This is one of the sayings that's always bugged me. It's true, but that's because the first thing that a good workman does is pick appropriate tools, or build them if they don't exist. Many of the great scientists, artists and craftsmen over the decades have been as well remembered for the tools that they created as for the things that they did with the tools, yet this saying is often used to mean 'put up with crappy tools, their limitations are your fault,' when it should mean 'if you are failing because of bad tools, it's your fault for not using better ones.'

There was a point made at the 30-year retrospective talk at last year's European Smalltalk conference. If you have two languages, one of which allows developers to be more efficient, then you will end up needing fewer developers for the same amount of work. Unless your entire company uses this language and never experiences mergers, then this group of developers will be outnumbered. When you begin a new project or merge two projects, management will typically decide to pick the language that more developers have experience with. If you have a team of 100 C++ programmers and another team of one SilverBulletLang programmers, then it seems obvious that you should pick C++ for your next project because you have vastly more experience within the company in using C++. The fact that the one SilverBulletLang programmer was more productive doesn't matter. In the real world, languages tend not to be silver bullets and so the productivity difference is more in the factor of two to five range, but that's still enough that the less-productive language wins.

The first C book I read spent most of the first chapter justifying why you'd use a high-level language like C instead of assembly. How times change...

And yet you'll frequently see ordinary Americans vocally defending the rights of a small subset of the population to control the vast majority of the country's assets, which naturally leads to this same subset being much more able to influence the political process.

Not even remotely true. A full explanation of why you are wrong would take up far more space than a slashdot post. Please read at least the first chapter of a textbook on UK politics.

The UK has a written but not codified constitution. If you don't know the difference, then pick up a politics textbook and learn something before you start trying to sound knowledgeable in discussions about the subject.

Not really. In a species with a relatively long gestation period and few offspring per litter, the limiting factor in population growth is the females. A primate female can only produce a very limited number of children over her lifespan (especially compared, for example, to rodents) and a significant fraction of those won't survive to adulthood anyway. A reproductive strategy that involves killing even more of them off is going to leave the tribe very weak and so the survivors may have benefitted from the process, but that only matters in evolutionary terms if they survive long enough to breed, and do so in comparable quantities to others with different strategies.

If you think this means that it's not evolved behaviour, then I can only assume that your education in evolution stopped just after Darwin. Try picking up a textbook written in the last 30 years. I'd recommend The Extended Phenotype (published in 1982).

Who said they can't afford it? An iPhone 5 currently goes for about $500 on eBay. US minimum wage is $7.25/hour, so it takes about 70 hours (1-2 weeks) to earn that much, pre tax. Even if they're paid double minimum wage, an iPhone 5 is something that you can easily slip into your bag, and selling it on eBay will double your weekly income for a tiny extra effort. If you manage to average one every week, then it's a nice extra income, and if you're willing to steal from your employer then you probably aren't going to be in too much of a hurry to declare the income for tax purposes either, so it will more than double your take-home pay.

Forcing employees to spend time on the premises without pay is clearly illegal, but to pay them enough that there was no economic incentive to steal would mean paying 10 or more times minimum wage and I don't think any retailer can afford that.

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?

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.