Then you're probably not going into an establishment where the only drinkable beverages are laced with sugar and milk to disguise how bad the coffee is.

BT is required to allow third parties to install equipment in the exchanges ('local loop unbundling'), and while most of the companies that take advantage of this are small local affairs, TalkTalk has quite a lot of coverage on LLU exchanges. Since BT won't sell naked ADSL lines, they've priced themselves completely out of the market in areas with Virgin Media coverage.

Well, sort of. Clause 7 could be interpreted as a patent license, in that if you knowingly distribute code that violates your patents then you are violating the license if you don't also include a patent grant. In v3 it's more explicit precisely because it was ambiguous in v2. It's up to the court to decide whether this ambiguous license is a license.

In the book, Pris and Rachel are the same model and identical. Rachel seduces Deckard so that he will have an emotional reaction to Pris, which will slow him down. In the film, she seduces him because the film wanted some implication of sex at that point.

In the book, there's a lot of ambiguity about whether Decard is human, but only in his mind. There's also another bounty hunter who fails the empathy test when asked about androids, but passes it when asked about humans. The 'electric sheep' line from the title is a reference to the fact that, after almost destroying themselves in a nuclear war, humans are expected to keep pets to demonstrate their empathy and it's been engrained in the survivors as the most important character trait, yet the manipulate their emotions with mood organs and via shared religious experiences. Most of the subtext was lost in the movie (fortunately, so was the weird subplot about the police precinct populated entirely by androids, who believed that they were humans hunting androids).

The problem is that they don't differentiate categories well. Having bought some kind of computer thing means that I might be interested in buying some kind of computer thing again, but having bought one hard drive probably doesn't mean that I want another very similar (but not identical) one soon. In books, it's very different - if I've bought one novel then I probably want to buy another very similar (but not identical) one next time I shop. The same is true for a lot of things on Amazon - DVDs, CDs, and even clothes - and so the algorithm works pretty well overall, it just fails laughably in some cases (ah, you've bought a USB flash drive, do you want to buy a different USB flash drive with the same capacity?).

Even without direct enumeration, it's still relatively easy to find. The object / embed tags can be nested for fallback and the resource is only requested if you have that plugin installed. You can provide a load of 1px objects with different nesting and just check in the server which cookies show up in the requests.

It's easy to prevent. The browser should only expose a whitelisted set of system fonts to the web, which would then tell you nothing that wasn't in the user agent string to start with. With the widespread support for Web Open Font Format, it's easy for designers to provide additional fonts if they want to use them. I don't want something random on the web to be rendered in, for example, the Quake font, just because I happen to have it installed - it's almost certainly not what the developers intended, and if it is then they should use a .woff file.

Add to that, it's relatively easy to wrap your images in a noscript tag referencing a JPG version, so for the cost of storing two versions of the image on the server, you get to save money on bandwidth for anyone whose client can support it and not degrade the user experience for people who can't.

These prototyping boards are fairly expensive (around $40), but the system is amazing - web-based IDE and the device appears as a USB mass storage device that you can just drop the code onto. They're easy to drop into a breadboard and connect other stuff to. ARM's pushing them for the kinds of people who wouldn't normally do embedded development, but I'd love to see them in schools. They have similar I/O capabilities to the BBC Micros that we used in the '80s and '90s, but are small enough that you can put the controller in the computer. I don't know how much the microcontroller itself is in bulk, but I'm really impressed with the prototyping system and I'd love to see them in schools.

No, you made general statements about open source. You said Linux, but you then mentioned a bunch of projects that are part of the wider open source ecosystem. With regard to FreeBSD on the desktop, the FreeBSD Foundation funded much of the work to bring GPU support up to parity with Linux and iX Systems sells machines preinstalled with PC-BSD (FreeBSD plus some other stuff aimed at desktops) and pays most of their developers.

And that's where you go right back to your original false equivalence. The devs who are doing that are not doing it for free. They are paid. This is true for Linux, FreeBSD, or any other moderately large open source project. And they're paid because the people paying them benefit from the project being taken from hobbyist quality to professional quality.

That's not even a new phenomenon. The original NFS is a good example: Sun hired ex-UCB people to work on BSD because they needed a decent OS to sell workstations. They released NFS as open source because they could sell more servers if everyone's clients used their protocol. No one was working for free.

The clever people use C when C is the right tool for the job and use something else when it isn't. The rest use C, Python, or whatever else their favourite language is, irrespective of whether it's the right tool.

You're conflating the language and the implementation. LLVM does lots of optimisations for bitfield manipulation and has various patterns in the back ends for using them and intrinsics so that you can help the compiler out. If you're seeing some missed optimisation opportunities, then please file bug reports.

The mbed development environment for the ARM Cortex M series uses C++, but you need to stick to a fairly limited subset of C++ to fit within the requirements, at which point you're basically using C with an annoying type system and some nice syntactic sugar for constructing vtables.