imho, lol looks like someone sticking their hands up. "So the police yell 'Stick em up', so I'm, like, lol"

Umm, I flew from Malaysia to Australia last week, with a good 4.5 L of whiskey in my hand luggage. And the whiskey was cheaper in Malaysia than Melbourne.

Already been thought of, some 50 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

Well, scientific analysis might have shown that some (even many) of treatments in question are not effective in a laboratory test. Scientific analysis has also shown that many of these treatments are effective in a real-world sense. The key here is the placebo effect. It works if the patient has trust and belief in the practitioner. It was the basis of most pre-renaissance medicine. If I go to my doctor, they will probably prescribe me antibiotics or some other pills and get me out of there within a few minutes. The treatment may work because it is the scientifically tested treatment for the condition, or it may work because I have a belief in my doctor and the modern system of medicine. If I go to a naturopath, they'll spend at least half an hour with be, building trust and a relationship. Any treatment will likely be a placebo, but it will still likely work. If you separate the trust-building from the treatment, of course it won't work. That's why alternative practitioners spend so much longer with you in a consultation.

Not as such due to technical limitations, but the new energy-beaming satellites should overcome that hurdle.

I never really had any issues with skype (in part because I never used it) until I tried in on Linux. And gee it sucks. 100% CPU when on calls. Hasn't been updated for years (stuck on version 2, without updating to newer audio systems). As a result I'm in the process of moving the organisation I've joined (which uses skype as it's primary conferencing tool) to a more open, linux friendly solution. If it _just worked_ I could look over the proprietary/closed nature of it, but it doesn't, so I'll move away. And bring others with me.

Good one. Thought you were being serious there for a second.

... with the apple logo photoshopped out

Actually I found the public transport in London quite reasonably priced, and relatively reliable. Buses were frequent and cheap (if a little slow). Individual tube lines were unreliable, but there was enough redundancy in the system that you could re-route your journey most of the time. Trains were stupidly overpriced, but that's because they had been privatised under Thatcher. The tube and buses were still govt owned when I was there 5 years ago, and created a better transport experience than most places I've been in Australia. You say that the govt can't do public transport? You'll need a better example than London (and there are plenty), but I can give you plenty of examples in mainland Europe where the govt runs extremely successful PT.

Soil being public? Sure. Who pays to put roads on it? The public. But since I don't drive I'm a bit pissed off my taxes are subsidising the road users. So why the hell not charge road users for the roads they use? What are you, a communist?

And one final note: can you imagine what trying to find a parking space in the city (any large city, but particularly one as dense as London) would be like if there were no restrictions on parking? Or the traffic? I'd love to see it, personally, but wouldn't be pretty...

And there are an unknown number of patents not covered by MPEG-LA that affect h.264. There's just as likely (probably more likely due to market share) to be a patent troll holding an h.264 submarine patent than a theora submarine patent. Just because some of the patents are licensed doesn't make h.264 immune from further patents - it is in exactly the same boat as theora.

In Soviet Russia, robot throws you!

How is this different to the videos linked in the summary? +5 informative?

To what end? If someone wants to clone the biometric data contained on my passport, so be it. It will let them make a duplicate passport, that will still only be usable (in theory) by me. I don't see how an analog system here is any more secure than a digital one, but can give a number of arguments how it might be less secure.

A digitally signed message cannot be tampered without being detected (provided decent crypto is used). That what cryptographic signing is for - detecting tampering. Again, please explain how an analog message is less susceptible to tampering than a digital one.

I'm guessing we'll soon get with GPUs what happened with FPUs. Remember FPUs? Maths Co-processors? 80387? A seperate chip that handled floating point ops because the CPU did have those in the instruction set. Eventually merged into the main CPU chip. GPUs: initially on a seperate card, but requiring and increasingly faster bus (GPUs have driven the development of high speed buses), now often on the mainboard (true, not top-of-the-line chips yet, but I suspect that has a lot to do with marketing rather than technology) with shared access to the system's main memory. I'm guessing before long the GPU will be on the CPUs die.

I think Murdoch's vision involves shifting those who used to buy hard-cop[y newspapers but now read only that newspaper's website back to the print copy. It is mainly the older people, as the younger ones will find other sources.

Either that, or, as a parting gesture, has a crack at revolutionising Internet news so he can go down in history as the guy who made news on the Internet profitable. And if it doesn't work, well, he hasn't got much to lose.