As per their Ruxcon presentation it was a previously un-compromised system that used magnetic stripes.

I was at their Ruxcon talk this last weekend and I can categorically state that the headline is accurate!

Take off the rose colored glasses. Learning constantly for 12 years is hard. Meaningful breaks are very important to avoid burnout and keep morale up. If people want to look at schooling maybe we should reconsider how the school time is allocated but lets not do it from the perspective of 'lazy students, they need to do more'.

This process reminds me of an exam from hell, where there are 11 other people all trying to answer your questions. If you want to pass exams you focus on the low hanging fruit and use the remaining time to chip away on the hardest questions. I wouldn't call it obvious to attempt to solve this problem by doing the exact opposite.

So of your list of important laptop upgrade features the only one you can't do with a Retina Mac is upgrade the RAM. Sure it is restrictive to force forethought of the appropriate amount of RAM to select for the tasks the laptop will be used for however it is clearly a tradeoff to get a fancy new type of fast RAM. Once it comes in a small form factor stick I imagine it will become upgradable again.

If not being able to upgrade the RAM is all the Apple-haters can drum up against this laptop all I can say is this is a storm in a teacup.

I prefer something productive like widely shown moderated public debates like we have in Australia. This could be the basis of an enforced voting question to ensure the voter at least bothered to skim an hours TV. We get away without the voter question as several million of our population watch the shows and discuss it after with those who didn't.

Our two successful formats are 'the worm' and 'Qanda'.

• In the worm a panel of the countries best media journalists ask targeted policy questions of the two contending political leaders and an audience (either right/left or swing only) controls an opinion graph that is shown to the TV audience in real time.
• For Qanda a balanced audience including undecided voters and online viewers may ask literally any question and a moderator enforces either a reasonable answer or an admission of some type. The audience and moderator ensure facts are kept forfront so very little spin survives the process without embarrasment.

Exactly.

Furthermore, CSIRO immediately reinvested almost all of this money into developing better wireless technology for rural communities in Australia and worldwide (as part of the NBN project). If patent trolls used their gains for research instead of lining pockets of the rich I imagine we'd all have a very different opinion of them.

Why would they want to take down what may become the most effective honey pot in history?

I watched Avatar in 2D as that was all that was on offer and I suggest an alternative reason Avatar was successful.

It was a well directed, acted, scripted, and paced movie telling a time old tale that was fun and enjoyable.

I'm sure you won't agree as in your world view only technology dictates how good cinema is.

I know school supplies were very expensive when I was young but I'd have thought that $499 american dollars probably covered all of my pens and paper for at least half of my schooling, if not all of it. Where is the rational to splash out on iPads but then continue to penny pinch on basic supplies?

I, for one, don't see why we bothered moving past valves for transisters.

Where are the coal versions of Fukushima and Chernobyle? Surely you can point to tens of examples easily as coal has been in use much longer and on a larger scale.