Don't forget you're paying for all the people trying to break into your household - a friend here in NZ noticed he kept going over his paltry 1/2Gb cap - turned out 1/3 of his traffic was from other machines (mostly on the same ISP) trying to break into his.

I used to regularly buy a CD or two a week, but all the good local music stores have closed leaving chain stores full of pap - if I don't regularly browse I'm just not going to buy.

Sure I could buy on line but I really don't get the opportunity to find new stuff that interests me Pandora doesn't stream outside the US and besides buying from Amazon from outside the US is really expensive - and of course one can't buy from iTunes from a linux box because of Apple's lousy support

Years ago, in my first job out of college, i was tasked to do just this - I spent a day wandering around town looking in hardware stores - a lot of the old guys behind the counter would snigger and make a smart comment - it wasn't until the end of the day I realised that "do you have any small vices" might have another meaning ....

Just last month I found myself at the local big box hardware store looking for - you guessed it - looking for a small vice .... with a wonderfuil sense of deja-vu I got to pop the question - the young whipper-snapper there didn't even blink and took me to the aisle with the vices - kids these days, just oblivious

haha!

I've always been a big fan of recycling but recently I've realized that recycling newspaper is probably wrong - it drives down the cost of wood pulp at a time when we ought to be providing economic incentives for people to plant more trees. We're better off sequestering its carbon - down some old coal mines or the equivalent - yes I know there are issues with methane and land fills but I see those as being things that one can spend some money on researching technological solutions for not just a reason for rejecting the idea out of hand.

Well to be fair he's a nutter, part of a right wing party that seems to have jumped the shark at this point, he was the proponent of our '3 strikes' legislation - when this was announced in parliament today there were shouts of "strike two".

The main reason why the government started doing that in 2005 was because we had discovered that Israeli spies had been doing exactly that thing, getting fake NZ passports using the birth certificates of dead babies - the police went back through the records to hunt down any such passports, to cancel them to protect our citizens traveling abroad.

and now they announce the release of a new product with a funeral ....

Ah - that's the code to enable the deep cover Swartzenager operative ....

it's worse than that - he has to install a firewall in his phone to stop things from calling OUT

maybe to you - I haven't received that email yet and I'm sure my email address is in there too somewhere

Where's the "I project my display on Cowboy Neal" option?

You don't understand - virtual humans can be tailored to your every need ... in this case Microsoft is hemorrhaging customers - this way they can create their own who wont depart the sinking ship .... billions and billions of virtual customers running in spare cycles on the cloud, very very cheap, and they never report bugs ....

I think you're misinformed about how such things work. Here in New Zealand we use something very like the German system - while the tiny details may be different the basic idea is the same.

Parliament or whatever has N seats, everyone gets two votes:
- the first is for a local representative elected using FPP almost exactly as you do for the House in the US - there are N/2 local representative seats.
- the second is for a party, after the first set of votes are counted and the number of party representatives with local seats are determined the total party votes for the country are tallied - the second N/2 seats are allocated to representatives off of party nominated lists so that when added to the first N/2 the party seat count in parliament comes out according to the second vote

There are various details around minimum votes to get party seats and various rules for strange overhang situations that those can create that are different from system to system.

And yes we haven't had a single government since we changed to this system where a single party got 50% or more of the vote - all governments have been coalitions - it means politicians have to make public agreements and compromises which result in them acting more constrained in their actions than they would have been if they'd gotten 30% of the votes in an FPP election but 60% of the seats - it's a wonderful thing - many of the politicians, especially the old school ones, hate it.

why not use what the rest of the world uses: liters/100km