If everyone in Australia had a Root (Chinese or otherwise) there would be no need for a Web of Porn

While it is technically true that the Australian Federal Government is spending the money, in this particular circumstance, money for laptops for children was given to the various State and Territory governments to decide exactly how they were going to spend it.

The retarded "unhackable" claim, and the decision on which OS and brand of computer to give to children in NSW was made entirely by the NSW government.

The federal government make plenty of stupid statements and policy decisions, but this is one they're not guilty of

I thought implementing ITIL just involved renaming the Help Desk to the Service Desk, then carrying on business as usual?

What's potable, preciouss?

They probably assume that like VisualStudio, competing IDE's take over an hour to install and just can't be bothered

VS is a great product, but god damn does it (and the complementary MSDN library) take a long time to install

It's a shame that a relatively interesting idea, has to be marketed as an ANTI-TERROR product for it to get any attention.
I can imagine this being useful for all sorts of problems related to drinking supply water - accidental contamination due to agricultural products, algal blooms etc

It's not surprising an article by Charles Stross reminds you of work by Vernor Vinge.

Charlie Stross's novels explore some of the same topics as Vinge, particularly Accelerando, which is an awesomely headfucking look at the Singularity. He's also released it as a creative commons free ebook, so there's no reason not to check it out

As another person who has done both at the same time, I also think this is the way to go. When I graduated from my degree, I went straight into work. It's great to be taking home money, but I found I missed the feeling of constant learning you can only get in academia (while you can and should learn on the job, I feel it's learning of a different nature). After 6 months of work, I enrolled myself to do a Masters in night classes.

Working fulltime and studying part time is hard. It requires time management, prioritisation and most of all, commitment. It's tough when your friends are all going camping for the long weekend while you're at home studying. It's tough when you've got an assignment due at university and a project due at work and you're expected to work late.

The upside of all this is that even more impressive than having a Masters on your resume is being able to show that you can complete a Masters while working. This shows employers you're motivated to continually better yourself, which can be cast in a very positive light in job interviews

So in Britney Spears case, it will be in about 71-73 years

I tried the same search and got a 451 error

On a whim I paid an extra coupld of bucks and saw the movie at an IMAX Digital theatre, and sweet jesus does it make a difference. Now I've seen a full size cinema screen with not a speck of dust and perfect colours, I don't know how I'm going to go back to watching regular old film projections

So the NSW state police have been given the same powers that other state police forces/services and the Federal Police already have? Who cares?

As has already been pointed out, it's under the same type of arrangements as other Australian agencies are subject to: Court ordered warrants. Not just any court, but the Supreme Court of NSW.

When applying for a warrant, the police must provide convincing reasons to the judge, and the contents of these warrants come out in court if a prosecution results. Somehow I don't think "he looks funny" is going to cut it.

I think this is a reasonable use of police powers, with suitable checks and balances in place

I suspect this is a clever attempt to offload tens of millions of excess HD-DVD components by sticking them in a mouse and calling it new technology