I'm not in Australia (I live in the UK) but I have bought a couple of things from ebay sellers who would only ship to the US in the past few years (sadly this seems to be an increasingly common occurence). I've used Shipito for package forwarding for this and would definitelty recommend them - for my sort of low-volume use they worked out cheapest by quite some margin (as they have a plan where they don't charge you a monthly or annual fee, just a higher fee per shipment) and everything has worked out so far exactly as advertised. Although I've not really had any major issues, I've been in contact with their customer support team a couple of times too and that has been a good experience - they respond to emails/online form submissions pretty quickly.

One other tip - more relevant if you're not using a forwarding service though - I've found it's well worth paying for USPS Express rather than USPS Priority Mail for boxes as it's usually not much more money (often in the region of 5%) and is SIGNIFICANTLY quicker - we're talking a difference of 2-3 WEEKS, at least from the US to the UK and in my experience.

Even if all the information were a 100% accurate representation of the actual records and all links were correct, the original records likely contain numerous errors or important omissions; to take the most obvious point, there is likely to be almost no way to verify whether children were legitimate or not. So its usefulness for genetic study seems doubtful to me as many generations later I suspect those sort of effects are difficult to pick up or isolate properly in living people's genes.

What's worse, in some historical periods it would not have been uncommon for some children to be biologically unrelated to either of their legal parents - e.g. lovechild of an affair the man had with a woman who was also sleeping with other men (but who claimed he was the father as he represented the best economic/social prospect of the possibilities), after which the man might take responsibility and raise the child as his own.

Don't worry, the EU isn't about to invade the US in some weird reincarnation of Red Dawn. But they (or individual member states) could do a lot of things which would hurt the US a great deal.

Off the top of my head for example, while still keeping things at least nominally relatively "targeted": (1) economically punish the US: impose import/export tariffs on relevant US goods/services (particularly tech but perhaps also bandwidth/peering etc), make it much much harder for US citizens to get visas to come over here for business, expropriate the EU assets of US companies who have been complicit in this eg Google, Facebook, etc, or even impose full-on trade sanctions e.g. banning EU companies from dealing with US companies in certain sectors (eg ban EU companies from using or buying Cisco gear); (2) withdraw military cooperation and support from the US: close US military bases on EU soil, cancel their (remaining) participation in various joint procurement projects eg the JSF project, immediately withdraw EU-country troops from roles around the world where they are supporting or working alongside US troops, and stop sharing intelligence with the US; (3) diplomatically punish the US, by removing some of their diplomatic staff from the US and expelling some US diplomatic staff from EU countries, stopping cooperation on international treaties such as extradition agreements, ending support for the US in international fora such as the UN etc etc.

Even if it were actually the NSA's job (which you seem to be saying it might be, provided simply that they don't get caught), you're answering the wrong question. Here's a close analogy - in countries that have armed forces, the military's most basic job is to fight and kill other people (whether to advance an invasion of other countries, repel an invasion by another country, or for some other purpose). Does that mean that we have no right to be surprised or outraged if politicians or military commanders tell their troops to kill everyone in a certain category "just in case" they might be troublemakers (even if they made it legal by changing/secretly reinterpreting the law/constitution/regulations)? Of course not. Does it make any difference if "the enemy" is doing the same? No. Neither does it make any difference if they do it in secret and never get found out. The law (of any country or even international law) doesn't even enter into the question. It's simply a moral (and ethical) imperative.

Just because you can do something, does not mean you should do something, and it is especially not a valid excuse when you get caught later. Likewise, just because someone else is doing something, or other people have "always" done something, or someone in authority has told you to do something, doesn't mean you should. I mean, come on, these are basic morals and ethics that small children the world over are taught by their parents.

If something similar had happened in any other agency of government, it would be a scandal and people would be fired (although sadly often not the actual people responsible). In fact, that seems to happen with reassuring regularity, even if the scandal is far less wide-reaching than this one. What is puzzling me is why the normal rules of politics seem not to apply to the UK/USA signals intelligence agencies.

Mostly because they make significant profits from EU-based customers. The EU can easily cut off their access to EU-originated revenues, which is what FB, Google etc really care about. The users are the product, not the customer remember - and this is one of the very very few instances when this can work in users' favour.

I'd add either the (UK, not Australian) Telegraph or (preferably) the Financial Times to that list (much better than the WSJ). Particularly for financial/business stories I almost never read the mainstream press, they are simply awful at reporting these things (usually misunderstanding, missing key details, or over-sensationalising stories as well as over-simplifying - the BBC is particularly bad at this). Bloomberg generally does a decent job most of the time on them and is worth following for that as it's free to read on the web (unlike the FT).

It's also WELL worth picking up a copy of the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, or Foreign Affairs on occasion (as well as The Economist, although that's a bit lighter-weight) - they are not really "real time" but they will give you much more to think about when you are reading the day-to-day news (just be aware that they each have their own institutional biases too).

One of the big reasons for this is that outside the USA, generally people do not pay to receive calls on mobile phones; the caller pays a higher cost to call a mobile number than a landline instead (at least in theory, although inclusive minutes deals make this increasingly not the case for either the USA or rest of world). One of the principles that seems to be broadly applied in the numbering systems used in most countries is that you should be able to tell whether a number is an "expensive" one or not by looking at the prefix. Allowing higher cost for calls to mobiles would break this principle (it also makes sense logically, since mobiles are non-geographical so giving them a geographical prefix is a bit weird).

And individuals get plea bargains. Same difference really, just the available penalties for corporate infringement are more limited.

One other fact which appears to have been massively under-reported is that, from what I understand, their definition of "metadata" includes location data for cellphones (ie at least which tower you were connected to, and potentially a tower signal-strength triangulated position). Simply knowing where you made your calls from (and where the recipient was) can allow someone to infer an awful lot about what might have been said on those calls. Especially if they can then cross-reference that with e.g. credit card records etc.

gscan2pdf is OK, but if you want to do this seriously then you're probably going to want a reasonably fast sheet-fed scanner (I got a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500, which is supported by SANE and can scan at 18-20 pages/36-40 sides per minute) with a button so that you can go through a whole stack of paper quickly with minimal keyboard/mouse interaction to slow you down. This led me to setting up scanbuttond (which just gained official support for the ScanSnap but there was a patch floating around somewhere for a while before that) with a custom script.

Make sure you OCR your documents to make them searchable then run an indexer (I like recoll but KDE and GNOME both have their own desktop search solutions as well). I've found the best OCR engine on Linux seems to be tesseract, but there are a couple of others you can try. The process took me a while to get right and is a bit painful - the script which scanbuttond runs runs scanadf to scan to a string of image files per side and puts them in a processing directory. I then have another batch-processing script I run once I'm done with a pile of papers while I go and get a cup of tea which runs unpaper then tesseract on them, then hocr2pdf to convert each page individually into a searchable PDF file then finally pdftk to concatenate all the pages together into a scanned document. I split the two parts of the process out because the OCR bit can take some time and this way I can get maximum throughput on the scanner itself without needing to wait for the rest to catch up. If I could be bothered then I could make the scanning script run my de-batching script once only and have it pick up new files as they are dropped in the directory but it's not that much of an effort really.

I then sort my PDFs into a hierarchical directory structure once they've been OCRd (and at this point they get indexed as well for searching).

If you're on Windows/Mac then the software that comes with the ScanSnap will pretty much do all this for you; although it's better to scan with OCR disabled then use Acrobat to batch-OCR the PDFs later for the same reason. Add a decent desktop search solution like an old version of Copernic (or possible Windows Search) and all is good.

But if the "cur" directory in the Maildir is corrupted then you're back to the same problem; in fact potentially worse depending on how resistant to corruption your filesystem is (will that trash the whole directory or just a part of it? If a single file has corruption in the middle of it can you still read before and after the corruption?). The correct solution to corruption concerns like that is to make good backups. Maildir has advantages over mbox in terms of the consequences of a crash/segfault/whatever while your mail client is writing the mailbox causing an issue but for an archive you won't ever write to it so this shouldn't be an issue.

Completely agree here. The Canon 10-22 seems to have a better reputation than the rather-maligned 17-40 (although I personally like the Tokina 11-16/2.8). And the Canon 17-55/2.8 has a very good reputation in terms of "normal" zoom lenses - probably equal to the 24-70/2.8 which is the FF "equivalent" only it's lighter and has IS (albeit that f/2.8 on FF is arguably really like f/2.0 on APS-C as FF has both shallower DoF and better low-light capability). Plus you can generally use all the FF lenses but just take the crop factor into account to buy slightly different lenses - e.g. you would buy the Canon 85/1.2 (or the Sigma 85/1.4) and use it on APS-C where you would be using the 135/2.0 on FF and buy something like a 50/1.2 or 50/1.4 where you would be using one of the 85s on FF.

APS-C (and APS-H for that matter although Canon have discontinued that line of sensors now) also allows you to "get away with" more on FF-designed lenses since you lose the "worst" parts of the frame which are typically the corners. So it's not all bad. Plus the extra pixel density in reach-limited situations means more reach (since there's no 47MP FF camera yet the 7D still has more reach than any other camera right now).

APS-C loses out to FF mainly in terms of low-light photography as it's at least a stop "worse" due to physical limitations - and this is why e.g. the 5D range is so popular with wedding photographers who are constantly available light challenged. Many people also talk in terms of the "quality" of each pixel being worse - i.e. at the same resolution, crop is noisier than FF since the pixels are physically smaller - although a lot of that difference can be made up for in post-processing; so another reason the FF cameras are more popular among pros is that it reduces workload in post-processing to get decent results.