Dude, you're Australian. You're lucky to have some pretty strong consumer protection law on the books.

According to my Aussie friend if you have a problem with Telstra, or any other Aussie telecoms company, you contact the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman and your problem will almost always get sorted quickly. He's had to call them when Telstra have dragged their feet fixing his Internet connection. After he complained to the Ombudsman, Telstra were calling HIM back and apologising, and had a team out in his neighbourhood fixing the problem the next day.

You still would though. You know you would.

This is just a guess.. but might they not have been playing on a association with a certain historical event.

"Liberation kits", after all.

Of course white people can still be called terrorists, but only if they've DDoSed a corporate website or similar... simply add the "cyber-" prefix and you're ready to go (to court).

Yes, it's ridiculous.

An Aussie friend tells me that he and his mates refer to VB as "Vaginal Backwash".

Whether that's better or worse than cat-piss...

In my experience, they WERE almost always caused by buggy device drivers, and Windows' poor handling of buggy device drivers, rather than the hardware.

Windows' handling of device driver failures has greatly improved over time, so now when a (for example) display driver has a shit-fit, Windows can successfully recover, rather than just barfing a blue screen, so maybe NOW your point is more valid, but it certainly wasn't prior to the introduction of Windows Driver Foundation.

Sounds like they were trying to create a game where cities could be genuinely different and still successful and functional. With the strong emphasis on multiplayer and shared maps, a game where people didn't have to follow the same rigid template as everybody else to create a viable city was probably considered a vital feature.

Older SC games really only had a single "optimal" strategy. I think this was what they were trying to avoid.

Unfortunately, it seems that in trying to make it more free-form and less rigid, they inadvertently weakened the "Sim" part of "SimCity".

It's a different game. People used to RCI balance as the core mechanic are going to find it different to what they expected. Whether that's better or worse is probably a matter of opinion.

Personally, I find the stock Samsung roms to be perfectly good. I've rooted my S3 and disabled a lot of the built-in Samsung apps, but apart from that, it's still running the latest official Samsung firmware. It does everything I want, so I see no reason to change for the sake of it. (In other areas/devices I'm an incorrigible modder, so this isn't just apathy, this is the 3rd party roms not being compelling enough to change).

If I still have my S3 in a year or so when Samsung have stopped releasing updates for it, then I *might* consider flashing a 3rd party rom, but by that time I'll probably have upgraded to the Galaxy S4 or S5 or whatever the new hotness is anyway.

So, no it won't affect my decision, and I doubt I'm a unique case in this regard.

Run out of space on your iPhone? Too bad, delete stuff.

Run out of space on your GS3? Shift stuff to the external microSD card. If that gets full, pull the back cover off and swap in another microSD card.

Run out of battery on your iPhone? Too bad, find a power socket to plug your charger into. You brought your charger, right? Hope you weren't planning to go anywhere for the next hour or so!

Run out of battery on your GS3? Pull back cover off, take dead battery out, put charged battery in.

THESE were the features that sold me on the GS3 instead of the iPhone.

There's no way we could go back to that now. Why go to all the cost of producing multi-gigabyte ROM chips when they can pump the games out on BluRay for a few cents per copy, and particularly when the games would still get illegally dumped and distributed anyway! They'd just be going to great expense to put a small bump in the road for the pirates.

You don't have to wait 10+ years if the console was already obsolete when it was released. Case in point: Dolphin was emulating Wii games with a high degree of accuracy and compatibility for a large part of the Wii's active lifespan. Yes, the hardware requirements were a bit steep (though not so much now) to run games perfectly, but it shows how weak the Wii's hardware was (i.e. barely a step beyond the Gamecube) that a very playable emulator was available while Wii games and consoles still sat on store shelves.

Me neither, so I checked out the Wikipedia article and discovered this gem:

HPA can be used by various booting and diagnostic utilities, normally in conjunction with the BIOS. An example of this implementation is the Phoenix FirstBIOS, which uses BEER (Boot Engineering Extension Record) and PARTIES (Protected Area Run Time Interface Extension Services).[3]

Assuming that citation is valid, I have to give props to the Phoenix Technology guys for taking the time to give awesome acronyms to pretty mundane tech.

I know you mean the in-game command console rather than a game console like the xbox, but not everybody is familiar with the game :)

OTOH, the weapon names were changed to be even less similar to their real life counterparts in the original xbox console port (CS not CS:S). Deagle became Night Hawk etc. Obviously the xbox port lacked a command console so I don't think there's a way to see if they changed the actual item names as well as the UI labels.

As an actual Scot living near Glasgow, I'd say...

1. Move to Scotland. Unless you're rich, in which case move to a tax haven.
2. Use any excuse to get drunk. Waking up in the morning, for example, should be properly celebrated.
3. Occasionally wonder what both sides aren't telling us about the Independence question, then give up and drink more.
4. Use the word "cunt" primarily as punctuation.

There's more to it than that, of course (like pretending to enjoy haggis) but start with the items above and you'll be well on your way.