Utterly untrue. Australia DOES have mandatory voting.

The Electoral Act makes it very clear: ”It shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election”

Now it's impossible to ENFORCE that, because there's no way for the Electoral Commission to KNOW that you've just rocked up, got your name checked off, and left, so in practice attendance is all they'd care about. However, voting is, strictly speaking, legally compulsory.

FYI, URLs aren't permitted:

"His family asks that you respect their privacy at this difficult time"?

[citation needed]

[citation needed]

[citation needed]

If I search for 'map of sydney' on Bing, I get a map result for Bing Maps embedded in the page. If I search for 'daniel morcombe' (a topic in the news in Australia, sadly) I get a sampling of news articles with the 'more' link taking me to Bing News. I don't see any links to Google Maps or Google News.

This is different... how?

Yes, though born in London.

We've had a few British-born PMs (well, arguably, even the ones born in what is now Australia were 'British-born' if they were born before Federation, right?); as far as I know, there's only one born outside Australia / Great Britain -- Chris Watson, PM #3, was born in Chile (to a New Zealander mother, no less)

... by an unholy army of Death Knights?

If you want examples of stupidity and superstition in the US Military, I wouldn't look at MAD. Read The Men Who Stare At Goats, detailing the Army experiments to try and kill goats with thought power, 'remote viewing' to spy on enemies, and the idea of creating psychic peace soldiers. Scary scary stuff.

My biggest annoyance with the HTC phone is that it uses a single mini-USB connector for everything... charger, headphones/hands free, etc. It doesn't actually have any other input/output ports besides the single mini-USB.

Unless the HTC Hero US version (the 'chinless' sprint one) varies from the European model in this regard, it has a 3.5mm jack. The 'ExtUSB' (HTC proprietary but at least compatible audio-carrying extension of Mini-USB) jack is on the bottom, and the 3.5mm headphone jack is on the top left.

Trust me, it works, was listening to music on my (UK) Hero without an adapter not one hour ago. Unless I've been hallucinating. Which is, you know, actually quite plausible.

Magic, no, but Hero yes.

Huh? Android phones have a capacitive touch screen, gps, and an accelerometer. A "compass" is an application that uses an accelerometer.

Uh... no. Android phones (at least, I think all the ones on the market currently -- I don't know if some will be released later without, can't see why though) have an inbuilt magnetometer -- an actual compass. The 3GS added the same thing to the iPhone range.

Totally agree. "This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use". Uh-huh, sure it does. What an inescapable conclusion.

We could instead argue:

"This means that these these languages are newer and less well-established, showing that people doing projects on the weekend are more likely to use something they're not experienced with as a learning experience."

or more likely

"This means that people developing in Python and Ruby are more popular in the kinds of startups that sucker people into working every weekend to get the 'next big thing' out the door with the promise of stock options, even though stock options in e-plasticthingsontheendsofshoelaces-online.net aren't actually ever going to be worth jack."

The instructions say, pretty clearly, "copy and paste the article text you want to use", not "copy and paste some random guff you want to prove a point with". If you don't follow the instructions then, no, the results you get won't be valid. Surprise.

The rights they're granting you are clearly 'the rights not to be sued by AP for quoting their text', not anything else -- not rights against being sued by any third party or anything else. It's rights licensing, not insurance. Likewise, if YOU screw up the building permit form, yes, the city are within their rights to let you swing in the breeze as far as I'm concerned. But if you didn't then, sure, they'd better honour their commitment, as (hopefully) AP will.

It's a braindead web app, yes, and AP do a bunch of other stuff that's dumb and/or evil. But claiming that it's some elaborate IP fraud scheme to allow a stupid web app to accept incorrect input and print out some boilerplate text around it is a cheap shot, and dumb.

Sigh, what a total non-story this is. It's an estimation tool, people. If you're dumb enough to use it in the wrong way, then... you know, hooray for you.

It's like a tool on a carpenter's website to get a fence built. Fill in what material you want, how high the fence will be, the perimeter of your block, and whether you want it finished or painted. The site gives you a quote for the fence. Then ring the carpenter, say "I've got the money now, can I pay you BEFORE you do the job?". Give the carpenter the money, and OH HA HA MR CARPENTER I SURE TRICKED YOU I JUST PAID YOU TO BUILD A FENCE FOR A PROPERTY THAT'S NOT EVEN MINE THAT IS THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR I AM SO CLEVAR.

Err.. yeah, good for you, I guess. Want a cookie?

How is this noteworthy?

'Stereo Mix' functionality is provided by some sound card drivers, not others. The same as in Vista. And XP. And probably further back. Either the submitter is running different hardware, or was using OEM drivers before and Windows 7-supplied drivers now, or the Win 7 OEM driver has regressed, which would be the OEM's fault and not Microsoft's... almost certainly not a real story (that part, at least).

You can do something similar to the divided-inserts in a SQL Server cluster, assuming your table is partitioned appropriately, but I agree that it doesn't sound like the same thing... and is a lot more fiddly.

In SQL Server, you can use "sp_configure 'query governor cost limit', xxxx" to do something very similar. It's elapsed time, not CPU time, but has the same basic effect.