So the rich donate to museums and humanitarian aid causes because it benefits them and that makes them evil? Are we supposed to disregard the fact that their donations have made a difference to society as a whole? Altruism is overrated. I'd rather have good results which are attainable than totally pure motives which are a pipe dream.

I confess I do not understand what you're complaining about? I do not know how much profit they should have made, but if you're saying that they made £65m profit and they paid only £157k tax, that's an effective tax rate of 0.24%.

This does not condone Apple/Google/etc and the schemes they run. If Google are breaking the law, throw the book at them. If they are not, leave them alone. If you don't like the amount of tax they're paying, change the law. Absolutely no one be they individuals or corporations will pay more tax than is legally required.

How is that a smear? Stemcor paid £157k in tax on revenue of £2.1 billion. Given that corporate tax in the UK is 24% on profits, this means that Stemcor made a profit of £654k. A £654,000 profit on top of £2.1 billion in revenue is laughable and utterly unbelievable.

That's not an ultrabook. You pay a premium for small and lightweight, and a 17" is going to be cheaper and better spec'ed at the expense of portability.

11" is not enough real estate for development. Doesn't matter what resolution it is. I have a pair of 24" 1924x1200 monitors that I use for development and I find the real estate far more usable than the 1920x1200 15.6" laptop I had a few years ago.

It isn't expensive and I think it's in line with similar offerings from other manufacturers. If you know of any other ultrabook that sports similar specs (1080p screen, 256GB SSD are the specs that interest me) then please share as I avoid Dell like the plague.

You are comparing server Xeon chips to *mobile* i7 chips, hence the price and performance difference!

What sort of workload is concerned with stuffing a rack with 3000+ cores only to have those cores idle?

Besides, you don't need scientific computing workloads to keep the CPU busy. Isn't that what virtualization and over-provisioning is about?

I imagine that the power draw and corresponding cooling requirements of that rack stuffed with AMD cores will be significantly higher than the Intel one.

Why? You can set the size of the vector on initialisation and your vector is guaranteed to be deallocated in the event of an exception. The other benefit of vectors is that the underlying buffer gets freed when the vector goes out of scope. Can you guarantee that the code you're writing will not throw an exception (factor in 3rd party libraries too)? If not, you're going to have to catch the exception, delete your buffer then re-throw the exception. There is no reason *not* to use a vector in C++.

An ORM isn't a silver bullet. You still need to understand how your objects map onto the database or you're back to square one with a poorly performing database. In fact it's probably worse as you then need to figure out what the database *and* ORM are doing.

In your outraged diatribe, you fail to answer the original question to which I was responding to which is "Why should the safety net be labor free?"

Was my post hyperbolic? Yes it was. Do I agree with the principle of what you're saying, i.e. how a government handles the reality of people going hungry is a true test of it's character. Of course I do. However, none of that addresses the issue. "Why should the safety net be labor free?"

If you're going to start giving people money for doing nothing, they will keep on doing nothing. You get a benefits subculture, akin to what you have in some areas of the UK where multiple generations of a family are dependent on the government aid and none have seen work in years. If your motivation for running a social programme is how much money you'll save on prison expenses, you're doing it wrong. This was the point of the post I was replying to, which I merely extrapolated to the logical conclusion.

The safety net should be there as a temporary measure, to help people get back to work and to prevent them from starving while doing so. The key is to prevent it from being seen as a lifestyle choice, lest you get into the mess the UK is in. If it means that you need to work for the safety net, tough titties?

No, it isn't good for a company to hire overqualified people. Can you guess why?

If you're overqualified for a job, there's a high chance that you will get bored with it. As you're over qualified, you're able to get a better job somewhere else and you're most likely to do so the moment one appears. For a non-trivial job, it takes months for an employee to become proficient. I've seen 6 months as the number being bandied about. Regardless of the actual number, that means that an employee leaving is going to be very disruptive for the company as they will have to hire a replacement and then suffer the lack of productivity for X months while the new employee gets up to speed.

This surprised me when I moved from interviewee to interviewer. Being overqualified doesn't mean that employers will be falling over themselves to employ you.

If that's going to be your argument, why not argue that it's cheaper to put a bullet through them than it is to pay them to keep out of trouble, which is in turn cheaper than locking them away in prison? After all, what you're saying is that they're effectively holding you to ransom.

"Gimme money or I'll start causing trouble."

This is the only game I'm playing at the moment. It rocks, but it's sadly Windows only.