Sadly, Kauri are dying from a fungal disease and they're not entirely sure how to stop it. Sections of NZ forest have been closed to trampers to try to minimise transfer. Many paths have boot washes with disinfectant but too many people don't bother. The disease may also be spread by feral introduced pigs and goats (there are no native land mammals in NZ).

"Slow down, dear, other users have only rated this corner three stars!"

Driver fell asleep at the wheel, and instead of crashing into things as in a conventional car, semi-autonomous vehicle came to complete stop with no loss to life or property.

Eh, don't worry about it. Heard a catchy tune last year at my daughter's ice skating lesson so I Googled the lyrics. At that point "Uptown Funk" had been watched about a billion times on YouTube. Also, I saw a Volvo 240 at a classic car show.

Well, yeah, ya do. There are a lot of people in (especially US) prisons who are there for non-violent crimes - embezzlement, drug possession, etc. To allow people to be subjected to rape dehumanises them. Jail is supposed to punish but it's also supposed to rehabilitate, something US prisons are notoriously shit at. You don't fix someone by raping them. Why spend all that money locking someone up if you're going to release them more broken than when you put them in?

If the generic term for Jet Ski is "Personal Watercraft" than I guess we may as well call this a "Personal Aircraft".

Sadly, the property owner is the City Council, who is facing massive funding shortfalls due to having to repair huge amounts of infrastructure on top of repairing thousands of under-insured buildings.

Basically, if you're a mucky-muck for a city, you need to have a close look at what's happened here to make sure it can't there.

When they're done, send them down to New Zealand and tell us how to fix our stadium. Four years after the Christchurch earthquake, ours is an abandoned concrete tomb that looks fine but is apparently damaged beyond use. It was under-insured. The insurance companies will only pay out to repair it, other engineers say that's impossible.

The second biggest problem with earthquakes is how to fix what nature has trashed. The biggest issue we have had has been global reinsurance companies "reinterpreting" their obligations.

Data shmata. I didn't give two farts about my data. Here's my experience from the Christchurch NZ quakes. First, before the quakes, look around your house and pretend you were Hulk and wanted to throw furniture around. This is the stuff you have to secure : bookcases, televisions, freestanding pantries and wardrobes, fish tanks. After the quake, we lost power for a few days, fresh water for a month, and weren't allowed to flush the toilet for three months. I had 20 litres of fresh water which was enough for me alone as my wife and infant child moved out of town for ten days. Plenty of tinned food and a camp stove if I needed it, but we have a propane cooktop in the house that would probably go for a couple months on the bottled gas. Had to crap in a hole in the yard for a few days until the city distributed chemical toilets. Cell networks were remarkably resilient. I would suggest keeping an older (non smart) cell phone around that you can pop your SIM into. My old phone would go days without a charge, smartphone needs charge daily. Your issues are shelter, fresh water, food and food storage, sanitation, and communication. Think all these things through. I now have a 1000 litre rainwater tank and purifier. Also a hand cranked torch (flashlight) that doubles as phone charger. Get to know your neighbours as much as you can, you may need to rely on them. I know at least ten of my neighbours, and their relative skill sets (ones a HAM operator, for instance). Be prepared. We got lucky.

They can have my 2000watt vacuum cleaner when they pry my cold dead hands... Wait, the EU? Nevermind. Whar's mah beer?

...for the desktop. Why? Because on a six hour old install of the latest version of Linux Mint, Shockwave crashed rendering video unwatchable.

On topic, I really wish these guys well. Been listening to their podcasts for a while (back when they were TuxRadar) and they are knowledgable and fun to listen to.

Liked their work on LXF and look forward to getting my hands on a copy of LV - still hasn't hit newsstands here in New Zealand.

My wife is a corporate accountant for a large city in New Zealand. I've asked her about this as she uses Excel every day and has used OO/LO at home on occasion (a while back). She says they use so many third-party reporting plugins that work with Excel that a switch to a FS option would be nearly impossible. Word may be crap but Excel will rule the bean-counter world for the time being.

The main bit of software councils need to wean themselves off of is SAP. My jaw nearly hit the floor when I found out the seat license cost for that (I've forgotten the exact amount and am not waking her to find out), and any individual of a company that runs it who enters their own timesheets must hold a seat license, even if that's the only thing they use a computer for in the firm. We're talking thousands of dollars per seat here, not dozens.

No kidding - as if my Panasonic "Smart" TV didn't suck enough already. Twice now we've sat down as a family to Skype with my mother on the other side of the world only to have the telly decide it needed to do an update NOW. Twenty minutes later, the 3 year old is in no mood to sit and talk to grandma, who is already tech-challenged and doesn't understand the hold-up. The inbuilt "OS" is slow and buggy and the UI is atrocious. The YouTube browser tries to do a full search for each letter you enter, so by the time I've laboriously typed "Winnie The Pooh" it's tried to do 15 searches. The matching DVD player is even worse. There are right ways and wrong ways to implement this, I hope Firefox does more right than wrong.

Yeah, this is Slashdot so I should be whipping up some sort of MythTV thingie but I've seen the agony my friend has gone through doing that and seriously, I've got better things to do with my time (see three year old).

I remember my Dad's first Datsun pickup (77? 79?) rusted through the bed in a little over a year. Road salt (VT) and non-galvanised steel. He's since bought three more ;)

I'm curious what road salt will do to aluminium. Your john-boat can handle oak leaves, but has it been in salt water?

Repair is the other big issue. Body shops (panel beaters here in NZ) will require new tools and techniques, and the learning curve will be steep with inevitable poor quality work at first. The big pushback here may be from the insurance industry.

Trying to regulate this, as others have pointed out, won't work. There will always be those who can and will find a way around it. I remember Ben and Jerry's attempt at a 5:1 ratio - they had to give it up after they couldn't find/retain high level staff to work for them. Better would be a "name and shame" campaign, offering consumers a chance to take their business to companies who were closer to 20:1 than 400:1. If consumers don't care enough to make that decision in numbers great enough to have an effect, than they are effectively endorsing the high salaries. Not to mention the fact that something like this could NEVER get passed in the US, with the 1% having such a tight control on the way things run.