I drove from Melbourne to Mildura and only had to look at the map once at the start. Just follow the one highway with the big green signs telling you that you are going in the right direction. The drive takes about 6 hours (8 if your engine catches fire on the way like mine did).

That's the one!

Well, I have a few objections to them violently slaughtering her. The point I was trying to make is how messed up those particular people's views are - they were enthusiastic about killing a girl for what amounted to a minor offense, yet they were against the essentially harmless display of some skin.

It was footage from a mobile phone. Not a staged movie. The girl died when they slammed a cinderblock onto her head.

I once watched a video clip of an Iranian girl getting stoned to death by a crowd of people. At one point during the ordeal her dress started to ride up her legs. One of the attackers was very quick to cover up her legs again.
Extremely horrific violence: Ok.
Semi-nudity: Not ok.

I'm an Australian, and since the Australian dollar is pretty good against the US one now, it would be a good time to go there for a holiday. But I refuse to allow myself to sexually abused or get hit with an unknown and possibly unsafe dose of ionising radiation, so instead I holiday elsewhere.

There are plenty of seismologists that can predict an earthquake a week ahead of time. We just lack the technology to predict which seismologists they are.

I'm amazed that it's even worth mentioning that you are allowed to carry water into sporting events. Isn't the right to carry water just assumed?

I'm a business analyst, and when I did my degree they taught me UML and DFDs and various other types of diagrams. In the real world I never follow the rules though - I pick and choose the bits and pieces that I need. Ultimately my goal is to express information; having rules and a structure helps, but it's just as important to know when to break the rules.

A properly managed brainstorming session is a great tool for generating ideas. Some minds (such as mine) work really well in a brainstorming environment. One person says one thing, it leads to another, and through an associative process a whole bunch of ideas will come out. Lots of them will suck, but that's ok because sometimes a sucky idea will trigger someone to have a great idea. Only when the session is finished to you start evaluating them.

You ought to be careful using brainstorming to get a person to buy in to a project, because if they have bad ideas and you don't include them it will have the opposite effect.

You have no choice; they install the smart meter whether you will or nill it.

It might actually be illegal. In a nutshell, the Privacy Act requires that all personal information must be kept appropriately secure. If a company sends personal information to a third party, it requires the company to ensure that they keep the information secure too (e.g. by having a clause in the contract requiring them to meet the requirements of the Privacy Act). It is not possible to provide personal information to a USA company and still meet the requirements of the Privacy Act, because the USA's Patriot Act allows the US government to gain access to that information (without even informing the information owner).

Does it count as a release if it is uploaded to Letitbit.net, which proceeds to try and trick me into downloading an .exe file, then presents me with about 20 unreadable captchas in a row, then fails because it uses javascript on some IP address which got blocked by noscript, then after making an exception for that IP address it says I have reached my free limit of one download per day?

Mine was a Mybook. I went to Seagate after that, but I have vowed never to purchase a Seagate drive again after my most recent experience. I plugged the drive in, and it kept trying to install software. Lucky my virus scanner blocked it. It was linked to an autorun.inf file that would try and install every time I even clicked it. They had managed to lock the file down so tightly that I could not remove it, copy it, or even view its contents. I had to reboot my computer into safe mode, log in as an administrator, and run CLI commands against the file just to get rid of it! That is so arrogant, and blatantly misleading given that they advertise the drive as "no software required".

I broke an external USB hard disk once (it tipped over while running). It cost me AUD $2600 to get it repaired. They got most of the data off; some was corrupted but fortunately nothing important. I take more regular backups now!