It only costs a few extra quid per month to get a Bupa (private company) top up to smooth out all the areas where the NHS is a bit rough. The end result is that we still end up paying less than you do in the US since the Bupa cover does not have to worry about the really expensive stuff as the NHS covers that.

With a Bupa policy I can leave work now and go and talk to the private clinic just down the road with no appointment. Even without a Bupa policy I can still go and talk to them and then just pay cash for their time (I have done this to get some jabs for going to South America on short notice).

Then why didn't you: http://www.bmihealthcare.co.uk/hospital/description?p_hosp_id=294&p_hospital_page_id=163&in_page=Emergency%20care%20centre

It took me about 30 seconds to find that link via Google. I bet they have other clinics all over the country.

I know A&E is awful on a Friday night through experience, but that was when I was a poor student dropout and I broke my hand (cleanly snapped third and forth metacarpals). If I had been in the US at that time I probably wouldn't have had any cover either as my family are not that well off so god knows what would happened.

As it was though I was in surgery within 16 hours and then discharged within 36 at no cost apart from the taxes I had paid as a checkout boy in a supermarket (the only job I had ever done at that age). Now I happily pay my taxes as I am grateful to be able to type this using both hands and go climbing as a hobby thanks to my 100% recovery because the NHS pinned my hand back together.

In the US I very much doubt I would have been able to get my hand reconstructed the same way without paying a fortune, instead they would have just patched me up so it did not get any worse but left me with limited movement.

we?

Do you really expect anyone to believe you work in the "financial trading industry" and hang out on slashdot?

It is worth remembering that the only treatments for Pancreatic Cancer are: Surgery, Radiation Therapy or Chemotherapy. Ok, he probably should have gone down the surgery route sooner than he did (he waited nine months) but the other two options both suck.

Many people choose to die of cancer rather that go through the shit of Chemo or Radiation Therapy as they both utterly ruin your quality of life for the time you have left for a very low probability of success anyway. By choosing to avoid these two treatments you can actually make the most of the time you have left and remain relatively active.

Most medical research nowadays is done by drug companies. They are not interested in "cures" they are interested in finding a drug to manage a particular condition, that way they get to make tons of money from all the repeat prescriptions of their creation. If they came up with a cure for that condition they only get the money from a single prescription.

If they created a single pill that would cure and vaccinate you against all the worlds diseases they would all go bankrupt within a decade, even if they could sell the pill for $1 million.

So who knows what is possible when the corporations who fund (and hence choose the direction of) most medical research are not interested in looking? Instead they come up with crap like Viagra as that is where the money is.

In next weeks slashdot I expect to see something about Moxie Marlinspike being asked to deliver a nice shiny yacht to Saudi Arabia and it going horribly wrong when he gets arrested for piracy :)

Only if you happen to be an immoral twat trying to justify their argument.

The truth is that thing like paying sales taxes on mail order goods involve you going out of your way to pay more tax. Setting up a dodgy offshore arrangement involves going out of your way to pay less tax. There is a massive difference between these two things in that in one case you are just taking the path of least resistance, in the other you are investing a shitload of extra effort in order to hide money from the taxman. The effort involved is key.

Also, there is the minor difference in terms of reward. By not paying the odd bit of sales tax you can probably save a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars at most. By hiding money offshore you can save millions if you have it.

Is that fair though? Just because you can find another government that you can pay to take that shit off your hands does not mean the people in the country actually want the damn stuff.

Also, what happens if the country in question falls apart and someone decides they want to give it back to you later in the form of a dirty bomb? Even though you shipped that crap abroad you still have to keep an eye on the stuff to stop it falling into the wrong hands.

Apt is fine for the OS, they even said so. What they want to come up with is something completely different I think. This is not a replacement for apt, it is to complement apt. It actually sounds like this is really designed as a competitor to the APK file you use under android for distributing applications.

However great apt is, it is utterly useless from the point of selling commercial software as there is the possibility of software not installing due to dependency issues. This is not an option with commercial software as the (stupid) end use will blame the software he just bought for not installing, not the fact that his machine is not able to download a dependency package because it is not available upstream. As many have pointed out this wastes disk space, but who cares as it is cheap now.

It sounds like their grand idea is to come up with an additional application wrapper format that will always install everything for a particular application in a single directory also making uninstalling much easier.

So if I do a default Windows 7 or 8 install does Windows XP Mode get installed by default then so hence require no configuration? Thought not, as thats what to configure.

This actually makes perfect sense. On a modern PC it will involve the user learning about virtualisation (to run XP) and then also learning how to configure windows (to not run updates). This is great way of preparing dole claimants for an IT job so by the time you have gained enough skills to claim any dole money you have enough skills to go straight into a job as and IT support worker for the dole office and their crappy old IT systems.

This is a problem that employers deal with in other countries though. My missus is just about to take maternity leave, she is planning to take the full 12 months she is entitled to by law (We live in the UK).

The second 6 months will be on vastly reduced pay though she does have the option to transfer some of this leave to me (in addition to the 2 weeks on full pay I also get by law) but since I earn more it does not make sense to do this unfortunately. The fact that she can transfer some to me if she returns to work though does mean we are both fairly equal in this regard. Note that this applies even though we work for completely different companies, if I earned less than her I would simply go into work and explain the situation to my boss and he has to give me the leave (on the same vastly reduced pay as she would get though, basically my pay would come from the government instead of my employer while I was off and they put a maximum weekly wage in place that is roughly equivalent to working in McDonalds).

Because that is if you break the law. Google are not breaking any laws here, they are just making sure they pay as little tax as legally possible.

Big international companies always have the ability to declare their profits in whatever country they see fit by rigging the rates that the parent companies charge for use of the brand name, this is perfectly legal, if the government want to stop this they can try changing the law. Even if you changed this law though it would be tremendously hard to prove if the fees being charged for use of the brand name were over the top or not.

This is just that the government has to be seen to be doing something as we have local elections today and the ruling coalition is going to take a bath at the hands of smaller parties and desperately want to be seen to be doing something on tax avoidance.

The truth is that the government has already done something, they have lowered the rate of corporate tax to the same level as Ireland to make us competitive as a nation in the race to the bottom. Simply lowering the rate of corporate tax in response to corporations avoiding tax smacks of surrender and weakness though so they do not exactly want to draw attention to this.

If you are a decent techie you can earn far more working in the private sector than you can working in government. Also, it is tremendously frustrating working in the public sector if you are competent because of the utter retards you have surrounding you in the public sector. You also have to deal with people who go sick every other day and never get fired because their manager does not want to take the risk of screwing up firing someone and all the crazy european labour laws you have to follow in the process.

This is all quite annoying to most decent techies I know are pretty driven so the only people who stay in the public sector for longer than it takes to earn their first decent reference (that gets them the better paid private sector job) are the people who seem some benefit from it. The benefit is never financial so usually it is that they get to doss about all day and do fuck all.

They probably asked how much it would cost to securely remove all data from the hard disks with the same 100% cast iron guarantee and got a similar quote back from their outsourced IT as they did for cleaning the viruses off them.

As to reimaging the machines that is the sort of magic that only a techie would know about, not the clueless public servant middle manager who was tasked with the project.

Also, he would get the blame when one of the machines had a perfectly normal hardware failure in a year or so. If he buys he new machine he does not get blamed when it breaks in a similar time frame.

Of course none of this makes any sense whatsoever, it is a government job, it is not supposed to. That was my point. Anyone who doesn't understand should try watching the film Brasil.

Well, there was that new object orientated thingy-ma-whatsit that came out recently?