A hot topic indeed :-) After that comment comes a fall. Then a win to slash dot. Finally someone will spring to his defence to complete the circle. This comment donated by a seasoned slashdotter.

The youth of today are conditioned to give up every personal detail for any menial service offered by a provider. It is one short step from here to "Papiers!". If a service involves risk to the corporation, then that's their risk not mine. If you don't like the risk, don't offer the service that way. Get a knowledgable risk assessor to speak to me and size me up. I am the one with the money. You want to know if I'm trustworthy, well find out. Otherwise keep your business for the next schmuck who gladly gives you his privacy for a cheap bit of plastic. Do we wait to be chipped like dogs before we stick it to the man?

It will be interesting to see if nano-suface treatment to give colour and patterns will one day be able to replace traditional pigment coatings where the coating is purely cosmetic. Time will tell.

To put this in perspective The Health Physics Society's position statement first adopted in January 1996, as revised in July 2010, states:[13] In accordance with current knowledge of radiation health risks, the Health Physics Society recommends against quantitative estimation of health risks below an individual dose of 5 rem in one year or a lifetime dose of 10 rem above that received from natural sources. Doses from natural background radiation in the United States average about 0.3 rem per year. A dose of 5 rem will be accumulated in the first 17 years of life and about 25 rem in a lifetime of 80 years. (See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model) For the SI people in the world, 1 rem is 100Sv. So in 5 hours or so in the suppression chanmber you would get a years dose of radiation. Mind you, it would be worse in the reaction zone of a coal-fired power station.

Have you seen the lunatics out there? Give me a robot any day! We are given a licence (one test only) in our youth and then out you go, rain, hail or shine, fit or unfit, tired or not, drunk or senile or both. That's ignoring the meatheads who want to deliberately drive dangerously and those not paying attention on a mobile phone texting "RORL" (roll off road laughing). I see your point but lets move on.

This is the Government-based peer-to-peer networking in action!

In 1992, when the Net was young(ish), I used a 300 baud modem on a 486DX2 PC with DOS and with a new text browser called "Lynx" (wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)). I would make descions on whether I would download the pictures with Zmodem or Kermit to view them. My patience dictated 11kb as the size limit. A year later, I used to envy those uni poeple connected to the main network using MOSAIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) ,a precursor to Netscape and other browsers which showed you the pages in HTML form - usually on X on unix minicomputer. Happy days. Not much porn on the net back then. Says something about what "mainstream" means.

Food prices are also now controlled by just a few companies in Aussie and this is something you can't go without. It's bad enough that Nike shoes are over the top, but when it's meat and bread it really hurts. The GST is essentially a tax on locally produced goods to which value has been added or service performed. Raw food is exempted from GST, bust processed food isn't so it now seems that Coles and others have found their own GST loophole by importing partly processed food but claiming the exemption. They spend millions finding out how to get around the GST so it seems absolutely hypocritical to bluster on about us buying mountains of sub-$1k items from overseas. I agree with AbRASiON on this - it's not the 10% they're worried about, it's the other 40% on top! See ATO guide on which foods attract GST here - http://www.ato.gov.au/print.asp?doc=/content/18694.htm Just don't know how highly processed brekfast cereals gain an exemption (ask Mr - tax free - Kelloggs/Sanitarium) and of course the sugar lobby got white refined sugar GST-free somehow - can't live without that one :-) The whole GST application is a debacle. But AbASiON's ponit on gouging is valid - just try to buy books online and see what local suppliers think, never mind DVDs and MP3s.

Yup, I used Dosshell (ascii menuing system) on my IBM-Compatible (MS-DOS of course, not PC-DOS) rather than use anything that needed a mouse until I got my 286. Still, this was a vast improvement over the old 1983 Commodore64 and the tape drive, where a saved game or document was accessed by fast forwarding a standard audio cassette to a preset number you had written down, then type load" and play! Which in turn beats a stack of punch cards, typing blind with no monitor and asking an nice operator to pop your disk pack into a large washing machine for you :-) Happy days. Tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe yer!

Of course, the payload would be tiny too, milligrams I would think. And you would have to hope there was no dung or fruit trees on the way. And you need to control what they think. Nothing insurmountable, but maybe but lets stick to what can do first :-)

Of course your African primates are non-migratory you see...

Ni!

Marginally better than using a slash dot :-) I was quoting Monty Python who were using pidgin Swedish, plus the website used it that I copied it from.

You failed to mention the wonderful telephøne system and mani interesting furry animals. Those responsible for that post have all been sacked. signed : JUTTE HERMSGERVORDENBROTBORDA http://www.smouse.force9.co.uk/monty.htm