epscylonb

I agree, whilst Stewart spends most of his time poking fun at the establishment, he isn't actually anti establishment.

Most of his material comes from picking up on hypocrisy by politicians when they make essential compromises in their head for money.

The establishment is afraid of the internet, they want to place restrictions on it. Stewart may well agree with them.

In the UK it is commonly said "you don't vote people in, you vote them out".

It would be nice if we could be more pro active and avoid some of this nonsense.

The hypocrisy of republicans (and some democrats) amazes, they boast about freedom but they hate liberalism. They want everyone to believe in the same religion and are happy to use authoritarian tactics to achieve it.

This is where bitcoin may be useful.

I would say the queen is more popular than the political establishment as it is.

How is it different from Walmart opening a store in a small town, putting local shops out of business by undercutting them, then deciding they don't make enough money and closing?.

I think the argument against SOPA has yet to break out of the tech echo chamber.

To be honest I think SOPA is inevitable, most people won't be able to grasp the level of injustice involved until it is enforced.

How can you verify the security of the "cloud" hosted data?.

Marketing companies tend to specialise, think of the big labels as music marketing companies if you like, they have expertise and relationships (radio, physical and digital distributors) that a generic advertising firm doesn't.

The smarter people in the music industry know that their future is dependant on staying close to the artists. The tables are turning, in the past the artists served the labels, in the future the labels will serve the artists.

Really excited about the pi, I can see lots of hackers doing interesting things with these.

I have similar battery life on my Desire Z.

The shortcuts thing is kinda fixable, you need to disable each keyboard shortcut.

And this is unrelated to their upcoming big announcement on the 15th, there has been speculation that they will start accepting bitcoin.

I live in the UK as well.

Clearly there is a "democratic deficit" in the current structure of the EU. This is a problem that will have to be righted one way or another.

In the long run I am optimistic and pro Europe, I don't have a problem with a certain level of federalisation and a supreme court in the style of America.

Of course I also completely agree with this judgement, but my views on Europe have not changed in the last few years. Despite what you may think at the moment, the things that unite European countries (compared to the rest of the world) far outweigh the things that divide us.

Collision detection is the big thing for me, sure you can fake it with invisible polygons but that usually leads to weirdness in the player experience.

But interestingly it does appear to lead to less google searches being performed for those keywords.

As to the affect this has upon actual visits to the sites in question, only they can say.

Isn't the real danger from the ocean garbage patches that the rubbish breaks down to the point where you can't easily collect it up?.

It could be taken down, I guess a game of whack a mole would ensue with mirrors popping up.

I am not sure I would like UK "culture" to be judged by our eurovision entries and suspect most europeans would feel the same.

The UK does have a problem though, in many ways we are much more like america economically than the rest of europe, but european is trade is big part of our economy.

Anything that could push ssd prices down in the long run is good news.

I am really hoping MicroSoft and Sony decide to put an SSD in their upcoming consoles, that kind of volume would help lower prices too.

I also really enjoyed that book, it was a good mix between the technical stuff and Turings life, I learnt a lot from it.

I think I am a better programmer for having used C.

C is interesting because like php it is very easy to end up with an unmanageable code base (but of course C is a lot more powerful than php).

I learnt a lot from good C code, the best C libs I have seen use a pseudo version of objects. They create a data structure to hold state and pass that as the first parameter to each function that can be used on it. Once I got my head around that I found I had a better understanding of the concept of object orientated programming.

I heard population is expected to rise to about 9 billion at which point it will start falling.

The statement (insult, trollbait, whatever you want to call it) doesn't make sense.

I would be a bit unhappy and would try and get away from the guy, but I wouldn't challenge him on it and try and start an altercation.

Regarding the separation of investment banking from retail banking, I am strongly in favour of this.

However at the moment, investment banking subsidises retail banking quite significantly, if you change this then banks will start charging for retail accounts.

There are a couple of solutions to this, but they all basically come down to the same thing, someone has to pay for the retail banking. Either it comes directly from the customer as a periodic payment or it is funded by taxation, I suggest the later because arguably a retail bank account is a necessary part of modern life in the west and could be considered a utility.

I would personally like to see retail only banks that charge and are strongly regulated to avoid bailouts in the future.

Investment banks should be allowed to offer retail services, but they should be forced to make it clear to the customer that if their investment arm fails, there will be no bailout from the government and they could lose all their money.

Let the people who want to play roulette and let those that don't have an option too.

Sadly this kinda depends on their being enough consumers who don't want to play roulette.

In the UK the government bought in a system where all purchases over £25,000 are recorded and publicly available on the internet.

I was pleased about this but I would say it is not a perfect solution, payments could be split up to go under the limit for example.

Ideally we would have a system where this is all automated, every invoice goes through a system and the results are collected. I admit this is a very tricky one though.

I think the very first judgement you should make about a piece of software is whether it works or not. After all the user will never care about anything else.

That being said, if you are in a team and you know you all will have to extend or maintain the code at some point, then discussion of coding style, program features, choice of data structures, etc, is healthy. These things are important for a growing application, getting them right will make the software more robust and make maintenance more efficient.

How easy is it to get linux running on an iPad?.

I am not quite convinced that the days of the PC are over, but I can see the market being squeezed quite a bit. And none of the devices that are supposedly the future have the same open nature as the PC.

Bitcoins utility is a factor in its value.

True, speculation and hoarding dominates its usage at the moment but there is still potential.

If a lot of people are buying bitcoins then that should push the value of them up (depending on the available supply of bitcoins) regardless of whether they exchange them back in to traditional currency shortly afterwards. It is a form of utility.

All currencies are valued against each other, it is no surprise to see the dollar value used most frequently to determine value, since dollars are the worlds reserve currency.

My opinion is that bitcoin is probably ahead of its time, the technology is amazing, and could be used in many different ways, and I am not yet ready to count bitcoin out just yet.

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting the jury be only check and balance, and I don't think it would be a silver bullet.

We are where we are because business (those who desire money) and politicians (those who desire power) have overlearned the system.

There is no reason why they couldn't overlearn the jury check as well, I can't think of a simple solution.

Perhaps we are doomed to cycles of people being complacent, which lets tyranny flourish only to be ended violently?.