The way you pose your question is sounds like "Why does software developers like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg get to make billions of dollars and be set for life? It's unfair, I as a plumber can't do that so it's only fair that I pirate everything I come across, particularly everything that says Microsoft on it." Star actors hit the lottery jackpot, that's why. Even in big Hollywood productions most the people are not getting paid millions. For example the LotR production employed 2400 people, of course two of them was Elijah Wood and Peter Jackson but most of them wasn't even on camera and most of the rest nameless extras on completely ordinary salaries, just like there's thousands of Microsoft developers working for ordinary pay. Pretending all actors are as rich as Elijah Wood is as stupid as pretending all software developers are as rich as Zuckerberg.

You do realize most of us would still have the PC for gaming and surfing and coding and whatever else we do right? So the only extra cost I had was the HDMI cable. It's one device less so less cable clutter, it's less shelf waste - I have a collection of discs and they're all collcting dust. And I can put it on my laptop or iphone or ipad, I can easily have a backup, browsing a folder is easier than searching through discs. I'm not going to make a mountain out of a mole hill but in an ideal world I'd still pick having my movie collection on a PC.

It wasn't exactly atheist movements being persecuted, various minority/fringe religious groups were persecuted and fled to a country where they could make their own little wacky religious community. They weren't trying to get away from religion, just the dominant one in the country they left. Not sure why you'd think otherwise, the Bible Belt is far more religious than any area I know of in Europe. Oh maybe not in the Christianity statistics, but in the number of people that truly are deeply religious. Here in Norway almost 80% are technically in the state church and get counted as Christian, but only about 2% visit church weekly and 12% for Christmas. To most people church is a place for ceremonies like baptism, confirmation, marriage, funeral and the occasional memorial service with a dash of religion.

True, but those systematic flaws to would be there every year. So unless there's some reason to believe people would lie more today than they did before then that the poll hasn't changed since 1982 probably means people's real opinions haven't changed either. That is to say, 30 years of science and evidence detailing the evolutionary process means absolutely nothing to them. Extrapolation is of course always dubious but I suspect that holds true both forwards and backwards in time, that is nothing we've done have changed their minds and nothing will.

Well sure, if you first decide what staff and infrastructure you have then decide what business you want to be in but most companies do it the other way around. To take an example from the IT industry that's maybe more relevant, AMD used to run the own fabs. Then they spun off GloFo and now they've divested themselves of it and become a fabless company because they decided designing CPUs is what their core business is while they could buy processing time from TSMC. It's actually quite common that businesses do this, saying we don't want to do this ourselves anymore, lay off, spin off or sell the business then hire that service back in from the open market.

Your emergency medical information does not change much really, we're not talking about your journal. Epilepsy, diabetes, allergies, heart condition, hemophilia and conditions like that are what an emergency paramedic needs to know, the rest not so much.

Sure because they made an economic structure (the euro) without the political structure (a common economic policy) so if they want a United States of Europe all they have to do is add a federal government. But Europe doesn't want that, being English or French or German isn't the same as being a Californian or Texan or New Yorker. They're not just different states, they're different countries. "I'm European" doesn't mean the same as "I'm American" and most likely never will. If you try forcing them together with a top-heavy government you'll only end up with a mish-mash country like the USSR or Yugoslavia that'll fall apart violently. Maybe if you took it one area by another then in a hundred years and I'm sure that's what they thought when they introduced the euro, but we're not there today. And particularly not now under these circumstances, it'd be like sewing up a poisoned wound. If things do come to a collapse now they need to back off and try again in a better way, not rush it and hope a central government will fix everything.

The euro may or may not collapse but the EU will survive in some form or the other, there's been far too many positive gains by being a 500 million people market rather than 27 countries with their own odd rules. Even very worst case I suspect the southern countries get kicked out/leave and the northern/eastern countries stay. There are after all despite the PIIGGS over 20 countries who haven't fucked their economy. Besides, it's not like they could turn this around if they just paid attention to it. Right now if they increase taxes and impose cutbacks their economy tanks more and they get less taxes and more people on unemployment. If they decrease taxes to kick start the economy their public deficit goes to hell and the markets shut them down. Right now they're at the bottom of a deep, deep pit and only has to sit still and hope the world economy recovers so they're able to climb out. Meanwhile they might as well reject bullshit like ACTA.

They've done 111 Gbps on a single channel in the lab, but yes "only" 40 Gbps is more likely but I can live with that. Normally I can reach 5-6 MB/s actual transfer rates on my 60 Mbps fiber so it can't be that oversubscribed, I suspect the backbone hookup is far more than a OC-12. I could get 400 Mbps for about $1000/month, 1000 Mbps is available at "call us" prices so it's technically possible to get something ridiculously fast already.

Prices here in Norway:
Uncapped 5 Mbps ADSL: Around $50
Uncapped 60/60 fiber: Around $90

Okay quite a bit more than you're paying but Norway is in general an extremely expensive country overall, an average full time salary is $75k so by our standards it's cheap. And I once downloaded a 500GB torrent, it really is uncapped. And this country has a population density of 13/km^2 as opposed to India with 368/km^2, delivering broadband there should be much much cheaper. I honestly wouldn't worry it seems mostly like a US problem, all of Europe is constantly upgrading. For example here's from an article I recently read on Britain:

Oh and they'll also triple top speed from 100 Mbps to 300 Mbps. Any new apartment block or any new housing field is wired with fiber and it's being retrofitted to a lot of old housing too. It's not a question of whether it's the future, but how long it'll take.

4700 Mbit/s = 4.7 Gbit/s, how's that a record? The Gathering here in Norway had a 200 Gbit/s Internet Connection, topping Dreamhack in Sweden's 120 Gbit/s. Maybe it's some silly 4.7 Gbit over cable, but that's like the wold's fastest subcompact. And for all of us that have fiber to the home, yeah we know it's just what equipment you put on both ends. The cable itself could probably pull 100 Gbit/s with the right equipment.

Same with a lot of computer and electronics repair, in the old days they actually repaired them like replacing a bad chip or capacitor or welded a bad connection. Then they were replacing whole cards instead of components and eventually mostly replaced the whole box. They went from highly skilled jobs to simple manual labor to glorified delivery boys. It doesn't even matter if they are repairable, it just isn't worth a skilled person's time to look at cheap, small electronics anymore. Even warranty repairs are becoming more and more warranty replacements, it's not worth it to fix one item compared to increasing the capacity of the production line to produce some replacements.

By that logic, you'd never need anything like suppliers, partners or subcontractors, it'd be cheaper to do everything yourself right down to making the PC all the way from mining silicates. Supporting your basic desktop is not something unique to your company and there's typically economics of scale. I doubt you need exactly twice the IT staff to double from 200 to 400 users. For an outsourcing company that might be increasing the desktops under management from 10,200 to 10,400 instead, they can do it for less because of economics of scale.

Just to take one very obvious example of non-core activity at least here in Norway a lot of the big companies use one of the same two-three big cafeteria operators. Why? Bigger quantities of food both in purchasing and in preparation, better redundancy in kitchens and serving staff and all the overhead is spread across more customers. By far most companies would prefer to simply hire in a company that's specialized on doing exactly that if there's a reasonable number of suppliers they could switch between. When to take the total cost of doing it in house, it just isn't worth it to most companies.

That's fine if your patent is a full end-user product. But say I invent a new kind of spark plug for your car, it won't come into production until you get a major contract. If nobody jumps at the idea, are you going to lose it instantly? Is it good enough if I have a prototype? Then the patent trolls would just collect prototypes like they collect their patents, with no genuine attempt to sell the prototype. Very quickly you can end up in a situation where the only ones who can put patents into production are those who already are incumbents in the industry already.

Not to mention that regardless of what certain socialists seem to think, there should be wage differences. If you're smart and you work hard, then of course you should make more than one that's a stupid slacker. "From each according to ability, to each according to his need" says that if that's all you had the ability to do you're good no matter if it in absolute terms was much less. Fuck that, if he can produce so little then so should I. If you want to be the brain surgeon instead of the burger flipper, go for it. But if you can't make it I'm not sorry the burger flipper earns less. The way they define relative poverty there's no way that it could or should be eliminated.