Too bad the same magic that throws up things like that cant throw up a few hundred of the obsolete Knowles speaker the Neo900 project has been trying to source (or the other hard-to-get components that project has a need for)

The airspace over Sydney isn't closed, nor is its airport. Flights are being diverted around the CBD (both by order from the authorities and voluntarily from the main domestic airlines agreeing to divert).

I flew from Perth to Brisbane last xmas with a desktop tower case PC plus a bunch of peripherals and other stuff in my checked luggage (it was part of a permanent move from Perth to QLD) and there was basically no security checks of my luggage at all (despite the fact that the cardboard boxes or their contents could easily have contained explosives). In the US on a similar domestic flight, I am sure my 2 cardboard boxes and suitcase would have been run through all sorts of scanning machines and possibly opened (they may have even removed the cover off the PC to inspect its inside).

That said, I did learn just what a cross-country flight (and QANTAS baggage handlers) can do to a desktop PC when the only thing protecting it from damage is a layer of bubble wrap and a cardboard moving box...

Why are banks pushing this crap in the first place? I can't see entities like Bank of America spending their own money on security stuff unless its going to cost them more money not to.

All the times I used a taxi (which were because I needed to carry more stuff than it was possible to carry on the bus and was unable to get help from friends/family) I only had to make one phone call, they showed up reasonably quickly and got me and my stuff where I needed to go without any problems. As for costs, the costs for those taxis were quite reasonable (although you better carry cash or else they will sting you with a ridiculous 10% surcharge for card payment)

The satellite TV situation is different since you are obtaining a service without paying for it.

If the government and media companies REALLY want to stop piracy they need to make the content easier to legally acquire without needing to pay a lot of money for content you dont want. This applies to both new content and older content.

Some examples of how the local industry makes it harder:
1.Scorpion (2014 TV show). Channel 10 (local FTA network) aired up to episode 10 straight after the US airing. However, to see Episodes 11 and 12, you will have to wait for a few months. Episode 11 is already available online to download and episode 12 will likely follow shortly after its US airing next Monday.

Its a good bet a bunch of Aussies are going to pirate those 2 episodes rather than wait for TEN to air them. And its a good bet that when Episode 13 airs on TEN, it too will be weeks behind its US airing and have already been pirated by a fair few people.
If TEN aired these episodes straight after the US (and continued to put them on their catch-up-TV website), there would be basically zero reason to pirate them.

2.The films of Yahoo Serious. Aussie actor who was in 3 films, none of which is particularly popular but all 3 of which have their fans (myself included). Young Einstein is available on DVD overseas (and importing that DVD is technically illegal under Australian parallel import legislation I believe). Reckless Kelly is not available on any physical media format. No clue about Mr Accident. All 3 films seem to be available on the US Amazon digital store. None of the 3 films are available in Australia on either physical disk format or digital store.

3.Halt & Catch Fire (AMC TV series). As far as I can tell this show has yet to air on any Australian TV network (Foxtel included) and is unavailable on disk or digital in this country.

4.X-Planes (old Discovery Channel show about the X series of experimental aircraft). Totally unavailable in any form.

All 4 items above are items I would happily consume legally if there was an option to do so.

Rural areas are very much able to go off-grid. I have family who used to own a sheep station 100s of km from the nearest town and they ran for many years off a combination of a diesel generator and batteries with a small wind turbine (this was back before solar panels really became anywhere near viable). Provided all the power needs for the property. No reason why rural properties elsewhere couldn't do the same with solar/renewables and batteries with a generator (running off the same diesel they use to run the tractors and machinery most likely) for those times when the sun isn't shining and the batteries are dry.

It costs the utilities a certain amount to provide you with a grid connection (grid maintanence costs, power station maintanence costs, repairs, wages, capital expenditure etc) no matter how much electricity you use. So why shouldn't the electricity companies charge you this fixed cost directly instead of trying to roll it into the variable per-kWh cost?

My power company charged me for 420kWh of "anytime usage" and 56 days of "service to property charge" on my last bill and there is no reason electricity companies couldn't do the same thing everywhere (as long as they reduced the per-kWh charge in line with the maintanence costs that are now being covered by the service charge and not the usage)

Here in Australia more power companies are forcing residential customers (especially those with grid-tie solar connections) onto "time of use" metering where you pay more at times when demand is higher.

Government regulations that encourage or promote competition are good (e.g. regulations designed to encourage competition in the broadband market)
Government regulations that prevent a monopoly from abusing their market power are good (e.g. net neutrality regulations)
Government regulations that limit competition are bad (e.g. regulations banning or restricting services like Uber or regulations limiting the ability of municipalities or co-ops from running internet services in competition with the local telco or cableco)

If ads didn't cause so many problems, people like me wouldn't be blocking them. And I dont mean problems like obtrusive ads that hover over the page content. Or ads that play audio. Or even the tracking that ad companies do.

The biggest problem with ads is that compromised ad servers are a BIG delivery vector for malware though things like Flash vulnerabilities and drive-by downloads.

If you live in the US, write your appropriate federal representatives (using an actual physical letter is still more likely to get noticed than an email I believe) and ask them to support the "Secure Data Act" which is designed to stop exactly this (the use of NSLs and other things to mandate backdoors and compromises in software)

See http://www.wyden.senate.gov/ne... for details of the bill and get behind it (and spread the word about it). Is it perfect? No. But it (at least to my non-lawyer reading of the relavent info) seems to be a good place to start.

Here in Australia that's exactly what they do, local councils collect fees to fund garbage collection (usually collected as part of a general annual fee paid by property owners called "rates" that covers all the many services and things councils deliver) and then either runs garbage collection themselves or contracts out to a 3rd party to do it.

Even where its a private for-profit business being contracted, the business knows that if they jack prices up too much, the council could always buy some garbage trucks and do it themselves or find another contractor.

They want it to be as cheap as possible for them to make so when they sell it (to other power companies or to consumers) they can maximize profits.