I think the China reference is deliberate. I have heard WOMBAT-wall, for Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time-wall, but people think of wombats positively, so that isn't a very good name.
Apparently, in South Australia, you are more likely to be injured or killed crossing the Esplanade on your way to the beach than you are to be attacked by a shark once you have got there.
They are planning on banning all R-rated stuff as well, even if it is not R-rated because of sex. The term "restricted" has been thrown around a bit as well, in terms of the criteria for filtering, and that would cover MA15+ as well. I really, really hope that this is just rumour, but one cannnot be too paranoid.
In my area, the bikies just steal psuedoephedrine, which makes the regulations even more pointless. They stole them before the increase in regulation as well, but would also buy it in large quantities. Now they just break into pharmacies.
They Liberal party has always been moderately libertarian in the economic sense (which is what I assumed rtb61 was referring to), it is a slight drift towards social libertarianism I was commenting on. Whatever the social policies, the Liberal party has been economically liberal (in the British sense), which makes sense, as Sir Robert Menzies (and other earlier proto-Liberal leaders) was referring to the British Liberal Party with the term Liberal.
In fact, the AEC publishes a list of legitimate excuses for not voting in an election. One of these refers to a case in the ACT courts, regarding a territorial election. The defendant had recently moved from interstate, and had not been able to get sufficient knowledge of local affairs to make an informed vote, and could therefore not express his preference. Furthermore, you are not required to vote, only to attend the polling booth. You may spoil you ballot papers once you have them. Finally, some (maybe all) states do not require you to vote, provided you have never enrolled to vote in the state. These all invalidate the first point, and my first point overturns the entire arguments and could in theory disenfranchise the person making the claim.
YOu really only need one example to cover every category: A Clockwork Orange. The book includes the rape of two twelve-year-old girls by a 15yo boy, murder, assault, youth gangs, police brutality, torture, 15yo boys taking drugs (moloko plus), robbery, and a whole host of other criminal behaviour. The film is rated R18+ in Australia, and if it had been more faithful to the book, it would have been refused classification. (Interestingly, the copy I read had no warning on the cover, but it may have been an import.) Despite all this, it is a good book and well worth reading, although not by children.
The Liberal Party is a broad church, with 3 main groupings, Wets, Drys, and libertarians. The drys are the largest, and are the conservatives, such as Nick Minchin. Then there are the wets, who are the social moderates or progressives, such as Turnbull. Finally there are the libertarians, the smallest grouping, and I can't think off-hand of a good example of a federal parliamentary libertarian.
Unlike Labor factions, these are not formal groups which one joins, and are by no means rigid, so one can be wet on one issue and dry on the next. Rather, they are simply a description of a party member's general alignment and voting record.
Of those I know who joined the Liberal Party in the last year, there has been a large proportion of libertarians compared to the parliamentary party under the Howard government.
Former prime minister John Howards irrational fear of firearms was clearly evident on one of the few times he went to speak to concerned firearm owners, he wore a bulletproof vest...
Actually, in some ways that made sense. I know that if I were PM, I would much rather be wearing a bulletproof vest all the time than be surrounded by policemen. compare "Oh crap, the guy who shot me got away and I have some broken ribs" to "Of crap, I'm badly wounded and maybe dying. Oh well, at least they caught they guy who attacked me". OTOH, I would do this all the time, and I'm be far more worried about someone with a concealed firearm which I don't know about than someone openly carrying a weapon. At least that way you would have some warning, and passers-by are more likely to see the perpetrator of any attack.
It is a little difficult to speak once they've ripped out your voicebox.
However, if the slowdown isn't too bad, and they don't mess with https traffic out of the country, this will simply be like the filtering in the scary devil monastery: enough to keep out the absolute idiots, thus keeping the level of stupidity manageable. The average schoolboy knows how to get around a school's filter (at least they did at my school), and unlike a school, they can't block all HTTPS traffic out of the country to stop you using a proxy.
This means that either Australia is about to enter a evil dystopia of censorship and oppression, or the filter will be a complete and utter waste of time and money, abandoned after a few years as the blacklist gets out of date and it stops getting funded.
No, a US states citizens would be protected by the bill of rights.
Exactly, something that seems lost on a lot of Australians when the Anti-Terrorism laws, and laws to remove liability from Australian Soldiers shooting Australian citizens in protests were passed. Australian law has decended to that of a sleazy dictatorship without the dictator. However, the stage is set...
I think that Turnbull is our best bet to soften the Anti-Terror laws. He is rather more libertarian than I am, but nonetheless, I don't think that anyone with any real following in the parliamentary Liberal Party is likely to repeal them, because they were all (at least in public) in favour of them in the first place. I don't think Labor will do anything about it because they have always favoured more state control and nanny-stateism.
FFS Zimbabwe has a bill of Rights, and look how well that is working. If a government is going to abandon all pretence of caring about human rights, it can and will.
Anyway, and of more concern to Australia, look at the terrible effects of the Canadian equivalent, especially on free speech.
Thankfully, the Oz/s tech news section is less in favour of the filter, although the business section is in favour of it. Hopefully the good sense will spread to other parts of the Murdoch press as journalists ask the tech writers to explain things to them.
THe best we can hope is that someone with a clue can persuade Rudd to get the authors of the Howard Government's report to do another one, spending even more money on it so it looks impressive enough to keep the FFP happy, and then say "Oh look, it seems to be impossible. Oh well." Hopefully, they can waste enough time to last until the 2010 election, at which point hopefully either the Libs/Nats or Labour/Green will control the Senate without the nutjobs. Hell, even getting the Democrats back would be an improvement on the FFP.
That's why you dock XP/karma/whatever for killing innocents, or if the game is one in which ammunition is in short supply, simply make killing innocents worthless, so most people wouldn't bother once they have finished exploring the limits of the engine.
The Howard Government commissioned a report on a national filter, which showed that one wouldn't work. It did introduce a gratis filtering package available to all Australians, butt he take-up is quite low (mostly because people don't want it).
I suspect that they were tying to keep Senator Fielding happy until after the election, and were hoping that after the election, they would be able to point to the report and abandon the idea.
Of course, now that Labor has won, the Libs can get them coming and going. If Labor do introduce the filter, when it doesn't work the Libs can point to the report and say "told you so", and if they don't, Senator Fielding will give them a lot of grief. If by some miracle,it worked, the Libs can claim it as their idea all along, and take the credit.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the China reference is deliberate.
I have heard WOMBAT-wall, for Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time-wall, but people think of wombats positively, so that isn't a very good name.
Apparently, in South Australia, you are more likely to be injured or killed crossing the Esplanade on your way to the beach than you are to be attacked by a shark once you have got there.
And a non-car analogy:
http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/08nov/uf012109.gif
They are planning on banning all R-rated stuff as well, even if it is not R-rated because of sex. The term "restricted" has been thrown around a bit as well, in terms of the criteria for filtering, and that would cover MA15+ as well. I really, really hope that this is just rumour, but one cannnot be too paranoid.
In my area, the bikies just steal psuedoephedrine, which makes the regulations even more pointless. They stole them before the increase in regulation as well, but would also buy it in large quantities. Now they just break into pharmacies.
Flour, of course. It's not like anyone would want to cook at home when they can just eat KFC.
Isn't it sometimes used to stand for Gnome, the same way as KDE apps tend to have K in the name somewhere?
Most PS fans would consider GIMP to be gimped, so that works quite well, anyway.
The menu is accessed by M-`
The old MS-DOS editor (edit.exe) is better than Notepad, but you need to make sure the 16-bit subsystem is working.
They Liberal party has always been moderately libertarian in the economic sense (which is what I assumed rtb61 was referring to), it is a slight drift towards social libertarianism I was commenting on.
Whatever the social policies, the Liberal party has been economically liberal (in the British sense), which makes sense, as Sir Robert Menzies (and other earlier proto-Liberal leaders) was referring to the British Liberal Party with the term Liberal.
You use UUCP for surfing porn! Someone's phone company must love you!
In fact, the AEC publishes a list of legitimate excuses for not voting in an election. One of these refers to a case in the ACT courts, regarding a territorial election. The defendant had recently moved from interstate, and had not been able to get sufficient knowledge of local affairs to make an informed vote, and could therefore not express his preference. Furthermore, you are not required to vote, only to attend the polling booth. You may spoil you ballot papers once you have them. Finally, some (maybe all) states do not require you to vote, provided you have never enrolled to vote in the state. These all invalidate the first point, and my first point overturns the entire arguments and could in theory disenfranchise the person making the claim.
YOu really only need one example to cover every category: A Clockwork Orange. The book includes the rape of two twelve-year-old girls by a 15yo boy, murder, assault, youth gangs, police brutality, torture, 15yo boys taking drugs (moloko plus), robbery, and a whole host of other criminal behaviour. The film is rated R18+ in Australia, and if it had been more faithful to the book, it would have been refused classification. (Interestingly, the copy I read had no warning on the cover, but it may have been an import.)
Despite all this, it is a good book and well worth reading, although not by children.
The Liberal Party is a broad church, with 3 main groupings, Wets, Drys, and libertarians. The drys are the largest, and are the conservatives, such as Nick Minchin. Then there are the wets, who are the social moderates or progressives, such as Turnbull. Finally there are the libertarians, the smallest grouping, and I can't think off-hand of a good example of a federal parliamentary libertarian.
Unlike Labor factions, these are not formal groups which one joins, and are by no means rigid, so one can be wet on one issue and dry on the next. Rather, they are simply a description of a party member's general alignment and voting record.
Of those I know who joined the Liberal Party in the last year, there has been a large proportion of libertarians compared to the parliamentary party under the Howard government.
Also, there aren't any Velcro gloves in Australia, and NZ has enough sheep, so there is no reason they'd bother.
Former prime minister John Howards irrational fear of firearms was clearly evident on one of the few times he went to speak to concerned firearm owners, he wore a bulletproof vest...
Actually, in some ways that made sense. I know that if I were PM, I would much rather be wearing a bulletproof vest all the time than be surrounded by policemen. compare "Oh crap, the guy who shot me got away and I have some broken ribs" to "Of crap, I'm badly wounded and maybe dying. Oh well, at least they caught they guy who attacked me".
OTOH, I would do this all the time, and I'm be far more worried about someone with a concealed firearm which I don't know about than someone openly carrying a weapon. At least that way you would have some warning, and passers-by are more likely to see the perpetrator of any attack.
It is a little difficult to speak once they've ripped out your voicebox.
However, if the slowdown isn't too bad, and they don't mess with https traffic out of the country, this will simply be like the filtering in the scary devil monastery: enough to keep out the absolute idiots, thus keeping the level of stupidity manageable. The average schoolboy knows how to get around a school's filter (at least they did at my school), and unlike a school, they can't block all HTTPS traffic out of the country to stop you using a proxy.
This means that either Australia is about to enter a evil dystopia of censorship and oppression, or the filter will be a complete and utter waste of time and money, abandoned after a few years as the blacklist gets out of date and it stops getting funded.
Exactly, something that seems lost on a lot of Australians when the Anti-Terrorism laws, and laws to remove liability from Australian Soldiers shooting Australian citizens in protests were passed. Australian law has decended to that of a sleazy dictatorship without the dictator. However, the stage is set...
I think that Turnbull is our best bet to soften the Anti-Terror laws. He is rather more libertarian than I am, but nonetheless, I don't think that anyone with any real following in the parliamentary Liberal Party is likely to repeal them, because they were all (at least in public) in favour of them in the first place. I don't think Labor will do anything about it because they have always favoured more state control and nanny-stateism.
FFS Zimbabwe has a bill of Rights, and look how well that is working. If a government is going to abandon all pretence of caring about human rights, it can and will.
Anyway, and of more concern to Australia, look at the terrible effects of the Canadian equivalent, especially on free speech.
Thankfully, the Oz/s tech news section is less in favour of the filter, although the business section is in favour of it. Hopefully the good sense will spread to other parts of the Murdoch press as journalists ask the tech writers to explain things to them.
THe best we can hope is that someone with a clue can persuade Rudd to get the authors of the Howard Government's report to do another one, spending even more money on it so it looks impressive enough to keep the FFP happy, and then say "Oh look, it seems to be impossible. Oh well." Hopefully, they can waste enough time to last until the 2010 election, at which point hopefully either the Libs/Nats or Labour/Green will control the Senate without the nutjobs. Hell, even getting the Democrats back would be an improvement on the FFP.
The whole thing was largely Senator Fielding's idea, before the election. He is the FFP's senator.
That's why you dock XP/karma/whatever for killing innocents, or if the game is one in which ammunition is in short supply, simply make killing innocents worthless, so most people wouldn't bother once they have finished exploring the limits of the engine.
The Howard Government commissioned a report on a national filter, which showed that one wouldn't work. It did introduce a gratis filtering package available to all Australians, butt he take-up is quite low (mostly because people don't want it).
I suspect that they were tying to keep Senator Fielding happy until after the election, and were hoping that after the election, they would be able to point to the report and abandon the idea.
Of course, now that Labor has won, the Libs can get them coming and going. If Labor do introduce the filter, when it doesn't work the Libs can point to the report and say "told you so", and if they don't, Senator Fielding will give them a lot of grief. If by some miracle,it worked, the Libs can claim it as their idea all along, and take the credit.