If your company could hire someone else equally qualified, experienced and competent to do your work for £7k less, would they have any qualms firing you? What about £15k? Outsource it to India for 15% of the cost?

You are in a purely transactional relationship. You provide knowledge and hard work, and you get paid in money, prestige and satisfaction. That's it. It's your company, not your parent or sibling or friend or spouse - you 'owe' it no loyalty beyond that transactional relationship (and even personal relationships break down when they don't work out....). You wouldn't think twice about switching if someone opened up a new grocery store that was closer to your home and offered the same products for a lower price. Why is this different?

Do yourself a favour, mate. Go get the £7k + 7.5 hours of your life (almost a full work day on its own!) per week back. Good luck!

Nor is his personal fortune 'second only to the King of Saudi Arabia'. Has the Daily Mail been tipped off about Wikipedia yet?

This isn't about Libya being Muslim. Libya's own ambassadors to the UN urged the SC to impose the no-fly zone. This isn't an imposition on the Libyan people as much as it is on Libya's government.

He isn't talking about high prices because of the suppliers; he means high prices due to taxes that would discourage oil use and encourage the use of alternative sources.

Live long and prosper.

I disagree. Empathy and kindness can be programmed, and if sufficiently advanced, may be indistinguishable from human empathy or kindness. What makes my genetic programming or yours more legitimate than that of a future robot? Then again, we may not even need to get there. Humans have a tremendous ability to empathise unilaterally. Spock and R. Daneel Olivaw are two of the most beloved characters in sci-fi. We emotionally connect to pet rocks and the abandoned lamp in the IKEA commercial; we feel for characters in novels and are moved by music. Why not a robot?

It isn't easy. Admitting an approach was 'wrong' damages their legacy. And no one is saying it was wrong then; they are merely saying it is wrong to continue it now.

I'd like to ask you to shut up and stop applying your situation to everybody else. Just because YOU can be happy and content with the concept of private transportation, with its concomitant waste and inefficiencies, does not mean everybody else can.

No, that's more of India's al-Qaeda. Or everyone's, really.

Sadly, English proficiency is not required for citizenship, and the United States does not have an official language (some states do, but not the country as a whole).

Yes, we had friends before and Facebook may well become irrelevant one day, but social networking is here to stay. Email is here to stay. So are newsgroups and online fora and relay chat. Forms of communication, once invented, cannot be un-invented. Some of them do fill niches better than any did before. Face-to-face is charming and telephones are polite, but inviting a hundred people at once is much better on Facebook. Efficacy is sometimes not the point; efficiency is.

Good question. Depends on the event. I can send a mass email to any pre-determined set (colleagues in my department, members in my club) for events going from the private (birthday parties) to the public (protest marches and elections). The flexibility and visibility settings keep it context-specific and useful.