It never actually got implemented (indeed, the legislation was never even drafted, let alone actually introduced to Parliament). So there isn't really much to 'shelve' other than a plan. And the only taxpayer money spent would have been on a few feasibility studies.
Not to say that was money well spent, of course. But at least they are shelving it now before anything serious was done/spent on it.
To be fair, Australia never actually went into recession during the financial crisis. In fact we were the ONLY OECD country not to do so.
Of course, this is mostly due to the good financial position the previous Government left us in. But we still could have ended up worse than we did. So I think a least a little bit of credit is due (and this is coming from a life long Liberal voter).
Not that that excuses them for the rest of their abhorrent ideas re net filtering/monitoring. Good riddance if they lose the next election.
Precisely. Every time Slashdot published a story on this over the last year or so, people hyped it up so much and responded (as you'd expect) with doom and gloom predictions. I always expected this would happen though - it was obvious from the start that this proposal (in its current form, at least) would never see the light of day. At the end of the day, we are still a very robust democracy, populated mostly by mostly secular, level-headed people. Blind Freddy could see that it would be political suicide to introduce this Bill. The idea is tremendously unpopular with the majority of the population. Not only that, but even if the Bill had been introduced, Labor does not (and has never had, during their term of government) the numbers in the Senate to get it passed in its current form.
If Labor get reelected next election, I imagine they WILL attempt to resurrect this policy in some form. However I suspect it will be a more benign version of it, such as a voluntary/opt-in/opt-out scheme. Which I have no issue with. Provided I can choose not to be filtered, I see no problems with a filtering service being provided for those that do want it.
Time will tell of course. But many reactions over the last year to this story on here (mostly from non-Australians who don't know the reality on the ground here, and aren't exposed to day to day Australian events/news) have been overreactions. Some things I've heard have been ridiculous (e.g. comparisons of Australia to China and Iran - even the proposed filter, as abhorrent as it was, was not anywhere near the scale and scope of those countries). The filter proposal was doomed from the outset, no matter how much Conroy and his sympathizers would like to think otherwise.
This is not to say that we shouldn't maintain vigilance against such abhorrent ideas in the future though... kudos to the many politically active people that helped to bury this scheme (for now).
Or maybe you should simply have switches on the actual power outlets like in most places in the world. I was actually fairly disbelieving when people told me that North American outlets didn't have switches, until I visited the US for the first time and found out that it was actually true. You guys just literally plug things in and pull things out from the wall while the current is running - no switch.
They genuinely are quite useful, as it means you can leave things plugged in but easily turn them off (as in, completely off) when required. I do this for my TV and PS3 and various other things that I've noticed have quite a large vampiric power draw when on standby.
I'm curious if anyone knows why the US/Canada don't commonly have these switches? Maybe the lower voltage (110V instead of 240V in Australia) means that safety wasn't as great a factor in their design?
Yes I think it's fairly obvious it's not official Apple policy since you can, in fact, buy the iPad from Apple themselves in Australia (online or in an Apple store), and they do not have such a policy...
This is just the retailer (JB) realising that demand for iPads is so high that they can get away with making a bit of extra money by telling desperate consumers that they'll have to buy some extra crap with it - the customer will usually still make the purchase. When you (or your sales staff) are paid on commission, it's very tempting to do this kind of thing.
Having said that, they won't get away with it. The ACCC is one of the toughest consumer watchdog organisations in the world when it comes to this kinda crap (and IMO is one Government department that is WELL worth the money spent on it!)
Er, this was thoroughly explained at the time of the original article - his passport was 'confiscated' because it was old and damaged and wouldn't pass through the bloody readers. It was returned 15 minutes later, and he was informed THAT passport would need to be cancelled. That is, he'd have to go to the post office at some point and request a new one. NOT that his right to a passport had been removed altogether.
No conspiracy there, just customs informing him his old and tattered passport needed replacing. Happens all the time to regular travelers.
As an aside, that 'using a brand name as a word' thing seems to be predominantly American thing. I hadn't actually heard of Kleenex being used as a verb (or even a noun frankly) before I visited the US. We (Australia, NZ and as far as I can tell, the UK) just say tissue. Even though Kleenex is a dominant brand of tissues here just as in the US (although certainly not the only brand).
Ditto with Xerox and Hoover and no doubt some others I haven't heard of. Although 'to google' as a verb does seem to have caught on. I guess the world is smaller and language more easily 'spread' now than in the days when the 'Kleenex' usage arose in the US.
a) this is only a proposal (and unlikely to ever actually happen); and more importantly...
b) would only be implementing a European Directive that is already in force in most EU countries.
So sure, include Australia on that list of assholes. But you'd have to include most of Europe in there too, since they already HAVE the exact same freaking laws...
To be fair, Slashdot is terribly alarmist when it comes to articles like this (and related ones, like the filter proposal). It almost always describes such things in a way that make it sound like they are a done deal, and are coming soon to [whatever country the article is about].
But in truth, this is just some random idea from a couple of random politicians trying to push their particular agenda. It has zero chance of becoming an official policy or law. Hell even the filter (which at least has a modicum of support in some minority parts of the population) has almost no chance of being ever implemented. Labor simply does not have the numbers to get any such laws through the Senate, and they know full well that these proposals are incredibly unpopular (a bad thing, given they are already performing poorly in the polls and an election is occurring in the next 6 months).
Take what you read on Slashdot with a grain of salt. It may be factually true (in most cases), but it tends to hype up minor privacy/online rights type stories far far beyond their actual magnitude (e.g. "1 senator vaguely proposes something" ends up as "COUNTRY X TO IMPLEMENT INCREDIBLY DRACONIAN NEW POLICY").
Honestly Slashdot, stop mangling my comments every time I use a slightly non-standard character. That was supposed to be:
and I look forward to another 12 months of correcting people saying "omg Australia has [insert awful big-brother policy that doesn't actually exist but was merely proposed by some random dude at some point in time] - what a terrible country!"
I think you're right. This is yet another stupid idea born in the minds of Conroy and a couple of other Senators that has approximately zero chance of realistically ever becoming an actual policy or law. Much like the filter proposal. But this would be much, much harder to get into law than even the filter would be, because as you say, virtually NOONE would approve of records of their browsing being kept (whereas a sizeable portion of the technically ignorant population think that 'filtering out the illegal stuff from the Internet' at least sounds good in principle, even if it's technically impossible to do).
But of course, whack an alarmist headline/summary on Slashdot and a whole bunch of non-Australians who don't know the real situation on the ground here (and who haven't probably even read the article) and I look forward to another 12 months of correcting people saying "omg Australia has "
As for Conroy, this is an election year and it's looking like it could be a relatively close contest, so he could be gone in as little as six months. We live in hope.
Are you sure about that? A continual string of hiragana would NOT be easy to read, especially since, unlike English, you don't generally have spaces between the words. Not to mention that text would have to occupy twice the physical space it did now...
It's one writing system and once you understand ~why~ it's the way it is, it's really quite efficient and beautiful. I shudder when I hear of idiots proposing to get rid of Kanji to make Japanese 'easier'. God can you imagine trying to read Japanese as just a massive stream of hiragana (without spaces)? Ugh...
Nope. There are plenty of instances where there is an identical kanji to an extant Chinese character, but the meaning has changed over the centuries such that the Japanese meaning (and usually also, reading) is different from the Chinese one.
I think it's quite a shame that more emphasis isn't put on these subtle differences in syllabic emphasis when teaching Japanese to non-native speakers. Foreigners usually just get told "it's not a tonal language, just give each syllable roughly equal weight". Which as you've mentioned is not ~quite~ true (although it's close enough that you can get away with it and still be understood).
But I think if we were taught the correct emphases and the correct 'rhythm' of the language properly from the start, we'd have less obvious 'foreign' accent as perceived by native speakers. Often we are simply ignorant of these subtle differences, not because we couldn't learn them, but because we simply weren't taught them.
Not necessarily. Not all characters are necessarily words in and by themselves (although many are). Some words, even though written entirely in kanji, still require multiple characters.
Heh you'd love Australia then. That describes most of the continent outside of the 10 or so main cities. Australians mostly live in a few large cities and there's not much in between them. You don't really get that continual patchwork of mid-sized towns and cities (50k-500k population) that you do in the US and Europe. You get a few huge metro areas (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide) with millions, a handful of mid-sized cities (e.g. Canberra/Newcastle/Wollongong/Gold Coast/Albury-Wodonga sized places) and a scattering of tiny towns, and that's about it.
And all of those are either on the coast or a small way inland (200 miles). If you cut out the very narrow coastal fringe, what's left of Australia (which would still be like 95% of the land area) would be almost completely unpopulated. There ain't nothin in the middle (population-wise).
It is true that there aren't many parts of the world that are unpopulated. However, large tracts of Australia genuinely are. There are certain patches of Australia where it is likely that no human has ever set foot (yes, including Aborigines). There really are very few other places in the world that are as 'empty' as the interior of Australia. Antarctica obviously. And random areas of the Greenland ice cap. And not much else.
However in this case the area mentioned in the article is empty not because of its remoteness, but because it's a military reserve/testing ground. They did atmospheric nuclear testing there in the 50s. Non authorised personnel aren't allowed - so they can be reasonably confident it's 'unpopulated' for the purposes of the Hayabusa landing.
In principle nothing's wrong with decilitres, but you've made me realise something odd that I hadn't thought about before. For some reason, the 'deci' prefix really isn't used much. For instance it's 1-10 millimetres, then 1-99 centimetres, then a metre. You almost never hear of anyone using decimetres. Same applies with litres it appears.
And yeah nothing is wrong with 0.5 L, understandability-wise. But IIRC there's some SI 'rule' that you shouldn't use decimals where a prefix is available.
It doesn't really matter I guess... as it stands, usage among countries outside the US varies a bit anyway. For instance here in Australia our soft drink bottles (the 'personal' sized ones you'd get out of a vending machine, not the big 1-3 L ones) are 600 mL. But in Europe they'd be labelled 60 cL (cL is basically unused in Australia).
Fair call on the NZ thing - that filter is indeed opt-in (well, on the basis that not all ISPs use it, and if you can choose your ISP then you can 'opt out' in that way).
But the NZ filter is still 'live and working'. The Australian one had a couple of small ISPs participate in a short-term trial of it a while back. That was only a test though, and it finished long ago. So for now, AU has no filtering (other than via user-installed software). That's the comparison I was making (NZ live and implemented, albeit opt-in, AU still in planning/test).
I still see the current NZ situation as more significant than the AU one though, as NZ is at the ISP level (and on major ISPs), where as AU is third party software only (and even during the trial, the participating ISPs were tiny ones noone had heard of).
Anyway, that's all semantics... the situation sucks either way. I don't disagree with you there! However the filter plans aren't as well advanced here in AU as you might think.
I think the problem is that Slashdot always hypes this issue up and loves sensationalist headlines. Which is why I constantly seem to see people on Slashdot that think Australia already has a national filter (or is about to get one any day now).
In truth, I would put money on the mandatory filter never happening:
- Polling shows that the vast majority of Australians are against the idea;
- The couple of senators who proposed it in the first place are not well liked (for many reasons not related to the filter);
- It is an election year, and the incumbent government is currently not doing so well in the polls (again, due to reasons outside of the filter). It is unlikely they would try to shove something this unpopular down our throats until after the election, at least;
- Regardless of the above, the incumbent government does not have the numbers to get this legislation through Parliament without the support of the Greens. And the Greens have publicly said they will block it;
- The Government's own trial showed the filter is essentially useless and riddled with flaws. - And finally, no proposed Bill has even been drafted yet, let alone introduced into Parliament.
I honestly think the Government is simply testing the waters here. And I think they'll find those waters aren't conducive to introducing a filter. So I don't think it'll happen. Or if it does, they'll need to water it down to get it through Parliament, to such an extent that it's not bad anymore (I have no problems with an opt-in system like NZ has - so long as I have the choice).
Actually funny you should say that. Proxies used to be ubiquitous for Australian ISPs (in the dialup days especially) for exactly the reason you describe.
However with the rise of dynamic content pages and more importantly, P2P/Bittorrent, ISPs realised the proxies weren't really helping anymore. People simply weren't accessing the 'same' content enough.
So now most ISPs don't have proxies anymore (or if they do, they are transparent and only used for a small percentage of (HTTP) traffic).
What's funny is that even when Americans do use the metric system, they use it wrong:)
When I visit America I always notice the "0.5 L" soda bottles and mentally do a/facepalm. It's 500 mL or 50 cL please. In metric, never use decimals if you can avoid it. Use the SI prefixes - they exist for a reason.
Plus the whole misspelling thing: metRE/litRE etc are units of distance; metER is a tool or device that measures something (thermometER, odometER, electricity metER etc).
Still, I would forgive both of the above things if you'd actually move fully to metric. I spend a good 30-40% of my time in the US and as an Australian, your system is incredibly difficult to use and I honestly can't see a good reason for it to persist. Especially since you already use SI units in some areas, but not others. Either go one way or the other, but the mix of units is baffling.
It's 62 miles. I just round to 60 when I'm doing stuff in my head. Not exactly terribly hard to envisage - it's very roughly "the distance you drive in an hour" in most places.
Americans I've met often like to think of miles as minutes (40 miles? That'll take 40 minutes to get to). So 100 km should be an easy measure for Americans to understand. It's essentially "hours", using the same reasoning.
That's not a European thing. AFAIK that's an "everywhere except the US" thing, just like most things involving Imperial vs. metric units.
Although come to think of it, the UK is guilty of this too from what I've seen on Top Gear - they are always talking in MPG. (Albeit, different MPG than the Americans - the UK gallon is slightly larger).
Slashdot Mirror
It never actually got implemented (indeed, the legislation was never even drafted, let alone actually introduced to Parliament). So there isn't really much to 'shelve' other than a plan. And the only taxpayer money spent would have been on a few feasibility studies.
Not to say that was money well spent, of course. But at least they are shelving it now before anything serious was done/spent on it.
To be fair, Australia never actually went into recession during the financial crisis. In fact we were the ONLY OECD country not to do so.
Of course, this is mostly due to the good financial position the previous Government left us in. But we still could have ended up worse than we did. So I think a least a little bit of credit is due (and this is coming from a life long Liberal voter).
Not that that excuses them for the rest of their abhorrent ideas re net filtering/monitoring. Good riddance if they lose the next election.
Precisely. Every time Slashdot published a story on this over the last year or so, people hyped it up so much and responded (as you'd expect) with doom and gloom predictions. I always expected this would happen though - it was obvious from the start that this proposal (in its current form, at least) would never see the light of day. At the end of the day, we are still a very robust democracy, populated mostly by mostly secular, level-headed people. Blind Freddy could see that it would be political suicide to introduce this Bill. The idea is tremendously unpopular with the majority of the population. Not only that, but even if the Bill had been introduced, Labor does not (and has never had, during their term of government) the numbers in the Senate to get it passed in its current form.
If Labor get reelected next election, I imagine they WILL attempt to resurrect this policy in some form. However I suspect it will be a more benign version of it, such as a voluntary/opt-in/opt-out scheme. Which I have no issue with. Provided I can choose not to be filtered, I see no problems with a filtering service being provided for those that do want it.
Time will tell of course. But many reactions over the last year to this story on here (mostly from non-Australians who don't know the reality on the ground here, and aren't exposed to day to day Australian events/news) have been overreactions. Some things I've heard have been ridiculous (e.g. comparisons of Australia to China and Iran - even the proposed filter, as abhorrent as it was, was not anywhere near the scale and scope of those countries). The filter proposal was doomed from the outset, no matter how much Conroy and his sympathizers would like to think otherwise.
This is not to say that we shouldn't maintain vigilance against such abhorrent ideas in the future though ... kudos to the many politically active people that helped to bury this scheme (for now).
Or maybe you should simply have switches on the actual power outlets like in most places in the world. I was actually fairly disbelieving when people told me that North American outlets didn't have switches, until I visited the US for the first time and found out that it was actually true. You guys just literally plug things in and pull things out from the wall while the current is running - no switch.
For comparison, this is a picture of a standard outlet in my country (Australia FWIW). Other countries I've visited, such as the UK, also have similar switches.
They genuinely are quite useful, as it means you can leave things plugged in but easily turn them off (as in, completely off) when required. I do this for my TV and PS3 and various other things that I've noticed have quite a large vampiric power draw when on standby.
I'm curious if anyone knows why the US/Canada don't commonly have these switches? Maybe the lower voltage (110V instead of 240V in Australia) means that safety wasn't as great a factor in their design?
Yes I think it's fairly obvious it's not official Apple policy since you can, in fact, buy the iPad from Apple themselves in Australia (online or in an Apple store), and they do not have such a policy...
This is just the retailer (JB) realising that demand for iPads is so high that they can get away with making a bit of extra money by telling desperate consumers that they'll have to buy some extra crap with it - the customer will usually still make the purchase. When you (or your sales staff) are paid on commission, it's very tempting to do this kind of thing.
Having said that, they won't get away with it. The ACCC is one of the toughest consumer watchdog organisations in the world when it comes to this kinda crap (and IMO is one Government department that is WELL worth the money spent on it!)
Er, this was thoroughly explained at the time of the original article - his passport was 'confiscated' because it was old and damaged and wouldn't pass through the bloody readers. It was returned 15 minutes later, and he was informed THAT passport would need to be cancelled. That is, he'd have to go to the post office at some point and request a new one. NOT that his right to a passport had been removed altogether.
No conspiracy there, just customs informing him his old and tattered passport needed replacing. Happens all the time to regular travelers.
As an aside, that 'using a brand name as a word' thing seems to be predominantly American thing. I hadn't actually heard of Kleenex being used as a verb (or even a noun frankly) before I visited the US. We (Australia, NZ and as far as I can tell, the UK) just say tissue. Even though Kleenex is a dominant brand of tissues here just as in the US (although certainly not the only brand).
Ditto with Xerox and Hoover and no doubt some others I haven't heard of. Although 'to google' as a verb does seem to have caught on. I guess the world is smaller and language more easily 'spread' now than in the days when the 'Kleenex' usage arose in the US.
Er, if you'd read the TFA you would see that:
a) this is only a proposal (and unlikely to ever actually happen); and more importantly...
b) would only be implementing a European Directive that is already in force in most EU countries.
So sure, include Australia on that list of assholes. But you'd have to include most of Europe in there too, since they already HAVE the exact same freaking laws...
True. I must admit Hangul is an awesome system.
Kanji have a certain charm and elegance though IMO :)
To be fair, Slashdot is terribly alarmist when it comes to articles like this (and related ones, like the filter proposal). It almost always describes such things in a way that make it sound like they are a done deal, and are coming soon to [whatever country the article is about].
But in truth, this is just some random idea from a couple of random politicians trying to push their particular agenda. It has zero chance of becoming an official policy or law. Hell even the filter (which at least has a modicum of support in some minority parts of the population) has almost no chance of being ever implemented. Labor simply does not have the numbers to get any such laws through the Senate, and they know full well that these proposals are incredibly unpopular (a bad thing, given they are already performing poorly in the polls and an election is occurring in the next 6 months).
Take what you read on Slashdot with a grain of salt. It may be factually true (in most cases), but it tends to hype up minor privacy/online rights type stories far far beyond their actual magnitude (e.g. "1 senator vaguely proposes something" ends up as "COUNTRY X TO IMPLEMENT INCREDIBLY DRACONIAN NEW POLICY").
Honestly Slashdot, stop mangling my comments every time I use a slightly non-standard character. That was supposed to be:
and I look forward to another 12 months of correcting people saying "omg Australia has [insert awful big-brother policy that doesn't actually exist but was merely proposed by some random dude at some point in time] - what a terrible country!"
I think you're right. This is yet another stupid idea born in the minds of Conroy and a couple of other Senators that has approximately zero chance of realistically ever becoming an actual policy or law. Much like the filter proposal. But this would be much, much harder to get into law than even the filter would be, because as you say, virtually NOONE would approve of records of their browsing being kept (whereas a sizeable portion of the technically ignorant population think that 'filtering out the illegal stuff from the Internet' at least sounds good in principle, even if it's technically impossible to do).
But of course, whack an alarmist headline/summary on Slashdot and a whole bunch of non-Australians who don't know the real situation on the ground here (and who haven't probably even read the article) and I look forward to another 12 months of correcting people saying "omg Australia has "
As for Conroy, this is an election year and it's looking like it could be a relatively close contest, so he could be gone in as little as six months. We live in hope.
Are you sure about that? A continual string of hiragana would NOT be easy to read, especially since, unlike English, you don't generally have spaces between the words. Not to mention that text would have to occupy twice the physical space it did now...
Mod parent up. All absolutely true.
It's one writing system and once you understand ~why~ it's the way it is, it's really quite efficient and beautiful. I shudder when I hear of idiots proposing to get rid of Kanji to make Japanese 'easier'. God can you imagine trying to read Japanese as just a massive stream of hiragana (without spaces)? Ugh...
Nope. There are plenty of instances where there is an identical kanji to an extant Chinese character, but the meaning has changed over the centuries such that the Japanese meaning (and usually also, reading) is different from the Chinese one.
I think it's quite a shame that more emphasis isn't put on these subtle differences in syllabic emphasis when teaching Japanese to non-native speakers. Foreigners usually just get told "it's not a tonal language, just give each syllable roughly equal weight". Which as you've mentioned is not ~quite~ true (although it's close enough that you can get away with it and still be understood).
But I think if we were taught the correct emphases and the correct 'rhythm' of the language properly from the start, we'd have less obvious 'foreign' accent as perceived by native speakers. Often we are simply ignorant of these subtle differences, not because we couldn't learn them, but because we simply weren't taught them.
Not necessarily. Not all characters are necessarily words in and by themselves (although many are). Some words, even though written entirely in kanji, still require multiple characters.
Heh you'd love Australia then. That describes most of the continent outside of the 10 or so main cities. Australians mostly live in a few large cities and there's not much in between them. You don't really get that continual patchwork of mid-sized towns and cities (50k-500k population) that you do in the US and Europe. You get a few huge metro areas (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide) with millions, a handful of mid-sized cities (e.g. Canberra/Newcastle/Wollongong/Gold Coast/Albury-Wodonga sized places) and a scattering of tiny towns, and that's about it.
And all of those are either on the coast or a small way inland (200 miles). If you cut out the very narrow coastal fringe, what's left of Australia (which would still be like 95% of the land area) would be almost completely unpopulated. There ain't nothin in the middle (population-wise).
It is true that there aren't many parts of the world that are unpopulated. However, large tracts of Australia genuinely are. There are certain patches of Australia where it is likely that no human has ever set foot (yes, including Aborigines). There really are very few other places in the world that are as 'empty' as the interior of Australia. Antarctica obviously. And random areas of the Greenland ice cap. And not much else.
However in this case the area mentioned in the article is empty not because of its remoteness, but because it's a military reserve/testing ground. They did atmospheric nuclear testing there in the 50s. Non authorised personnel aren't allowed - so they can be reasonably confident it's 'unpopulated' for the purposes of the Hayabusa landing.
In principle nothing's wrong with decilitres, but you've made me realise something odd that I hadn't thought about before. For some reason, the 'deci' prefix really isn't used much. For instance it's 1-10 millimetres, then 1-99 centimetres, then a metre. You almost never hear of anyone using decimetres. Same applies with litres it appears.
And yeah nothing is wrong with 0.5 L, understandability-wise. But IIRC there's some SI 'rule' that you shouldn't use decimals where a prefix is available.
It doesn't really matter I guess ... as it stands, usage among countries outside the US varies a bit anyway. For instance here in Australia our soft drink bottles (the 'personal' sized ones you'd get out of a vending machine, not the big 1-3 L ones) are 600 mL. But in Europe they'd be labelled 60 cL (cL is basically unused in Australia).
Fair call on the NZ thing - that filter is indeed opt-in (well, on the basis that not all ISPs use it, and if you can choose your ISP then you can 'opt out' in that way).
But the NZ filter is still 'live and working'. The Australian one had a couple of small ISPs participate in a short-term trial of it a while back. That was only a test though, and it finished long ago. So for now, AU has no filtering (other than via user-installed software). That's the comparison I was making (NZ live and implemented, albeit opt-in, AU still in planning/test).
I still see the current NZ situation as more significant than the AU one though, as NZ is at the ISP level (and on major ISPs), where as AU is third party software only (and even during the trial, the participating ISPs were tiny ones noone had heard of).
Anyway, that's all semantics ... the situation sucks either way. I don't disagree with you there! However the filter plans aren't as well advanced here in AU as you might think.
I think the problem is that Slashdot always hypes this issue up and loves sensationalist headlines. Which is why I constantly seem to see people on Slashdot that think Australia already has a national filter (or is about to get one any day now).
In truth, I would put money on the mandatory filter never happening:
- Polling shows that the vast majority of Australians are against the idea;
- The couple of senators who proposed it in the first place are not well liked (for many reasons not related to the filter);
- It is an election year, and the incumbent government is currently not doing so well in the polls (again, due to reasons outside of the filter). It is unlikely they would try to shove something this unpopular down our throats until after the election, at least;
- Regardless of the above, the incumbent government does not have the numbers to get this legislation through Parliament without the support of the Greens. And the Greens have publicly said they will block it;
- The Government's own trial showed the filter is essentially useless and riddled with flaws.
- And finally, no proposed Bill has even been drafted yet, let alone introduced into Parliament.
I honestly think the Government is simply testing the waters here. And I think they'll find those waters aren't conducive to introducing a filter. So I don't think it'll happen. Or if it does, they'll need to water it down to get it through Parliament, to such an extent that it's not bad anymore (I have no problems with an opt-in system like NZ has - so long as I have the choice).
Actually funny you should say that. Proxies used to be ubiquitous for Australian ISPs (in the dialup days especially) for exactly the reason you describe.
However with the rise of dynamic content pages and more importantly, P2P/Bittorrent, ISPs realised the proxies weren't really helping anymore. People simply weren't accessing the 'same' content enough.
So now most ISPs don't have proxies anymore (or if they do, they are transparent and only used for a small percentage of (HTTP) traffic).
What's funny is that even when Americans do use the metric system, they use it wrong :)
When I visit America I always notice the "0.5 L" soda bottles and mentally do a /facepalm. It's 500 mL or 50 cL please. In metric, never use decimals if you can avoid it. Use the SI prefixes - they exist for a reason.
Plus the whole misspelling thing: metRE/litRE etc are units of distance; metER is a tool or device that measures something (thermometER, odometER, electricity metER etc).
Still, I would forgive both of the above things if you'd actually move fully to metric. I spend a good 30-40% of my time in the US and as an Australian, your system is incredibly difficult to use and I honestly can't see a good reason for it to persist. Especially since you already use SI units in some areas, but not others. Either go one way or the other, but the mix of units is baffling.
It's 62 miles. I just round to 60 when I'm doing stuff in my head. Not exactly terribly hard to envisage - it's very roughly "the distance you drive in an hour" in most places.
Americans I've met often like to think of miles as minutes (40 miles? That'll take 40 minutes to get to). So 100 km should be an easy measure for Americans to understand. It's essentially "hours", using the same reasoning.
That's not a European thing. AFAIK that's an "everywhere except the US" thing, just like most things involving Imperial vs. metric units.
Although come to think of it, the UK is guilty of this too from what I've seen on Top Gear - they are always talking in MPG. (Albeit, different MPG than the Americans - the UK gallon is slightly larger).