This is not a new problem, and is well covered in Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness written in 1932.

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day.

Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price.

In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before.

But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.

There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness.

Can anything more insane be imagined?

The whole essay is well worth reading, and remains just as true as ever it was..

Holding office until you are dead, and having fixed terms of office are not mutually exclusive

Executing your rulers after they have served their terms is not a new concept

original poster said;

Here in the EU, we're removing all the highest-denomination notes from circulation on the grounds that the only people who need to make such huge transactions in cash are criminals.

you replied;

Do you have ANY evidence to back that seemingly far-fetched claim up? I've never even heard of categorically removing high denomination notes in the EU.

I politely give you a link about the UK (a member of the EU since 1973) removing 500 euro notes (what might be called high denomination) from circulation because of organised crime (what we might call criminals)

and you then tell me that the currency of the UK isn't euros...

no fucking shit sherlock

top tip for you; not all members of the EU use the euro. There are 27 members of the EU and only 17* of them are in the eurozone

*this number may drop suddenly in the next few months

500 Euro note withdrawn in the UK here is one example for you. actually the main trouble is that it makes a large amount of money quite a small physical size, and thus harder to catch people moving about

you are only exacerbating the situation

i believe the parent was making a reference to this film; in the loop

while i may agree with your overall assessment of the artistic quality of avatar...

I'm not sure this comparison to technicolour helps your case.

As i understand it, the first big budget technicolor movie was the Wizard of Oz, and it was to most movie goers of the time utterly ground breaking

[for people who may not have seen the film in a while, the begining starts off in "normal" black and white, it's only when Dorothy gets to oz that it switches to colour]

I think its not an unfair comparison to the early scene in Avatar where there is a drop of water floating in space, 30 feet in front of the projected screen.

For me that was a genuine wow moment at the new technology, which i imagine was the same reaction technicolour had

I think from then on the problems with 3d detract from the movie more than they enhance it, and to be honest it's a pretty weak story with very 2 dimension (pun-intended) characterisation - ( except for the armoured mechs, Cameron is right in that EVERYTHING can be improved with armoured mechs...)

Actually thats not true, it was quite sucessfully solved by the Cathars,by the premise of two equally powerful gods, one good the other evil

The World of matter we are living in was held to be a creation of the evil god btw, this is why it is so obviously full of suffering and sin. the goal of the cathar's was to transend this evil physical world and enter the good spiritual one.

This is of course utterly heretical, and is why the catholic church saw fit to help the cathar's escape the physical world by setting them on fire...

How about Clement Attlee, Father of the welfare State. regarded in a recent Poll as the greatest prime minister of the 20th Century.

When interviewed on the subject of his belief, he declared himself to be "incapable of religious feeling"

he's just the first I thought of by the way, I'm fairly sure there are a large number of other european heads of state who would fit the bill just fine...

actually there has already been an experiment that demonstrated the converse rat park

which appeared to demonstrate that addiction in rats was as much related of their being held in tiny cages, as to the inherent "addictiveness" of opiates

the funding was withdrawn, and doubt cast as to Alexander's integrity

one could speculate that it is not popular opinion that the way to reduce drug dependance in humans is to improve their general quality of life, such that they don't feel the need to compulsively take drugs in the first place

not to diminish your point or anything, but the Dark Ages weren't quite as dark as all that.

There was still much pan european trade and flourishing culture all over the place.

most of the whole dark ages = lack of civilisation propaganda was from the venerable bede, and he had a very definate agenda for promoting a view of history that england went through a period of terrible darkness before being brought into the enlightment of the christian church

actual archeology reveals that life for most people carried on just fine once the romans had left.

This is the same government that made a deal with Microsoft to pay them regardless of whether Microsoft's software was actually installed. That doesn't sound like the kind of logical decision making that leads to entertaining the notion that 230 students might not need 192 servers after all.

I can see a possible case where that might make sense.

If for example the cost of auditing what each machine was running was more than the discounted price offered by microsoft, ie just pay us a flat fee for every machine you have, dont worry about auditing it.

Having said that of course, I doubt that the deal microsoft worked out is anything like that fair.

However I would imagine part of the cost saving involved, is the schools are not being sued for unlicenced copies of windows, when they have 300 copies of office, but only 200 licences

Not that it makes it any less a protection racket from microsoft, but it might not be an entirely stupid move on behalf of the education department