If (as has been claimed by a number of sources) the people who were allegedly raped by Assange no longer want the prosecution to go ahead), why are the Swedish (cops/state prosecutors etc) still interested in continuing with the prosecution?
Maybe the law is different in Sweden but from where I sit, if someone commits an act of rape against someone else, it should be up to the victim to make the decision on whether they want to make a complaint and proceed with prosecution.

If you need a modern "system that just works" in the vein of these old systems, IBM and others will sell it to you.

Comparing a PDP to a modern desktop PC is like comparing a big-rig truck to a Toyota Corolla.

Now THIS is an idea I have had for a while but lacked the skills (and time) to implement. Basically an IM client which does not log anything to disk by default (so there is nothing for anyone to recover about what was said or who was talking, great if you are in a country where the secret police like to seize the computers of suspected dissidents).

As difficult as possible to detect and block. Full end-to-end encryption with unique session keys (so even having the secret keys of all participants in the conversation AND a full log of the network traffic wont let you recover the data). High strength RSA for client to client authentication with strong protections against a MITM attack by a rogue actor (such as a police or intelligence organization)

And in my idea, it would be 100% open source and open spec and as widely distributed (both in terms of number of copies of the program and its code and in terms of geographical location of those copies) as possible. This ensures that its hosted in enough countries that if, say, the US government says "you can't distribute that, it doesn't have the backdoors to let the FBI listen in on conversations as required by CALEA", the program will continue to be available.

I used to use Trillian for a while but then I switched to the open-source Miranda IM client. Talks to most of the networks I need (IRC, ICQ, MSN, AIM) and has all the features I need (even more so with extra plugins). 100% open source so I can hack on it if I wanted to.

Only thing it doesn't do is Skype but you can thank Microsoft for that, not Trillian.

If I lived in the USA (and in the right district), I would specifically vote AGAINST any politician who supported forcing NASA to use ATK systems products.

If ATK systems cant come up with a new product to build and a new use for all those workers, they deserve to go out of business. And yes those workers would then not have a job anymore but hey, that's life, people loose their jobs all the time because the company they work for doesn't need em anymore.

1.Make it illegal under libel laws to claim that someone is violating a patent without providing details of the actual patents (i.e. if someone claims you are violating their patents and wont say which ones, you get to sue them for libel). This will stop the kind of thing companies like Microsoft have been doing where they make nebulous patent claims without actually providing details.
2.Ban any and all patents on any part of the human genome regardless of what form the information is in (including banning patenting of any proteins that are produced by any gene found in the human body).
3.Require that any patent holder who holds a patent covering a standard that is mandated by the federal government MUST license their patents under FRAND terms to anyone wishing to implement that mandated standard. So if the government requires that all TV sets support ATSC digital TV or that TV channels must transmit ATSC digital TV signals, then holders of any patents covering ATSC digital TV must license those patents to anyone who wishes to implement ATSC digital TV in order to comply with the government regulations. (whether that be for the purpose of a receiver that can receive ATSC digital TV or for the purpose of a TV network wishing to transmit ATSC digital TV)
Or if the government mandates that cars feature airbags, then anyone holding relavent airbag patents must license them to any automaker under FRAND terms and cant use the patents to lock out competitors.

Not much in the way of heavy industry in my town and certainly not the sort that is likely to need software development guys.

I would be happy to have ANY job in Software Development.
But around here everyone wants 3-5 years experience in .NET or Oracle or J2EE or any number of other technologies and no-one is going to give you the experience.

I bet the heads of the security/intelligence/law enforcement agencies (CIA, NSA etc) are already telling Obama at the regular national security briefings that making any of this public WILL compromise the ability for those agencies to catch the bad guys and prevent the next 9/11 or the next Boston Marathon.

Here in Australia, when they phased out leaded gasoline, they had a fuel available called "Lead Replacement Petrol" which then got phased out in favor of a fuel additive (which I assume is the same additive that was used to turn unleaded petrol into the "lead replacement" kind.
So, the FAA just needs to place a mandate on fuel companies to invent a lead-free substitute for the lead in avgas that is suitable for the needs of aircraft (assuming one doesn't already exist)

The problem is that NASCAR technology is 50+ years old. If they would change their ways and move towards a modern engine, it wouldn't be a problem.

Here in Australia, the V8 Supercars (which is becoming more and more like NASCAR with all the rule changes they keep bringing in) are using modern 5.0L N/A V8 engines with EFI and they are doing just fine running E85 Ethanol.

Given NASCAR has hillbilly/farmer/rural/redneck associations/roots and given how big corn ethanol is in the US, using E85 in NASCAR would actually be seen as a good thing among much of its traditional fan base. They would just need to move into the modern era and embrace engines that aren't 50+ years old.

Because not all OSs provide the time zone data in the same format... Take Windows for example, how do you get at the time zone data on that platform? (not just the current time zone as set under "date and time" but all the time zone data and settings including historical information)

It may be the case that there is a general shortage of the out-of-stock item.
It may be that the supplier was unable to deliver the item for some reason (e.g. recently I was looking for milk and the store was out of the brand I wanted because the supplier had not made a delivery. Ended up buying from another store the next day).
It may be that the trucks only deliver product on certain days.

I too refuse to use the self-checkouts. Firstly I dont want to contribute to putting checkout operators out of a job. And secondly I dont want to have to figure out how to use the things.
Especially since using the self-checkout would probably take just as long (if not longer) than going the regular way.

What I would like to see (and could probably partially get if I had the right smartphone and the right app) is a means where I can scan things with a bar-code scanner of some sort as I use them up and have them added to a shopping list. Then being able to go to the store and scan things as I pick them up and get them ticked off the list, along with building a running total so I can see how much I spend before I get to the checkout.

The sheeple wont care about this, they will continue to listen to (and believe) the propaganda from the talking heads on Fox, MSNBC, CNN and the other TV news operations when those organizations say "yes we are tapping all your phone calls and internet traffic but if we dont, Evil Terrorists will come and kill your children so we have to do it to keep America safe".