Real world trials generally don't use placebos. Instead, the control is the best treatment currently available. After all, you're usually not interested in whether some drug works better than sugar, but whether it's worth using it instead of or in addition to some currently available treatment. So the control group get the best treatment they could have got if they were not in the study, while the experimental group may or may not fare better.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. Getting clean data for evidence-based-medicine is absolutely necessary for the well-being of possibly thousands or millions of potential patients.

We already have an unpatented, royalty-free, unencumbered, lowest-common-denominator video codec for use on the internet: H.261.

H.323 specifies it as the lowest common denominator for video-over-IP, so all video phones already support it, including hardware implementations. It was published in 1990 - twenty years ago - so it is as patent-free as you can get. And it's published by the ITU, so the specification is freely available.

a return value from main is required by spec

Um, no. Main is special.

C99 5.1.2.2.3 Program termination

If the return type of the main function is a type compatible with int, a return from the initial call to the main function is equivalent to calling the exit function with the value returned by the main function as its argument;10) reaching the } that terminates the main function returns a value of 0.

Reaching the end of main without a return is the equivalent of calling exit(0); as the last line.

Why, that's a nice gift horse, mind if I take a look at it's teeth?

Laptops with 3G aren't new, but now that Apple is (maybe) planning on adding a 3G capable radio chipset (to add to the bluetooth and wifi 2.4/5GHz radio chipset), it's just bringing "more problems"?

Well, if you don't want to use it, that's fine, but I would be happy with a laptop which is able to talk to the world outwith the confines of my home or work wifi networks.

Does anyone find it amusing that after all the ridicule the French heaped on Americans for electing Bush that they went and elected somebody even worse?

I know, cutting people off from the internet is so much worse than torture.

3. Amount/Substantiality - well, most people I know torrent the whole film, not just 5 minutes of it, so...

Nonsense. I only ever download between 64kB and 4MB of any film at a time.