The problem is that companies like Mars, Hershey's, Nestle and Cadbury aren't willing to pay more for their cocoa since that would mean making the end product more expensive (or making less profit). If you increase the price (to cover the higher cost of the cocoa), less people will buy your product and more people will buy from your competitors (who haven't increased the price)

Write to your city government and ask why they continue to sign these exclusive deals...
I suspect the answer will be "without the exclusive deal Comcast has said it wont invest into its network" (which is probably true)

The problem is that Comcast is deliberately refusing to upgrade its links to big backbone providers like Level 3 in order to force providers like Netflix and others to pay Comcast for private links.

If Comcast would invest some of the money they get from subscribers on actually upgrading the links at their peering points, there wouldn't be an issue and those peering points wouldn't be so congested.

If that's the case they should drop subsidies for the airlines as a whole and instead say "any airline providing service to airport xyz gets a direct payment for the flights they run" to make flying to airports that wouldn't get service in a purely competitive market viable.

The real question is, would the advantages of a high speed train from, say, Washington DC to New York (leaves from a central station instead of out at the airport, dont need to go through as much security crap, dont need to be there hours in advance, don't have to worry so much about luggage, faster total door-to-door time etc) outweigh the disadvantage of paying a fair bit more for the ticket than you would pay to fly between the same cities on one of the cheaper airlines?

Brisbane proper does well. Whats missing is more resources devoted to better service levels in areas like the northern gold coast, suburbs like Ormeau, Coomera, Pimpama, Pacific Pines, Oxenford etc.

I have family who live in the area (Upper Coomera near the Masters Hardware and Woolies and stuff) and the last bus through that area leaves Coomera Station at 5:07 or Ormeau Station at 6:01, totally useless for anyone wanting to commute to Brisbane. Weekends get even less service.

Not all cities have crappy public transport. My city (Brisbane, Australia) has excellent public transport if you live in the right area (to be fair, there are areas with lousy public transport but some of that is due to some political stuff and lack of resources rather than a genuine intent not to provide service to the area. (i.e. service would be better if the resources were there)

There is a reason the Swiss are regarded as making the best watches in the world.

The reason why big email providers would be blocking business IP ranges from big ISPs like Comcast as well as residential is probably because they have seen too many people with a "Comcast Business Grade" connection, and no knowledge of whats going on get infected with the same spam-bots as residential connections.

What about solar thermal plants? These use mirrors and reflectors to concentrate the sun onto some form of liquid and heat it up. The stored heat energy is then used to generate electricity later when the sun isn't shining. It can certainly be baseload.

That said, if the country/area building them doesn't get enough sun its possible to use up all the stored heat energy and have neither stored heat nor sunshine to generate more. So a country like Australia that gets lots of sunshine lots of the time should be building these. A country like Denmark not so much.

It never occurred to me that Cryptonomicon would be better as a TV series but yeah a TV series would be amazing.

Ummm, just because AT&T aren't doing inflight internet doesn't mean that the companies currently offering inflight internet like Gogo, OnAir and Panasonic are suddenly going to stop providing it.

yeah my mistake, I got confused. It was originally made by Warner not HBO (although Warner owns HBO)

William Gibson's Neuromancer should be made into a movie. Just as long as they get the "Cyberspace" stuff right (there are some "cyberspace" type scenes in Jonny Mnemonic that are exactly how it should be done.
Cryptonomicon is another book deserving of a movie (and with all the current stuff going on, the modern-day parts of the book are scarily topical)

Political drama? HBO has shown they can do those too (and do them well) with West Wing :)