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.

The difference is that its a lot harder for the NSA to get a microphone into the office of a German agency (and a lot worse for international relations if the NSA did it and the Germans found out) than it is for the NSA to hack into the computers at a German agency from a computer room at Ft Meade.

I live in a rental apartment (so no solar) and don't drive a car (so I have no control over the fuels used to power the buses and trains I take to get around). No air conditioning either.

The biggest energy users in my house are probably my TV, my computer and maybe the fridge. I doubt I could buy a TV or computer that was more energy efficient than my current ones without sacrificing usability and the fridge is probably the most energy efficient model that exists in the size/price range. (its a Samsung Inverter)

I usually pay for things with EFTPOS anyway unless the merchant doesn't take EFTPOS (online is another matter obviously)

I suspect the bank in question makes its money from loan products, credit cards and other things that do have fees and interest charges.

The problem isn't banks, its US banks.

Here in Australia I recently opened a bank account including an attached VISA Debit card (lets me pay with VISA using my own money). When I did it, the bank didn't care about my financial circumstances or anything and I was able to open the account with a single dollar coin.

The only account fees I have paid since I opened this account was an overseas transaction fee when I bought something from overseas with the VISA and a fee (charged by the ATM operator) when I used an ATM not part of the RediATM network.
I pay NO monthly fees and NO transaction fees for using RediATM ATMs, EFTPOS, VISA in Australia, bPay or internet banking.

No reason why a bank has to make it hard for people to get a bank account or charge huge fees, they just choose to because they are greedy.