I'm nearly 60, Australian, and have never owned a cheque book. There is no reason to here. Nobody I know apart from my elderly parents use cheques.

Spot on, the news services could use the 402 'Payment Required' HTTP status in their responses instead of just serving up the news stories...

"not without his flaws" seems like a massive understatement. Anyway, you Americans can have him, flaws and all, just please keep him there.

More correctly you call it "false hope". When you supposedly have the best advisers around you who would have told you it was utter bullshit to hope to be back on track by Easter we call it "utter bullshit".

What law? This is a furphy spread by Murdoch media. There are laws that mandate that controlled burns be done to reduce fuel loads. Given the drought, reduced funding to the NPWS and RFS (who do most of the hazard reduction burns) and extended fire season there was neither the time nor resources to do the amount of reduction required. Fuel reduction does not usually include removing trees, it's about removing the flammable brush and leaf litter from the understorey. https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... Listen to the RFS commissioner here, I'd rather believe him than Murdoch's reporting.

I doubt that any government would be able to do anything without power trippers and notability police. They are what generally constitutes most governments today.

I remember the local performing arts center getting new stage managers' consoles. The stupid thing was that the que buttons were on a touch screen. So their was no non-visual feedback as to wether it had been pressed or not. A stage manager has to keep their focus on the stage. They went back to the old push button system. This is just one example where the lack of kinaesthetic feedback makes touch screens a bad UI choice. There are many more examples. Wherever one needs to operate a control without looking directly at that control touch screens are a bad choice.

I have been to China. Never got patted down at the airport. The airport security was slow, inefficent and officious, but not invasive.

I saw the Kecak dance on my honeymoon in Ubud. I'd be interested to hear what that logical link might be.

How can a strange Balinese dance perform better than SHA2 as a hash algorithm. I'm sure that hash had something to do with the creation of the Kecak dance, but not the cryptographic sort.

Actually most of the copper was probably laid by "The Post Master General" it's that old and decrepit.

That was one of the first sites I thought of when I saw this post.
It looks like you can set your own block list up. So I'm going to be happy never to see Experts Exchange again.

How would I pull this off?
Buy a lot of them then sell the duds to some dimwit at 50% off.

Because it's the Sagan Scale, and I think you missed the joke.

Yes but who will own the P.O.S.? And who's going to take responsibility for fueling it?
I dont think we have an ice belt in this system either.