Switzerland signs [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] tax convention
  October 15, 2013

Once this treaty gets passed through the Swiss legislature, their bank secrecy will become a thing of the past.

Give it a few weeks and I bet we'll see a story, sourced from Snowden, about how Switzerland helped the US spy on countries that it doesn't have any diplomatic relations with.

Caring about what goes in what filesystem is neck-beardy.

Who mounts /var noexec by default? How many people have already dispensed with a separate /var ?

We don't have to let private corporations own infrastructure installed through easements.
A government chartered non-profit corporation has all of the pros and less of the cons.

There's no reason why the city couldn't reclaim AT&T's telephone poles at market rate, then lease it back to AT&T and anyone else that wasn't to use 'em..

>> about the only parts that haven't happened yet are Scottish Independence.... .... Actually there is a referendum on Scottish independence next year, although polls at the moment suggest around only 35% of the Scottish population want to be independent.

Something is wrong with the entire system when a financial company is awarded a patent.

You're kidding, right? Google - home of the cloud - is going to worry about local storage limits on drone machines. And...again...drone machines - onboard video is probably 4x as fast as they need it to be for nearly all conditions. They've rolled out fiber in an entire town; I'm going to guess that they've got a pretty speedy wireless system on campus.

Apple hardware is very limited if (a) you're looking for a bargain and aren't on a corporate buying plan, or if you're a hardcore gamer, or if you are running massive analysis software, or you are locked into industry software packages which are platform locked. None of that is an issue for desk machines at Google.

I'm not, in any way an Apple fan, but pretty much none of the problems you state are of any consequence to their usage profile.

Who wins with the Internet of Things? Corporations and Governments. If you're not a hobbyist, why do you need a *BSD-powered toaster?

Exactly what I was thinking too

Are you talking about BMWs?
BMW's M button is just their version of the sport mode/button in most other cars.
No M button or Sport mode in any car I know of will ever lock brakes up.

>> doing burnouts doesn't make you a moron

In my opinion it does. Also if you're doing donuts properly you're not even touching the brakes.

I just assumed that anyone writing Java code would use Eclipse as their first choice. (But I'm not an expert Java coder.) Is there some reason to want to use KDevelop rather than Eclipse when coding Java?

They did NOT say that the goal was to realize a loss, just that profit was not the reason for the acquisition.

It should be noted that the loss realized is probably less than the gross federal revenue of the direct GM employees and supply contractors (parts and services) during that time, not including second tier effects like money spent by the employees or default losses on mortgages owned by fannie/freddy. (figure 200,000 direct and 200,000 immediate contract workers, $60k avg at 10% effective gross tax rate over 5 years = $12B)

I could be wrong, but I suspect that even if you had the means to teach for free, you'd find most public school systems to be so depressing you'd quite within two years.

It seems that because of (a) students who don't want to be there, (b) students whose parents require nothing of them, and (c) the ravages of No Child Left Behind, very little actual teaching gets done in public schools.