"here in Australia" - not British ;)

Unfortunately, the voting system in the US (plurality) is heavily biased towards a two-party system (whatever the intentions of the founding fathers). It's better here with an instant-runoff system, but still not ideal (there are still strategies where voting for your preferred candidate is not the best option, but they're much much rarer, and almost impossible to predict where it would be effective).

What does happen in Australian elections (where voting is compulsory - approximately 98% of eligible voters voted) is that a small number of swing voters can have a disproportionately large effect in our lower house. The current government won in a landslide in terms of numbers of representatives (90 to 55), but only had 53.5% of the two-party preferred votes (there are also a couple of independents).

If you mean bipartisan by "center [sic] ground" then I'd agree.

However, I don't think it's left vs right so much as centre-right (Democrats) vs right-extreme right (Republicans). Very few are actually on the left anymore in the US (and it's going that way here in Australia as well unfortunately).

There might even be less bipartisanship here - our current government got in on an "Anything Labor did was bad, we have no policies of our own" platform ... and damn are they delivering on their lack of policies.

I wonder if such stoves would meet the standards if SmartBurn was used:

http://www.smartburn.com.au/

Their pitch sounds like the usual snake oil, but the things really do work. My parents have been using them for a few years now and the change is incredible (and was noticeable within a few days).

All the baked-on sap, etc on the inside of the glass went away, there is noticeably less obvious smoke (smaller particulates) and more complete combustion inside the fire, and my parents haven't had to empty their chimney since they started using it.

I have no idea what is in the things (it's a Trade Secret) and no association with the product other than having seen them in action.

It is *not* illegal to enter Australia via any means to seek asylum, despite what so many of our politicians say. There are zero "illegal asylum seekers".

Asylum seekers may well perform illegal acts or use illegal services to get to Australia, but the actual act of coming to Australia to seek asylum is not illegal, whether they come by boat, plane or walk across the ocean floor.

They may be determined not to be asylum seekers, in which case their continued residence in Australia may be determined to be illegal, but that is separate from the act of coming to Australia to seek asylum.

Wish I could mod you up - OP read the parent of this post!

No - courts close loophole, loophole can't be used anymore.

Laws that take away freedoms (e.g. making something a crime) or property (e.g. taxes) must not be retroactive. This includes loopholes - if use of the loophole was determined to be legal under the law as it was at the time anything gained from it cannot be taken away.

I dislike people using loopholes to advance themselves as much as anyone, but not setting precedents of making retroactive legislation is more important.

I know that SSHDs work. They work pretty well for what they are. But they don't work as well as an HDD + SSD cache drive when that is an option (which it isn't always).

And guess what - it's possible to have a check box "Add SSD cache drive (faster performance)" as well. As much as a year ago I started seeing Ultrabooks configured with HDD + mSATA SSD cache drive out of the box (in fact, my current work machine is one of them - although I replaced both SSD and HDD ...). The initial boot image configures the system to use it and the user generally won't even be aware it's been done that way (unless they're a techie and investigate).

This week I was speccing out a system for a family member (not a techie). I showed them the options of HDD, SSHD (this very Seagate that is being discussed) and HDD + SSD. They were told that with the normal SSD install (OS on the SSD) that file management would be trickier, but I don't think it registered. They "knew" that SSDs were fastest and so wanted the SSD.

I will be configuring it to use the SSD as a cache + fast storage. Some games will be installed initially to the SSD. When using it they'll probably never even think about the fact that there's more than one drive in there - they'll just install as per normal and leave the cache drive to deal with it.

BTW, configuration of an SSD cache drive is (on Windows):

1. Set SATA ports to RAID (this is unfortunately vital).

2. Install OS to HDD.

3. Install Intel Smart Response Technology software/driver.

4. Open SRT and enable caching.

In general, I don't see a lot of use of an SSHD on the desktop, at least not with only 8GB of NAND. There are significant advantages for a system (such as a notebook) where there is only a single available storage option.

However, if you have the capability to have both an SSD and an HDD you have a couple of much better options (e.g. on a notebook with an mSATA port or any desktop).

1. Install OS to SSD, manually manage installing things to HDD.

This will generally give you the fastest performance for the things that really need them, but you're losing a lot of your SSD to OS + hibernation file (if enabled) and you have to know how to manage multiple drives effectively.

2. Install OS to HDD, dedicate a portion of the SSD to caching (e.g. with Intel Smart Response Technology) and use the rest for things you always want SSD performance with.

This gives very simple drive management - by default you install everything to the HDD. The SSD caches the most-used stuff and you can manually move things which benefit most from SSD characteristics to the SSD. Definitely the easiest setup to usefully use an SSD when setting up a machine for someone else.

BTW this is how I've got my ultrabook set up (32GB SSD cache, 80GB SSD data partition). The 32GB of cache is approximately equal to the Windows 7 OS + Hibernate file (16GB RAM) so I'm not really losing any space, but it's being used more usefully. And things which greatly benefit from fast random access (e.g. source code trees) are on my SSD.

To be fair, SETI (the organisation) does not say "we believe there is intelligent alien life out there". They say "We think there is a good chance that there is intelligent alien life out there, and we're trying to increase our chances of finding it if it does exist".

Now, some (even many) members of/contributors to SETI may be 100% convinced that there is intelligent alien life out there right now that wants to communicate with us, despite zero evidence so far. They're the nut jobs. But someone who contributes isn't necessarily a nutjob.

FWIW, I don't contribute to SETI. I think that it is a near certainty that there has been or will be intelligent life somewhere in the universe other than us. I also suspect the chance of encountering signs of intelligent alien life in my lifetime is close to zero (too far away; missed them by a million years, etc). But I do think many of their activities are worthwhile even if they don't result in success in their stated aim.

As a non-"ideas person" myself, I largely agree with the parent. I'm both talented and skilled at software development, but I'm not much good at coming up with the initial concept. I need someone to point me towards a goal in most cases (at least if it's not scratching my own itch).

Once I have that goal however it's a totally different situation.

Did you read my second paragraph? I'll try again and be a bit more verbose about it.

By saying that Abbot uses his religion as justification for being an intolerant bigot I felt it was implied that I thought his religious beliefs would significantly impact me (and other people), in a very bad way. In fact, we've had proof of this in the past when he was the Minister for Health.

That he's religious in and of itself isn't a problem to me. I am personally agnostic and have friends and family with many and varied religious beliefs (or lack of) - Christian (of various denominations); Muslim; Jewish; Buddhist; Agnostic; Athiest ... and probably some I'm not even aware of.

What people personally believe does not concern me - until it adversely affects other people (or animals, the environment, etc).

In particular I do not believe that religion should have any place in the forming of public policy.

The fact that he's religious doesn't bother me. I couldn't give a toss about someone else's religion, so long as it doesn't significantly impact me.

The problem for me is that he uses his religion as justification for intolerance and bigotry.

The two major parties are very similar in most respects. Both parties have been trying to out-do each other in reprehensible policies.

For me the election has come down to just a few issues:

1. The (incumbent) Labor party has a future-proofing, infrastructure-based Fibre-to-the-Premises broadband policy that is in build at the moment. The (opposition) Liberal/National coalition has a patchwork Fibre-to-the Node policy that they've been dragged kicking and screaming to because the FTTP policy has been so popular. The FTTN policy will cost almost as much to implement, cost more to maintain, and need replacing with FTTP before the FTTN build is complete.

2. The Labor party is still slightly less nasty on social issues (but they're doing their best to convince me otherwise right now).

3. The leader of the Liberal/National coalition - Tony Abbot - is a truly nasty piece of work. He is an intolerant bigot. He makes my skin crawl every time I hear him talk. I don't like the leader of the Labor party (Kevin Rudd) and was ambivalent on the recently-deposed leader (Julia Gillard) but there are some things they say that don't make my guts turn.

Disclosure: I'm personally scheduled to have the FTTP NBN start building in my town in about 1.5 years. For purely selfish reasons I need to vote for a party in the Senate (upper house) that will work to ensure that the NBN stays on track (I'm in a safe Liberal seat, so my vote in the House of Representatives means nothing). However I happen to think that the FTTP NBN is the most important infrastructure project we're likely to see in the next 50+ years, so my vote is not just for selfish reasons.

Was the computer assigned to him to be wiped clean as part of his duties as IT Director? The letter doesn't say.

Well, you wouldn't have had to expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Something similar may well have occurred, because at it's most basic it was a power play, as pretty much every atrocity is. However, I would contend that the religious pretext allowed it to gain much more traction than would have been likely if they had been limited to a purely secular pretext.

Of course, it's impossible to verify whether there would have indeed been a lower level of atrocity without religion being involved. We do have the example of the Holocaust where Gypsies and homosexuals were also targeted in the same manner as Jews, but again it's impossible to say if the Nazis would have been able to achieve such levels of public participation without a religious pretext. By my reading of the history (and I could well be wrong) the public was primarily focused by the propaganda on the Jews, and the targeting of the other groups was kept a lot more low-key.