To all the posters chuntering on about "what a waste of money" etc. to something that is actually inspiring and gets people interested in engineering and aerospace, consider this.

Let's invent a new unit of currency: the Iraq War Dollar. One Iraq War Dollar = the cost of the Iraq war, or $800 billion which is the Department of Defense's estimate of the direct costs.

Cost of the entire Apollo program: 16 Iraq War cents (in 2012 dollars)
Estimated cost of research needed to get to the first working fusion power plant: 10 Iraq War cents
Current cost estimate for Mars rover Curiosity: 1/3rd of an Iraq War cent
Entire NASA budget for 2012: Just over 2 Iraq War cents
Cost of the ISS for its entire lifetime: 19 Iraq War cents

Five huge engineering projects, that inspire people and push technology and hardly kill anyone - and we're not even up to half of one measly Iraq War Dollar.

On the other hand, my last computer monitor (a big 21 inch Trinitron) lasted 12+ years before it started going bad - I suspect it was bad capacitors (it had all the hallmarks), I didn't repair it because I wanted to upgrade to a higher resolution 16:9 LCD. (I don't know exactly how old it was, I bought it second hand about 11 years ago). I didn't have to do anything to that monitor the whole time I had it, it just kept going.

My Trinitron TV in my living room I bought new in 1993 and it's still working fine. It did get repaired once.

My grandfather's job was repairing TVs, and we usually got a free TV from him (an old rental set). It was always fairly old, but he repaired it and it worked. As a kid during the 80s, I had my home computer plugged into a valve based TV. Even the analogue stage was valves, it took about 30 seconds or so before you got sound, and another 30 seconds or so before the picture began to appear after turning the TV on.

We had one set that had both tubes and a couple of integrated circuits in it. I think we got rid of our last valve (tube) TV in the early 1990s when it finally expired for good.

The dumbness of some of these systems (specifically including the humans) can be staggering. No one thinks, they just accept the numbers at face value.

My dad used to work for B&Q (a home improvement/hardware store). The big bosses in head office look at the trends of how certain things sell and when, which is all very good. But the dumbass managers see in, say, May that there was a huge spike in sale for a right angled copper pipe coupling in one store. So the next May they order a huge ton of right angle copper pipe couplings because they excitedly think thers's some seasonal trend here at that particular store. Not that, say, a plumber had a.one off large last minute job and happened to need a one off purchase of these things...

The sovereign nation is the United Kingdom (England is just one part of the UK, which consists of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). England doesn't raise taxes, the United Kingdom does.

You are no longer subject to UK income taxes the very day you leave the country to live somewhere else. So yes, it is just the USA (and Eritrea) that taxes non resident citizens for income tax.

No, we're further along.

Saying "we're not even back to 1969" is like saying "We're still only at 1959" at news about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Sure, the 787 does pretty much the same thing as the original Boeing 707, but it moves more stuff for less money, and is a lot less expensive to maintain and a lot more refined. SpaceX's launcher is less expensive to maintain, moves stuff for less money and is more refined than what we had prior to 1969.

And SpaceX also cuts out the pork barrel spending, since SpaceX did all the specifications to make a space vehicle, not specifications to distribute work to various contractors in various politically favorable states, making things still more efficient.

You need to consider that these days people are starting to use HTTPS by default for things like Facebook. You won't be able to inspect the contents.

If it's scammers he is genuinely worried about, education will solve it, not monitoring (which will catch it too late, after the scam has already started).

"Adequately reading for technical jargon" actually comes before "adequate reading in general" if you're a native English speaker and the foreign text is on an IT subject. Certainly in Spanish, I could adequately read Spanish computer manuals before, say, a novel. Much of the idiom is neologisms imported from English, so if your native language is English you have a good head start already.

That's rubbish. The fly by wire system didn't prevent anything. The engines actually spooled up quicker than the numbers in the book said they should. The problem is basically the crew didn't add power until the tail was already dragging through the tree tops (which added a tremendous amount of drag, as well as distorting and damaging the aerodynamic tail surfaces). Any airliner of that size, fly by wire or not, would have crashed doing what that crew did - unless it was fitted with JATO rockets.

Not only were the engines not "unresponsive", they actually responded faster than their book values. He just painted himself into a corner.

This is the whole point of the GPL, so you don't take someone else's work, derive something off it, then distribute the derived product in a less free way. Your payment as such for using GPL software is that if you distribute something based on it (however small) you pay the community back by distributing your source.

If you don't want to do that, consider contacting the original author and working out a proprietary license deal, so the original author gets something (such as money) in lieu of the source code to something that extends his library. This is the GPL working as intended.

Why don't they make the loans only repayable when the income is greater than some amount?

Just download VLC already.