The US customary units differ from the imperial units anyway. Imperial gallon is 4.54 L (based on volume of 10 pounds of water), US gallon is 3.785 L (defined as 231 cubic inches). Even the ratios of fl oz to cups and pints is different. 1 imperial pint = 2 Imp. cups = 20 Imp. fl oz ~= 568 mL, 1 US pint = 2 US cups = 16 US fl oz ~= 473 mL.

The FDA also already defines metricated units for use on food labelling, so that on nutrition labels where fl oz are stated, that really means 30 mL exactly, and similarly for teaspoon (5 mL) and tablespoon (15 mL).

Although the international inch, foot, yard and mile are all the same in every day usage, the US also has the special survey foot and mile.

The US survey foot differs from the regular foot by about 610 nm, and the US survey mile by about 3.2 mm (~ 1/8 in). That difference multiplies to about 1 foot over a distance of 95 miles, or about 27 feet over the 2600 mile distance from San Francisco to New York.

Except blood pressure, which is still measured in mmHg (millimetres of mercury) instead of hPa (hectopascals).

Ask the English how that worked out for them. They buy petrol by the litre, but measure speed and distances in miles, and fuel economy in miles per (Imperial) gallon.

In Australian copyright, there is the concept of fair dealing. This is similar to fair use in the US. That gives the right to use copyrighted material for, among other things, the purpose of news reporting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing#Australia

Opera does hold patents and does sometimes patent new inventions. (As an employee, I am forbidden from discussing specifics and I don't know if a patent application was even filed for this particular feature). However, for specifications developed within or submitted to the W3C, Opera is subject to the W3C patent policy.

WTF? How does it possibly stop you from removing the battery when the phone is turned off? Isn't the battery held in with some sort of mechanical latch, with either a slider, something to depress to release the hooks, or similar? Which blackberry model are you talking about specifically?

These patents are NOT related to HTML5. These are related to the Widget specifications in the WebApps working group. The HTML5 work does not make use of this specification (though W3C widgets do use HTML5). Apple has not and there is no indication that they have any interest in doing anything that will impede the work of HTML5.

Torrents you've already got won't be affeted by thepiratebay.org going down. The web site is only used to distribute the torrent files and magnet links. Once you've got that, then you find other peers either through the openbittorrent.com tracker or the trackerless alternatives.

Tony Abbot's skepticism is easily addressed by giving him a demonstration of the technology. The only problem is that he's such a stubborn fool, he'll probably keep insisting that maintaining the ageing copper lines is fine for now and ignore the future as somebody else's problem. He's an tehnologically incompetent fool who should not be put in a position to make technical decisions on this issue, particularly because he seems incapable of listening to the industry experts on the issue.

To be fair, though, the Labor party has it's own share of misguided policies (the filtering policy, for one), but having a Labor government would be significnat better than a Liberal government right now. I think the best option is to give preferences to parties like The Greens, The Secular Party of Australia, and the Australian Sex Party ahead of Labor, and to put Liberal, National, Family First and the Christian Democrats at the end (with Labor's Stephen Conroy given the special Dead Last position, for voters in Victoria only), with the rest in the middle somewhere.

Compulsory voting is fantastic because it encourages a higher voter turn than voluntary schemes, and gives a better chance of actually getting what the public wants, rather than just what politically motivated groups want. Donkey votes are a minor problem, but at least such people can be seen to have willingly abstained, rather just failing to turn up.

I think it would be a complete disaster if Australia ever adopted a voluntary system like the US, where half the battle is just getting people to bother turning up, and the result can often be heavily influenced by politically motivated groups. For instance, just think about terrible the result will turn out if the Tea Party movement manages to motivate a significant portion of their followers to vote for extreme right-wing nutjobs, while the less politically motivated people and less well-organised groups who don't agree with them at all, just don't bother to vote.

So compulsory voting levels the playing field and gives a much fairer and more representative outcome.

The latency is irrelevant. I meant that they would look up the data from participating ISPs, using whatever implementation method they use, regardless of whether that's a local database or a remote lookup service. The fact is, SSL does not hide your IP address, and so SSL is not any kind of protection against this issue.

SSL won't help guard against this at all. If you visit a site that embeds an advertisement, the ad provider still obtains your IP address, and they can still query participating ISPs for the postal code of the user at that address.

Oh, you're just whinging without actually paying attention to any of the benefits that metrication would bring. Please watch Metrication Matters and read this site to find out more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M
http://www.metricationmatters.com/

I don't buy that argument. Petrol stations set their prices based on what they pay for the fuel and necessary profit margins. Also, they are still going to want to compete with each other by offering the best price they can. It's not in their interest to rip off consumers by 20 or 30 cents, expecially when there's a station down the road that isn't doing that.

Also, if you're getting around $0.70/L for fuel in the US, you're already getting a serious bargin compared with what we pay in Australia, and what I've seen being charged in some places in Europe. You'd have little to whinge about even if the prices did go up a little.

Of course, I meant to imply that the US should also switch to using metric at the pump, selling fuel per litre rather than per gallon, and also switch to using km/h for road speeds.

It can be done and has been done in many countries before. It does, however, require that the actual conversion be done relatively quickly, rather than a gradual changeover.

Watch Metrication Matters, a Google Tech Talk that covers these issues well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgtsSM7vN0M