Well, unless the constitution is actually changed, you still have a chance to defeat such excesses in court. Which takes a lot of time and money, which sucks. But it is still possible.

In theory, as a contractor you could say "I'm not taking this job unless there is a decent set of requirements". But that will leave you with a very small set of potential employers.

In practice, most people need the money and try to manage somehow.

And then there are the unscrupulous contractors (usually companies, not individuals) who make big promises, knowing that those are not realistic. Or knowing that the requirements are incomplete and fulfilling them will not be sufficient to make a succesful project.
I strongly suspect that this is what happened with Toll Collect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_Collect) in Germany. Just for instance.

In political terms too.

While I'd still say China is worse, human rights wise, than western countries, asshats like the Australian government are working hard at erasing the difference.

Probably true, but being successful without a diploma still takes some luck.

A good example might be Josh Parnell, the developer of Limit Theory (URL:http://ltheory.com/).
The guy seems to be quite brilliant, and I believe he is capable of pulling off his plans for a space game with an unprecedented amount of procedural generation. But he still got lucky in finding enough backers for his Kickstarter.

Another thing we can learn from Josh's example is that it may not be necessary to drop out of college. He wrote that he put his studies at Stanford on hold, with the option of continuing later.

But publishers don't lower the initial game price from the goodness of their hearts. New releases on Steam still cost (typically) 50 Euros, that has not changed compared to pre-Steam times. In short, publishers try to charge as much as the market will tolerate and pocket the extra profit.

Now there are a few people like me, who strongly dislike "services" like Steam and will buy less than before (and that preferably from DRM-free sources like GOG). But it seems that we are too few to make a difference.
Unless you count the success of crowd-funded games (Kickstarter) as an aspect of that dislike. Which it may be, but I don't have the data to prove it :-(

And don't forget product liability.

If there is a known, safety-relevant flaw in a car, and the manufacturer does NOT do a safety recall, future accidents caused by that flaw might lead to lawsuits of the nasty kind. Since negligence is now easily demonstrated, the courts might grant the victims punitive damages. Ouch.

I guess it will backfire in the form of other carmakers offering cheaper cars that are just as good for the "entry level" features. Because the extra hardware was never installed.

NT4 had only limited DirectX support, so it was not for gamers (although vastly better than 98 in stability). 2K was the first "business" Windows that had all the features of the consumer OS.

[slightly off topic]
And I used it happily until 2007 when my then-new PC would not run stable under 2K. In hindsight I suspect the drivers, in particular those from NVidia. My 8600GT officially had only "legacy" drivers for 2K, inofficially you could also run the XP drivers. With either, the machine would crash frequently. So I finally relented and installed XP.

The 45W Kaveris are interesting, as they show a nice improvement in performance/watt - the new "sweet spot" is not in the top models but in the somewhat slower A8-7600 (3.1-3.3 GHz CPU speed).

I wonder how a 4 module (8 core) FX on that basis would perform and at which TDP. For software that scales well with many cores, it might be a good buy.

A good point from the perspective of a game designer, and I support the sentiment.

But most of us are consumers most of the time. Even those of us who work on one or two community software projects will typically use a bunch of software where they are not involved in the making. Which means taking the software as it is, and if its creators went for a design that requires a beefy PC you have one or you don't use that particular software.

For some applications, in particular games, performance still matters. My current PC will run older games just fine, but some newer releases tend to demand a fairly powerful machine.

For example, I might be interested in Star Citizen but Chris Roberts has already announced that he is aiming for maximum eye candy on high end machines. It is unlikely that my current machine will handle that game, even on low settings.

If the applications you run do well on a machine from a decade ago, fine. But that is not the case for everybody.

It would also require a new and presumably more expensive socket, and motherboards would always need four DDR3 sockets for provideing the full bandwidth - no more cheap mini boards with only two sockets.

Overall, I'm not sure if it would be much cheaper than GDDR5 on the mainboard.

An 8-core Steamroller would be an improvement too, now that computer games finally start scaling well with multiple cores. I might even be willing to re-purpose a server part for my next desktop, even if it is a tad more expensive.

If AMD does not bother though, the Xeon E3-1230 v3 from Intel looks nice as well, only the mainboards that actually support ECC RAM are a bit expensive.

While I agree with the underlying idea of doing something about the tax avoidance, this rule is probably violating the rules of the EU internal market (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market).

What the EU really needs is IMHO a tax harmonization that stops countries like Ireland from attracting corporate headquarters with extremely low tax rates.

Considering countries outside the EU, the measure described in TFA would make more sense. I'm still not 100% convinced, but it would be at least worth discussing.

Similar here,

although it is more likely to be a new programming approach to an existing project. So instead of a complete "private" computer setup it is more likely to be an unofficial change set that modifies only a few parts of the project. It may even live on the official TFS as a "shelf set" ;-)