If it really hurts your butt that much, you could buy one of these, or go on eBay and buy a cheap Chinese one for half the price.

Yeah, it sucks that Apple's stuff uses a different cable than any other device, but that's the way it's going to be until the industry comes up with a standard connector that does everything that the Apple connector does.

Only for international traffic, IIRC (I'm not Australian). Australia's choke point is its fibre links to the rest of the world. If you host within Australia (by arrangement with the ISPs I believe), then you can get round the caps.

It's the responsibility for whoever sets the calendar for debates in parliament to choose which topics are the best use of the parliament's time. That doesn't mean that members of parliament should be prevented from submitting for consideration whatever topic they wish to talk about.

Punished for politicians comes in the form of causing serious outrage both in and out of parliament, and (in extreme cases) the politician having to resign from his/her post.

Where is the serious outrage within parliament going to come from, if by your own admission, politicians can be convinced that such measures are right? If a parliament is capable of generating sufficient outrage surrounding a proposal that it causes the resignation of the person who proposed it, then it is certainly capable of voting the proposal down.

Likewise, serious outrage outwith parliament should have the effect of persuading politicians who were previously minded to support such legislation, that it might not be such a good idea.

The fact that someone at that level can fly a kite like that, and get away with it, is worrisome enough to me.

You imply that he should be punished for his opinions? I fundamentally disagree. Parliament, of all places, should be a forum for any and all views, whether or not they're popular. The proper way to deal with people who put forward views you do not agree with is to vote them down, not to use fear to silence them.

The SDK contains the emulator, which in turn contains the operating system. Whether or not this constitutes a 'release' is a matter for debate (I would argue that it doesn't), but the OS is definitely out there for public consumption.

By that logic, the next space race will be between India and China. They've already taken the first steps.

I remember reading that Galileo's 'free-to-air' grade would be roughly equivalent in accuracy to civilian-grade GPS, and that the high-accuracy grade would be protected as in GPS. The difference would be that, whereas high-accuracy grade GPS is only available to the US military, Galileo's high-accuracy grade would be made available to anybody on a (presumably expensive) commercial basis.

No, when that happens you still have your local copies. And if you're sensible, you have backups of your local copies.

It's probably not a solution, but Heathrow Airport have had a stab at it.

First of all, there is a huge amount of variety when it comes to bricks, rope and tiles. Nails aren't entirely homogenous either.

Second, patents last a maximum of 20 years. A patent granted on a brick in the First World War would have expired before the Second World War. History wouldn't really look all that different.

The problem with your approach is that you're relying on the government to decide what items are necessities. In the UK, politicians seem to think that it's not necessary to wash, because most personal hygiene products are subject to the full 20% VAT rate (although they concede that it's more difficult to avoid menstruation, as 'feminine hygiene' products are subject to the reduced 5% rate). You can't buy these items second-hand. Likewise for other domestic cleaning products, and almost any consumable that isn't for human consumption.

Do you regard electricity as one of life's necessities? How about gas or oil for heating? 5% VAT. The government thinks that heating your home during the winter is somewhat optional. You can't buy energy second-hand.

Second-hand purchases are a solution, but only if you buy from people you know. eBay? That's a long way for a shortcut, seeing as you need a computer and an internet connection (both subject to 20% VAT). Second hand store? They're have to charge VAT on the items they sell. And if you buy from a man on a street corner, you're not going to receive any kind of warranty, so you could end up out-of-pocket further down the line.

One of the mantras you hear regularly from libertarian types on Slashdot is, "I know how to spend my own money better than the government does". I think the same applies here. Poor people know what the necessities are, far better than the government does. If you scrap VAT, raise the personal allowance to £10,000 (as the Lib Dems recently proposed) and raise the standard and higher rates of income tax, you can ensure that the poorest people have what they need to live a normal life, while still giving an incentive to earn more.

Many genuinely rich people don't pay any income tax at all, as they have no income (on paper).

I'm fine with not taxing people who are living off a big pot of savings. Income tax should already have been paid on that money.

If you're referring to the various ways that rich people with expensive accountants can avoid paying tax, then yes I acknowledge that problem. I would rather that the government invested time and effort into closing those loopholes (which they have an incentive to do), rather than attempting to overhaul the tax system in the way that you are proposing, where the government is incentivised to fiddle with the 'necessities' list in a way that impacts the poorest.

It sounds to me like you want a truly fair taxation system, without inequalities. If you want to do that sort of system, there is another that would be better than an income tax and would be very simple. Take the total government budget for the year and divide by number of people in the country. Children's taxes must be paid by the parents. It's only $11,370 per person. Seems very affordable to me.

Now you're just being obtuse. What you describe is a regressive tax, and is the most unfair method of taxation in existence because it isn't linked with a person's ability to pay.

You're not the only person who has described such a system as 'fair' before. Margaret Thatcher did. It was called the Community Charge, but more commonly known as the Poll Tax.

When it was introduced in Scotland (a year earlier than in the rest of the UK), it led to mass non-payment and civil disobedience. It's one of the reasons that the Conservatives are now almost unelectable in Scotland, and 'Thatcher' is a dirty word here. The fact that the Scottish wing of the party (what is left of it) is debating whether or not to split from the UK party and undergo a massive rebranding exercise is in part a legacy of the Poll Tax.

And finally...

Heck, I'm not poor, but I have over $100k in student loans to pay off with my meager earnings after the government takes over 50%

To use your argument against you, a university education is an optional purchase.

The problem with that idea is that you're going to end up with a system that raises taxes for the poorest people and lowers them for the richest. That won't go down well with the majority of the population.

You can't explain it away with exemptions for 'necessities'. You'll end up in a situation where the food you buy is deemed a necessity, but the oven in which to cook it and the the plates off of which to eat it are not. The strictest definition of a necessity, which is the definition that a tax system would use, does not cover the necessities of modern life.

I would argue exactly the opposite. All taxes are bad, but an income tax is perhaps the worst type as it is an outright presumption of slavery, that the government owns the fruits of our labor, and thus owns us... Allowing us to keep whatever percentage of our income. Income tax needs to end entirely.

What utter nonsense. The government is going to take its percentage at some point anyway, unless you're thinking of being buried with your money. It might as well be done in a way that lets the percentage taken be proportional to the amount that you earn.

Stallman's problem, in my opinion, is that he's looking at things in terms of good and evil, when really they are just two different ways of doing things... and I think he's just a bit pissed off that Jobs' way of doing things has been both successful and different than his. Stallman seems very intolerant of opinions that are different than his own.

He wasn't hateful towards Job's himself

It doesn't matter how you say it or how you qualify it - saying "I'm glad he's gone" immediately after someone has died is a horrible thing to do.

The correct time to make these remarks would have been after he resigned his post as CEO of Apple in August, or perhaps after he went on medical leave back in January. If he'd said it then, it would have been in the context of Jobs leaving the company, and in that case I'd respect his opinion even if I didn't agree with it.

But saying it now is just disgusting, and Stallman's credibility as a spokesperson has to take another huge knock for this.

But to put Steve Jobs in the same league as people like ... Charles Babbage seems... very wrong.

Charles Babbage never really accomplished anything. His designs were revolutionary, but no revolution happened because the entire project was a financial disaster. Today's computers have no direct relation to Babbage's designs, and we would be at the exact same technological level even if he had never existed.

Babbage's work is a historical curiosity, and a window into a world that might have been. Nothing more.