Apple haven't announced anything. In fact, they specifically declined to comment. Making parallels to Osborne does not make sense in the absence of an Apple announcement.

How are they getting the MAC address of my WiFi interface? I thought that an unassociated WiFi station would listen for beacons of access points (scanning). When an upper layer sees an access point that policy says the device should connect to, it will try to associate with it. Until then, what packets is my device sending out?
If I were running my own access point, I would be transmitting beacons. It my device was configured to connect to any open acces point, then it would connect when it found one.
In the absence of these two device policies, what would be causing my device to transmit packets?

In Australia, I ordered two model B boards from element14 on Sunday and they turned up today (Tuesday), just under 50 hours after I ordered.

If you have an Android, iPhone or Blackberry device, you can also use the Google Authenticator app. Granted, if you have one of these devices you probably also have a mobile service, but at least with the app you are not reliant on the mobile network delivering your SMSs in a timely manner. Then again, you could probably run it in your homebrew portable raspberry pi running android connected with bluetooth to your pebble watch. No mobile service required, only a little hacking. :-)
See http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1037451

Then you're just not looking. Every release from 3.0 had an rc7 release. That's was the last for each, except 3.1 which made it up to -rc10. In fact, every release since 2.6.20 except 2.6.35 went up to at least -rc7. Have a look at the git tags if you don't believe me.

When I did my degree in the early '90s, it was a Bachelor of Applied Science (Computing Science). i.e. about computing, not computers. It seems that this degree from the same uni is now labelled Computer Science. That really irks me, but at least my degree says Computing Science.

Because HTTP is proprietary? Google Drive has a HTTP API for storage, updating and retrieval: https://developers.google.com/drive/v1/reference/
I think the garbage to forget is your uninformed post.

When you sit down to start your work day, send an email to your team and manager saying what you plan to get done today.
At the end of the day, send another email saying what you did get done today.
This helps by keeping you focused. It is harder to slack off when you've already told people what you're doing. It's ok to miss your targets occassionally, but you become conscious of doing that too often.
It also keeps you connected with your colleagues and manager. It is a virtual hello/goodbye, and helps people see that you are getting work done.

A couple of researchers in Sydney think they've got a model for searching the genoma much more efficiently. They're trying to fund their research and development with crowdsourcing: http://rockethub.com/projects/4065-a-gps-for-the-genome : "The PASTE project [is] based on a new number system we call Permutahedral Indexing - P.I. for short, an N-dimensional map that efficiently locates and interrelates complex datasets in the space of all possible data. P.I. does this efficiently even when the data has hundreds of independent dimensions and comes in petabytes and exabytes."
They don't seem to need much money in the scheme of things - I might just throw in $25.

I was hoping we'd see a 95W X6 available retail sometime soon. I want to build a mini-itx 6-core box, but these are typically limited to 95W parts. There is a 95W X6 manufactured, but it is not available retail (only to OEMS from what I understand).

Perhaps your friend could have a read of this: http://norvig.com/21-days.html . It's not what he/she wants, but that's life.

So, Google are leveraging their monopoly in search/advertising to break into the mobile platform market? Is this Google being evil?