I bought a PC in 2008 and have made one single upgrade of the video card. Its basically a Core2 E8400 (3GHz) with a Nvidia 275GTX. There have been exactly zero PC games in the last 5 years that have not run smoothly on this machine. Worrying about specs for PC games is more or less a thing of the past, these days if you can play one decent game you can play them all.

Here in Australia at least I believe a phone can be blocked from accessing a network via its IMEI. You can't change and IMEI through jailbreaking.

It's in anyone's self interest to use 50 free gigs of encrypted cloud storage.

See I thought the same thing but then discovered that "use" is a key word in this sentence. I've so far not even managed to successfully back up my photo collection and a few other odds and ends to the tune of a mighty 4GB. The upload speeds I'm getting are terrible, the interface makes it worse in that you must have the browser running to upload anything. It doesn't do jack shit in the background (like dropbox does).

I'm ready to give up on Mega, the browser only thing I can handle, but the upload speeds have just been atrocious rendering it unusable for me.

As the owner of two mechanical pocket watches and a smartphone, you're just whining. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade dude, buy whatever you want to use and use it.

...and so NFC payments kind of flopped.

Are you kidding me? NFC payments are exploding here in Australia. Pretty much every bank card is now an ATM/Visa debit/NFC card rolled into one. Its rare to encounter a store without NFC payments.

and you know how us Americans are with our Starbucks!

We Australians have no fucking idea how you are with Starbucks... Starbucks Australia went broke and had to basically exit the country almost as soon as it started opening stores, because compared to Australian coffee it was plain trash. You spent a week in Australia, I hope you realise how bad Starbucks coffee is now! Australia is renowned for having the highest standards for coffee.

Debt is just an operating cost as long the company can afford it. I don't see how it changes the equation?

You know there are open and free licenses for software which had nothing to do with Stallman, right? Many people, myself included, find that these often unencumbered OSS licenses are even better than GNU.

I think you just successfully demonstrated the viewpoint that the GP was referring to...

There's only solution I've found to the problem of people taking your disagreement as an insult, and that is to pose every concern as a question for more detail

I've personally adopted this strategy on internet 'discussions' and it works well a lot of the time. You do always get that one wingnut who dances around every question, quotes your every sentence and delivers a 100-page response though.

They both suck *as phones*, when compared to "dumb" phones. My old Philips had 3 weeks of battery life with my usage pattern and it took two pushes of a button (including unlocking) to call pretty much everybody I care about.

Many people (myself included) understand and accept this as a trade-off for the ability to carry an email/gps/web browser/media player comfortably in your pocket. I use all of the other features more than my actual phone anyway.

I think it takes way longer than that. If I remember correctly they open the shutter for a few minutes at a particular point in the telescope's orbit and catch a few photons. They then repeat this process every time the telescope swings around to that same spot, i.e. they can't just open the shutter for 2 million seconds otherwise there would just be a big smear of light. They actually add up small bit of a few seconds at a time, so it probably took more like months or maybe even years.

You missed the main point: Scientific research needs to be relevant in order to qualify for funding.

Previous high court rulings on the interpretation of the constitution mean we do in fact have free speech protections. We don't have this right through an act of parliament, but this is only one way we get laws in this country. Legal precedent is another.

Can't you just buy a powered USB hub?

For $30 I bought a media streaming device for my lounge room. I've been looking into a dedicated streaming box for a while now and there is nothing on the market which comes close to $30. I don't see how this isn't appealing?