions, but I am having difficulty finding any evidence of the 0.0001%). How we handle the differences in appearance and gender is one thing, but there are still biological factors at play.

Maybe the best compromise would be to have phone booths, where you can go in and make your call? Anywhere else in the plane there would be no signal. Now how to make it so people share the space respectively?

There are two approaches:
    - limit the ratio to within the company
    - have the ratio based on minimum wage

I feel the first approach may be the better solution to start with, since this is an environment where a CEO controls the wage scale. If the CEO wants more money, then they would have to consider how much the staff is being paid and how to boost things overall. This means that they can't tell the staff there is no money, while allocating themselves more if the pie. If they can't afford to raise pay overall, then maybe they need to see how they are running the company. If they can only pay people more short term, then give them a bonus, since that does not need to be maintained the next year.

The second approach is a bit more complicated, since a company may be performing well, while the rest of the economy is not doing so well. There is a risk that even a non CEO in a successful company may pass the 20:1 ratio?

My issue with https is that unless you are willing to spend the money, it is expensive to get a certificate that is suitable for a small hobby website.

Don't get me wrong, https is a good thing, but it needs to be simpler and more affordable to get a legitimate certificate.

I'll certainly be following this and see if this works out to be 'not so bad'.

Anything is possible, but at least it is GPL and currently there is a good community supporting OpenJDK. Killing Java doesn't make much sense, since I am betting a good number of Oracle DB clients have their software written in Java and killing Java would mean pissing off those people in larger numbers.

Tomcat may just be a Java based web server, but once you have Spring or delegating service implementations to other servers, much of what application servers provide become overkill, at least from what I have seen.

I have seen a number of projects using Spring and Tomcat. Once you have that combination much of what application servers provided become redundant.

There are already a few home automation hubs (if I understand what he is suggesting correctly), such as Pytomation.

The main challenge is as far as I can see there is yet a single protocol to bind them all, and even then it would be yet another protocol. For this reason, there have been attempts to create protocol exchanges (not sure the right term), that act as central system that can speak to different sensors and control systems using the specific protocols.

Its not clear what he is offering that existing solutions fail at? It doesn't help that the site doesn't sum things up in one paragraph and instead requires us to parse the whole presentation before understanding what he really is proposing.

Certainly, but a LED based TV offers a 60% savings in energy costs, while switched on. One available chart is here:

http://www.rtings.com/info/lcd-vs-led-vs-plasma/power-consumption-and-electricity-cost

Also, if you are using your plasma TV in the summer, in an air conditioned space, then you are likely to find an even better energy savings with the LED TV. Sure you can argue that in the winter the plasma TV is doubling as a space heater, but it is easier to provide a more efficient heating unit, than it is trying to compensate for the heat in a cooled space. Additionally, a focus on LED based TVs will probably help focus innovation on improving the blacks in that technology.