"640K ought to be enough for anybody.” -Bill Gates (1981)

Dear Ms. Julia Gillard,

As a 20-something tax paying adult I feel this is a topic that needs to be resolved as soon as possible. I am not against bometric or ID scanning, however I am extremely against zero policies being implemented to address this. We must implement the following policies to resolve this:

1. Do not allow any club/pub/anything to automatically perform these scans without prior consent
2. Enforce real and strong penalties for pubs/clubs who do not store, protect and secure this information.

Only a few months ago, Vodafone released public information of it's customers. Vodafone is a tech savvy company., I can only imagine how bad the computer information security policies in-place within these clubs/pubs.

I have had my ID scanned in the past at a nightclubs. You line up, the bouncer looks at your ID and immediately (and unethically, if that exists in the bouncer world) passes it to another person who scans it. If you blink, you wouldn't even have realised it. The only thing worse than this is the fact that now my information is "somewhere" in the underground scene in Australia and I have no way of finding out who owns it or how I can have it purged.

Sadly our Minister for Privacy and Freedom of Information (Brendan O'Connor) doesn't understand the fundamentals of Information Security.

Please fix this as soon as possible.

Although valid points, you're still inserting invalid and virtual road blocks that don't need to exist.

Let's assume the future cars are electric -- no cylinders.
Let's install run-flats with censors that allows it to cleanly exit a train.
Let's enforce a minimum satefy standard to allow the car to participate in the train (last service passed OK and was less than x KM's)

In other words, the Internet probably wouldn't exist in the state it is in today if people like you were present in the design meetings.

Piracy is a simple scapegoat for an overzealous and underachieving CxO.

Call me naive, but it seems to me that a lot of these problems can be resolved by Google allowing (and release a application to do it) for any device to be flashed reliably to a stock Android [stable] release. Past and present.

Manufacturers don't want to update there fancy phone and custom UI to the latest? That's fine. But the user is still allowed to manually update themselves and lose the original features they bought into. Guess what -- those fancy features that brought them to your phone may prove to be optional and there's a much better chance they won't choose your hardware platform moving forward. This may be a big enough kick up the butt that the manufacturers need.

In effort of open information, this is roughly how much we pay for goods and services in Australia. Like the above poster, I travel to the USA a lot and quite frankly, I'm like a kid in a candy store for most of the everyone. Everything in the USA is substantially cheaper.

• Unleaded Petrol with 10% ethanol: $1.30c a Litre (that's $5/gallon for you Americans!)
• Bread: $3 AUD
• Milk 2L: $2 AUD
• McDonald's Large Big Mac Meal: $9 AUD
• Typical Main Meal at a nice (not fine dining) restaurant: $30 AUD
• Panasonic 50" 1080p HDTV: $2000 AUD
• "Australian" Family Car (Holden Commodore): $35,000
• BMW 320ci (this is considered a luxury car in Australia): $65,000

I hope this helps the rest of the world 'understand' how violated we are by monopolized retailers. Aussie dollar gets stronger overseas, people realize it's better to shop overseas and then our fat cat CEO's cry foul play.

I'm an Australian consumer and I will happily pay an extra 10% on purchases for GST on behalf of the overseas retailer.

Goods online are, in nearly all instances over 50% cheaper overseas. If I can give 10% of this money to Australia to help support our country I am happy to do so.

Dear Retailers who are involved in this,

Please rest assured I and every other consumer who is outraged at your comments will never shop in your overpriced, monopolized brick and mortar stores ever again. Our AUD has almost doubled in value (54c to 101c vs USD) yet our prices are still increasing.

When you stop buying from China, so will we.

Would you forget to lock your door if the moment you left every single person in the entire world could pass your door? Oh, and would you *still* forget to lock your door if you happened to have the personal information for everybody in your neighborhood at that point in time?

While we're talking about it, I thought I'd use this space to inform others about how my Outlook 2010 beta is going on Windows 7 64bit. Back end is Exchange 2010 RTM.

• Since installing it, IE -> Office 'Sharepoint Services Support'" literally doesn't work. Obviously supporting being able to click a Document in Sharepoint and have it Open or Edit inside it's Office counterpart is too hard. You can't even manually open a document from 'Open' and save it to Sharepoint.
• Composing an Email Message will take 100% CPU until you send it. I can confirm this on other SOE's with AMD to Intel CPU's. Lucky I have a Core2Duo so my workstation is usable. My team mate who is also trying it is unlucky enough to only have a single CPU so he literally can't leave an email half composed. Well he can, but he can't do anything else.
• Returning from PC from Standby leaves the Inbox empty, It reconnects, but just doesnt show any email. You need to click another folder than another one.
• The Send-A-Smile 'feature' is stupid. Yes I want to give some feedback (for example, the above 3 points) but I'm NOT giving you a screenshot of my Corporate SOE Desktop while doing so.
• It's slow, really slow.
• Composing an Email in HTML default with a signature and then trying to change it to Plain-Text will cause all your cause in the Email to be deleted.

Uninstalling it and moving back to Office 2007 32bit fixed all my problems. Some of the new features are pretty cool though, and I'm looking forward to having a true 64bit Office SOE Workstation