But there are two big problems with a USSAC Empire -

1) Of countries most likely to stab each other in the back, the US, Russia and China top the list.

2) Both the US and Russia/USSR more or less failed at containing Afghanistan. If they can't contain a forsaken country like that, I don't see what hope they have of conquering the entire planet, even in the highly unlikely event that they pooled their resources. They could probably get away with pushing Europe around, but I think the rest of the planet would give them a lot of trouble.

But where is a military large enough to crush all dissent planet wide going to come from? How would it be paid for?

Also, unlike Tibet with China, some of those factions have nukes (and lots of them). There's not much point in having dominion over a dead planet.

But you won't get a single planetary government - some faction (or even multiple factions) will break out and try to screw over the rest.

They can't even manage to get regional government working - they don't have an ice cubes chance in hell at getting world government up and running.

England (and the rest of the UK) is not in the Eurozone. We're in the EU, but we do not use the euro.

My understanding is that Germany tends to take employee involvement more seriously (so you get works councils and the like) but people are generally on lower wages.

Doing what? OK, London is expensive as hell but at least there's stuff to do.

It's fairly easy, especially if you get a company formation company to handle most of the work. Basically, fill in a form on a web site, pay around 30 quid (last time I checked) and in a couple hours you'll have a limited company.

Pretty much everyone signs away their working time directive rights away in order to get employed.

They're working on it. Be patient.

You won't get an entire planet of high taxes - some countries will have low taxes to try and screw over other countries.

My previous employer had a non compete clause, but then they were an American company (though they waived it when they moved our dev jobs out of the UK and made us redundant). My current employer (which is British) doesn't, and I don't remember any British company that I worked for having one.

You could try an Allwinner A10 based tablet. Apparently they can be flashed with a version of Ubuntu

http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?6,8491

If they can be made to run Ubuntu, then they can be made to run Fedora. Not sure how well Gnome 3 runs on them though.

"Imagine if some of those 'self-driving cars' would use them."

If a self driving car was using the data from my Garmin GPS, then it would merrily drive me down single lane country roads (with high hedges on either side) at 60 mph instead of the nearby (though theoretically slower) main highway. That would be pretty much guaranteed to end up in disaster.

With OSM data (especially the tagging bit) it would be a lot easier for the self driving car to think twice before choosing those routes.

That's the point, really. M$ is a PC OS company trying to make phones.

I always think of them as a games company with a side line in developer tools, trying to make PC and Phone OSs and Office software.

I'm less than convinced by there being an upper limit to the amount of bitcoins that will ever be created. Look at Spain before the New World was founded - they didn't have enough money because they lacked enough precious metals so they had a terrible economy compared to places that did have an adequate money supply (like the middle east). It's hard to see how the bitcoin economy wouldn't eventually dry up, especially as there no new world to get more bitcoins from.