QR codes have an edge because they are a free to use standard. and unlike the RF spectrum of the rectennas use, the optical spectrum allows as many QR codes and sensing devices as you can cram together because the optics are simple. The RF equivalent "optics" are a bit more. I also see a problem climbing the side of a building to get to the rectenna's near field range.

Get a proxy or VPN account with a US provider. Hire a remailing service in New Hampshire. (one that gives a street address, not box number address) Get a US based Visa debit card.

Join the Virtual US!

YMMV, and you then must pay the shipping at consumer rates for hard goods, and then customs and import duties as required, and any local regional taxes on purchased materials above customs and duties fees, for example in Washington State we have a "use tax" on goods purchased out of state and brought into the state.

Compare cost to cost purchasing locally. Save? Woo Hoo!!! Lost money, welcome to the free market!

The free market also accounts for cost. If it costs more to sell somewhere, shopping, transit fees, etc. licensing agreements with the content providers included, you add those to the cost to buy in that area. Software comes with support issues as well. It could well be that in order to meet the requirements for service (like the whole one year versus two year current snafus) the cost is higher in another region. It is not because Apple or some other seller decided they don't like Australia (or some other region). They have actual cost differentials they add to the same base price to determine cost for a given market. And "free market" is more of a J.P. Morgan thing of "you charge what the market will bear"; suggested reading on this is "The Octopus". Free markets are about government controls, not financial decisions by the seller. Restricting the seller through legal means to a "level playing field" means lower cost to sell markets pay for selling in higher cost to sell markets, quite the opposite of a "free market".

Or since they burn natural gas in turbines to drive generators to generate the electricity to drive the motors to drive the compressors ... which will drive turbines to drive generators to generate electricity can't we eliminate everything after the first "to generate electricity" and if not because of peak demand issues store the natural gas instead and still short circuit a lot of this. I think thermodynamics is being monkeyed with here ...

If you are looking at colonization, send 4 women and redundant cryopaks of semen. Women have less weight burden on average so cheaper on resources, and women stand high g flight better so less complications there. And to maximize diversity you'll need 30 people on average to become stable without in breeding issues. So also consider some frozen embryos.

But this expedition is likely not focused on colonization... That alone would change the cost and weight balance unfavorably. The only way these folks would likely see more people is if earth sends more people. So I was surprised no one asked if all the developed hardware and software and plans, etc. would be open sourced to encourage more people to follow in their footsteps and improve along the way without the need for reinvention!

Or the Unicode emoticons #1F494 #1F46E #1F434...

After the initial period of software problem support of months additional support is at our customary hourly rate of $$$ adjusted annually by no more than 10% from the acceptance date of the contracted work. A prepaid retainer of $$$2 may be paid for a yearly support contract. The $$$2 amount may be adjusted downwards annually to reflect past performance and upwards for inflation.

Then make $$$2 be about 20% of the contracts value.

I have been nickel and dime'd to death by major industry players who feel they are entitled to infinite support and even "small changes" for free. Sometimes a small enough matter (or occasionally a big one time one) is done as "good will", but don't get sucked into free support forever unless you build that into your contracts price. As in for contracts under a years duration quote a price at least 20 times your cost if you are so foolish as to include lifetime support for no additional cost.

Lower your import duties and maybe the price will be closer to a real parity. And wait for the middle of the night to call all the support calls in. Stuff a hundred million more users into Oz then get back to me about the strength of the Aussie dollar being something important in Adobe's pricing model. Alternately we subsidize worse economies than ours, so while yours is going stronger you can subsidize ours ...

Regards shipping products, I can't get half the eBay Aussies to ship to the US at all, and when they do it takes 3-4 weeks ... So that shipping thing goes both ways. I got a package from Kazakhstan faster than any from Australia. So ... Buy from Amazon us. Get yourself a US credit card and buy it with that. Send it as a gift to yourself. Use the bank as the US remitter address. It will cost you a little bit each month for the account and a bit each time you fund it but _might_ work out to be a bargain in some cases.

Just make sure inland revenue or whatever the Oz tax agents are, get their due, that way you get to pay the import taxes directly! I wonder which Adobe CS6 package he was talking about ... You might also download the demo versions, then pay by US credit card (above) to get the registration code ... No shipping involved.

In a different world view, and one that is equally valid, is Comcast provides multiple products over the same pipe. The "Internet connection" is capped per the subscriber agreement (which by the way, pay approximately $50 more a month for a business Internet connection and caps go away and you can get static IPs to host your own services). The Comcast Xfinity App is provided under a different access arrangement. That they happen to use the same pipe is not meaningful. The Comcast Xfinity user is paying for an additional service bundled into their cable TV service. Likely Comcast VOIP service does not count towards the cap while Vonage likely does.

I have a solution for Netflix, as Comcast makes profit from the Cable subscription supporting use of the Xfinity App, Netflix could pay Comcast a portion of their profit to move Netflix into an additional service branded as Comcast Netflix... So it is not like Comcast is "giving away" the bandwidth for Xfinity usage. It is part of the bundled cost of cable tv service.

Now you can reach the data cap in under a minute ...

Man is not to blame. See the effect of solar output here. The nay sayers that attempt to put done the solar effect look at sunspot activity not total solar output. Man is a speck on the surface of the planet.

The earth's rotation will continue to slow down more and more. Dino-days were shorter. And eventually we will lose more and more atmosphere to space. And the radioactive material that keeps the earths interior molten will all graceful move towards iron, and the lower magnetic field will mean even more atmosphere erosion. The surface will be very very hot. No life as we know it will live there as the temperature will be over that of boiling water, our atmosphere will be much less dense and unbreathable, and the solar radiation will not be deflected because our magnetic field will have weakened and collapsed to far. Depending on your science this is 500 million to 1 billion years off. Earth will be a lifeless rocky planet.

Generally warmer climates predicted by the global warming fanatics are in the range of normal variation, the last warming period allowed the renaissance by longer growing seasons and thus more plentiful food in Europe.

We are "overdue for an ice age" (well and a eruption of the super volcano in west central US but that's another paranoid's dream). If and it is a horrendously HUGE if, mankind is contributing to global warming, then hurrah. Just learn when to stop. Worldwide food production will increase, and contrary to intuition the desert areas will actually subside because the alterations to the weather patterns will allow for more rainfall. We owe it to mankind (and Canada) to help stop the next ice age. Not likely we can, any more than we cause global warming.

The fundamental question is not is global warming happening (as in in the 1970s the next ice age was coming, same science behind both). The question is, "Is man causing global warming?"; the answer to that is no. To many facts show the effects of man are minor in comparison to natural events, like volcanos, slides of methane hydrates under water (don't tell the doomsday makers, but the North Atlantic has enough methane in seabed ice/methane hydrates to _really_ cause global warming). We don't as a species even try to track things like the effects of undersea earthquakes as they relate to global warming. There is a lot going on. Look for the strongest correlation. Occam's razor says solar output is the biggest contributor by far to global warming. Studies that dismiss it only look at selected portions of solar activity that support their hypothesis.

Recall that even Sauron did not have the power to make the palantiri show false images, but rather could force selective showing of truthful images to lead to deceit. The best lies are based in truth.

One big thing is when a program ends the contractors are no longer on the payroll. The US Government hiring direct, those employees would be assigned some other task and never fired or laid off. It just doesn't happen. We actually need to go in the opposite direction and hire more contractors. It behooves managers in the government to never fire employees. It reflects poorly on them, and possibly reduces their budget the next year. If they keep bad employees and assign them do nothing work, they still get periodic raises.

Consider if you need to hire a database analyst to set up a system that will accept some information from data entry folks, process it and then spit back some results in reports. If you are in the private sector the DBA can be a just OK level in his field and still cost twice or more what a normal programmer costs. A really good DBA can cost 4 to 5 times a normal programmer. If you are a corporation dealing with a few million records in the database the DBA can do things in the clearest most easy to maintain, non-optimal way to get the job done quickly. For dealing with potentially billions of records you need to have the most optimized ability to generate this reports or the next set will be due while you process the current set. So you need to hire the best possible talent. And they still need to test and document things so others can maintain them ... (don't think this is an issue, ask the IRS that has scrapped more than 1 over a billion dollar project to revamp the tax records system). So there is a demonstrated need to hire very qualified talent. Now after the 6 months to a year project is over, put that same guy on payroll forever at his pay scale with increases while he reads Dilbert and writes tech journal articles all day since he has very very little to do. Or as a contractor the job is done, let him go.

Smaller government could use more contractors, and then implement better oversight over their actual use and deployments.