Truly you have achieved the best government that money can buy...

If you live in the USA, then you might like to ask your elected representatives in the Federal Government why they decided that removing the restrictions on speculation in commodities markets such as food was a good idea. Speculators used to be limited to a certain fraction of the market, to provide liquidity for the other players, now they are the dominant market force.

I thought Watt had already been on one, although maybe I just think that because Stephenson's Rocket was (is?) on the fiver. The main reason I object to Austen (literary merits aside: I like her books) is that it seems to be saying 'well, we can have a woman on there, as long as she's doing a suitably feminine occupation'. And once that's done, we go back to wondering why it's hard to attract women to STEM occupations. Pick a female mathematician, scientist, or engineer. This list has a few good candidates on it, but if you're only looking for ones that are old enough to already be dead the list is depressingly short for the UK compared to many other European countries.

If they really needed a woman to replace Charles Darwin on the notes then surely someone like Marie Curie would have been a better bet? Why not replace a scientist with another scientist?

Ethics and social implications are an important part of the discipline of computer science, just as they're an important part of other science disciplines like biology and neurology.

The first working Silicon transistor was 1954 and worked at room temperature. The first microprocessors were in the late '70s. It's great that people are working on other materials for transistors, but it's a very long road from 'works in the lab' to 'ships in a mobile phone'. 20 years is not unusual.

If you expose every single thing that requires root to non-root users, then there is no distinction between root and non-root and so root is unnecessary. Very few people, for example, feel the need to enable root on OS X, but since normal users in the administrator group can sudo with their password there is no need because they can do anything that a root user can.

If, however, you expose some subset of what root can do to normal users, then you are always going to find some users who need to do some of the things that you haven't thought of. In my case, for example, I want to stick a Debian chroot on my Android device for development. This requires the chroot system call, which is only permitted for root users for reasonably good security reasons (it makes various categories of confused deputy attacks easier). I'm sure that other people will find other interesting things to do that require root.

You can disable automatic updates for these as well. It isn't done automatically, which is a piss-poor UI from the perspective of the end user, but understandable given the layering of Android. App stores are not part of the base Android install, but the system preferences UI (where you disable applications) is. It is not aware that the app store that you are using will automatically try to update apps that are installed, because that is a higher layer in the stack (it is typically Google Play, but it might be F-Droid or the Amazon Appstore). If the Android team didn't completely suck at UI design, then they'd either have provided a notification to app stores that the app was disabled, or hidden it entirely from the apk database. Unfortunately, a 5 minute conversation with anyone who works on Android will inform you that the Android UX team at Google is entirely populated by drooling morons who don't understand the basic elements of HCI.

There are several reasons for wanting to uninstall stock bloatware:

• To free up the flash space it takes.
• To avoid the UI clutter of having it visible.
• To reduce the attack surface by reducing the amount of executable code available.

The current Android model does not address the first of these, but it does address the next two. None of these applications installs shared libraries (Android applications can't install shared libraries that are visible to other apps) and they can only be launched either explicitly by the user or by a Binder event with a URL that they have registered to handle. Disabling them removes both of these mechanisms for launching them, and so removes the security implications (by the time a malicious application has enough privilege to reenable them enough to launch them, it effectively has full control of the device and so won't need them for privilege escalation) and removes them from the UI.

The space issue is far less than it used to be. My HTC Desire only has about 100MB of free on-board flash for apps and so is quite constrained. I'd love to free up some space by deleting crapware like the Facebook and Twitter apps and Google Maps, but I can't, even though doing so would increase my available storage by 20-50% (most apps can install most of their contents to the SD card, but you still need 2-8MB per app on the internal flash). My newer tablet, however, has 64GB of space, and so even deleting the whole Android install would only free up a few percent of the total storage space.

So what service do you use instead for watching films that works on all operating systems?

I've never encountered a bank doing this, and if they did then I'd strongly object and report them to the regulator.

You wrote about something like a prepaid charge card. A Maestro or Electron card can be issued by any major bank on an existing account, so you don't need to jump through hoops and pay even more fees.

First of all, if your bank can charge $180 in overdraft fees for being a few cents over then you really need to get a different bank.

Secondly, if you're in a position where $3 can push you into the red, but you can still manage to afford a smartphone, then you're doing something seriously wrong with your finances.

You should also consider getting a card like a Visa Electron or a Mastercard Maestro - these are debit cards that do not allow you to go overdrawn (they are intended for minors) and will just reject transactions if there is not enough money in the account for them.

Netflix does run their own CDN (based on FreeBSD) for the movies, which are the vast majority of their bandwidth. The Amazon stuff is for the web UI and background processing workloads (e.g. working out popular films related viewing patterns and so). This stuff is pretty busty, especially as more and more people use custom NetFlix apps and so don't hit the web UI at all.

Not noticeable? So I can run it on the machine connected to my projector, that runs FreeBSD and happily plays content grabbed from iPlayer or DVDs? Oh, no, sorry, not supported. Well, at least I can play it back on my WebOS tablet. Oh, sorry, not supported. Well, I can at least copy a few films to watch on a mobile device while I'm travelling? Oh, sorry, not supported either.

Meanwhile, I'm paying Lovefilm (Amazon) a monthly fee to rent DVDs because I can take these with me (or rip them for a mobile device, as long as I delete them before I send them back) when I travel, and I can watch them on every device I own.

Now, technically, it would be possible for me to rip every single DVD I rent, but I don't do this because there's no point. The entire point of paying the monthly subscription is for someone else to be responsible for maintaining the large library of content and being able to watch some of it when I want. I'd end up spending a lot on hard disks if I ripped them all and 99% of what I watch I have no desire to re-watch anyway.

A system that let me download films in a DRM-free format and had a monthly cost proportional to the number that I downloaded (e.g. 50 hours for the cost of my current 3-DVD-at-a-time package) would solve the problem for me and would mean that there is no danger (from their perspective) of my downloading everything I might ever want to watch - a somewhat silly fear that is predicated on the idea that there will never be new releases that I want to see - and cancelling the subscription.

If you'd read my post, or even the sentence you quoted, then you'd know that it's not my country and that I am very much aware of this (we hire a reasonable number of PhD graduates from places like MIT who've just been kicked out of the country by this policy).