The wireless cards have ample protection against copying of the complete information to make clones. RFID Passports have sufficient protection against someone being able to get useful personal data without seeing the same info on the inside of the passport first. EMV cards however will cough up all the information from the front of the card unencrypted (or if not, encrypted using a fixed publically known key at least) to anyone within range.

Set a flat price for all users, residential, commercial, industrial. No reason that some users of water should get it more cheaply than others.

On the other hand, tiered pricing based on usage helps those who made the effort to reduce waste when you get to step 3 in your scheme. But of course, when you have tiered pricing, the biggest industrial users will all negotiate for a lower rate anyway. Probably most of them can use grey water anyway, since they're using the water for cooling, irrigation or other use which doesn't really require clean, treated, tap water.

That's probably because Christianity does not require believers to spread the faith

I don't know what bubble you're living in. I live in a Muslim majority country, and I still encounter Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses on their mission to spread the faith. I've never encountered such zeal from the local Muslims (when I lived in the UK, there were evangelical Muslims with a table in the town square every weekend, so they do exist, but it seems to be more about recent converts taking an aspect of Christianity over into their new faith than anything fundamental to Islam itself).

This incident is classified as a terrorist act however even the top Muslim Cleric in Australia has condemned this

I'm not sure what the word however is doing in that sentence. Doesn't the top Muslim Cleric in Australia consistently condemn every terror attack performed in the false name of his religion, like top Muslim Clerics all around the world?

I would prefer to be taken hostage by someone who (is a hostage taker AND is a wack-job) to someone who (is a hostage taker AND is a Muslim)

I'd rather be held hostage by a whack job with an obvious motivation than one with unknown motivation. At least with a Muslim whack-job, you know that sending in a Muslim cleric to talk him down has some chance of success.

It would be super deceptive in my opinion to get actors in roles, then have them "saying" all sorts of craziness

Craziness is one thing, if you've ever seen foreign films dubbed into English, you'd know it is standard. The issue in this case was a specific kind of craziness that could get her on some whack-job's hitlist. I'm not supporting the crazies that would want to kill her, and I would defend anyone who willing stood up and said those things, but I don't think the ideal of "Free Speech" should trump her personal right to not be associated with this particularly inflammatory way of making a point.

Actually the Loudness war is a reversion to how things were before CDs, when recording engineers were trying to squeeze more out of cheap thin vinyl on ever longer albums. With CDs, they suddenly had dynamic range to play with, but the novelty wore off when they realized that pop music was mostly listened to in noisy environments with cheap in-ear headphones.

It's like taking someone running at 10 footsteps per second, filming them at 5 frames per second,

Ahh, no. It would be like filming them at 22 frames per second.

Perhaps an increase the amount of bass or mid-range may get the effect you're looking for.

Definitely midrange. As the linked article states, vinyl is pretty awful when it comes to reproducing high end treble or low end bass. But I don't think an equalizer is going to give you the distortion, which is also part of the "quality" of the vinyl listening experience.

I use Shotwell, and it definitely has an option to write the metadata to files, so you can recover it later or from another program. The database is necessary for search - you don't want it to have to open each file one by one to find the image you are looking for.

Yes, saying that Sony might have the second amendment on their side is like claiming that vigilante groups in white hoods that go around shooting anyone with dark complexion because one guy who they think was probably black robbed a store in their neighborhood once, have the second amendment on their side. The second amendment is not about that at all. It is about the maintaining the ability of the people to form a militia to overthrow a tyrannical government if the need arises. The funny thing is, the constitution will have long since been thrown out the window when that scenario eventuates.

Waste

Wait, you're seriously complaining about the possible waste of undrunk biodegradable coffee, and suggesting expensive disposible plastic pods as the solution?

Now that the ink DRM on their cartridges is cracked, will we see the emergence of third party continuous coffee delivery systems?

And Maggie should be postgraduate age by now, so why wouldn't she be publishing papers?

You've got that backwards. Exchange is the one that requires proprietary clients (it just happens that the major smartphone vendors include proprietary ActiveSync clients out of the box). The others listed use standard IMAP+LEMONADE extensions (which admittedly isn't widely supported by desktop clients, because they generally don't need it).