The best of Reader Comments: The broadband backlash, lazy voters and Gates' Linux lashing

First up is news of ISP Clara.net attacking the UK government over its increasingly "irrelevant" approach to the rollout of broadband internet access (http://www.silicon.com/a44278 ) which brought in an almost unprecedented number of comments.

Townies must come first
By Anthony Mayfield
It's less than "irrelevant" to talk about initiatives to make sure broadband reaches less densely populated parts of the country when its roll-out in urban areas sometimes seems to be just an urban myth ("a friend of a friend of mine has just had ADSL installed"). The Government should focus on getting the broadband wagon rolling at all and THEN worry about getting fat pipes out to rural communities.

They can do it in rural Sweden...
By Ian Davies
It's difficult to see how this is ever going to happen without substantial government backing, as Sweden seems to be doing. Even tiny Swedish villages will receive high-speed internet under a programme to set up a nationwide broadband network.

... and even rural Belgium - so why are BT and Blair failing Britain?
By Peter Hitchmough
A strength of the internet revolution is that participants need not live in high-cost high-stress cities. I operate a small IT consultancy living in one of Manchester's satellite villages I was looking forward to broadband. I'll never see it at home in this decade whereas a colleague in rural Belgium has been running for a year. Poor infrastructure is one reason I might jack the whole thing in. Why is the UK so far behind? Step forward BT and the government.

We're wasting our lives waiting
By Rob Smith
The slowdown of the entire IT industry is due to poor internet connections. The average home user is sick to death of the internet. Not because of the content, they just cannot justify spending five minutes waiting for a page to load up.

Next up is rant of the week. One story we ran this week claimed the lack of an online voting system is stopping voters within an increasingly busy population having their say come polling day (http://www.silicon.com/a44293 ). Sound reasonable? 'Chalky' White doesn't think so:

Busy! Lazy more like!
By Chalky White
When I read stories like this it makes me want to puke.

While secure online voting is clearly a good thing there exists a perfectly good postal vote system that allows for people with 'busy lives'.

Generally (yes, I'm generalising and I know there are a FEW exceptions), the people I know with 'busy lives' spend an awful lot of that 'busy' time in front of the telly.

Anyone that claims it is too difficult to vote has just proven that they are too lazy to be interested in democracy.

If they can't be bothered to make a phone call to their local MP, political party or even their local council to find out about postal voting they don't deserve the vote.

We clearly have it too easy in Britain. After all, people laid down their lives to ensure that even lazy people can vote. It's time they got off their rear ends and understood that democracy costs. At least the phone call won't cost their life.

Let us know what you think of Chalky's comment. Is he speaking sense about a nation too obsessed with convenience to use anything that might be out of arms reach, even at the cost of their hard-earned right to vote? Register your reader comment below.

Finally, many of you reacted to Linus Torvald's attack on Bill Gates this week (http://www.silicon.com/a44238 ) by getting behind the father of Linux in a broad condemnation of the Seattle tycoon and his monopolistic practices. Others left the subject matter of the story far behind and concerned yourselves with the life and times of Sir Isaac Newton who Linus chose to quote:

Copying Apple's code
By Lee Sidley
Well I don't see any reason why microsoft doesn't open its source code. Or perhaps it's because they are afraid people will realise how much really is copied from the Macintosh.

Watching apples fall
By Steve Cooke
I wonder if Linus Torvalds really wants to use Isaac Newton as an example of the 'Open Source' philosophy?

Bright guy - sure, but despite the 'shoulders of giants' pose he was apparently one of the most political and devious operators of that era. The long running dispute with Leibniz over the invention of calculus, more political battles with Flamsteed and constant political manipulation of the scientific community to his own ends are just a sample & or perhaps this is how Open Source works.

Standing on the shoulders of giants
By Jack Cleaver
The 'giants' quote is often used to demonstrate Newton's intellectual generosity in crediting his antecedents. In fact these words were Newton's riposte to Robert Hooke`s allegations that Newton had appropriated his own ideas - Hooke was short of stature, and a hunchback. The remark can thus be seen as a personal and vindictive attack on Hooke.

Even the Newton quotation is open source
I wonder if Newton, in his turn, read much Aristotle (the first to coin the 'shoulders of giants' phrase)

So there we go. We may not have progressed too far in our understanding of the rift between Gates and Torvalds but we're probably all a good deal more knowledgeable when it comes to Newton.

Keep the comments coming in.