My eldest brother has asthma.

My Dad smoked. He gave up before his second child was conceived. The rest of us don't have asthma.

Really? i'm sure I've seen TV ads recently with the fine print 'acceptable use policy applies'.

that would suggest isps are still getting away with throttling one's connection.

Uncle Rupert owns the content. Uncle Rupert owns our pay tv network. Uncle Rupert discourages FTTH.

Follow the money.

low cost carriers charge extra for any checked luggage, incentivizing those bulging Texans.

I've been on flights where staff have requested that carry-on luggage be stowed in cargo (free at the gate) because the plane overhead lockers wouldn't cope with demand.

Solution? maybe have a set limit, e.g. 5kg for carry-on.

How common is ad-hoc seating? Surely in most cases, seats are allocated at check-in.

Scrap Windows RT and dump the locked-down bootloader. You might get a few extra thousand sales of Linux nerds who want an Android tablet/portable debian machine with a keyboard but occasionally need to reboot into Windows e.g. to run a touch-enhanced Visio that work requires.

If MS do continue with the ARM-based Surface, make it run the full Windows 9.

But emulation is a crutch and should be a fallback only. Shrink-wrapped x86-only software needs to go the way of the dodo. you'll have a nifty checkbox in Visual Studio to compile for all architectures and publish to their app-store.

The 'fraud squad' already contacted me about credit card skimming traced to our home internet, whereby someone had hacked our wifi in a drive-by usage. They suggested we change our password but you wonder how secure WPA2 is anyway...

The local ISP, Telstra, is said to soon be trialling nationwide 'free wifi' to ADSL2 customers by offering a free modem with segregated wifi. So I wonder what firmware they plan to use.

za - the South African release?

Gimp and firefox are the main programs that tie me to gtk+2/X11 but I'd be prepared to run those inside an a x-wayland container.

Where I live, the security agency was on telly tonight calling for greater hacking powers and data retention.

(The Terrorism card)

Why spy on your own citizens when the information is, seemingly, freely available online?

Funny you should mention that.

When flying out of NYC, I flew from La Giardia, the shiteist airport in north america. ;-)

Migrate to Australia, then. :(

The ghost of Uncle Rupert and Big Coal will still be dominating. Our current treasurer, Joe Quixockey, tilts at Canberran windmills.

Technically, but only using a distro crafted for ARMv6.

Doubling the RAM aside, switching to a modern core such as a CortexA7 would make for a faster experience and allow RPi2 to use stock debian.

Well the specs were modest for ARM SoCs even by 2012 standards. Deliberately so, given the mission to produce a $35 computer.

A rpi 2 with Broadcom's quad core Cortex-a7 SoC would still be no speed demon compared to an iPad Mini but adequate to run, say, Gnome/KDE with all the bells and whistles. (Whether they can achieve the same price envelope...)

A $35 computer will never match a 'desktop replacement', if you're used to a Corei7 workstation but should just about surpass the P4 I'm typing this on in the next iteration.

Scotland is closer to the dark side of the moon, so the Space-Nazis will bomb Edinburgh first?