What a ridiculous situation... from what the other posters are saying, it may well be that voting for the Pirate Party is the only way for voters to express their dissatisfaction with this kind of partisan politics.
As others are saying, Liberals/Nationals came up with this idea in the first place, the Greens just kick their votes to Labour, and it's the Labour party which - traditionally - is meant to prevent these kinds of abuses.
Voting for a 'pirate party' seems like a foolish notion to me, but given the alternatives it's going to look mighty appealing on election day.
It's not representational government when you blindly push your personal agenda against the objections of just about every stakeholder and expert in the system.
I wish Steven Conroy would hurry up and get caught looking at naughty pics of Miranda Kerr on the (uncensored) Internet during a newscast and fired, so the free world can stop giggling at all these Australian human rights violations and we can all get back to being the relaxed outback heroes people used to think of us as.
Sure, getting kicked off the internet is pretty bad from a rights perspective and all, but what gets me is the fines they're still able to levy in court for these things. The UK's fines are way out there, though not so much as the $2 million or so the US has fined in the past.
From this blog post, here's a list of seven crimes which, in the US, will cost you less than downloading pirated music:
1. Child abduction: the fine is only like $25000. 2. Stealing the actual CD: the fine is $2,500 3. Rob your neighbor: the fine is $375,000 4. Burn a house down: The fine is just over $375,000 5. Stalk someone: The fine is $175,000 6. Start a dogfighting ring: the fine is $50,000 7. Murder someone: The maximum penalty [for second-degree murder] is only $25,000 and 15 years in jail, and depending on your yearly salary, would probably be far slighter a penalty than $2 million.
What's going on here? Are the judges (worldwide!) just crazy? Do they get a cut?
How can anyone think these fines are reasonable, to say nothing of the further abuses discussed in the article?
I don't know that it's such a stretch to call them terrorists, really.
As I understand it, Scientologists use scare tactics to convince people that they are infected with ancient alien souls which are causing health complaints, and then take advantage of their victims' vulnerable (and gullible?) state to extort money.
I get that Dungeons & Dragons is Satan's Game and all that, but this all seems rather beside the point to me.
These people are in there because they committed serious crimes, and are supposed to be facing the consequences of their crimes, doing hard labour, and learning to reintegrate into society.
Sitting around playing games and watching TV all day while the state ensures you're well fed doesn't exactly sound like the kind of negative reinforcement that would spur a behavioural change.
I'm playing Devil's advocate here a little, but I suppose the trouble is what happens at the latter end of the curve.
When we're down to 12 sources, what then? Supposing they need to drum up revenue to support doing the research once done by thousands of others, so as to give us accurate and factual news, they might consider charging for their content. Once they do, let's say the public decides they will go get the content for free by reading blogs or aggregators, which provide handy summaries of the news, alongside helpful (if biased) interpretations. What then?
If the dying-off trend continues, all we're left with is partisan news which gets its funding from something other than doing good research and writing quality articles. Or we're reading the blog posts of the relatively-informed, and trusting them to abide by some kind of journalistic standard.
However, the most recent example of this I can think of is the Original Arnie Terminator they included in Terminator: Salvation.
That, too, only got away with being CGI because it was MEANT to look a little bit alien and disturbing. Try the same thing with Humphrey Bogart or Clint Eastwood, and you're still going to have trouble getting it realistic.
Because they're looking to cash in on the morbid fascination of seeing a sexy, healthy-looking person who died of some non-obvious disease (such as certain cancers) get stripped down and cut to pieces.
It's much less can't-look-away horrifying if they're cutting up an 80-year-old. Who'll want to buy ads in THAT half-hour?
The exact same image (or rather, one even more accurate) could be recreated just by turning down the surface-transparency on a medical scan (such as a CT scan). Once all those subcutaneous organs are properly filtered out of the scan, what's left is a high-resolution, extremely-accurate naked image of your child.
Moreover, it's in 3D!
When the for-the-children lobby figure that one out, perhaps we ought to expect most hospitals (already terrified of lawsuits) to start delaying or refusing potentially life-saving diagnostic scans on the grounds that they may constitute illegal child pornography.
My reaction was exactly the same when I saw that website. Why should I willingly enter all my medical data on any webpage, let alone one that is run by Microsoft?
1. Because Microsoft is not subject to HIPAA (as far as I'm aware this is why they are allowed to run such a site in the first place), and are able to use that information to provide a variety of extremely useful health-related services above and beyond customising your game avatar, such as personalised reminders or health tips relevant to your health profile.
2. Because two unrelated pharmacists might not know what other drugs you are taking, and HealthVault will tell you when mixing two medicines will kill you.
3. Because personalised healthcare is the future of medicine and requires that 'baseline' data about your fitness while you are healthy be collected unobtrusively as part of your day-to-day life, and:
4. Because having your medical records in one easily-accessible online repository could save your life in an emergency.
Also, you don't enter the data. You authorise Microsoft to digitally transfer it from your hospital or GP to their servers.
... that those Gold and Platinum credit cards they're collecting 'reward points' on also oftentimes provide extended warranty on purchases made with said credit card.
Before you shell out for an extra year or two of warranty, try reading through the terms and conditions of your favourite rewards card. Chances are, you can get that extra year or so of peace of mind for free.
Censoring the game to bring it down to an MA15+ rating doesn't really help, in my opinion.
Just about everyone I know, for instance, is purchasing gray-market overseas copies or downloading pirate versions of Left 4 Dead 2, because none of them want to settle for the content-reduced version deemed 'suitable' for Australian audiences.
As the OP noted, this leads to more piracy and hurts sales.
Also, you must be giving your kids a lot of pocket money... Australia's markup on computer games is pretty significant. So much so that just about anyone with sense over here is purchasing via Steam or Direct2Drive (at roughly half the price) wherever possible. Many of my friends own US-region consoles, for the express purpose of importing games from the US (thus bypassing both the price-markup and censorship issues).
Your argument is well thought out, but the OP makes a solid point nonetheless: censorship hurts sales, and given that the most popular games kids are asking for right now are mostly 'mature' titles (as noted in another recent Slashdot thread), it's better to give people the option to purchase the game legitimately (and with all the content intact) rather than driving sales overseas or simply losing them to piracy.
I think that once they're on public record, they should simply be required to either make good on their promise or publically recant.
Politicians too, for that matter.
Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of simply ignoring election promises, they had to either honour those promises or come back on TV to explain why they didn't? (Or even just to say that they changed their minds.)
It's not a lot to ask, and I think it would cut down on a lot of the lies.
Slashdot Mirror
What a ridiculous situation... from what the other posters are saying, it may well be that voting for the Pirate Party is the only way for voters to express their dissatisfaction with this kind of partisan politics.
As others are saying, Liberals/Nationals came up with this idea in the first place, the Greens just kick their votes to Labour, and it's the Labour party which - traditionally - is meant to prevent these kinds of abuses.
Voting for a 'pirate party' seems like a foolish notion to me, but given the alternatives it's going to look mighty appealing on election day.
It's not representational government when you blindly push your personal agenda against the objections of just about every stakeholder and expert in the system.
I wish Steven Conroy would hurry up and get caught looking at naughty pics of Miranda Kerr on the (uncensored) Internet during a newscast and fired, so the free world can stop giggling at all these Australian human rights violations and we can all get back to being the relaxed outback heroes people used to think of us as.
Oh, so ragging on Catholics and queers is nasty and evil, but casually insulting the 1.3 billion Muslims of the world is OK?
News flash: most of those 1.3 billion Muslims are actually good people, and here you are needlessly insulting them based on a media stereotype.
Until you clear your mind of bigotry, you're no better than the "Fundies" you so despise.
Sure, getting kicked off the internet is pretty bad from a rights perspective and all, but what gets me is the fines they're still able to levy in court for these things. The UK's fines are way out there, though not so much as the $2 million or so the US has fined in the past.
From this blog post, here's a list of seven crimes which, in the US, will cost you less than downloading pirated music:
1. Child abduction: the fine is only like $25000.
2. Stealing the actual CD: the fine is $2,500
3. Rob your neighbor: the fine is $375,000
4. Burn a house down: The fine is just over $375,000
5. Stalk someone: The fine is $175,000
6. Start a dogfighting ring: the fine is $50,000
7. Murder someone: The maximum penalty [for second-degree murder] is only $25,000 and 15 years in jail, and depending on your yearly salary, would probably be far slighter a penalty than $2 million.
What's going on here? Are the judges (worldwide!) just crazy? Do they get a cut?
How can anyone think these fines are reasonable, to say nothing of the further abuses discussed in the article?
I don't know that it's such a stretch to call them terrorists, really.
As I understand it, Scientologists use scare tactics to convince people that they are infected with ancient alien souls which are causing health complaints, and then take advantage of their victims' vulnerable (and gullible?) state to extort money.
That qualifies as terrorism in my book.
I get that Dungeons & Dragons is Satan's Game and all that, but this all seems rather beside the point to me.
These people are in there because they committed serious crimes, and are supposed to be facing the consequences of their crimes, doing hard labour, and learning to reintegrate into society.
Sitting around playing games and watching TV all day while the state ensures you're well fed doesn't exactly sound like the kind of negative reinforcement that would spur a behavioural change.
Some of us actually do work on our machines... without ripping it off from the Internet.
Some dudes run it on VNC from their iPhones...
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/25/world-of-warcraft-on-the-iphone-heralds-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it/
Is that close enough?
I'm playing Devil's advocate here a little, but I suppose the trouble is what happens at the latter end of the curve.
When we're down to 12 sources, what then? Supposing they need to drum up revenue to support doing the research once done by thousands of others, so as to give us accurate and factual news, they might consider charging for their content. Once they do, let's say the public decides they will go get the content for free by reading blogs or aggregators, which provide handy summaries of the news, alongside helpful (if biased) interpretations. What then?
If the dying-off trend continues, all we're left with is partisan news which gets its funding from something other than doing good research and writing quality articles. Or we're reading the blog posts of the relatively-informed, and trusting them to abide by some kind of journalistic standard.
That's not really a good thing, now, is it?
Good journalism costs money.
So he is doing the Battle Angel Alita film? Cool.
However, the most recent example of this I can think of is the Original Arnie Terminator they included in Terminator: Salvation.
That, too, only got away with being CGI because it was MEANT to look a little bit alien and disturbing. Try the same thing with Humphrey Bogart or Clint Eastwood, and you're still going to have trouble getting it realistic.
Because they're looking to cash in on the morbid fascination of seeing a sexy, healthy-looking person who died of some non-obvious disease (such as certain cancers) get stripped down and cut to pieces.
It's much less can't-look-away horrifying if they're cutting up an 80-year-old. Who'll want to buy ads in THAT half-hour?
Actually, it could very well get worse.
The exact same image (or rather, one even more accurate) could be recreated just by turning down the surface-transparency on a medical scan (such as a CT scan). Once all those subcutaneous organs are properly filtered out of the scan, what's left is a high-resolution, extremely-accurate naked image of your child.
Moreover, it's in 3D!
When the for-the-children lobby figure that one out, perhaps we ought to expect most hospitals (already terrified of lawsuits) to start delaying or refusing potentially life-saving diagnostic scans on the grounds that they may constitute illegal child pornography.
Perhaps Second Life has simply been killed off by the far superior offering that is Sony's "Home".
...
...
...
... hahahahaha! :D
Had you going there, didn't I? Yeah, it's still awful.
Incidentally, though, it would seem that Sony's Home is also plagued by sex fiends. Maybe it is shaping up to become a worthy successor?
If they'd also evolved kitty-ears and a characteristic love of french-maid outfits, they would be the master race.
That depends entirely on what you're sharing.
If you're lending a book, chances are it's probably allowed.
If it's a DVD, I wouldn't be so sure...
Finally, a use for my PhD!
My reaction was exactly the same when I saw that website. Why should I willingly enter all my medical data on any webpage, let alone one that is run by Microsoft?
1. Because Microsoft is not subject to HIPAA (as far as I'm aware this is why they are allowed to run such a site in the first place), and are able to use that information to provide a variety of extremely useful health-related services above and beyond customising your game avatar, such as personalised reminders or health tips relevant to your health profile.
2. Because two unrelated pharmacists might not know what other drugs you are taking, and HealthVault will tell you when mixing two medicines will kill you.
3. Because personalised healthcare is the future of medicine and requires that 'baseline' data about your fitness while you are healthy be collected unobtrusively as part of your day-to-day life, and:
4. Because having your medical records in one easily-accessible online repository could save your life in an emergency.
Also, you don't enter the data. You authorise Microsoft to digitally transfer it from your hospital or GP to their servers.
Dude... what century did you post this from?
It seems like every other story on Slashdot was about exactly that, not too long ago.
Only reason it's not in the news any more is 'cause things are getting even worse down here in Australia, so we're making you guys look good.
Does that mean you've captured the video, and are now trying to edit the file in iMovie?
If so, you should be able to use an app called MPEG Streamclip to do the conversion.
You may have to purchase Apple's MPEG2 component for Quicktime, however.
... that those Gold and Platinum credit cards they're collecting 'reward points' on also oftentimes provide extended warranty on purchases made with said credit card.
Before you shell out for an extra year or two of warranty, try reading through the terms and conditions of your favourite rewards card. Chances are, you can get that extra year or so of peace of mind for free.
Censoring the game to bring it down to an MA15+ rating doesn't really help, in my opinion.
Just about everyone I know, for instance, is purchasing gray-market overseas copies or downloading pirate versions of Left 4 Dead 2, because none of them want to settle for the content-reduced version deemed 'suitable' for Australian audiences.
As the OP noted, this leads to more piracy and hurts sales.
Also, you must be giving your kids a lot of pocket money... Australia's markup on computer games is pretty significant. So much so that just about anyone with sense over here is purchasing via Steam or Direct2Drive (at roughly half the price) wherever possible. Many of my friends own US-region consoles, for the express purpose of importing games from the US (thus bypassing both the price-markup and censorship issues).
Your argument is well thought out, but the OP makes a solid point nonetheless: censorship hurts sales, and given that the most popular games kids are asking for right now are mostly 'mature' titles (as noted in another recent Slashdot thread), it's better to give people the option to purchase the game legitimately (and with all the content intact) rather than driving sales overseas or simply losing them to piracy.
That would totally kill the lobbying industry. That or politicians would have to shut up and only speak when they absolutely had..... to......
In this same spirit of openness, they could build a new government building, give all the lobbyists desk jobs, and call it the "Ministry of Bribes".
Science Papa?
I'm surprised I haven't yet seen a Slashdot article on outraged feminists' reactions to the Science Papa / Cooking Mama gender divide.
But... but... the AT&T ads tell me it's the fastest broadband in the country!!
They wouldn't lie in an AD, surely?
I think that once they're on public record, they should simply be required to either make good on their promise or publically recant.
Politicians too, for that matter.
Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of simply ignoring election promises, they had to either honour those promises or come back on TV to explain why they didn't? (Or even just to say that they changed their minds.)
It's not a lot to ask, and I think it would cut down on a lot of the lies.