That's not entirely fair.

The girl told police that Cesmat had taken away her cell phone away when she went to bed, telling her he did not want her texting all night.

So the girl had no phone, just her iPod, which I assume was an iPod touch. She wasn't able to make a call from it, or an SMS, but she could send a Facebook message (or an email, or with the right software an IM to pretty much any service).

This is a story about how important communication can now be made by devices other than a phone. Or how children now not only have a mobile phone, but often a second gadget capable of keeping them connected.

And it's not like she didn't use Facebook and an iPod.

While other manufacturers hardly have a spotless record (I'm looking at you, Sony, Acer and Gateway) Dell has been well below average for years now. For those of you that got a Dell and never had any problems with it, congratulations. But just like how it being cold where you are today doesn't mean global warming isn't real, just because your one PC didn't have any problems doesn't mean Dell's quality control has been shit for coming on 10 years.

But somehow, when it comes to management, Dell is Teflon coated. I wish this was the death knell for Dell, but it just isn't going to be.

I have my keys on a Carabiner. The core set stay there all the time, other groups (like car keys) or tools (like a little USB Swiss army knife) get clipped on and off as needed. The set then gets clipped on the belt loop nearest my pocket and slipped into the top of the pocket. The weight never pulls on the pocket itself.

A small, fast flash drive is preferable to a big slow hard drive. I know, because someone at work bought one of the newer EeePCs with a 160Gig drive and it was basically unusable until we swapped in an expensive flash drive as a replacement. Until the extra money was spent on it, my 4G Eee was much better, even if I do have to manage my use of the system drive very carefully.

Since I'm posting, the AA batteries are a HUGE advantage. I've refused to buy any digital camera that doesn't take AAs for ages now and the result is that the last three cameras I've bought are all still perfectly usable. Meanwhile, I'm onto the second battery for my Eee (which I effectively got by buying an entire 2G Eee fairly cheap), and my early digital cameras (which I spent quite a bit on) are glorified paperweights. There are some very, very nice rechargeable AA options out there and some seriously good chargers. I've invested in some of this stuff and would love to be able to use it with my netbook.

Paypal specialises in dodging regulation and being an arsehole. There may well be times when you can sing the praises of the wondrous capitalist market and how it solves everything, but this is not one of them.

Fox make roughly the same number of mistakes and bad calls as everyone else, but on top of that they deliberately mislead in order to sell their agenda.

All around the bike path network of Perth, Australia. And I'd like the job of riding it 'round them.

I live in Western Australia and this sounds like standard ticket parking to me. Not particularly "smart", but hardly offensive to the degree suggested by the writeup.

Those folding kick scooters are currently my top pick for urban personal transport if you don't have anywhere to stash something as large as a bike. Recently I've tried; an A-bike, inline skates and a folding kick scooter. The A-bike is too large and heavy for walking around once you've folded it up and moved into areas where you can't ride a bike. The inline skates are a pain in the *rse (literally) if there are problems with the path you're skating on (sand, holes, bumps, etc). The kick scooter is trivially easy to learn to ride, folds up into a really small, light package and is easy to jump on and off as the situation warrants.

Next up I'm going to test springy stilts. I just have to lose about 8kg first.

Why would anyone need that many thumb drives?

RAID.

Just like how I installed Windows over the Linux version at work! ^_^ Isn't choice a wonderful thing?

I've used BeTwin to run two simultaneous instances of Diablo 2 for a small LAN game. It worked okay, but at US$99 for a single license, there are probably cheaper ways to run old games.

As do I. I even have experience I can put on my CV. Anyone know where I would inquire about this job in Western Australia?

I don't know if it was this bill that I heard about a little while ago or something similar, but there are serious risks in any sort of taxation that encourages people to move away from products with real sugar and towards products with artificial sweeteners.

My EeePC runs XP Home. And Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird. None of the extra license fees you invoke are required. I think the only commercial app I have installed is my old copy of Photoshop 3.

The OS is largely irrelevant. What is important is that they're small and cheap.