Well hence "anti-government" - which McVeigh definitely was.

I can confirm as of like, yesterday that this is not the case. iTunes dutifully demanded my Apple ID, then demanded my credit card details to download a free app. At the very least it's well hidden.

Having just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get a photo on an iPad to my Android phone (both devices having wi-fi, bluetooth, internet connectivity) I cannot agree with this enough.

I mean sure, yeah, it's possible but the solution I landed on was "download BitTorrent Sync app and use that" - which did just work in the end. Of course the iPad was the real problem in this chain - hand over your credit card details to iTunes to download anything, and then are you going to get to use Samba or FTP? Haha, of course not!

For the first 3 years of my undergrad degree program I used one of the convertible laptops from Toshiba back when Microsoft was pushing pen computing. Taking notes in maths lectures with that thing and a stylus worked fantastically because of the simple "easy erase" functionality which meant I could scribble things out, then erase them and leave my notes in a more comprehensible form.

It wasn't a great platform by any stretch (underpowered hardware, and ultimately the screen was way too fragile - even under warranty you can't depend on something like that then spend 2 weeks without it while it's repaired) but even just with the very basic hand-writing system it was a great way to work.

The thing is you're not going to get cancer from that anyway. Dead (due to being burned alive) but not cancer.

....

It was what, two guys with guns?

So the candidate is what, every anti-government idiot in America who owns guns and posts a lot about it on the internet?

It's the talk of organized platoons and squads which is absurd, because - get this - organizing things involves a lot of communications and is quite hard to do secretly for exactly that reason!

You know you can just install over TouchWiz right? Even without root, Android freely lets you install alternative launchers. I like Nova.

I would say they almost certainly had thought of them, and were all waiting to see if it was commercially successful elsewhere.

Which is why most of these patents get shot down - because the US is about date of invention, not date of filing, and so if you had the concept thought up then hey, you did in fact get their first.

Frankly, the Apple patents on the look of the iPhone are stupid - because it comes down to arguments over the precise curvature of corners, whether the screen has to be flat or not and any number of other stupid things. PDAs and actual phones (WinCE phones) were converging on the iPhone design for a long time - so then you get to "if the technology wouldn't allowed it..." considerations and all that other stuff. It's a god damn mess.

This is where the money in this idea lies. If you had an effective way to completely deaden low-end bass, then you'd dominate the market. Being able to build a whisper quiet nightclub or listening room would be incredible.

I'm about to embark on some deadening and sound proofing in my basement theatre, and I'm now thinking I really need to look into the metamaterial research to see if it can offer anything there.

Electricity prices in NSW are a direct result of an idiot subsidy scheme which encouraged the utilities to overbuild, and get overpaid, for long-distance delivery lines. Which means we have a ton of underutilized infrastructure for delivery we pay more then full price for. [i]That's[/i] where the cost of electricity increases, at least in my state, have been coming from.

The net effect of this is that while we still get brown outs and black outs in the middle of Sydney from transmission lines failing, we're overpaying by a huge factor for a delivery network we don't need, since energy efficiency measures have been consistently staving off the need for extra power plants and solar installations cut the summer A/C problem down a fair chunk.

Which part of the constitution are they violating? Can you cite the passage or amendment?

The other issue is that power prices do not, cannot and should not operate as a totally free market. Lots of things are predicated that the price of electricity moves in predictable ways, and scales according to individual and not aggregate usage yet this is not the natural state of the electricity market. Reducing the rate of power consumption growth means you can better optimize how you layout and upgrade transmission lines and power plants. Society as a whole might generally need to use more power year to year, but there's no particular reason this should be true for residential households when most of the used electricity is currently wasted as unneeded heat.

How much amperage do you think your hard drive draws? (and also you might want to look at your case cooling if your hard disks are running that hot).

Since when do incandescents tolerate switching well?

CFL fluorescents don't because they blast the hell out of the filaments to get instant on capability (which is you know, identical to the behaviour of incandescents). If you need a light which tolerates being cycled, LEDs are it.

Because English needs less words that sound the same in my head and mean different things :)