such as restricting advertisers from working with rival search engines

Maybe there is no counter-argument here, and that they are guilty as sin. Just the cost of lawyering up is the only thing stopping them being brought to book. You make it sound like the allegations are just rumour and trivia.

Its pretty reasonable to suggest that justice is not being done at all here - despite what could easily be plain anti-competitive practices. That no-one will take it to court to test it means there is no justice for anyone, an allegation hanging over Google and whatever bad practices they perpetrate continue.

We'll just have to do it ourselves then, we need a massive internet campaign that reveals Google's new branding : "We do evil".

Well, it depends - which country, and who you owe to. If you owe the council for local taxes, you can (and people have) been sent to jail for a short time to name one, popularised case.

Similarly you can (in the UK) be sent down for not paying child maintenance payments.

your citation sir
http://www.findlaw.co.uk/law/b...

But still, my point is about the inequity of life - if you''re a big player things are applied differently to you.

I think the issue here is you don't know if the company you're buying services or materials from is owned by the same people who own the original company or isa real, 3rd party supplier.

eg. Google UK buys IP from Google Holdings Ltd Ireland, if you could somehow figure out that these 2 companies were related by ownership chains, then you could simply say that the IP licenced doesn't count as a business expense and so instead of making profit of 20p they'd make profit on the full sales (minus legitimate expenses).

I guess we could go with names, but that's not good enough, what we really need is transparency in ownership, so you can see that Google UK, Google Ireland are both owned by Google USA. You'd also be able to see all the holding and shell companies criminals use to hide their activities (eg Prenda Law).

Same policy happens in the US too - if you fail to repay $1000 the debt collectors come for you, your credit history is wiped and you could even go to jail. If you fail to repay $1bn the government gives you more money.

Anyway, I wonder if the Chinese can start selling their newly-legitimised copies of Windows 10 on ebay?

Its an imitation VMS of course - though I think Dave Cutler did learn some lessons about OS design that were improved when NT was made.

That they then gave it to the rest of the Microsoft dev team and said "write all manner of shitty UI and ill-conceived services on top of this new, well designed and thought out kernel" is another matter.

All we need now is for Facebook to release initial access to this app to users via CD distribution methods and the old internet will be new all over again!

I agree dynamic real time pricing would be 'teh win' if combined with smart plugs to use electricity when its cheap, so you'd put your washing in and the meter will run the washing machine when electricity is at its cheapest during the day, much like how we run storage heaters during the night when the price of electricity drops to the 'economy 7' rate.

Getting people to understand this is important, econony 7 is easy to understand, dynamic pricing needs good monitoring and reporting to make it work for the majority.

The way the world works is not to imagine a system where we create the battery before generating the solar power - instead we generate as much as we can and at some point, someone realises they can make more money out of battery tech than it costs them to research it, and that's when they start researching it,

In the meantime, there's a long time where we generate more solar power than we need - well, it makes no difference to me, they can sell it to whoever they can (maybe Californian plants can sell it to eastern states) meaning Californian solar has a better return on its investment, or they just dump it.

What is important to understand is that nothing will ever happen if no-one starts it somewhere. So we've started generating power from renewables, one day we'll be good at it and it'll power everything.

So true. If this takes off, I can see it as a way to achieve microtransactions, but if a few billion people suddenly start using it to send 1p to each other every time they read a newspaper article or whatnot, then I can see that blockchain becoming as large as all the computer storage in the entire world in short order.

It has to be trimmed in order to be practical, and I'm not sure how practical it would be without the blockchain. I wouldn't worry too much about the transaction speed, visa and mastercard happily handle a lot of transactions so this can be handled too (even if they need a better system than the current one).

people new to torrenting and need a client might look at old links (there are many on the internet) and go and install the very pretty looking uTorrent, and of course they'll want the latest version.

Frankly, I ditched it when they started getting shitty with the adware, I moved to qbitorrent which doesn't look too dissimilar from uTorrent and all is good now.

creating code that doesn't need to be refactored is the key to maintainable code.

C++ is a language that is very good for generic programming. It doesn't really meet Alan Kay's definition of OO

To be fair, there aren't very many that do!

Did they come to that conclusion from looking at their own tax returns or Amazon's?

Ah, but the principle is that the lagoon is filled by the moon (spinning those turbines as it floods in) and then they put down gates to keep the water in, releasing it when the tide has turned. The tides are every 6 hours, so you get a lot of generation during that time - it may not be continuous 24/7 but you get it between 4pm and 10pm, so we would get a lot during the evening when the sun has set and solar is no longer producing. They say generation will be 14 hours a day,

Sure, we still need storage though - efficient storage would fix all our energy problems! I think if we could pump water uphill during peak generation times, it would store a lot of energy. I vote to re-use all the old gas meters we have kicking around for the task!