Most European countries forbid bribery of foreign officials. As an example there's a recent case in the UK where two company directors have been convicted and sent to prison for bribing foreign officials.

They already did: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

... and we found 2 weeds. One of them was one of the safest substances known to mankind, which chilled you out and even had some health benefits. And the other was tobacco, which causes major health problems in just about every organ in the body.

AND WE MADE MARIJUANA ILLEGAL.

I have a better idea: preload nothing but the OS and desktop environment (well and key utilities like voice memo/dictation software and an alarm clock) and leave the rest up to me.

It's called Cyanogenmod.

Monetization?

Some time ago when I was working for IBM, I did have a POWER workstation (back in the days they were called the Risc System 6000). Our entire department had them.

You look at the probability of that happening. Renting just means you're certain to lose.

Probability that I have no equity after 25 years of renting a property: 100%
Probability that some great disaster means I have no equity after owning a property for 25 years: less than 1%

I'll take the second odds.

Of course you should think of the "what ifs" before making financial decisions, but concentrating all on just the risks and not at all on the upside is every bit as silly as thinking of only the upsides and ignoring altogether the risks. A depression is a terrible time to not own property too by the way - you're pretty much just as shafted if your work sector has collapsed whether you rent or own.

It is generally easier, more error resistant and more portable. Java makes my day job of writing boring back end business software much more rapid and productive.

I do C and asm too. One of my current projects is for embedded ARM (in C). I've also done a significant amount of 8 bit asm (very recently) and also asm for an OpenRISC SoC. Those I'd never dream of letting Java or even C++ get near.

Right tool for the job. Sometimes, that's C or even in some niches, asm. But the vast amount of software people are writing isn't system level - some business application with a GUI is much better done in java or C# etc.

Don't know what distro you using, but "just works" test has passed for me both at home and work with Debian.

Not so much with Windows. I have a Windows partition because a couple of games I like don't have Linux equivalents - it took some fscking around to make them run because a default Windows install doesn't actually have all the required DirectX DLLs, and software installers for Windows do not have any dependency resolution built in, so it requires running around finding the DLL on microsoft.com. Not to mention the time it took to actually install Windows *and* have it actually do something useful due to the lack of drivers on the WIn 8.1 install DVD. Didn't even have a driver for my incredibly common onboard ethernet (so required fscking around with removable media to be able to even start the process of finding all the other drivers I needed).

I just do not think you have had enough experiment with. delete that, delete that, dear mom let's set so double the killer delete select all

Aluminium house wiring is awful, they used it a lot in former Soviet satellite states and it breaks all the time. The Soviets probably used it because it was cheap.

Our local telco also used aluminium interconnects in the exchange - if they found you using your own SDSL equipment on a "dry copper" leased line they would replace the interconnects at the exchange with aluminium ones which made the line go out of spec and your SDSL to stop working to force you to buy their high speed leased line product at 10x the cost.

That wouldn't make it across the Pacific, simply because when the sun goes down your motor stops turning. You'd need solar panels enough to not only power it during the day, but with enough excess to charge batteries for the night, which makes the drone much heavier, which means bigger structures made with fancier materials and more energy use.

The Greek government got you into this state in the first place, with the full, willing complicity of Wall Street who helped hide Greece's massive debts (which should have disqualified it from joining the euro). Unfortunately the EU in its headlong and breathless rush to get the euro under way didn't do their proper due diligence. Greece is now paying for these mistakes.

While I do not work for BMW directly, the company I work for does do projects for BMW. One of the projects I worked on was the iOS app which is part of this ConnectedDrive system.

To be precise, for the 'old' version of the app (My BMW Remote App) for non-i models we started off with this black box library (CD lib) which handled all the communication with the BMW servers.

While I didn't do any protocol analysis or looked at the communication between car and servers, even for this iOS app it was pretty clear to me and my colleagues what the security implications would be if someone were to be able to obtain log-in data just for that part of the communication.

Depending on the market (America, Europe, Japan, etc.) there are some limitations to what one can do with the app (based on the type of account, IIRC), such as from what range one can see where the car is on a map and whether one can unlock doors with the app or not (not allowed in the US market, from what I recall). Where these limitations are enforced I'm not sure. It might be based on the server, in which case this hack would bypass such limitations as well.

At any rate, this security leak does demonstrate quite succinctly how important it is to properly security audit such systems before releasing it into the wild. Even for the current project I do for BMW (related to the headunits), having an active internet connection means that security is essential, including plugging buffer overruns and similar.

Nobody wants to have one's headunit go blank during navigation, in a constant reset cycle or be turned into a spying device, after all :)

Note that I'm still under NDA for all of these projects, so I can't go into much detail.

It's called a PC. Hook it up to the TV

Am I missing something here? How do you do that without having a big ugly PC sitting next to the TV?