Reading the above, I am *so* glad I live in a country with free healthcare for all.

Sure, it's paid for by my taxes, and sure maybe that means my taxes are a bit higher than yours, but:

1. If I lose my job and have no income, I'll still be covered.
2. If I get sick and need expensive medical assistance, I won't be hit with higher premiums or be uninsurable for any conditions.
3. If I'm in an accident and can't help myself my family won't need to dig through my files to find my insurance papers or pay up-front for anything.
4. If I feel unwell, I can make a judgement about seeing a doctor based on how I feel, not on whether I can afford it.

I honestly can't see how anyone who can make a sane argument against that.

Yep, there are issues -- some people do abuse the system -- but I'd rather have that than the alternatives any day of the week.

That was always the case with blackberry. Their core market always was business users, and they did pretty well out of it.

I'm sure they're very keen to eat some of Apple's consumer market share too, but don't confuse a lack of consumer sales with a lack of sales in general. In fact, when it comes to making a profit out of users, business users are a much better prospect than consumers, so if blackberries are still the phone you get issued at work, as you suggest, then BB should be laughing.

While on holiday recently (translation: that's "vacation" for all you Americans), my brother-in-law lent me his copy of T3 magazine.

T3 is a consumer-level technology magazine. A gadget mag for people who think they're a bit techie but are really just tech consumers.

I've not read T3 in years, and I wouldn't have actually bought a copy even then. But I actually found myself reading a lot of it. Not because it was talking about anything I didn't know about, but because it was presenting a significantly different perspective on things to the kind of web sites I normally visit. I was quite interesting to get a different perspective and see how the consumer market thinks about some of the devices on offer at the moment.

The reasons all this is relevant to this discussion are:

1. Asking about paper magazines to the Slashdot crowd is going to get a predictable response. But you'd be a fool if you think for a second that the Slashdot crowd is in any way representative of the wider public. Slashdot users do not read magazines any more, but other people do.

2. If my brother-in-law had been reading a T3 website instead of the magazine, it's virtually certain that I wouldn't have borrowed his copy; I'd have stuck with my own preferred sites. The internet is great at making all things available to all men... but most of us cocoon ourselves in our own little parts of the internet and very rarely venture out. We don't get that alternative perspective, and it leads to narrow mindedness and blinkered thinking.

Because the computer industry (and certainly the louder and more vocal parts of it) has a heavy bias of young excitable developers who are talented enough to create these things from scratch, and not experienced enough to think that others might have done similar things in the past.

Not to mention the most popular.

And the least corrupt.

....So I guess you weren't highly productive in that last half hour, then?

During WWII, the British rail network took a very heavy pounding from the German bombers. And yet, somehow it managed to continue providing the service of transporting goods around the country.

The reason was that it had excellent built-in redundancy. Multiple available routes between all the major destinations made it remarkably robust. Sure, some routes are quicker than others, but the ability to keep things moving even if two or three main lines were knocked out was critical.

So history shows your argument to be incorrect. Rail can be just as robust as roads when it comes to network reliability.

And in fact, your counter point that trucks can be routed onto any number of roads is also incorrect, as heavy vehicles can only go on roads that are suitably robust. You may look at the map and see a whole network of roads, but filter it down to the routes that could be used by significant number of trucks, and you'll see that in fact it wouldn't take nearly as many road blockages as you might think to severely affect the country's ability to transport goods.

Sadly the British rail cuts in the 1960s removed a lot of the "unnecessary" lines, which left the UK today with a much more efficient network, but one which would not survive a similar bombardment now.

And this points to the final part of the discussion: maintenance costs. Both rail and road networks require significant maintenance. Many will point to the roads as being cheaper in this respect, but in fact heavy trucks cause a lot of road damage. The main reason roads appear cheaper is because the cost is not direct, but the two are comparable. Subsidies and taxes also mask the real costs.

The real solution to the problem is to make the experimental features more obviously experimental.

It should be mandatory that a pre-standardised feature be disabled by default in the browser, and enabled via a preference setting for developers to try them out.

Most non-developer users would not bother to fiddle with these prefs, and thus the features would remain truly experimental until they were standardised.

Yes, this would mean that developers would get frustrated by stuff they want to do which is tantalisingly out of reach in terms of being able to use it for mainstream development. But on the flip side, I believe it would also act as an encouragement to all parties involved to get the features through the standardisation process at a decent speed (this has been a large part of the underlying cause of the problem, not the prefix policy itself).

It isn't just programming languages that have changed in the years since you changed career 10 years ago (or 30 if we start from when you first cut your programming teeth).

Back then, the concept of unit testing your code was unheard of outside of financial institutions (though I bet they didn't call it that back then), and the phrase "design patterns" would have made you think more of knitting than programming. (The actual practices described by the common design patterns have been around for ages, but the names given to them are relatively new and have quickly become part of developer jargon. You need to know them).

In short, whatever language you learn, try to also get a handle on some of the most current programming practices and the terminology around them.

Developing the infrastructure and technology to achieve the goal would provide you with a huge collateral resource. Don't under-estimate the money to be made from selling technology developed on the back of a bigger project. Even if the bigger project itself never actually comes to fruition, they could still make money from this.

Wow.

Now you've told me how brilliant it is, I feel compelled to go out immediately and watch every episode.

I never would have imagined there might be a brilliant comedian I'd never heard of in a foreign country. If only you'd told me sooner.

You say that, and yet..... I've never heard of him.

And I enjoy a good comedy show as much as anyone.

My guess is that he's pretty famous.... in the US, but completely obscure anywhere else.

(and yes, I know of Jerry Seinfeld, but I don't think I can remember the last time I actually saw him on TV)

Not if you also want an internet that maintains any kind of privacy.

Many terrorist groups routinely send bomb warnings when they have planted a bomb. During the troubles in Northern Ireland, the practice was so common that the IRA and the police had recognised code words they could use so that the police would know it was a real bomb rather than a hoax call.