Sorry but yes, forced, as a member of the Eurozone.

Theoretically they could have refused like thy have now, but that was a different government then. That government didn't have the best qualified finance minister in Europe. This one does.

They probably would have been better reusing 5 years ago. Iceland did, and they've done better than any of the countries that went down the bailing out of the banks route.

Fuck your childish pony comment. It's not a matter of no strings attached. The ECB and the IMF are attempting regime change. They are insisting that the debt is paid off by punishing the poor, rather than taxing the rich.

You believing this apocryphal tale is reality makes you look like a doofus.

Greek government spending has reduced year on year 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014.

Next question.

What austerity? Are you blind? Or are they being rather selective of the news where your chose to get it?

Where is it corroborated by two other people in the room?

The Gates/Jobs match is over. Gates might have lived longer, but Jobs won the business game. Apple is the biggest tech company in the world and Microsoft is in rapid decline.

Still, yes, Gates had different but comparable business skills. That makes 2.

There were far more engineers that could design a microcomputer.

So you're responsible for what Obama does then?

This is the off told myth, but in reality that was standard practice at the time. Components were simple to understand but expensive. Everyone came up with nifty tricks to minimise components.

Jobs mix of talents were rarer.

But this is about Jobs not Apple. Apple's next gen OS quest whilst Jobs wasn't there is irrelevant. Jobs selected Unix as the underpinning for NeXTStep. But had Unix not been around something else would be.

If you want to play the what-if game, Apple would probably have used BeOS. Which was better in many ways than Unix. And to an end user system based on Unix and one based on BeOS needn't look any different. Only the BeOS one would be smoother.

I admire Jobs because he made design, quality and user experience the overriding factors in creating products. And he had the confidence to know that approach would win out in the end. And the taste to be able to personally ensure the company kept on track.

The people who hate jobs are invariably people who don't appreciate design, and think it's just decoration.

The Knuth story is obviously apocryphal. The selection of Knuth for the story and the use of the word "all" is exactly what you would do if writing a gag. The fact that Knuth has denied it has laid it to rest for anyone who's rationality isn't blinded by hatred.

Absolutely. If Woz wasn't at the Homebrew Computer Club, Jobs would have recruited someone else, with similar results. There were plenty of other engineers who were capable of single-handedly putting together a microprocessor based computer board at the time.

Well that was a stupid thing to say. The C-language and Unix were just one language and one OS amongst many. If they hadn't been around Apple (and NeXT) would have used something else.

The Greek people didn't take out the loans. And the failed austerity programme was forced upon them by the ECB and the IMF.

Now the only sticking point to a deal is that the Greek Government want the rich to pay the debt and ECB and the IMF want the poor to pay. This has now reached a point where the ECB and IMF are attempting regime change by economic bullying, just as the World Ban and the IMF have done in Africa for decades.

If the banks can be bailed out because they are "too big to fail" so can Greece. And if it was a right wing government, it would be.

This is neoliberal warfare.

Linux? There's not much call for it. Not round here, sir.