Whatsapp is useful if you have moved country and would like to keep receiving texts from your old friends without putting them out. It is one of those cases where politeness dictates that you can't expect people to keep texting you, even though you would have no issue paying the £10 it would cost per month to send 50 text messages.

That said, catering for us is not an 'insanely hot' business idea and a lot may well be swayed to move to Google Hangouts or Skype quite easily.

"Bizarrely I'm pretty sure the system came about as a way to 'simplify' ticket costing and avoid companies abusing it :|"

I have no doubt. The result is of course a system which appears blatantly unfair to people in the same way that buying two small packets of biscuits in the super-market may end up cheaper than buying the double size "economy, always better value, package". It is just not right. It should be dead easy to price the journeys to have the same price per "stage" regardless of whether you buy the full journey or buy each stage individually.

The ridiculous thing is that it IS easy. This is proven by all the third party websites that offer you this service (SplitYourTicket, SplitMyFare, RailEasy, etc.). It really should be easy to sort this out through the official channels.

"Airlines have a pretty good reason to charge almost the same for singles as they do for returns on international flights"

This is EU internal, so this is completely irrelevant. Companies such as RyanAir, Easyjet, Norwegian, etc. are more than capable of giving you a decent offer for a one-way ticket for the same routes, the same goes for some of the traditional airliners. I'm afraid this must be KLM internal policy.

Go from Swindon to London at peak hours costs an extortionate £60.50.

Book the ticket from Swindon to Reading and then Reading to London Paddington costs £34 + £22.20 = £56.20, saving you £4.30.

The train from Swindon to London always stops at Reading anyway and you will spend your journey in the exact same train taking the exact same amount of time and you will stand just as uncomfortably for your slightly less extortionate fee. And as opposed to swapping tickets with someone, this is perfectly legit and not against the terms of service.

There may have been some original sensible reason, but it sure feels like a scam to me.

Also, some airliners (KLM, I'm looking at you), charge you MORE for a single flight than they do for a return flight. When I moved country (and consequently only wanted to book a single), I had to book a return ticket which I simply didn't turn up for, otherwise it would have cost me £500 more. There may be some logic in what KLM is doing, but it feels like a big "fuck you" to me.

"The cost of an airplane is not the issue. If you look back to at least the 1960s, an airplane cost about as much as a middle class house. That has not changed."

Oh dear. You are comparing the airplane with something which has also increased massively in price compared to income over the last few decades. That middle class house costs many more times the average income than it used to. Not least due to easy availability of loans. What has changed is that both the housing and planes have gone up massively in price. Where some may have been able to afford both previously, they cannot now, and guess what? The hobby usually loses.

While the indoor activities may well be in the City of Sochi, the activities which actually requires a large amount of snow (alpine and nordic) are actually arranged in Rosa Khutor, which may only be 50 km away, but happens to be approximately 1000 meters above sea level, something which does have an impact on the climate.

There may be lots of things wrong with these Olympics, but there is no need to exaggerate.

He's got a reputation as a Playboy and admittedly has a very punchable face. This seems to be enough to brand him a shameless opportunist and dickhead, despite the fact that he's both successful and has chosen to invest his time and money into companies that actually do properly cool stuff which may have positive impact on the world.

If he's a shameless dickhead I hope for more shameless dickheads in the world.

Unless you are simply passionate about web technologies and just really want to work with it, stop trying to chase the latest and greatest here. You will find it remarkably hard to compete for the Javascript/web/whatever jobs as the 20 year old wizz-kids will have more experience than you in web-stuff but will probably need much less money.

Instead focus on improving what you already do, and expand into new areas of the embedded sphere. All that fancy web tech will in the end use and require embedded devices. We will get many more embedded devices, rather than fewer of them. Furthermore, try to expand your embedded domain knowledge. Perhaps there are some really exciting new embedded devices (drones, wireless home management devices, etc) you'd enjoy working on as a hobbyist? Expand into other embedded languages as necessary to work on the range of devices you like (i.e. Objective-C if you want to write iOS apps). You will only really learn properly if you have something concrete you want to do anyway.

The point is; unless you hate what you're doing, you should work on ways to make all those 15 years of embedded experience count. Chasing some Javascript web-stuff will not achieve that.

Since I haven't read the actual paper, I'll give the researchers the benefit of the doubt. But the BBC reporting is terrible. What I got from the story is that a study has demonstrated that this Quantum computer isn't better at everything. Well, duh! Everyone who has even very casually followed Quantum computing knows that they are a new class of computing which can solve a limited set of problems very quickly. I'm really not much wiser after reading this story.

"I've always taken jobs where I could either work remotely or walk / cycle less than 10 minutes each way. I wouldn't consider working somewhere where I'd need to drive to work, or where I'd spend more than 10 minutes commuting, and I'm always amazed at people in the US who are happy to spend more than the equivalent of one working day a week just getting to and from work"

I'm pleased for you. But if both you and your spouse have specialised careers with limited numbers of possible job locations AND you've got children that are already settled in their current schools, then this isn't necessarily easy. Finding jobs and housing becomes an optimisation problem (limit the amount of commute and school travel for 3+ people, taking roads, public transport and obstacles into account) which rarely have a particularly fantastic minima.

So was Windows XP, given that it wasn't released until the autumn of 2001. Linux was already really quite mature in 2001 and pushed by some of the world's largest companies. You could get paid support from IBM for instance. The rest of your post is a buzzword-laden mess with handwaving and conclusions you completely lack the knowledge to make ... apart from the "not fixing what isn't broken"-part... that part is fair.

A different matter altogether and not the point I was making.

That is not a "key feature" of a monitor. I doubt you will find any reputable definiton of monitor that includes that in its description. The key feature of a monitor is displaying information. If your DVD-playing LCD screen was semi-transparent you still wouldn't be allowed to keep it over your windscreen while driving because it is distracting. There are actual semi-transparent monitors out there, and guess what, they are still called "monitors".

But the important part is that it is not up to the individual driver to decide whether a HUD is distracting. As long as the technology has not been whitelisted (a listed exception to the monitor rule) it is illegal to use on the road according to the California law stated elsewhere. If you want to use Google Glass while driving, ask your local road authorities to consider it for road purposes. They will most likely turn you down.

No. As stated by others, there are laws against monitors while driving on a public road. There are specific exemptions (essentially a whitelist) when they have been tested and considered safe. Google Glass (or any wearable HUD-type tech) has not yet been tested and approved for driving but she decided to use it anyway. She is a douche and endangering others and should be prosecuted as such.

The most important consideration about driving: driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right. Driving on them comes with conditions set and enforced by the public. This should be kept in mind when discussing "driver's rights". Whenever Slashdot discusses things like random breathalyzer tests someone always brings up the constitution and inaliable rights. Surely the consitution says nothing about rights of access to public highways? If you refuse to take a breathalyzer test, I'm sure the state could ban you from driving on its roads without breaking any amendment.

No. It does not. It suggests that a certain level of societal bias has helped you along. That your 95% dedication wasn't quite enough, but 5% privilege was also necessary. This idea is vehemently opposed by people who have their whole self-image built upon the idea that everything in life is their whole doing. They also assert that every story about discrimination is wrong with no first hand knowledge of anything but success after their hard work despite lots of examples of people who have failed after a very similar series of hard work. They still maintain that everything is due to them, despite the fact that if you were the daughter of child-beating and molesting parents from the favelas (I'm just adding up bad things, not saying people from favelas are molestors) you would be extremely unlikely get as far with your hard work as some male kid from decent parents from a lower-middle-class background from the US.

Succeeding in life is not a simple matter of privilege or hard work. It is a series of factors including (but not limited to) genetics, social privilege and hard work which affects your probability of success.

You would at least be given the chance to fail. Instead of being assigned to 'write the documentation' in a University project, you would get a decent task which you may actually learn something from. By the time you get to a real job you may actually know what you are talking about.