We have registered as a party. Or at least, the paperwork is in, and has been for months. All processing for party registrations is put on hold during an election cycle sadly, but had the election been a couple of weeks later we may have actually been able to field candidates. I'll admit, I don't know the exact situation, as I've had to pull back from any real involvement to focus on my academic career.
I'll agree on your point that the party needs much more interaction on the website however. One reason for my own lack of participation there of late is how quiet the forums have become over the past 6 months. Most of the party discussion became centred around the IRC channel, with those logs only infrequently getting on the website, which I feel really disenfranchises party members without the time or inclination to be sitting in IRC 18 hours a day. I had hoped that might change following the party congress, but it doesn't appear to have.
I do think however you've got a pretty warped viewpoint of the party being "a circlejerk of guys in Sydney who dislike paying for CDs". We're campaigning for copyright reform, not the elimination of copyright.
The name derives from the Swedish "Piratpartiet", and was chosen as much to express solidarity with them and the other international Pirate Parties in our shared platform than anything else. I'll agree though it's not the best for PR purposes, given the connotations of the word Pirate in the English language.
Consumers most certainly do care about their privacy. The problem is what they may define as private or personal doesn't necessarily mesh with traditional viewpoints of what would be. The problem seems to be one of perception, but a campaign like this would really address that. Consumers are willing to act on privacy issues when they perceive some harm to them, and there's some big obvious ones in this case.
Fuel shortages? What fuel shortages? First I've heard about that. If there's a fuel shortage, I'd suggest it's more because a lot of Uranium deposits aren't currently being exploited (we have quite a few here in Australia where Environmentalists have prevented mines being opened), rather than an actually a shortage of available supply.
To say they "slow your internet speed" really doesn't do it justice. They throttle it. They choke it down to speeds that are just unbelievably low. So low, that you can't even log into your account on Telstra's own website to check your usage, and that checking your @bigpond email account takes minutes just to download a single short email without any attachments. I think until recently, they were quoting 64kbps as the shaping speed, but any test I did didn't even get about 12kbps.
In comparison, I think the standard shaping speed on the lowest plans for any other decent ISP is now 256kbps. If all you were doing is browsing, and not making huge downloads, or trying to load up multiple streaming videos at once....you might honestly not even notice a shape at that speed.
It's not only the countryside. The part of the Brisbane suburb I was living in until 6 months ago had Telstra cable as the only available service in the area . Impossible to get ADSL, couldn't even get wireless. It was a nightmare. Apparently there was an ADSL cabinet around, but Telstra had decided that there wasn't enough demand to justify putting in any more ports, since "everyone already had broadband". Through their cable. Bastards.
Though I don't particularly like to defend the arguements roflwind is making there, there is a point buried in amongst what he's saying. There's a few issues with EULA's, privacy policies, etc, that are making things rather difficult for consumers.
a) EULA's, privacy policies, etc, tend on average to be written at an above 12th grade reading level.
b) They're long. The Facebook privacy policy is longer than the US constitution.
c) Based primarily on those two reasons, approx 85% of people don't read privacy policies, and I'd imagine it's a similar statistic for EULA's. Even in the case of a short one that's written in every day language, they'll avoid looking at it in the first place (which would allow them to discover that fact), based on their perceptions of what these sort of things are "always" like.
Yes, there's certainly a lot of responsibility on the consumer to actually be proactive in reading these things, etc, but there's also a responsibility to the corporations to not be discouraging them from doing so.
How can you possibly arrive at the idea that CSIRO are engaging in patent trolling? They were the ones who actually developed the technology, their patents hadn't been submarined in any way, and the only reason they're fighting now is because they still haven't been paid the royalties the companies originally agreed to give them when they first implemented the technology. This is an unusual case of patent law, not because of any supposed trolling, but because it's a superb example of how patent law was always meant to be used.
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We have registered as a party. Or at least, the paperwork is in, and has been for months. All processing for party registrations is put on hold during an election cycle sadly, but had the election been a couple of weeks later we may have actually been able to field candidates. I'll admit, I don't know the exact situation, as I've had to pull back from any real involvement to focus on my academic career. I'll agree on your point that the party needs much more interaction on the website however. One reason for my own lack of participation there of late is how quiet the forums have become over the past 6 months. Most of the party discussion became centred around the IRC channel, with those logs only infrequently getting on the website, which I feel really disenfranchises party members without the time or inclination to be sitting in IRC 18 hours a day. I had hoped that might change following the party congress, but it doesn't appear to have. I do think however you've got a pretty warped viewpoint of the party being "a circlejerk of guys in Sydney who dislike paying for CDs". We're campaigning for copyright reform, not the elimination of copyright.
The name derives from the Swedish "Piratpartiet", and was chosen as much to express solidarity with them and the other international Pirate Parties in our shared platform than anything else. I'll agree though it's not the best for PR purposes, given the connotations of the word Pirate in the English language.
Consumers most certainly do care about their privacy. The problem is what they may define as private or personal doesn't necessarily mesh with traditional viewpoints of what would be. The problem seems to be one of perception, but a campaign like this would really address that. Consumers are willing to act on privacy issues when they perceive some harm to them, and there's some big obvious ones in this case.
Fuel shortages? What fuel shortages? First I've heard about that. If there's a fuel shortage, I'd suggest it's more because a lot of Uranium deposits aren't currently being exploited (we have quite a few here in Australia where Environmentalists have prevented mines being opened), rather than an actually a shortage of available supply.
To say they "slow your internet speed" really doesn't do it justice. They throttle it. They choke it down to speeds that are just unbelievably low. So low, that you can't even log into your account on Telstra's own website to check your usage, and that checking your @bigpond email account takes minutes just to download a single short email without any attachments. I think until recently, they were quoting 64kbps as the shaping speed, but any test I did didn't even get about 12kbps. In comparison, I think the standard shaping speed on the lowest plans for any other decent ISP is now 256kbps. If all you were doing is browsing, and not making huge downloads, or trying to load up multiple streaming videos at once....you might honestly not even notice a shape at that speed.
It's not only the countryside. The part of the Brisbane suburb I was living in until 6 months ago had Telstra cable as the only available service in the area . Impossible to get ADSL, couldn't even get wireless. It was a nightmare. Apparently there was an ADSL cabinet around, but Telstra had decided that there wasn't enough demand to justify putting in any more ports, since "everyone already had broadband". Through their cable. Bastards.
Though I don't particularly like to defend the arguements roflwind is making there, there is a point buried in amongst what he's saying. There's a few issues with EULA's, privacy policies, etc, that are making things rather difficult for consumers. a) EULA's, privacy policies, etc, tend on average to be written at an above 12th grade reading level. b) They're long. The Facebook privacy policy is longer than the US constitution. c) Based primarily on those two reasons, approx 85% of people don't read privacy policies, and I'd imagine it's a similar statistic for EULA's. Even in the case of a short one that's written in every day language, they'll avoid looking at it in the first place (which would allow them to discover that fact), based on their perceptions of what these sort of things are "always" like. Yes, there's certainly a lot of responsibility on the consumer to actually be proactive in reading these things, etc, but there's also a responsibility to the corporations to not be discouraging them from doing so.
Here's what I have on their previous trolling:
How can you possibly arrive at the idea that CSIRO are engaging in patent trolling? They were the ones who actually developed the technology, their patents hadn't been submarined in any way, and the only reason they're fighting now is because they still haven't been paid the royalties the companies originally agreed to give them when they first implemented the technology. This is an unusual case of patent law, not because of any supposed trolling, but because it's a superb example of how patent law was always meant to be used.