I paid 30p, which is actually closer to 50. I got them from the local supermarket.

You paid about ten times as much for your CFLs as me, and your power cost about a third what mine costs, so your arithmetic seems to match mine.

Paragraph tags (<p>).

There effectively is. Last time I bought bulbs, the CFLs were about twice the price of incandescents and the energy savings were such that I saved that much in a month of use. Over their lifetime, there's a huge extra cost to use incandescents.

That still seems a bit expensive. I paid 30p for the last set of CFLs I bought, which at the exchange rate at the time was equivalent to about 50. The most expensive ones I bought were about a decade ago, and they were about £4, which was close to $8 then.

So why don't you move to the Democratic Republic of Congo or the People's Republic of China if you think names, rather than ideals, are that important?

The decision not to make ISPs common carriers predates Obama, and even Bush...

Yes, no one ever talked about The Java Trap as a problem Free Software...

Because we want to get the best people. If you look worldwide, the gender balance (to pick the one imbalance your post mentions) is a lot closer to 50:50 in some countries, in others it's even more skewed. This implies that there's nothing intrinsic about women that makes them genetically less likely to want to do engineering or scientific things, there's some other cultural or social pressure stopping most of them. If we're only recruiting from 10% of the female population that, absent these pressures, would have gone into these subjects, then we can hope that it's the best 10%, but that's not very likely.

And the longer you keep using it, the harder it is to switch. I don't personally know anyone who has lost their GMail account, but I do for other mail providers (and Facebook), either because the provider decided they had violated some nebulous terms of service, they decided to start charging and kept pushing the price up, or they went out of business. If you like the GMail interface, then get the Google Apps for your Domain thing, buy a domain and point the DNS at Google, and at least then you can always point it somewhere else if you and Google stop wanting to do business.

The other part of the shift to chip-and-pin was the liability. If a merchant accepts a transaction with the magnetic strip, and the customer disputes it, then the merchant is liable, not the bank.

Not necessarily. Most USB keyboards have firmware stored on a flash chip that has some spare capacity, and a lot have built-in USB hubs. There was at least one proof of concept for a keylogger that would record things to the on-board flash and then dump them to a specific USB device when it was inserted, then erase the on-board flash (rewriting the bit that contained some of the firmware) ready to start again.

The question that you should be asking is what happens if the browser is compromised. It doesn't matter if JavaScript is enabled, if some malware controlling your browser lets the attacker make arbitrary payments then your bank is doing it wrong. To pay anyone I've not paid before (and saved the credentials for) via Internet backing, my bank requires me to enter a code that they provide and the recipients account number and the amount in either a mobile phone app or a separate device, which then generates a code that I have to enter into the browser. If an attacker can compromise both my computer and my mobile device, then they can make arbitrary payments, but if they just compromise the browser they can't.

So this is the way that Snowden should have done it? I guess now we know that those who say "well, some good came from what he did, but he should have gone about it the right way".

We now know that there is no "right way" to deal with government, other than kick them in the ass.

Microsoft, at least, creates a stable driver KBI for entire major OS versions. With Linux, you don't even get a guarantee of source compatibility across minor versions, so unless you upstream your driver it may be broken without warning (and if you do, the person 'fixing' it may not have access to the hardware, so will just compile test it). OS X also has stable KBIs for drivers, which are versioned to allow them to be incrementally deprecated and replaced. If you try to make life easy for vendors and they still don't produce drivers, then it ceases to be your fault.