True on the padding, just look at the kind of injuries various Rugby League players are suffering and the pressure to change the rules to prevent such collisions.

I will never understand that game, here in Australia sports players dont wear padding and helmets and dont need the coach (or electronic gizmos) to tell them how to play or where to move.

There has to be a middle ground between the super-heavy regulation the taxi industry gets in most cities and the zero regulation that entities like Uber and such are currently subject to.

Bring in regulations that require:
All drivers driving for these companies must pass a background/driving history check (to make sure you dont have criminals driving for these companies or people with too many bad marks against their driving records).
All cars being used must pass a comprehensive safety inspection and roadworthy check before they can be used and then undergo annual inspections after that (to make sure the cars being used are safe and you dont have drivers driving with bald tyres or other faulty kits).
Companies must provide insurance coverage (with the minimum amounts set down in the regulations) for drivers (insurance that is active at all times when the driver is "on the clock" regardless of whether they are taking a passenger, heading to their next pickup or waiting around for a job)

Don't limit the number of cars or drivers.
Don't limit which vehicle models can be used for
Don't try and regulate the prices ride sharing entities can charge or the places they can operate to (including airports). Oh and don't require them to pay more money than anyone else either (e.g. requiring them to pay higher tolls than normal drivers or special surcharges at airports or other locations)
Don't require drivers to have expensive equipment (e.g. government-approved meters) in their cars.
Don't require drivers to have special paint schemes or logos or markings on their cars.
Don't require drivers to have special licenses.

With the companies dropping drivers who get bad reviews and the requirements for background checks to weed out the genuinely bad apples before things start, the risk of bad drivers is low (a driver who was driving erratically or speeding or driving whilst drunk would be quickly identified and given bad reviews/pushed out of the system. Same with a driver who e.g. threatened a passenger or tried to rob them)

If a passenger causes trouble (or worse tries to rob a driver or steal their car or beat them up) the driver can give the passenger a negative review or for more serious cases, report the passenger to the cops (who can find out the passengers details since all passengers are tracked through the ride-share systems)

I did programming at school and I didn't find it boring in the least.

To be fair I was already super-interested in computers and programming by the time I started those classes and was easily writing programs above the level of the classwork even before I started. And the teachers knew what they were doing and how to teach things.

Heck, I still remember getting in trouble for trying to pirate VB4 off the machines in the computer labs or spending every lunch break in the labs using Netscape 3/4 to access the Internet over the schools ISDN line.

Or hosting my first website on the school servers (and getting to know the people in the school labs quite well). Or not knowing the ways of the world and putting my photograph (taken with an Apple QuickTake digital camera no less) on said website and seeing other students mess with that photograph in Photoshop.

Then again, this was a nice private school and these weren't government employees with some central bureaucracy telling them how things were going to be done, what they should teach and how they should teach it.

The Neo900 is even better than anything those guys may come up with.

Basically its the same case, screen, keyboard, slider and bits as a N900 but with a newer CPU, more RAM/Flash, a cellular modem that can do LTE and a more up-to-date software stack. Oh and its got a USB port that wont break off if you look at it funny :)

If consumers will always flock to the cheap stuff why then do the physical keyboards still appear on the lower-end devices. The same "its cheaper not to have one" rule should apply there too...

Doesn't have an "app store", runs an OS most people (even many geeks) have probably never heard of but its got one of the best physical keyboards ever put onto a phone.

I intend to keep using my N900 until it either breaks and cant be fixed or until I can somehow afford to upgrade it to a Neo900 :)

But what about if every politician you get to pick from is all spouting the same BS about why municipal broadband is bad?
Who do you vote for then?

I like it because I can get (and did get) free prescription sunglasses from my private health insurance (here in Australia I have one with cover for Optical). Laser surgery may be able to correct the vision but it doesn't do a thing about the high price of a pair of sunnies with sun protection as good as the sun protection in my nice pair of prescription sunnies :)

If you genuinely need to support Intercrap Exploder then your best option is Flash.

No support for DANE (certificate information stored in DNS and secured with DNSSEC) either. And the bug on the issue just says "we have no plans to support this" rather than "patches please"

The root cause of this mess is that the Palestinians want their land back (after it was taken off them first in the post-WW2 UN partition plan that broke up Palestine into a Palestinian section and a Jewish section and then later further taken by the new state of Israel in various wars)

Usually it comes down to the vendors not wanting to share the details of their hardware. Same reason NVIDIA doesn't share the details for its GPUs.

I am an Aussie, dont like Tony Abbot or most of his policies and didn't vote for him or his party but I believe that a carbon tax is NOT the right solution to climate change. The RIGHT solution is a trading scheme, one designed in a way that will cap the total amount of carbon pollution allowed at a number smaller than it is now to force emitters to reduce their emissions. One that doesn't allow the purchase of cheap carbon permits from overseas, the use of carbon offsets (e.g. tree planting) or the use of carbon capture and storage but instead requires genuine reductions in carbon emissions.

One that includes big incentives to anyone who owns a coal fired power station and is willing to shut it down and replace it with something that isn't coal (i.e. specifically targets coal power as "public enemy #1" in the war on carbon emissions)

Targeting emissions from burning of oil in cars (the other big piece of the carbon jigsaw) can be done through measures like CAFE but without all the loopholes the US system has like the one that lets automakers make their big gas-guzzling SUVs flex-fuel capable and get a benefit even though most of those cars will never be run on biofuels to any significant degree or the one that distinguishes between cars and "trucks" (which includes the aforementioned gas-guzzling SUVs) and distorts the incentives in favor of SUVs, crossovers, CUVs and big pickup trucks whilst distorting things against wagons and smaller pickup trucks.

The most telling thing about the whole story is that the last chips in the P3 line were beating the first entries in the P4 line at the same clock speed.