And there a difference between "government and industry watching your every move" versus "portable recording devices easily available"

I don't want to be recorded and tracked 24/7 by government/industry, but I don't particular have an issue with the people around me having cameras. Yes, somebody could catch me at a bad moment, but they can also film a lot of good things such as abuse of power (e.g. cop shooting fleeing suspect in the back and then planting a taser on the body), he-said-she-said (dashcams of car accidents, somebody assaulting a cop and saying it was abusive police), etc.

Public shaming of true a-holes isn't a terrible thing as well, so long as we don't get to the point where neighbours are posting our pictures wanted-ad style because a cat crapped on somebody's petunias once.

Perhaps somebody has a patent against using a cellular wireless chip to tune FM frequencies?
It's weird, because my old Samsung flip-phone had a nice FM tuner which worked with the headphones, but here (Canada) I haven't seen any such thing in newer smartphones.

One thing I note is that the particle effects are quite impressive, including explosions and sparks, etc. I'm guessing those are PhysX enabled or possibly Mantle? Whatever is being used, it definitely helps lend a bit of a Starwars/movie feel to things.

I wonder if this might apply to ragers/trolls as well? On games that are free (DOTA2) etc, there is a system for reporting, but at the moment it just seems to temporarily put you in the "slow queue".
I'm actually had some people say "go ahead, report me, I'll be back" (generally these are not even necessarily trolls, but people who spend the whole game screaming on the mic and spewing vile profanity at team members). If you could have a steam-account perma-banned, that would be nice, but obviously the bigger a-holes/trolls are just going to go from account bob1222 to making account bob1223. A $5 block to prevent them from certain in-game activities might be nice too.

There's been a lot of discussion about the sexist/misogynist/racist trolls online. My personal take is that - in the gaming community - it's not really a particular problem with any of those mentioned categories, but rather a problem with trolls/assholes in general. If we can reduce that issue it'll probably make life nicer for everyone.

"ex-Kennedy and ex-Kitty Hawk are currently in long term storage"

How exactly does one do "long term storage" on something the size of an aircraft carrier
Serious question, it's not like you can just park it in the garage/barn and cover it with a tarp.

Believe it or not, I did read the article.
It said she regained consciousness after drilling her skull and removing half the tumour. It's after that that it says they did chemo, radiation, and more surgeries which lost 80% of her left brain and paralysed her. After that she regained some vision and mobility, but the cancer still spread to the remaining brain.

So from the sound of it, there wasn't a whole lot of brain left. 80% of the left is gone, and the right had already been eaten away by cancer as well.

Yes, and it's pretty much just a brain, because the other half was already destroyed by cancer.

That part doesn't make much sense to me at all.
Spinal Damage. Stopped Heart. Sure.
Brain injury that prevents consciousness but doesn't seem to impact primary function, maybe.

But half her brain is gone. What are they preserving, exactly?

Australia has corporate tax rates that are in general lower than those in, say, the United States.

How do the laws/loopholes allowing companies to "write off" such taxes compare?

It doesn't mean so much as bumping up the salary of all the workers, but it might make it easier to argue with the shareholders.

The download speed is often a wee bit above the advertised rates, which is good

The upload speed is often below the advertised rates, which is bad.

Yes. One strong consideration in regards to the UK is that just handing people over to foreign governments (US or otherwise) doesn't work quite as well for high-profile persons. Sure, some people are going to be upset if you hand over "random person X" to a foreign power where he/she may likely be tortured or abused, but in many cases those people might not even be in a position to know it was done by the government, just that Bob didn't show up for work one day and nobody knows where he is.

If the UK government hands over Assange, there's enough eyes involved that it would probably spike somewhat significant protests etc. Kinda like airing your dirty laundry on the front porch rather than in the back yard.

Even an RNG etc might periodically need updates, for which it's not unreasonable to assume USB drives might be used. Having better audit practices would help, but it sounds like they already had a "minimum 2-person team" requirement that this dude bypassed due to his privileges as head of security. It's a case of "who watches the watchers"

A large portion of criminals are dumb. For the ones that aren't and still get caught, sometimes it's due to clever police-work, etc, but oft-times just plain bad luck plays a factor.

There are trolls, and then there are shit-disturbers. The trolls are there to get a reaction. The SD's are there to cause trouble. In the end, many of their methods are the same, but many of the trolls have somewhat better spelling/grammar.

An example of an SD would be many of the posters on the recent "shooting videos", who come online and say that we need to "declare war on all the cops, shoot them first." To most people, a war of escalation obviously isn't going to end well, but these people come spewing hate and bile that they seem to actually believe it.

One of the problems seems to be that if you want to grow somewhere that has an extended growing season (a.k.a lots of hot sun year-round), it's probably going to be in an area that is rather arid without a lot of irrigation.