As one of those who is suffering at the end of a 4Mbit piece of wet string that passes for a BT broadband connection I have to agree with you.
I wouldn't mind if I really was in a rural area, but this is Cambridge! Well I am rural if you could 30 minutes cycle/12 minutes drive to the city centre to be rural! This is supposed to be one of the high tech hubs of Britain and yet the exchanges haven't been upgraded in a decade and there are no plans to upgrade our local ones either. (The irony is that the latest ADSL chipsets are designed just over the road from me by the company i work for but that's another story).

The reason for the holdup is as far as I can tell why would they bother? The money to be made is in the big cities and because we're classed as none rural we don't get the benefits of the programs mentioned in TFA, however we also have BT saying that it's not worth doing FTTC because there aren't enough subscribers in our village either.
As far as I understand the costs would be because the problem would snowball - well it's only a couple of miles of fibre needed from our cabinet to the local exchange. Except then that exchange would need its links upgrading which would mean about 5 miles more fibre, but then the Cambridge to London link would then need upgrading...

How are they going to re-coup all that investment from me? Well I pay about £30 a month for my broadband. Assume this upgrade would last for a decade before it too was out of date then they've got a mere £3000-ish per user to pay for this upgrade. Assuming say £200 in equipment costs per user port and about £1million per mile of fibre then they're barely making 50% profit!
You can't be expected to run a modern company on those numbers... (as opposed to doing nothing like they currently are and still making the money)

This is an old thought experiment of mine. They say that the mass of ice is decreasing and that surface water freezes immediately, (what with it being -50 degrees and all that) .
Would it be possible therefore to do some engineering and pump relatively warm water onto the surface ice sheets and therefore act as a heat radiator. Surely you could radiate colossal amounts of extra heat this way?
The only problem I can see with this is the quantity of water you'd have to pump. The question is for me would it help radiate more heat than it would cost to do?

Many people spend their whole lives in minimum wage jobs, for whatever reason they are not able to get another one. For some people waiting tables or working in a call centre is their life and all they know how to do. Should they be denied things like healthcare and the ability to have children? Should their children be denied basic things?
Fine if you want to say that there should be no full time waiting staff because it is economically not possible to do that job and survive unless you are something like a student topping up your wages, I'm fine with that, but what you're saying then is that some people can earn less than a living wage because that is not for them how they support themselves - again fine; but if the outcome of this is that starbucks needs to pay its regular staff more than a pittance and therefore there isn't one on every corner then I'm fine with that.

Take a step back, I don't care about how this is achieved but I think as a society some basic things need to be catered for, because I don't want to live in a society of people starving on the street or dying of trivial medical problems, or even quite complex yet treatable medical problems.
However I am quite aware that because resources are scarce we can't hand out this standard of living to absolutely everyone, you need to do something to earn it. That is an advantage of doing this via a minimum wage; seriously what are the consequences of what i propose? No more need for obamacare, The cost of flipping burgers means that junk food becomes more expensive to match its societal cost.

That says to me that the current situation is already unsustainable and the only thing papering over the cracks is those people currently in that situation are effectively wage slaves living for less than is sustainable. If the employer cannot afford to employ someone to have a western standard of living then that job has no right to exist in the western world. Either that or we fess up as a society and state we are happy with exploiting people and economically forcing them to live at a lower standard of living so we can have a big mac.
Take your pick, you can either say you are happy for those who flip burgers to live at below western standards (i.e. no healthcare no pension, food shortages etc) or you can say that this is not acceptable to us and people should be paid enough to survive even if this means some fringe groups can't exist by exploiting people.
The only way out of this I know is to have a full welfare state providing a minimum acceptable level of living (this could be quite low) and then remove the minimum wage alltogether.
Seriously what fix would you prefer?

The money goes to the owner of the business who invested in that machine, to the engineers who spent their time designing and building it and to the shareholders in the form of profits. Alternatively this allows a lower cost of product in which case it goes nowhere, except not out of the consumers pocket. This is why in real terms the cost products can fall.

Any job is/becomes a minimum wage job if it meets any of the following criterion:
1) It takes relatively little training, i.e. replacements can be brought in rapidly.
2) It is a skill that is common, either because of a good education system or desirability of the task(mostly just a re-phrasing of 1)
3) The people once employed do not have much incentive to move on: i.e. they won't leave if conditions deteriorate

The capitalist in me says this is fine* as long as the minimum wage provides a basic level of acceptable living**. If you wish to have more than the minimum it is then up to you to do a job that is either undesirable or one that is both highly & unusually skilled. Alternatively if the problem with that sector is that the business owner is skimming off the profits then it is up to you to challenge that and become a business owner yourself***; take the risk and make the investment or stop complaining.
Look at some of the most successful tech companies and I don't think it is any co-incidence that they put a lot of effort into making sure 3 is not a factor by trying to have good working conditions. They need to do this because !1 is such an issue for them.

* If the employer can't afford to pay the minimum wage then capitalism should kick in and mean that they don't employ someone for that role because it is not worth it for society to do so.
** I do not believe this is the case and this needs to change. Acceptable minimum to me includes healthcare, pension and ability to support a basic family.
*** There are some sectors where again this is not an issue, one man can't decide to become the next Apple, but there are always ways into a sector if you have idea and skills and luck and are prepared to take the risk.

Just out-source the control of them to teenagers who think they're playing flight sim. End of ethical problem.

That's how these things work, right?
Bonus points if you can have the teenagers who are unknowingly piloting it in the country you are attacking!

Not played GTA5 yet, just 4.
I find it ever amazing that what you think is most unacceptable - or at least the example you choose - is not the murder or the general violence, or the drugs or the rape, but the soft core porn.
Now I will accept the argument that it's the attitude around that soft core porn that is pernicious and corrupting - that women are sex objects to be used and then discarded - but I cannot accept that a strip club is the worst thing in that game.
Why does a film showing people shooting each other get a PG while you still can't yet have a fully naked man in a sexual situation in mainstream entertainment. Seriously? Which one do you think is actually the more dangerous idea of acceptable behaviour?

Just to play devil's advocate, solar may be more expensive, but where does that money go? It doesn't just evaporate, it goes back into the economy somewhere providing more jobs and more demand. Assuming Germany is buying panels it produces itself, then the increased cost of electricity is met by the jobs needed to make and install these panels. As opposed to fossil fuels which would likely be imported and likely creating no new jobs except vanity projects somewhere in the middle east.
So although the end user sees a hike in electricity prices they could also see lower unemployment, crime, better education etc as a result of all this extra industry needed. Sure it requires big subsidies, but so do all other forms of energy production.

I obviously don't have the figures to prove it but given that Germany is currently bankrolling most of Europe implies that on average its overall economic policy is good. In the past countries have fuelled boom times by resource exploitation (Thatcher in the 80s for example with north sea oil) so perhaps you have Germany doing something weird here.

Of course all this theory falls down if the solar panels are being made in China and installed by Polish immigrant workers who are sending all their spare cash home. But then I have no explanation for Germany's current economic boom.

I can see why slashdotters don't read the article if the article claims things like whales are invertebrates ;-)

Erm the pi is about as powerful as a desktop from 2003. Are you saying we did nothing useful before then?

Surely for the the issue isn't assembly vs everything else it's demonstrating the ability to use a range of language philosophies, There are lots of languages under the sun and certainly I'd be worried about someone who always had garbage collection at their beck and call if I was trying to implement any system with real time requirements or involved lots of heavy lifting of data. However isn't there a worry someone can get too stuck in the nuts and bots. I've seen so many examples of code where someone has done something in hundreds of lines of C for something that would take 5 lines of perl, (and before you say the implementation they used would make the C slower)

So if a CV turned up for someone who had no assembly experience but had experience in C, Perl, Ruby, Occam, Lisp. I'm fairly sure if they would have a grasp of the fundamentals, much more than someone who just had x86 assembler and C++.

How many people today can function without a compiler?
How many welders can function without a foundry to produce the iron for them?
How many people can function without farms to grow their food for them.
How many farms these days can function without computers and iron tools?

It's called civilisation, we build on top of the work of others and do ever greater things. If everyone in all of life had to know how to do everything we wouldn;t get very much done.

Don't be silly, that would imply the UK actually made something these days, These days we offer services

That's the thing, and "silicon roundabout" and "financial services".

(disclaimer) I work as an engineer in the UK so no need to shout at me

You're making a classic mistake there. When matter gets converted into energy gravitation doesn't care. It cares about the total mass-energy. Which doesn't change. So while the emitted photons do not have mass they do have energy which of course has a mass equivalent.
In a closed system* even if there are nuclear reactions taking place the mass-energy of the system does not change.
*to actually do this you'd have to contain all the mass and photons and neutrinos, which we don't know how to do, but the point stands...

Why is it so hard to imagine that there is a particle that interacts with gravity but not electromagnetically? That's really what this comes down to.
Remember you only touch that key on the keyboard because of photon interactions.
Are you happy with the existence of Neutrinos? These particles that barely interact with normal matter or do you think they are purely there to balance formulas too? (okay that's why they were originally there but not anymore)