Didn't Jimmy Carter install solar panels on the Whitehouse roof, only to have Reagan remove them for ideological reasons immediately after his inauguration? (Or was that Clinton and Bush II?)

How is this not a terrorist act? Sure, one guy's terrorist is another guy's freedom fighter, but attacking sites one disagrees with is still terrorism, whether it's done with bombs or botnets.

To call early-1980s video-game box art "misleading" is to apply the expectations of the 21st century to society back then. Back then, everybody knew that computers and game consoles couldn't do realistic-looking graphics, and that video-game graphics were minimal and functional; good enough to play the game with. The idea of a video game, of images responding to joysticks and paddles, was novel enough, and it didn't occur to players to expect elaborate graphics. Meanwhile, since pixellated graphics were new, there was no nostalgia for them, and the age of pixel art hadn't yet arrived, so a frame grab of a game on a box would have just confused people.

The box art was in the same tradition as cover art from scifi/fantasy novels of the time: lurid, superficially exciting, and only tenuously related to the content of the product being sold. A dragon or spaceship could give a reader an idea of what kind of world the book is set in, without necessarily being from the same story. Similarly, racing cars or fighter planes on a game box would give some idea of the ostensible theme of the game.

In Britain, railways are expensive and slow, and most people catch coaches or fly. Mind you, this is not due to the inherent suckiness of railways as a technology but due to an unsympathetic and ideologically-driven privatisation of the state railway. The Tories in the 1980s hated public transport, seeing it as a form of socialism; Thatcher ran down British Rail, and Major finally privatised it, selling it off to several different companies. Rail fares went up, while the system continued to be dependent on government subsidies to keep the operators from leaving. (For some years, the annual subsidies amounted to three times as much as the entire British Rail budget of the last year of its operation.) Meanwhile, budget carriers like Ryanair and EasyJet have been running cheap flights between British provincial cities, undercutting the railways.

A better model for what railways can achieve would be found on the continent. France's state-run carrier, SNCF, manages to make a profit (its high-speed lines subsidise slower provincial lines), and internal flights in France are all but unknown. In Spain, meanwhile, the AVE high-speed rail system has all but killed the market for internal flights.

The likelihood of Sony allowing a new port of Lemmings to non-Sony platforms is exactly the same as Nintendo allowing a Mario Bros. port to the iPhone or Xbox: exactly zero. The name, trademark and visual art of Lemmings is a valuable asset, and by making it exclusive to Sony hardware, Sony can claim a minor marketing advantage when the iPhone is eating their lunch. (Granted, few people would buy a PS3 for Lemmings these days, but exclusive ports to new Sony Ericsson phones or the next iteration of the PSP could be a selling point.) Even if someone at Sony wanted to play nice and allow some third-party developer to produce a Lemmings game for competing platforms, the legal department would quash that if they were doing their job.

However, the answer is simple. Games cannot be patented, and the infringing content is merely the name and the art/music. Rename the game, redraw all the graphics and replace the levels with new ones, and you're no longer taking off a Sony property. (Disclaimer: IANAL.)

It's not quite a done deal, but has a smooth ride through Parliament. Party discipline in Australia is absolute, and any Labor member who votes against party lines (except during a declared "conscience vote") will be deselected automatically. Kevin Rudd, a self-defined social conservative, supports it. Meanwhile, the Coalition are headed by Tony Abbott, a hardline religious authoritarian culture-warrior often nicknamed the "Mad Monk"; for it to not get through, he would have to not only oppose it but exercise party discipline across the Coalition to prevent anyone from crossing the floor. And there are certainly enough social conservatives there to make up the numbers easily. The Greens, Xenophon, &c. are irrelevant at this point.

So if it gets to legislation being tabled and voted on before the election, it's as close to a dead certainty as can get in politics. The main chance of stopping it would be for the Labor Party to realise that they're making a terrible mistake and to kill or neutralise it. Which also looks unlikely; Rudd and Conroy are both ideologically committed to it, and polls show that opposition to it could only make a political difference in two electorates: the inner-city seats of Melbourne and Sydney, both safe Labor seats. So politically, it's not a liability (and probably an asset, given the legendary apathy of the Australian electorate).

Thatcher reportedly pressured Mitterrand into handing over the kill codes, threatening a nuclear strike on Buenos Aires if he didn't comply.

Mitterrand's (symbolic) revenge was the Channel Tunnel, ending Britain's haughty isolation from the Continent forever.

That's not the one involving bacon, is it?

Kafka did write other things than Metamorphosis, you know...

Peter Garrett is too busy defending uranium mining as the Australian government's Environment minister.

Though Labor and the religiots are committed to forcing through a national censorship infrastructure. If that's in place, expanding what is restricted is a matter of mere administrative fiat, no troublesome democratic debate required.

Thankfully, the firewall plan seems to have trouble getting the numbers in the Senate, and the fiasco of the recent technical trials (deemed a "success" by the government with no actual objective criteria having been cited and scant detail) is unlikely to help. Hearing that Tom Cruise's crazy friends want to use it to stamp out criticism of them probably won't be any more helpful.

A backdoored BIOS is for newbies. The real hardcore hackers use back-doored CPUs or other hardware. All it has to do is look at a packet with a certain byte sequence and its pwned.

Really? They why state governors? They really don't have a lot of access to secret stuff.

Though the state government does communicate with other government agencies in its day-to-day business. Were its infrastructure surreptitiously compromised, it could be a good stepping stone to more interesting agencies; police agencies, perhaps, could be useful, as could any federal agencies involved in infrastructure (even if they don't do anything sensitive, they have a long reach and might know someone who does). And if such a hack could be hidden well enough away, it could slip through where others wouldn't.

What if whoever's sending them isn't just a small-time crook but a foreign intelligence agency with the resources to custom-make chips with built-in back doors. (Such back doors have been demonstrated to be plausible; someone has built a CPU with a circuit which switches off memory protection when it finds a specific sequence on a memory bus, which means that it doesn't matter how secure the software running on it is.)

Why would they target state governors' offices? Well, they'd presumably be easier to pwn than, say, the Department of Defence or the CIA, and a good starting point for setting up pieces.

They are not interoperable with 3-pin sockets (without an adaptor which has the profile of a 3-pin plug, thus defeating the purpose), and are only fitted in bathrooms. They exist solely because British electrical codes prohibit normal sockets (i.e., ones with enough juice to power a hairdryer or heater, or, indeed, anything more powerful than an electric toothbrush) in bathrooms. (Which is another example of British electrical standards' hidebound, risk-averse conservatism; no other place has such restrictions on electrical installations. Either America and Europe have a higher tolerance of acceptable losses due to hairdryer-related electrocution, or Britain is overreacting. But I digress.)

But, in any case, the 2-pin plugs (which one can quite happily go through life in the UK without ever seeing) are useless for actually powering anything but a specialised class of gadgets.