Slashdot Mirror

First time accepted submitter norpy writes "The Australian branch of the pirate party has today announced that their registration as a political party has been successful. According to the announcement the party will now turn its attention to selection of candidates and development of policies for the upcoming federal election. 'Organising and validating a membership database to then submit to the AEC for the purposes of registration is a daunting task. Fortunately, we had a team of volunteers who were prepared to spend many weekends ensuring that the list we sent to the AEC was entirely valid, and I thank them for their effort,' said Brendan Molloy, Secretary of Pirate Party Australia."

Twisted64 writes "If you're interested in voting below the line in the upcoming federal election in Australia, but don't want to waste time in the booth individually ranking up to 76 candidates (for the unfortunates in New South Wales), then Cameron McCormack's website may have what you need. The website allows voters to set their preferences beforehand, dragging and dropping Stephen Conroy at the bottom of the barrel and thrusting the Sex Party into pole position (as an utterly random example). Once preferences are set, the site can generate a PDF to be printed and taken to the booth." (More, below.) "There's also something to educate the above-the-line voters — if you check the box for your single party of choice, the site will fill out the effective party preferences below the line. This shows that a vote for The Climate Sceptics hands first preferences to Family First, and so on.

The website claims not to harvest voting information, but for the paranoid it recommends printing out a blank ballot sheet and copying your preferences from the screen. There is also a button to set up a donkey vote when in the ballot view, in case you have trouble counting from 1 to 100."

shahman wonders: "I'll be on the road all day this election day, so the only access I'll have is through my PDA/Phone. I was wondering if any Slashdot readers know of WAP-enabled services or low-bandwidth sites that are providing (semi) real-time election coverage?" Nobbin has a similar, but less bandwidth-restrictive question: "I was wondering where I could find live results for the coming U.S. election, online. I live in Australia so I can't get them through watching CNN and so forth. I'm looking for something similar to the Austalian Electoral Commission's virtual tally room. So far, Google hasn't turned up much."

femto writes "The text of the US-Australian Preferential Trade Agreement has been released. It has significant implications for Free Software and the Public Domain within Australia. Implications include extension of copyright terms (death to the Public Domain & Gutenberg Australia), software patents (death to Free Software) and the DMCA (death to fair use). It is not yet law. The Europeans have shown that software patents are not a done deal. Now is the time to write letters to members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Join the EFA. Contact your local library. Sign up to the mailing list to organise opposition. Just make a noise during this year's federal election."

Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd, Australia's biggest media company and allied to Microsoft, has teamed with IT services company, Acxiom, to create that country's biggest private data repository, according to this story. It will hold the cross-matched details of Australia's 20 million people culled from government electoral rolls, Microsoft-related Web sites including Hotmail and Passport, credit card reports, casino records, bank statements and a variety of undisclosed other sources to provide marketing profiles of the country's entire population. The plan is then to sell these to marketers, insurers, banks and others. Naturally, consumer advocates and privacy groups are wary. A similar Government-sponsored scheme, the Australia Card, was universally rejected by citizens more than ten years ago. Australians are generally not protected by any privacy laws. What do you think: is it ok for private enterprise to hold such detailed information on our private lives, offering these to the highest bidder? Is privacy dead?

Bryan Crowl writes "Only yesterday all australians got to have their say in the historic referendum on becoming a republic. The Australian Electoral Commission have been using a Virtual tallyroom to allow people from all around the world to view statistics. Last night they posted some statistics about the amount of visitors , 6 million in the first 3 hours, or about 556 a second. And what was this server running to handle this sort of load, Linux(Redhat) and Apache(1.3.6) Check it out @ link "
You can also check it out for yourself by using the Netscape Poke. As we've always said, it's real world benchmarks that mean the most :) .