The US political funding rules allow any organisation to buy 'issue' adverts that aren't specifically pushing a single candidate, with no limits. Why not use this in the next election to run prime-time ads listing exactly which corporate interests each candidate has taken bribes from and their amounts, and the legislation that it bought. If taking money from certain organisations starts costing more votes than it buys, then politicians will be a bit less eager to take it...

He is wanted in the UK for violating bail. Judges should only interact with criminals in the court where everything said is a matter of public record (and subject to strict accounting). Allowing judges to talk to criminals in other settings sounds like a good recipe for legalised bribery.

I am aware of that. I'm also aware of the ThunderX box that we have on the FreeBSD test lab network, but I don't remember exactly how long it's been there.

Fake likes are ones where the recipient didn't pay Facebook for them.

Are you sure about that? Doesn't the extradition treaty between Sweden and the UK explicitly prevent extraditing people who have already been extradited? Sweden would have to deport him before he could be subject to further extradition requests.

Happy seems a bit of an overstatement. I'd love to pay less tax. I'd also love to have free beer from my local, but in both cases I think I'm getting pretty good value for money and I'd rather taxes went up a little than have a reduction in public services. We've got an election coming up in the next few weeks, so we'll see what happens...

Seems a bit stupid. If I were running Intuit, I'd lobby in favour of such systems... and point out that my company could provide them for a very good price to any jurisdiction whose representatives want to be taken out for a nice game of golf / dinner / whatever. It's much easier to sell a very expensive system to few governments than to sell a cheap system to a few million individuals.

Hmm, this sounds like a US bank thing (cheques are pretty much gone this side of the pond). The main feature of the app is that it can be the second factor in two-factor authentication for the web-based banking, so you don't have to carry around the chip reader device. It's also a bit more convenient for quickly paying someone that you've paid before or checking your balance on the go.

What have cheques got to do with mobile banking apps?

The markets are different. Google Play doesn't have the same stranglehold on app distribution in China as it does in the EU, so it's far easier to launch a successful phone in China without the Play store than in the EU.

Xeons aren't really the competitors for those, they're replacements for Cavium's existing MIPS64 offerings that end up in filer and network appliances. Apparently (according to a somewhat biased source at Cavium) they're competitive with current Xeons in aggregate performance per Watt, doing better on parallel workloads but less well on single-threaded ones. They really shine on anything I/O-intensive though, due to the integration of the ethernet and SATA controllers on the die (and the design of the DMA engines). They're not likely to be in general-purpose servers, but companies in the same markets as NetApp and Juniper are very interested in them (hence Cavium's investment in getting FreeBSD supported on them).

A bit more than hinting: Cavium is selling 24-48 core ThunderX (ARMv8) chips. I think the first one shipped a month or two ago.

Sucking at HCI doesn't make you evil (if it did, a lot of open source projects would be evil too). Though given their network settings UI, I can't help wondering if there's a little bit of malice in there...

I switched to DuckDuckGo a while ago. I periodically check Bing and Google (adding !bing or !google to the DDG search line will send you to either) if I don't find results that I want. On one occasion in the last year, I've found a useful result on Bing that I didn't get with DDG or Google. The last time I had anything useful from Google was about 18 months ago. Note that Google and Bing may be fine for most searches - I only try either if I don't quickly find what I'm looking for on DDG. I had one fairly obscure search a couple of days ago (FPGA synthesis problem) where DDG only returned six results (one of which was helpful), so I tried the others to see if there was something more useful. Google gave 10 completely irrelevant results (pages that didn't even include my search term), Bing returned no results at all.

The EU also fines more EU companies than US ones, but those tend not to make the news in the US either. Actually, most of them don't make the news anywhere, it's only when it's a household name that it is considered newsworthy at all, and when it's a household name that's considered American then it becomes more newsworthy in the US press because they can run with the tired old 'EU picking on US companies and jealous of their success' narrative rather than bothering with any real journalism.