If you want a phone that doesn't lock you into proprietary crap-ware, wait for the Neo900. Or buy a used N900.

You want an N900 or its successor, the Neo900 (which is basically a community-developed board designed to go into an N900 case with a faster CPU, better cellular modem and some other hardware improvements) Runs full linux (including X) and is close to the most hackable phone available.

N900 is available now if you look online for a second hand model and Neo900 is currently at the advanced prototype stage.

At the last few airports I flew out of, they have one way doors designed to stop anyone walking the wrong way back into the secured area (the only way into the secured area is through the security screening)
Why Sydney doesn't have the same thing baffles me.

Except that Windows probably has just as many holes only you dont know about them because they aren't public or because Microsoft has decided not to invest the engineering resources to fix them or because Microsoft has fixed them in a patch but the actual security flaw is still unknown publicly.

At least with Linux, if a security hole is found (and made public or released to experts in the security community or to the relavent developers or whatever), the number of people who are able to investigate and fix the hole (and make official or unofficial fixes available) is (in most cases) significantly larger than the number of people who would e able to deal with issues in Microsoft code. And the Linux guys can have patches out much faster (and they can get into distros fairly fast too)

They only need a very small amount of actual unchangeable memory. Do it like Microsoft did on the XBOX 360 and have fusible links on-die on the GPU, when the card is manufactured, the fusible links are blown to store the ID of which GPU it is in a way that cant later be altered.

In some areas of the US (especially the south eastern states where cheap dirty coal rains supreme) state governments have banned the kind of solar fiance schemes and loans that have allowed people in the west or in the north east to get solar panels on their home without the huge up-front cost. Yes the solar company makes money from the deal but the home owner still comes out on top in that they aren't paying anywhere near as much in power bills.

Also utilities have attempted to restrict (and in numerous cases succeeded in restricting) the amount of power allowed into the grid from small scale generation (including grid-tie solar) or have reduced or eliminated feed-in tariffs in way that make solar less viable.

Plus there are cases of outright bans on some kinds of solar setups (I cant find a cite right now but there have been cases where people have wanted to install solar panels and a battery bank or whatever and completly disconnect from grid power but have been prohibited from doing so by state and local laws)

The real problem is that the airlines switched from having a few flights a day between point a and point b using medium sized or large aircraft to having more flights per day using smaller aircraft.
Reverse that and you wont have anywhere near as much of a problem (especially if the airlines have an incentive to use larger planes as demand grows rather than adding more flights)

The right answer for water (and electricity and piped gas and other utilities like that) is for the company to charge a fixed cost (that covers the cost of running the systems and maintaining the infrastructure) and then a per-unit cost on top of that for the actual usage. That way everyone pays based on their usage of the infrastructure and how much water they actually use.

Yes please, I would comment on so many videos if I didn't need to go G+ to do it.

Yeah I never installed OO on that machine (for exactly that reason)

I ran Gentoo on a Pentium 4 for a while and compiling KDE without CUPS was definatly possible. Although it could take the best part of a week to run a full emerge pass if certain really big packages were all updated at once.

Although the ISPs like to talk about bandwidth costs and such the REAL reason the ISPs are doing what they are doing is because it helps suppress alternatives to the overpriced pay TV service said ISPs offer.

Here in Australia I see many stalls in shopping centers that can do phone repairs (as long as those phone repairs consist of replacing the screen on an iDevice or occasionally popular Android devices like the Galaxy S). But their primary business is selling overpriced cases/covers/screen protectors/etc/etc/etc for iDevices and sometimes Android phones.

Blame the high cost of maintaining (and upgrading) the poles and wires used to get the electricity from where its generated to where its used. (and the need to engineer that infrastructure to handle the highest possible forecast demand)

I have also seen/heard of circumstances where "doing the minimum to keep the thing working" is allowed but actually improving the code is not because improving the code counts as "new work" and comes from a different budget than maintanence.
Seems stupid but that's how some shops operate.