And if you get paid electronically via bank transfer, its a good bet that the machines at both your bank and your employers bank that handle the transactions are mainframes of some sort.

Just introduce a 0.001% tax on all transactions
(not just shares but other traded instruments like bonds and commodities).

Anyone buying shares or bonds or whatever to keep long term will see almost no impact from the tax. Even on a million dollar transaction, the tax would only be $1000 (so even big funds or corporate buy-outs or whatever wouldn't be affected by the tax). It would make high frequency trading (and day traders etc) unviable though.

If he issues an executive order to undo the spying, it is likely that those in congress who want the spying to stay will refuse to support Obama on other things he wants.

There ARE phones out there that dont give the baseband processor and other hidden CPUs access to the main RAM. The Neo900 for example doesn't give the cellular radio module ANY access to the main ARM CPU or its RAM. In fact, design of Neo900 means that only the Linux software running on the main ARM CPU can touch the main RAM. And there is no reason you cant run 100% FOSS stack on that CPU.

So if your stuff is encrypted by software on the main CPU, any backdoors in the baseband or SIM or whatever have no way to compromise that.

Just be glad you yanks broke away from the motherland all those years ago otherwise you would probably be doing what us Aussies are doing and playing the one team sport on this earth MORE boring to watch than Baseball, Cricket.

If I had a dollar for every time I have heard of someone that has used a Microsoft product (Access included) for the wrong thing (or used the wrong Microsoft product) I would probably have enough money that I wouldn't need to work for such people anymore (to be fair, the last job I had was a job replacing an Access based system with a much better VB.NET/SQL Server system (my part was converting reports from Access to SQL Server Reporting Services)

It would be very cool to see the source code for the Space Shuttle. Its retired now so releasing it shouldn't have any operational impacts on the shuttle itself and I doubt the Chinese or the North Koreans or the Iranians are interested in building their own shuttle (and certainly not one using a hardware architecture developed in the 1970s reverse engineered from a source code release)

The argument made by airport operators is that the money they collect from taxis, private car parking, rental car operations and other ground transport is used to maintain the road networks and parking lots around the airport, hence when someone comes along offering a service that (from the point of view of the airport) looks just like a service already operating but isn't paying the same money, the airport is going to say "hey, the taxis are paying, you guys are doing the same thing, using the same roads etc, pay up".

Given that it was Australia who launched the court challenge in the first place, it will be interesting to see what, if anything, Australia does next.

On the one hand, Australia doesn't like the Japanese whale slaughter. But on the other hand, Australia has good relations with Japan as a trading partner that they need to maintain (Japan buys a lot of Australian beef for example)

If I lived in New Zealand, I would be voting for his party.
Too bad I dont live in New Zealand and have to put up with Tony Abbot (who is just as friendly to big US corporations as John Key is, if not more so and unfortunately likely to be much harder to vote out)

He should promise to get the influence of the United States of America and the big US media companies OUT of NZ politics.

I don't know what its like in NZ but there are plenty here in Oz that dont like the influence of the USA in this part of the world (myself included) and I would certainly vote for a politician who promised to do what I suggested above.

Do they not realize that the best way to not only vastly reduce the amount of piracy going on but to increase their profits too is to make their content available for streaming either through pay-by-the-month or pay-per-show?

I for one have quite a few things I wish I could watch again (not necessarily own but watch once) but cant legally acquire (on DVD or via any internet service). Some of them are things I would probably be willing to pay for but the studios wont give me that option.

Its not just the big Hollywood studios either, I have things from History Channel, Discovery Channel, National Geographic and others on my wishlist.

As someone who has a copyright assignment on file with the FSF for GCC and actually tried to write an implementation of the Visual C++ __declspec(thread) keyword for GCC-on-windows (i.e. proper OS-provided thread-local-storage support) and got lost somewhere deep in the code that actually converts the intermediate representation into assembler (I needed to do stuff to it so it would correctly access the thread-local-storage data when an access to a thread local variable was made) I question your statement that GCC is well-written, elegant or easy to understand...

No, I live in Australia where my last pair of prescription sunglasses cost a fortune, not all of which my private health fund Optical cover paid back.
I very nearly went with a pair of Ray-Ban frames actually but a different shop offered me a good deal.

If you wear prescription glasses, the number is probably higher because very few people are going to buy expensive prescription lenses and put them into cheap frames.