I have no idea how on earth you came to believe that, but it is not the reason.

If bandits had the strength of force not only to take a person against their will and keep any retaliation at bay, they would have had 10 seconds to check if the person was worth taking. You've made it sound like a single bandit would ride into a village and snatch someone on the street like a handbag hit-and-run.

The real reason women wear veils is that Muhammad, the 'prophet' and founder of Islam, commanded women to cover themselves. And the history around that command is amusing too. It was only after Muhammad was repeatedly nagged by one of his most devout followers, begging/demanding that women be forced to cover themselves, that the follower stalked Muhammad's wives going out into a field to relieve themselves, then he went around proclaiming how he had seen them do so. This was the final straw and was enough for Muhammad to finally 'receive' a divine revelation that Women needed to cover themselves.

To be quite honest, the entire religion of Islam is based on how Muhammad envisioned it, and Muhammad was no friend to women.
Before Islam, women could be rich and successful business owners and wear vibrant-colored clothing. After Islam, they couldn't leave the home without both covering up and being escorted by a husband or brother. Property rights were for men only, and in their court of law, a woman's testimony was worth less than half of a man's, meaning if it came to him vs her, he would always win.

I can go on endlessly about the history of women's rights under Islam, its a horror story, because women's rights and Islam is oxymoronic, and the sooner people understand that the sooner they'll understand how incompatible Islam is with modern values.

Nothing underperformed, except for the story

The only reason my friends wanted to watch it was because it was hyped up from the infinity war ending spoiler. We wanted to see as much as we could before endgame because it was going to be amazing. A sentiment shared by all my friends that hugely contributed to its success.

Then we saw how the movie was rubbish and forgot about it. Thankfully any actual interaction with Cpt Marvel in endgame was kept to a minimum.

I'm sorry, but when did movies that should be about heroes saving the world turn into movies of strong "heroic" women oppressing weak sexist men?

If it was released on its own merits with no attachment to endgame, Captain Marvel would have been just another flop that most of the other post endgame movies/series have suffered.

As someone who's done home email servers, webhosting, phones, the lot
The age of running web services from your home connection has passed.

If you try to run emails out of a home connection, either your ISP will block by default port 25 used for sending emails, or your ip address will be blacklisted by any and every spam filter system out there.
Even if you're ISP is good and unblocks you, you'll still likely hit some spam filters.

As for security, do you really want to go to the hassle of applying security updates and being aware of security vulnerabilities and mitigating them?
And when you get hit by a zero-day exploit, do you want to run the risk of your machine being used to infect other machines on your network. Do you want to invest in the technology and have the skill set to ensure that the system is segregated or firewalled off from the rest of the network?

And finally, understand that if you have such a machine on your premise, you can easily be tracked by a simple subpoena to your ISP. At which point any civil, let alone criminal investigation will effortlessly tie all actions/crimes your website is responsible for to you, the tech-head running it in your home.

Just get someone else to host your crap, its not worth the trouble to do it yourself..

When the state pays into the university for educating its citizens, its called socialism.
When university's do what they can to make easy money its called capitalism. But at least they are motivated.

Regardless of the value for money, the issue is that they are failing to deliver quality education.
Be it socialism or capitalism at fault, a company that fails to deliver on its promises should be held to account. This is the first step.

If all schools of all levels were held to account, perhaps the US education system wouldn't be such a failure. But that's a whole different discussion for a different day.

I'm not american, but i understand your constitution.

There is no mention of "self-defense" in the 2nd amendment.
It is implied that the right to bear arms is necessary for the security of the nation. But nothing mentioned or implied about the security of the individual, let alone self-defense.
It is also implied that those who have guns be disciplined "A well regulated Militia".

I see no reason why preventing a firearm from firing unless its near the owners watch is detrimental. It is little more than a safety lock located on the owner rather than on the gun.

At the very least, it should be a choice a buyer can make when buying a gun. I know if i had both children and guns in my home, i'd like the idea of that safety lock.

That is such a horrible view, made by an idealist rather than a realist.
When both choices are unacceptable, the only logical choice is to not vote.
Voting in someone you don't want in power, is explicitly giving your endorsement.

And "no right to complain".
Everyone has a right to complain and free speach, thats one of the best ways to get thing improved. Enforcing censorship against those who are dissatisfied with the elections is tyranny.

Ultimately the best thing for a democracy is a politically active and informed population.
A "Put up or shut up" attitude to poorly run elections is just immature and counter productive to a healthy democracy.

How about some perspective.

The assets are being sold from the NZ government, to mostly the NZ population. The money made is being used to keep debt repayment insurance low, and help pay for new health infrastructure like hospitals.

Mr Key was born in a state owned house, with a single parent. He wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but hes made it to be the prime minster of our country.

I believe its a wise choice for leader, that we pick someone who (despite the poor start in life,) manages to be successful in life. Electing someone who can't run their own business, to the largest business in the country, The Country itself, is a recipe for disaster (*cough*Bush*cough*)

In the 2+ terms his party been running the country, he has managed to bring our country from the brink of a debt that could never be repaid, into surplus, while dealing with a earthquakes that obliterated our 3rd Largest city, Christchurch.
It hasn't been easy, as hes cut all new funding resulting in a lot of job losses, but the results are speaking for themselves. We are now in surplus with one of the best outlooks on the future in all the oecd

If the opposition had their way, we'd be worse than australia, who despite having a booming mining sector, are predicting record deficits because they only know how to spend money.

NZ authorities have not destroyed a company.
The running operations were halted by US enforcement on US soil.

All NZ was involved with, was arresting Kim Docom, and freezing his personal NZ assets.
Even if our police force told the US to sod off, the US would still have seized the servers, and his company bank accounts, and the company would of faced all the problems that have halted its business. The only difference is that Dotcom would be free to travel and make business arrangements as he saw fit, with his personal finances located in NZ

Its easy to say that when you're outside of the system looking in.

Fact of the matter is that a console, or the odd perk for that matter doesn't make them free men. And in return for such access to perks, we can demand and expect good behaviour or other such tokens in return.

A prison exists to :
protect the people outside from the people inside
create a deterrent to crime by creating a visible punishment
rehabilitate the criminals so they will be less likely/willing to commit future acts of crime.

If access to an entertainment device helps better rehabilitate the inmates, then its worth looking into. Creating a prison that's so badarse that only the strongest survive, isn't going to provide any useful social skills or conditioning... Unless you're trying to create sardaukar troops.

I've liked, and still like Google, because they have a high sense of business ethic.

Did Microsoft or yahoo pull out of china when it was getting hacked?
Did Microsoft or yahoo contest china's censorship programs?
Does Microsoft, Yahoo, or Apple make exporting data/contacts you create on their platforms exportable should you wish to migrate away?
Does Microsoft, Yahoo, or Apple offer free api's, allowing 3rd parties to access and interface with their services and user's data?
Does Apple operate a store which is free to publish on?
Does Apple have a phone that is unlocked, easy to perform maintenance and connect to, and doesn't attempt to brick jailbroken phones each time a firmware update arrives?
How about how Google tries to protect the freedom of the internet, adding its weight to net neutrality, patent reform, and other legal issues that plague the future of IT.

"What happened to the Google that just had a cool search engine? Why is it taking advantage of search monopoly profits to either buy out or crush every competitor in every non-core market? Why do they talk about openness when their core business is based on a search and advertising engine that is not open source?"

Google grew, advertising is its key business and like all businesses it does what it can to protect its review stream. But its doing it in the most honest way a business can, buying out or just beating via prices.
Its not sending lawsuits with patent infringement shakedowns like every other big company out there.

As for openness, there is no reason, legal, ethical, or moral, that google should reveal their search engine source code. In fact the only thing that would do is improve search functionality of their competitors, and help link farms be more effective.

In summary.
Google is a saint compared to every other mainstream IT company out there.
It’s not perfect, but they actively try to be good AND profitable. It’s not an easy line to walk.
They wouldn’t be around long if they were as perfect as Op wants (supporting the competition, never buying in small companies, opening all software/engines to the public/competitors)... In that case they'd be the good and forgotten.

$6.5 Billion isn't small change.
And what would google gain by purchasing sun?

Open Office?
They have google docs

The Sun OS?
They have chrome

A dying mainframe business?

They'd gained Sun's Java i suppose, but then again, they already had a working java engine. Why break their existing java engine when it isn't broke.

I suspect that Sun's purchase was way overpriced, and purchased mostly as a way of aggressively killing and smothering (or in Google’s case extorting) competition.

5-10 years from now, once oracle has finished sucking the blood out, it'll be sold for a few hundred million.

And his reason for providing it free is because he considers it unethical to charge for power he collected "free".

I'll also add, doesn't surprise me that its a student spouting such idealism. I expect someone else is footing the bill for parts (the student's university springs to mind).

Its a lot harder to provide the service free when it personally costs you $1500+USD with no return other then a feel good vibe.

For it to read an uncompressed file, it simply needs to seek it on disk and read.
For it to read a compressed file, it needs to seek the compressed file, open the libaries needed to deal with the compression logarithm if not cashed, read to the index of the archive, read headers to find the desired file, seek to that location, read, decompress.

For any small document, the number of seek operations on a standard HD is goign to be the limiting factor far more then the bandwidth of a hard-drive. And compression has probably doubled that limiting factor.

Most Hard-drives can match SSD in bandwidth, its just that the biggest advantage of a SSD is that there really isn't a seek time, so finding then accessing the file is near instant in comparasion.

About the only way compression improves performance is when the actual bandwidth is botlenecked, but thats really not the case with documents, its just the seek delay accessing the file.

A few things to consider

1. The price of meat is more expensive in Japan then most countries. So saying they'll get the costs down that of japanese meat isn't really a draw card for most other western/american nations.

2. Compleating the food cycle? I thought we got mad-cow disease because we did this very thing with cows. We reduced the food chain and had cows eating cows, Rather then having intermedate agents inbetween.

Now we want to mimic that efficency with humans eating human shit...

I don't know if thats a troll, but i guess someone needs to correct it.

Its free as in free speach.

You can still sell gpl software, with a gpl licence. So no, its not always free as in beer.

It's normally free however, because theres nothing stopping someone buying 1 copy, and then undercutting or giving it away for free. So selling it for money under the gpl isn't a practical business plan.

The owners of the software can do with it what they like, how they like. That's free as in speach.