Most often, it's the people who either need A Cause to get elected, or want to use a particular mob cry to funnel money to businesses in their constituency and get kickbacks (sorry, campaign contributions). The old hereditary House of Lords (before they abolished most of them and stuffed the house with Labour cronies followed by Tory cronies) had the advantage that, aside from a few issues like inheritance tax and fox hunting, the members didn't really have much of a vested interest in anything. If you watched the debates, the contrast between the two houses was astonishing. The Commons was full of people trying to score points against the other party, the Lords was almost empty, but those there were having an intelligent debate on the issues in the legislation.

I think it's unfair to characterise UKIP as racist. Racism is an opinion, and opinions lead to policies. As such, it has no place in the UKIP agenda.

Really, the only way of fixing this is to have time-outs for politicians. If you propose something completely obnoxious, then you just have to go and sit in a corner and have no part in legislative discussions for the next year.

OpenVMS has run on Itanium since Itanium was launched. This isn't a port to a new OS, it's just updating the existing support for the newer chips.

The x86 port story is quite funny though. The 80386 launched with four protection rings specifically to make porting VMS from VAX easy. DEC never did the port (or, if they did, never released it publicly) and instead designed their own chip, the Alpha as the successor to the VAX. The Alpha just had two protection rings, which required a little bit of restructuring of the VMS design. Now, x86-64 has only two protection rings (unless you count HVM and SMC modes as rings), and is being considered as a porting target for VMS...

The authors don't pay ACM to host it and generally do retain copyright.

Are you really that obtuse? A marketplace that someone is saying is large is significantly smaller than a single company that sells products in that market. Your argument is equivalent to saying 'this big shop has a huge profit and sells thousands of products!' and then mocking people who point out that there are individual suppliers of single products in that shop that have an order of magnitude higher profit nationwide than the total profit from all sales in the shop.

T-Mobile is aware of their shortcomings: http://explore.t-mobile.com/test-drive-free-trial

T-Mobile has been making a huge push in Voice over LTE (VoLTE) on the 700 MHz band
nd I imagine that as everyone switches over, it won't matter which carrier you have,
since eventually you'll be able to roam on any network.

It does me no good to read stuff I can't share.

Communications of the ACM has changed a lot over the last few years. They're trying to make it a lot more relevant and also raise the impact. This means that the Practitioners section is now managed by the team behind ACM Queue and contains stuff that people doing exciting things in industry are doing and the rest has a higher standard of peer review. The Research Highlights section often points to papers that I want to read. Most of the top-tier conferences and journals for computer science are ACM-sponsored.

You shouldn't.
Any system based on trust will be abused.

The ACM is pretty good about open access. Every author can use their 'author-izer' service to create links that check the referrer but give free access to the papers, so if you can't get free access to an ACM-published paper from the author's web site, then complain to them, not to the ACM.

They do pay developers, but they pay them quite a lot less than the purchase price. The logic is that they'll get a load more downloads. That makes sense, as I've downloaded several things for free that I'd never pay for and a few that I've only run for 5-10 minutes and never touched again.

Let's not. Let's compare the mobile app market to one company. The mobile app market has a number of small upstart developers making $0.99 at a time, but it also includes companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and a large number of software houses that are 20-40 years old, several of which have been on the receiving end of antitrust lawsuits.

This is, unfortunately, the case with a number of funding bodies in academia. For example, DARPA won't pay for my membership, but will pay for the conference. My institution decided to pay for membership out of a different pot of money that doesn't have these restrictions, which ends up with a saving of a few hundred dollars on one account and a cost of a hundred dollars on another.

Ah, you're in the USA? Here, most people have pre-pay plans (being locked into a contract is generally seen as negative, unless it comes with some really good deals) and so get the phone that they bought along with their SIM and then hang onto it until it breaks or someone gives them a new one. I don't think I know anyone who pays close to $40/month on a phone bill (a fifth to a tenth of that is common and it's hard for a contract that comes with a new phone to be that cheap). At that price, I'd probably do without a mobile.