The whole point of the Australian government is Representative Democracy.

By my rough calculations, 75% of our politicians should be self righteous, arrogant busy-bodies who think they know better than me regardless of anything so trivial as reality.

As an atheist, I can appreciate the sentiment, but as a realist I see the fact that all our leading politicians are currently zealots as simply an aberration that even those nominally religious abhor.

I would argue that encouraging participants to read the entire conversation and then respond once to all the previous discussion is a good thing.
Why deal with 4 separate single line responses?
If they are on diverging topics, surely they shouldn't be under the same thread any more?
The failure of participants to correctly quote is no more a fault of gmails than top posting is a fault of outlook.

The only other MUA (besides gmail) I have discovered that does it correctly is sup http://sup.rubyforge.org/
It's command line (which isn't a complete deal breaker for me, failure to render html or show inline images aside) but it stores all it's meta data (read, deleted etc) in it's own internal databases which are not reflected on your IMAP server (which IS a deal breaker for me).

I've been tempted to start hacking on the source, and if it was written in a language I knew I'd have already done it.

Every single time I see this discussion, someone pipes up to say "but thunderbird DOES do threads!".
That it does. And that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand.
Conversation view as provided by gmail gives you a single page for each entire conversation AND it inserts your replies online as appropriate.
There's several other features that make conversation view work so well, but you'll have to actually try gmail to understand what we are talking about.

One that's smart enough to realise that if you do away with the ticketing system (ticket creation, distribution, ticket machines on busses, policing people not using tickets) the entire bus system can be run for the same money the local government subsidizes the system ANYWAY.
And because the entire system is free, more people use it, reducing congestion on busy city street.
Who loses out on this deal?
People who pay tax and don't use the bus. But at least when they are driving, their roads are easier to navigate.

NAEV is lots of fun, 2D top down elite clone (actually an Escape Velocity ;)) http://code.google.com/p/naev/

Internet Explorer may not have been in the kernel, but key components of it were shared with the file manager and the windowing/desktop manager.
That's why it loaded so quickly.
That's why it ran so quickly.
That's why if you crashed it badly enough you ended up looking at your wallpaper with no icons, no start bar and (if you didn't know how to bring up the task manager) no clue as to how to make the computer "work" again without rebooting.

Well the article talks about electrical consumption and total energy, so I would assume that part of that total energy need is currently being met in a way that is not electrical.
Cars for example mostly run on petro-chemicals right now, but if they were suddenly all electric, it would substantially add to our electrical consumption without really altering our total energy usage.

Tell you what, on behalf of a vast majority of Australians I invite you to keep him.