There are good reasons and bad reasons for hiring inexperienced programmers. The bad reason is that they're cheap and willing to put up with a lot of crap. The good reason is that they haven't picked up very many bad habits yet. It's usually easier to teach someone good habits than it is to persuade someone to unlearn bad ones. If you're willing to put in effort in terms of mentorship and training, and then make sure that your work environment encourages them to stick around so you reap the rewards, then hiring inexperienced programmer can be a good idea. I can think of a very small number of companies that do this, but they tend to do well. Of course, this requires that you also hire some good, experienced programmers to bootstrap the process...

NT 4 ran on MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha. The Alpha version included FX32!, which allowed you to run x86 binaries, in many cases faster than on any shipping x86 chip at the time. Very few places, however, actually needed 64-bit CPUs at the time, and so there wasn't much native code available. If there had been a demand for 64-bit Windows and no x86-64, I am certain Microsoft would have delivered something. Remember, .NET was originally conceived as a contingency plan for making Windows applications architecture-agnostic in case Intel failed to deliver with Itanium...

It also helped that the (region 2, at least) DVDs of Babylon 5 were cheap. At launch, play.com had each series for about £20. £100 for the whole set, spread over a few years (I think they released one series every 9 months) was a simple choice for anyone who enjoyed the series. They now sell the entire series (5 seasons) for £42 - £1/disk. In contrast, the original series of Star Trek is £41 (for 3 seasons, 23 disks) for £42, and TNG is £111 (7 seasons, 49 disks), although you can get them for about £70 if you buy one season at a time. I was actually quite surprised by the TNG prices, as they were about £35/season last time I looked - at launch they were almost twice the price of B5. The BBC seemed to be having a laugh when they released Blake's 7 on DVD - something like £2.50/episode (I remember paying about £6/episode to get about half of them on VHS as a teenager, but it still felt overpriced).

I disagree. I want to watch enjoyable and entertaining shows. Writers, producers, and actors want to produce things that they enjoy working on and they want to get paid. There are two possible business models:

• Studios produce something I want to watch
• I pay them money.

Or:

• Studios produce something
• TV networks buy it
• TV networks sell advertising space on it to cover their costs
• I (possibly) buy something that's advertised on it, which justifies the purchase of advertising, which justifies the show.

Now, from the perspective of a studio, do you think the business model with zero or two intermediaries between the people who want their product and them makes more sense? Which is more likely to result in long-term funding for their project?

I may have an exciting investment opportunity for you.

The most amusing part of this argument is that the laws against holocaust denial in Germany date back to the time when the USA was running the country (or, at least, the part of the country that this law is inherited from).

1,000 for one hour, 500 for two hours, 250 for four hours, and so on.

Let's just look at that 3.7 billion figure for 2006. I couldn't find a figure for 2006, but in 2010 nuclear power accounted for 22.4% of the total electricity consumption in Germany. I couldn't find the 2010 figure for electricity consumption, but in 2008 it was 544,500,000MWh, and I doubt it's decreased since then so I'll use that figure. That works out at 121,968,000MWh of nuclear power consumed. So, 3.7 billion Euros subsidising 122 billion kWh of electricity, works out at about 3.3 eurocents per kWh. Put like that, it doesn't seem too unreasonable - it's an amount that could be lost in the noise of fluctuating electricity prices over the past few years if it were not subsidised.

A couple of car companies have demonstrated plug-in electric cars that can be used for electricity storage and power your house while sitting plugged in. If every household has an electric car and 20% of them are plugged in at any time, 50% plugged in at night, then that would go a long way towards helping even out the difference between supply and demand.

Other companies do build better machines for a premium price, but it doesn't work as well because they're competing in a commodity market. Most people who buy Macs want to run OS X. They have a clear choice of cheap(er) or pro lines. In some ways, the commodity models are intentionally crippled to make the decision easier (fewer people are on the line, because there's a fairly big gap between the capabilities of the two lines). With other manufacturers, the average consumer plans on running Windows, and can find another machine with the same checklist of features that will do exactly the same thing but at a lower price.