So much hot air about iOS by so so many where so few have even used an iPhone.

I'll be <sarcasm>sticking to this method</sarcasm>, really.

Hmm, it's illegal to berate people on the basis of race so the bigots all buy PCs and spout crap about "typical" Mac users instead these days. Your type used to hang "strange fruit" from Alabaman trees barely 100 years ago, therefore your ideas count for nothing.

If any of you PC bigots have ever owned an Apple product I might listen to your "product advice" about build quality, but I'll choose the "poor reliability" of my Macbook at home over the "mission critical performance" of the Dell on my desk at work, anyday.

Organic espresso? Go fuck yourself.

Since hemlock, actually, or even since walking up to a large predatory cat and slapping it on the nose.

They probably don't delete it, they probably archive it securely for legal purposes and anonymously for research purposes.

I agree, Team Firefly Night Rides and Steve's Wooden Bicycle are both gone forever, too.

Also, I've always taken the view that what I say in public is out there and there's nothing I can do but be honest if asked directly. We have to own our own responsibility and not expect others won't do background checks on us, then accept that, if our past is a problem for an employer, we probably wouldn't fit into their work culture. I've always gone for jobs where my music and cycling were not a problem. It's about making your weaknesses into strengths.

Just as society evolved to make it it illegal to discriminate against people because of their ethnicity or belief structure, society will probably evolve just as easily to make discrimination on the basis reasonably distant past acts illegal, too. There is already precedent for this sort of approach in some jurisdictions - the statute of limitations. A good law might deem post data older than 5 years in a social context and 10 years in a career or education context irrelevant and make it unlawful to be used in assessment of your fitness as a person.

<quote><p>Also, brb, building a TARDIS.</p></quote>

Well, the Relative Dimension In Space approach is a third, and very elegant, way to do time/space travel, too. It's everywhere and everywhen all at once, simply relocate the projection into spacetime, while the "interior" of that projection sits at the "centre" of the universe, never moving.

and surely all that was needed was to remove the offending blog accounts rather than the whole freakin' server?

No nation can call itself democratic when it dedicates resources to hiding activities from the people who empower that government.

This is what you get for not having compulsory voting.

In the 1980s they started downing E and listening to Art of Noise, that's what happened ;-)

Grid loads are a side issue, anyway. The real issue is relocation carbon emissions from the exhaust pipe to the coal-fired smoke stack.

Electric cars don't reduce CO2 emissions by all that much and will cause more reliance on brown coal. (80% of the world's electricity is coal fired.) They'll also add other factors into the sustainability equation - lithium for batteries, tech waste disposal and the CO2 externalities of those factors.

Bio-crude from farm waste is the only viable solution to the problem of fueling personal motorised transport sustainably. Nothing solves the problems of too much private car ownership and the unsustainability of manufacturing so many cars.

I'll second that motion.

Bags I the patent on doing a shit. I'll be as rich as shit! ;-)

<quote>Why not work on regular old websites?</quote>

I agree with this, even as an iPhone fanboi. Government services should be platform neutral, and currently, the only way to do this to any degree of universality is to use mobile optimised web apps.

Most of these special purpose corporate service apps are buggy as all hell and designed by chimp. At least with web apps there's hope of governments and corporations employing somebody with a broad background and familiar with web standards.

And you thought the shift from Rudd to Gillard was quick? Wait until these guys get going. Sadly, I think if this caught on, Australia would degenerate to a car driving, foreigner hating, forest felling, coal burning, fascist nightmare state.

Oh, it already has...