Most likely yes. Well, you could operate them over short distances on unlicensed bands, but to operate a mobile carrier (in most of the world) you need to buy a license for some spectrum. In the US, these didn't come with strings attached, so you ended up with some CDMA carriers and some GSM carriers, with no interoperability. In most of Europe, they came with a requirement to deploy GSM. Similar conditions were applied for 3G frequencies. In the UK, companies had to request regulator approval to repurpose their existing frequencies to new technologies. This was mostly granted (as long as it was for industry standard protocols). I don't know what LTE coverage is like, but I've not had a problem with getting an HPSA in any parts of the UK that I've tried, so I believe that it works and I know that any phone I buy will work with any carrier. Especially now, when spending over £100 on a smartphone is fairly common, knowing that doing so doesn't lock you in to a specific carrier is valuable.

I'd have listed TalkTalk as the third large ISP, since they're the company that does the most LLU work. They install their own equipment at exchanges and only use BT for backhaul. There are quite a few smaller LLU operators, but BT dragged its heels to delay LLU rollout until they'd largely cemented their monopoly.

The problem with the split of BT retail and wholesale units is that there's no requirement for BT retail to make a profit. The wholesale part has to sell to BT retail at the same price that they sell to everyone else, but the retail division is able to operate at a loss and be bailed out by the rest of the company...

Bullshit. They shipped Classic support right up until the last PowerPC release (10.5, 10 years after the first Rhapsody releases), years after pretty much every Mac user was running OS X-only applications. Try talking to some people who work at Apple or worked at Transitive some time about the dropping of Rosetta. Apple tried to rush a license agreement through when IBM announced that they'd buy Transitive, but were too late.

People are much more willing to put up with a 200 mile range on a car if it only takes them a 2-minute stop to recharge. If it takes an overnight charge, then that's a deal-breaker for anyone who might want to make long trips.

The important issue is the ratio between investors and speculators. You need speculators in the market to provide liquidity, but you don't want too many because liquidity is the positive spin on volatility. If you have too high a ratio of speculation to investment then the market becomes completely decoupled from the thing it's trying to represent and it becomes a dangerous place for investors (and companies) because they can lose all of their money as a result of something completely unrelated to the actual profitability of the company. If you have too few speculators, then it becomes difficult to buy and sell shares.

The problem with HFT is not really HFT itself, it's that it magnifies the effects of speculators on the market, meaning that you need far fewer speculators with far less capital to have a disproportionate effect on the functioning of the market.

Most ISPs don't change your IP on a regular basis anyway, so IP-based tracking narrows you down to a residential connection already. IPv6 is actually better in this regard because most implementation (yes, including Windows) let you keep a single static IP (or more than one) that you use for publicly advertised services but then regularly cycle IPs for outbound connections. This is something that most network stacks let you tune, but at the extreme case you can use a new IP for every new outbound connection (I think the default is a new one every 2 hours for most systems). This doesn't help much if you're the only user on a residential connection, but it makes tracking a lot harder if that's on something like a university campus.

That was fixed, what, five years ago? Please find a new troll.

The JVM nearly solves a problem that was solved by the IBM/360 in 1960? That's... great.

The problem was solved by making the ISA independent of the microarchitecture. That wasn't just solved, it was an industry-wide convention by the time Java appeared.

A candidate in the primaries had public speaking coaching?!?! And then had more when he was running for President?!? That's borderline unconstitutional, quick someone alert the press!

Even before that, my carrier has started allowing included minutes (and texts and data) to be used in several other countries without incurring a roaming charge. The EU is just nudging it along a bit. The smarter carriers know that roaming charges just piss off their customers and they're running out of space to cut prices for domestic calls so need something else to wave as proof that they're cheaper than the competition.

Why try to enforce it on the supply side when you can do it on the demand side. Require that all software that your organisation purchases be under an open source license. That way, you have the rights to go to any company you like for extended support. There are lots of options, ranging from in-house support through small businesses with a dozen or so coders up to behemoths like IBM.

Apple would have continued to ship Rosetta, but IBM bought Transitive (from whom it was licensed) and was still annoyed at the publicity that Apple had given them in the switch from PowerPC to Intel, so decided to return the favour and refused to license Rosetta for a new version of OS X. Apple tried to spin this in a positive way ('look how hip we are, stopping supporting that old crap!') but it didn't really work.

I only stopped using a 1200MHz P3 a couple of years ago. It was nice because it was the newest machine I owned that you could get deterministic CPU timing results out of. Building LLVM on it was a pain (over an hour), but 4 of them would be quite reasonable. My NAS / media centre box is currently using an AMD E-350, which is a dual-core 1.6GHz part - I think this would probably be faster. If it has a well-supported GPU and a decent collection of SATA ports, I might be tempted...

Yes they do. But hardly anyone makes ARM chips that draw 5W (nVidia is the only one that comes to mind). Most are 1-2W under load, with the slower ones closer to 250mW.

We're just about to open source our MIPS IV implementation (I'll post something to Slashdot when it's done - lots of legal paperwork for creating a community interest company to coordinate it and so on). It's written in Bluespec, which is a high-level HDL and very easy to modify (we've been setting an exercise to replace the branch predictor[1] in it to students for a couple of years now and they're able to in a couple of hours and get the required prediction rates).

MIPS IV is nice, because it's a 64-bit ISA that's over 20 years old (the magic number for patents). FreeBSD 10 runs on it out of the box with the BERI kernel config on the Altera DE4 boards and in simulation and 10.1 should include a kernel config for the NetFPGA 10G board. These boards are pretty expensive, but we have a couple of configurations that will let it run on smaller FPGAs. Removing the FPU makes it a lot smaller and you can also build a microcontroller variant (simple static branch predictor, no MMU) that's even smaller. The simulator is slow, but just about useable (it takes about an hour to boot to single user mode, but it's enough for testing).

It's only in the last couple of years that FPGAs have become interesting for this kind of thing. There are a few high-level HDLs appearing, because hardware is sufficiently complex that the traditional approach of throwing it all away and starting again every CPU revision is increasingly impractical. The devices themselves are now fast enough that they're useable for prototyping and getting a reasonable feel for behaviour. We can get 100-200MHz with 4 cores in a single FPGA with the latest generation - not competitive with an ASIC, but fast enough that you can actually use them. I gave a demo that ended up being more compelling than I expected because I was showing people some things running on the UART console and I'd left the network cable connected so the screen kept being spammed with messages about invalid ssh connection attempts. Nothing I was doing said 'this is a real computer' quite as much as people on the Internet trying to attack it...