Just out-source the control of them to teenagers who think they're playing flight sim. End of ethical problem.

That's how these things work, right?
Bonus points if you can have the teenagers who are unknowingly piloting it in the country you are attacking!

Not played GTA5 yet, just 4.
I find it ever amazing that what you think is most unacceptable - or at least the example you choose - is not the murder or the general violence, or the drugs or the rape, but the soft core porn.
Now I will accept the argument that it's the attitude around that soft core porn that is pernicious and corrupting - that women are sex objects to be used and then discarded - but I cannot accept that a strip club is the worst thing in that game.
Why does a film showing people shooting each other get a PG while you still can't yet have a fully naked man in a sexual situation in mainstream entertainment. Seriously? Which one do you think is actually the more dangerous idea of acceptable behaviour?

Just to play devil's advocate, solar may be more expensive, but where does that money go? It doesn't just evaporate, it goes back into the economy somewhere providing more jobs and more demand. Assuming Germany is buying panels it produces itself, then the increased cost of electricity is met by the jobs needed to make and install these panels. As opposed to fossil fuels which would likely be imported and likely creating no new jobs except vanity projects somewhere in the middle east.
So although the end user sees a hike in electricity prices they could also see lower unemployment, crime, better education etc as a result of all this extra industry needed. Sure it requires big subsidies, but so do all other forms of energy production.

I obviously don't have the figures to prove it but given that Germany is currently bankrolling most of Europe implies that on average its overall economic policy is good. In the past countries have fuelled boom times by resource exploitation (Thatcher in the 80s for example with north sea oil) so perhaps you have Germany doing something weird here.

Of course all this theory falls down if the solar panels are being made in China and installed by Polish immigrant workers who are sending all their spare cash home. But then I have no explanation for Germany's current economic boom.

I can see why slashdotters don't read the article if the article claims things like whales are invertebrates ;-)

Erm the pi is about as powerful as a desktop from 2003. Are you saying we did nothing useful before then?

Surely for the the issue isn't assembly vs everything else it's demonstrating the ability to use a range of language philosophies, There are lots of languages under the sun and certainly I'd be worried about someone who always had garbage collection at their beck and call if I was trying to implement any system with real time requirements or involved lots of heavy lifting of data. However isn't there a worry someone can get too stuck in the nuts and bots. I've seen so many examples of code where someone has done something in hundreds of lines of C for something that would take 5 lines of perl, (and before you say the implementation they used would make the C slower)

So if a CV turned up for someone who had no assembly experience but had experience in C, Perl, Ruby, Occam, Lisp. I'm fairly sure if they would have a grasp of the fundamentals, much more than someone who just had x86 assembler and C++.

How many people today can function without a compiler?
How many welders can function without a foundry to produce the iron for them?
How many people can function without farms to grow their food for them.
How many farms these days can function without computers and iron tools?

It's called civilisation, we build on top of the work of others and do ever greater things. If everyone in all of life had to know how to do everything we wouldn;t get very much done.

Don't be silly, that would imply the UK actually made something these days, These days we offer services

That's the thing, and "silicon roundabout" and "financial services".

(disclaimer) I work as an engineer in the UK so no need to shout at me

You're making a classic mistake there. When matter gets converted into energy gravitation doesn't care. It cares about the total mass-energy. Which doesn't change. So while the emitted photons do not have mass they do have energy which of course has a mass equivalent.
In a closed system* even if there are nuclear reactions taking place the mass-energy of the system does not change.
*to actually do this you'd have to contain all the mass and photons and neutrinos, which we don't know how to do, but the point stands...

Why is it so hard to imagine that there is a particle that interacts with gravity but not electromagnetically? That's really what this comes down to.
Remember you only touch that key on the keyboard because of photon interactions.
Are you happy with the existence of Neutrinos? These particles that barely interact with normal matter or do you think they are purely there to balance formulas too? (okay that's why they were originally there but not anymore)

Not to disagree with your point, but at least WebMD would tell you that you need drugs rather than the faith healer down the road. That might then get you to do something to get those drugs (either go to the next town for them, or try and get social changes so that you have better access to them for the next time). As things stand without the knowledge they may go to that faith healer and then blame the failure on God's will instead of things they might be able to change in their society.
Knowledge is always the first step.

Why?
Speaking as a citizen/subject of a western democracy, things are pretty good at the moment. Most laws work, most things work, it's the new stuff they keep proposing that sucks.
The problem is that we have governments with that majority you like the idea of and they keep changing the laws and are making things worse. If they spent more time arguing with each other so that only the really really good laws made it while all the stupid laws got tied up in knots then i believe things woiuld get even better.
Or you go the other extreme and have a dictator who at least gets things done and has a clear vision removing inefficiencies. But let's not go there because I might be one of those inefficiencies (s)he wants removed.

Not to mention the fact that a time travelling immortal would eventually become every person in the universe, then compose all mass of the universe then...

He has to die some time!

Many WLAN chipsets today use SDR(software defined radio), so most of the design is just a big DSP - so more clock speed = more complex algos. Alternatively since you'd likely have multiple channels in operation each of which probably has its own DSP by going faster you could put multiple channels onto a single DSP so save silicon area.
Or if you had hardened part of the algos into custom logic you could ease the memory latency requirements/move the hardened parts into DSP to save area.
Or move parts of the design that had to use onboard memories to use external memory to save area.

Lots of options and that's without me knowing the details of the design in question. As a general rule your 3 limits in a design like this are process speed, available area and external memory bandwidth; you're always at the limit for all 3 in any design, if you're not then you're wasting money

No, the clock signal needs to time between two connecting flip flops nothing more. It's extremely common (i.e. it's about 5% of my job) to have to change the design in order to achieve this local clocking requirement.
That's without having multiple asynchronous clocks on a single chip.
Or asynchronous logic

Even when you need to do very long paths it's called a clock tree for a reason you can have a 1GHz clock that takes several ns to get from its source PLL to its destination flop because the delay through the tree to all the leaf nodes is matched. that is a 1ns period clock can take 4ns to get from the source to the destination, and that's all fine because as long as it's the same 4ns...
  Now things get harder when different bits of the chip have silicon that runs at different speeds so you can't balance the tree like you'd like to, but that's what makes this job interesting ;-)