"I agree. I would love to move to Alaska. Any Alaskan companies looking for an experienced LAMP developer? I scan the job sites on a regular basis but haven't found any appropriate opportunities."

I agree with you, but if you look beyond the snarky comments in the "article" you will see they also consider the employment situation. Anchorage perhaps has the lowest per-capita quantity of IT jobs of any major city in the US. The number of tech companies that have a significant presence there is near zero. Just a few corporate IT jobs.

"WTF? Does that mean the US telcos are double dipping?!"

No, it is just a different model.

In the US/Canada, calling a mobile vs. calling a landline is the same price (often unmetered or very cheap). In most cases it costs just a few cents a minute to call anywhere in the US, landline or mobile, usually including Alaska and Hawaii. Some packages even extend that to Canada, and western Europe (non-mobile in the latter case).

That is not the case in Australia, the caller to a mobile is usually charged a hefty surcharge. Take a look at your international calling rates, you will see no special mobile rate for calls to the US. It is all the same rate, there are no special mobile area codes (a.k.a. city codes).

In many cases, you can even transfer your home number to a mobile if you are eliminating your landline.

One could argue which concept is better, fairer, or whatever. As with Australia (and almost everywhere) it really depends on the package you get.

"Well, they also completely missed the question (or rather dropped) the question of whether or not Obama is really even eligible to be president, or that one citizen tried to discover if he was through the courts and got thrown out for "having no standing to bring the lawsuit". "

Your point is somewhat valid. The concept of "standing" is important to keep the courts from being overwhelmed by frivolous lawsuits. The question is, who does have standing in this case, and why did they not file a lawsuit?

My guess is a Secretary of State for an individual state (or whomever is the head of elections) or an Attorney General could probably claim standing on behalf of the state's residents. So could Congress, or probably the Solicitor General or US Attorney General (both of the latter reporting to a Republican President). There are certainly plenty of officials from red states where Obama one that might be motivated to do so.

My guess is they are not filing suit for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is they know it is a farce and that they would be proved wrong, then highly embarrassed.

Also note, despite the "privacy" of the original vault copy, there are plenty of people who could access it (legally or illegally). I am sure the CIA, FBI, etc. have plenty of resources that could dig in, and have, but found it was legit.

If you read the lawsuit the Hilary supporter in PA filed, it was a bunch of conspiracy theory crap. No proof whatsoever, just a bunch of accusations. Are you telling me that some official in Kenya could not be bribed to pony up a birth certificate if it existed? But, no such certificate has emerged.

Obama responded with a birth certificate, yet no official in Hawaii has disputed it, and I am sure there are plenty of honest people there that would if it were bogus.

Bottom line, this was brought up by the media, but dropped mostly because it was a bogus claim.

I know for a fact it records the UserAgent of the program sending the queries. I once wrote a Perl module to harvest sentences using the groups.google.com collection of articles. Well I miscalculated a variable and the queries started to be sent too rapidly. Sure enough they started to time-out. However, switching the UA was a quick fix, even from the same IP. I didn't keep sending queries after this started though... ;)