It's not that they are not needed, it's that they haven't been used. Not the same thing. The government has simply let people die in care homes or their own homes rather than treating them, and there aren't enough NHS staff now in any case as so many of them are off sick due to a lack of protective equipment.

It's true.. although I'd never heard of him and haven't read the book, I see exactly what he describes in my own industry. Small companies constantly evolved and outmanoeuvre big ones because they are more change agile. But either they grow into the behemoths that they once out-competed, or they get bought out by the bigger companies but then lost their agility. But then new disruptors rise and the cycle begins again.

I don't have many videos with music, some that do use a Sony Vegas plugin to generate a random musical track which can be used royalty-free. On two occasions I have had copyright claims against those videos - upon investigation when I found the so-called "original" tracks they were essentially generated with the same plugin (in one case really badly mixed with another track) and although they exhibited similarities because of the way they were produced, they essentially looked like a fraudulent claim. It seems that there are some trolls who upload and claim copyright on a whole batch of machine-generated music (that they didn't not even write the algorithm for) and then attempt to apply it to YouTube tracks using the same software in order to leech revenue. Although it is possible to challenge the claim (I did so successfully) there appears to be no comeback on the trolls abusing the system.

Surely there can't be any under-appreciated Arnold Schwarzenegger films? Well, here are three...

Last Action Hero: Widely panned and probably misunderstood, this is a clever movie about movies that was maybe a bit too cerebral for critics expecting standard Arnie fare.
True Lies: OK, the bad guys are pretty offensive stereotypes but here's a movie that just keeps giving more and more. A clever premise, that scene in the hotel room, the nuke that... well I won't give spoilers and that isn't even the action climax of the movie. And James Cameron in charge making what is possibly the best action movie ever. But what a stupid name for a film.
Maggie: A much later film. A zombie movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger but definitely not what you expect. Kicks you right in the feels.

I used to do this years ago, but the amount of spam become overwhelming. I eventually ended it when I started receiving shady emails for a company with a domain name similar to mine, when the sender made a typo in the destination address.

Amen to that. After screwing up Cyanogenmod they should perhaps name themselves FCKWTS.

Warning: here be spoilers!

My favourite story about Pournelle is the synchronicity between "Footfall" and SDI. Footfall is probably one of the very best novels of the alien invasion genre. At one point, the president of the United States calls a conference of SciFi writers to look for ideas on how to defeat the alien invaders. Shortly afterwards (in real life), Reagan calls a conference of SciFi writers to come up with ideas for the Strategic Defence Initiative. Pournelle was part of that group (and his work for NASA would certainly have leant credibility), and although SDI was a bit of a pipe-dream it did seem credible to the Soviet Union of the time, and.. well, perestroika, glasnost and the rest is history..

Robert Tinney was the cover artist. Brilliant.

Robert Tinney was the cover artist. I did for a short time have a print of the pirate ship with a floppy disk sail until some idiot threw it away. A brilliant artist.

Keyboards were almost a religion with Pournelle. I sort-of agreed with him - a proper big SHIFT key next to the Z, a big reverse-shaped L RETURN key and a decent sized backspace key. I remember he was also keen on having the ESC key next to 1 which I think is not such a good idea, and CTRL next to A can have some unexpected side effects these days. I never used a Northgate keyboard, but Gateway 2000 and TeleVideo used some of the same principles and were the best keyboards I ever used.

No, he was always right wing and his political points of view didn't align with my own, but they were well thought out and worth considering nonetheless.

Exactly. Brexiteers either haven't figured this out or are in denials. Want to go to Spain? You'll need a visa. France? Visa. Ireland? Well, if you are travelling overland a visa and an amoured car.

Being a bit of a greybeard, I do remember the Openmoko project and blogged about it earlier this month. Launched at roughly the same time the iPhone first came to market, Openmoko took an utterly different approach. Today we might look at the Neo1973 and subsequent devices as being failed smartphone projects, but when looking back I realised that they were really fully-featured hackable computers. So, perhaps the Openmoko project in part foreshadowed devices such as the Raspberry Pi (launched 5 years later). The advantage that the Pi has over what Openmoko was trying to do is that it was simpler and cheaper. You weren't restricted by a crappy little resistive touchscreen with the Pi, just just plugged in a monitor, network cable, USB input devices and OS on an SD card and you were ready. The fundamental principles are pretty much the same.

I looked at it and though the same thing. Remind me, how did Prenda Law end up for it's principals?

Absolutely. Betteridge applies.

I have looked at ReactOS from time-to-time over the years in various buggy alphas. Although I admire the idea, it seems ultimately pointless. A free open-source alternative to Windows already exists, and it is called Linux.