Yeah, as long as you ignore "NVidia Optimus". I have a AMD-A6 based desktop, it works fine with the occasional glitches, but the only thing that is truly stable and works for everything is called "Intel". There simply is no contest.

Bingo. If there are millions of dollars in subsidies at stake or a multi-million dollar firm, paying a bunch of lawyers to take a bunch of lawyer-politicians to dinner and on vacations.

Force Congress to work securely from their respective state houses (make the lobbyists travel if they want to influence) and simplify the tax code (a recommendation of the President's Simpson-Bowles commission which only the GOP has embraced) and you'll go a long way to limit influence.

So...Morpheus was right?

~scans nanoparticle~
"We've got him."

A business called "BT Wholesale / aka OpenReach"

Actually, BT Wholesale is a separate unit from Openreach. Openreach manages the 'final mile' services: all the copper wire, the local exchange buildings, and some but not all of the equipment in there. A few UK ISPs build their services on top of Openreach's products directly: TalkTalk and Sky, for example, went and installed their own DSLAMs in those exchange buildings, paying Openreach to connect the copper wires to them. BT Wholesale also takes those Openreach products, adds in their own national backbone and offers a service to other ISPs: they'll install a fast fibre backbone link to the ISP's premises/facilities, and connect the customers through that to the ISP.

This can cause problems; my own ISP is a BT Wholesale customer, so when I had a fault earlier this year they had to report it to BT Wholesale, who passed it on to Openreach to deal with. Openreach came out and tested their bit - my phone line, and the VDSL equipment on each end - and found nothing wrong there, so closed the fault. After six visits, BT Wholesale (or rather, BT TSOps and the Adhara Ops team at Adastral Park, where the fault got escalated to in the end) eventually found the problem was on their own backbone (a faulty router was corrupting traffic between certain IP addresses - one of which happened to be a core router at my ISP).

I agree with the overall approach, though, having a separate and regulated entity run just the local loop portion. (In practice, Openreach is still a part of BT - hence I got a sales pitch from at least one of the six Openreach engineers about BT Retail being a better option. Against all the rules - Openreach are officially supposed to be neutral - but could that ever really happen in practice while they're still the same company?)

"Yes, that's just what the world needs: the rigorous code quality of PHP combined with the high performance and lightweight Java Virtual Machine."

Fortunately, I had already swallowed my coffee so the keyboard was safe.
However, your point is valid. Just because you can theoretically run something on something doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Anyway, I need to get back to writing a JVM in VBA. This is going to be the tits.

Have you checked out VueScan? Works with an amazing range of scanners.

Others, because it still works and they have no reason to waste money on a new machine. I know at least two such people. Me? I have WinXP Pro in a Xen DomU, just in case I need something windowsy. It's always on, and I connect to it using RDP over an SSH tunnel. Sure, I rarely use it, but it's there should I need it and it's a better solution than having a XP VM on each of my Linux machines.

At work I have a Win7 VM in VirtualBox, it is horribly, horribly slow. The XP VM on the same VirtualBox host, is snappy and quick.

XP might be dead, but it's makes a rather well preserved zombie.

Moreover what about Terms of Use for the other content? I have not read the LG ToU, but it could be something as simple as 'hey we need to pass this information on and we will store it on your TV for you so you can use Netflix, iPlayer, etc. but we won't receive or store anything.'

Without a copy of the agreement, it's hard to tell how nefarious this is.

Easy there, fella.
We all understand you've got the Ewok love.

You can have all the laws of physics explain how things move etc, but how will they ever explain this consciousness?

May I introduce you to the concept of "argument from ignorance". It might be well that it can be perfectly explained by natural laws, just you and me are not (yet) able to.

I can't even prove beyond all doubt that others experience this phenomenon and are conscious. And I can't prove my consciousness to others. I just have to take it by faith that these "imaginary friends" called "you" and "I" exist.

If you go the solipsism route, nothing is certain any more. Even those physical laws you say explain how things move (etc), become totally uncertain in a solipsistic worldview. After all, it could all be just your mind and nothing truly exists.

Of course, this espouses laissez-faire economics:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...

I suggested that. Cumbersome when working on big machines, apparently.