Houses generally ARE only worth about $100k.

Its the land that costs so much money.

Also, I don't know what its like in the US, but in New Zealand and in the UK you can buy leasehold properties (as opposed to freehold properties that you are aware of.)

In those cases, you buy the "house" and ONLY the "house". ie, what is built upon the land. And you pay rent (which is reviewed every 7 years or so) for the land.

The crux of this, is, it allows you to buy a nicer house in a much nicer area than you could ever possibly afford.

And one day you can buy the land of the owner, too, if you so please.

KeePass?

Works on Windows, Linux, OSX, iPhone, Android, and more.

You can even store the password database on the cloud if you wanted...

Yeahhhh well. There's always that, I suppose.

I just don't understand. There's been a stream of voting machine stores on and off on slashdot for the last couple years.

We have netbanking. And ATMs. Both reliable. And used by the financial industry for gods sake.

We have ATMs all over the world. They seem to do fine, without any major issues. AND THEY HOLD AND DISPENSE CASH FOR GODS SAKE.

What is so special about designing and manufacturing voting machines ? Why does every voting machine ever built seem to have serious issues and allow you to put in fake votes, or miscount votes, or whatever?

Imagine if you could do this with an ATM, and get extra cash out and the ATM had no idea you did it?

What exactly is it about voting machines that makes it so hard compared to ATMs and every other electronic security device on the planet??! I just don't fucking get it, I'm sorry.

I'm glad I left Australia.

Now I just have to pick up Citizenship somewhere else so I can revoke my Australian Citizenship.

What a joke Australia has become.

How is ChromeOS really all that different to say Android 4.0 running on Tablets?

I guess it supports multiple windows, not just maximised only.... but is it really that different otherwise?

In Auckland you just call a towing company. They come, collect the car free of charge.

The owner then has to pay like $250+ to get their car back.

Pretty much everyone here learns very quickly not to park in someone elses car park....

Auckland, New Zealand has a very very high number of Prius Taxi's, too.

Fuel is also ridiculously expensive here, at NZ$2.20/L. (My quick calculation says that's about US$6.85/US Gallon)

Here in New Zealand we're pretty cashless too.

I don't have any statistics (and the stats mentioned in the summary didn't sound too right) but from what I see here, people generally never use cash. You just see people using EFTPOS everywhere they go, for any small trivial amount.

Line up to get food somewhere, and every person infront of you pays using EFTPOS.

I go many many months without ever carrying a single bill or coin on me, and most people around me seem to be the same.

You see little fruit and vege vendors sitting on the side of roads, even out in the country. And they all accept EFTPOS.

So yeah. We're pretty cashless in New Zealand.

But there's no difference between a smart phone and tablet. One just has a bigger screen, and that's it. Obviously talking about 3g tablets, and ignoring the ipad which is artificially gimped to stop you from using it to send/recv text messages and calls without jailbreaking it. Android tablets are just big screen phones.