Though I've since grown accustomed to it, when PEP 308 was first resolved the grammar of the conditional expression ("X if C else Y"), placing the conditional as it does in between the choices, struck me (and not me alone) as particularly odd. Does this reflect your mischievous sense of humour, or am I missing something because I'm not Dutch?
Spoiler Alert: It occurs to me that I ought to add that the "gross betrayal" experienced by more radical leftists in Spain itself, Anarchists and Trotskyists alike, eventually took a more direct turn than mere annoyance at the Communist's turning back the clock as regard farm and factory collectivisations. The leadership of the POUM in particular did not fare well in the face of Stalin's ire.
Orwell wrote 1984 after beeing delusional on how the communists behaved during the Spanish civil war, where he inititially fought for the communists.
Orwell never fought for the actual Communists (i.e. the Russian aligned Communist Party), he fought for the POUM (which was a Trotskyist group). The exigencies of Russian foreign policy (Stalin wanted an anti-fascist alliance with Britain and France) caused the Communists to be the conservatives on the Republican side. For example, everywhere the Communists (as opposed to various Trotskyist and Anarchist groupings) gained control, factories which had spontaneously been "collectivised" by their work force were returned to the hands of the prior private owners.
The musn't upset bourgeois Britain and France line (the vanity of which reached it's denouement at the Munich conference) being pursued, at Stalin's behest, by the Communists in Spain was natural perceived by more radical leftists as a gross betrayal. Orwell saw it as such. Orwell too perceived the danger of the requirements of State taking precedence over the liberation of workers. I'm not sure how you think he was being "delusional?!" Disillusioned perhaps, but then he obviously didn't hold the Communists in high enough regard to fight with them in the first place.
I recommend reading his Homage to Catalonia, not only because it clarifies the meaning of works such as Animal Farm and 1984, but because it's a damn good read.
The OP presented a definition that currency is only issued and backed by governments. I would agree legal tender can be defined that way but most consider currency a broader term than legal tender.
You may very well be correct, which is exactly why I wrote "it's safer to say... legal tender."** Of course the term under consideration in this case was 'money.' What, if anything, distinguishes 'money' from 'currency' from 'legal tender' in a technical (whether legal or economic) and coherent sense, notwithstanding the what most consider (usually without too much considering), becomes less clear the more one considers it. Colloquially, either 'money' or 'currency' can of course be used in any number of senses.
Personally, I cannot declare OP wrong for using 'currency' as a synonym for 'legal tender' any more than I can declare another wrong for distinguishing between them. It may well be that currency is any exchange technology, (by which I mean something which derives the greater part of its value from its use in exchanging other goods or services), which definition would clearly encompass BitCoin. Then again it is perhaps exclusively the official exchange technology. So this dispute largely devolves into argument by definition and even argumentum ad dictionarium, which is best avoided by agreeing on a particular set of definitions prior to the argument. Of course it is another matter when a judge is called upon to determine what definition the law will henceforth accept.
In the end, we have a system that leaves it up to judges.
Indeed, and as someone who has had to read a fair number of judgments, I find this particular one to be wanting.
I would be surprised if any court rules that bitcoin is not currency.
Or, more pertinently, not money. I wouldn't be surprised either way, but I would be interested in reading the legal analysis which led to such a determination. This is what is sadly lacking in the present opinion.
[** I do this when I'm feeling timid. In a less cowardly mood, I'll simply declare money to be what is, from place to place, legal tender. Swashbuckling, no? Currency is perhaps any exchange technology, (by which I mean something which derives the greater part of its value from its use in exchanging other goods or services), which definition would clearly encompass BitCoin. Then again it is perhaps exclusively the official exchange technology. ]
Presenting as proof, any particular definition of 'currency' or 'money' when the question is what constitutes an apt definition of 'currency' (or 'money'), is begging the question. In fact both these terms prove so difficult that even someone like Allan Greenspan can famously admit that he does not know what money is. (Which is actually wisdom notwithstanding the lampooning he received). And observers such as Steve Forbes can declare that Whatever [Bitcoin] Is, It's Not Money! (Not sure I find his reasoning any more convincing than the current judge's)
And one could equally quote the classical money theorist Georg Friedrich Knapp's quip to the effect that "money is whatever is accepted at government pay offices" to argue the bitcoin is not money. Though perhaps it's safer to say that legal tender is what can be used to a) dispose of tax liability (or fines) and b) to coerce a creditor to settle a debt. Whether money is or is not something other than legal tender is an open question.
Given the highly difficult and contentious nature of 'money' and/or 'currency,' I have to agree with OP that this judge's determination, based largely on the idea bitcoin can be exchanged for conventional currencies, is somewhat lacking. I say this as a lawyer and someone with an interest in money theory. Here is how superficially the magistrate judge disposes of this thorny question:
First, the Court must determine whether the BTCST
investments constitute an investment of money. It is clear that Bitcoin can be used as money. It
can be used to purchase goods or services, and as Shavers stated, used to pay for individual
living expenses. The only limitation of Bitcoin is that it is limited to those places that accept it as
currency. However, it can also be exchanged for conventional currencies, such as the U.S.
dollar, Euro, Yen, and Yuan. Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors
wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money.
One hopes a superior court would provide a more considered evaluation as to what constitutes 'money' for the purposes of these Acts.
You could start off with your common-or-garden variety spam filter and increase the linguistic sophistication for your defences from there...
C'mon, given the technology that exists to spy on you everyday, CAPTCHAs are a really dumb way to deal with this problem. I mean, if we can land a man on the moon... oh yeah we can't any more, forgot.
What is the "consideration" given to the patient, in exchange for giving up copyright? Clearly it isn't dentistry...
No, it is dentistry. The assignment of copyright constitutes part payment for the provision of dental services, the balance being paid in legal tender.
...since that could be had elsewhere without the requirement of waiving copyright
Reducing that logic to the extreme, the fact that a free dentists practises elsewhere would mean that no dentist can charge anything for dentistry.
I suppose it's remotely possible that the patients were trading their copyright for dentistry, but that seems a pretty thin argument.
Now I think you are getting closer to the most obvious point of legal attack. The contract fails not for want of consideration, but because this kind of term is so far outside the ordinary nature of an agreement for the provision of dental services, so unreasonable, that it would require the proverbial "red hand" (UK law but similar cases exist in may CL jurisdictions) to bring it to the notice of patients. Patients wouldn't have imagined that they were trading copyright for dentistry and such a term must be specially brought to their attention. Alternatively this most likely falls foul of the relevant statutory prohibition on the formation of unfair contracts.
and they haven't even taken into consideration compression tellaphone has really low audio quality so it should take that much space when compressed
Even without storing actual conversations the knowledge of whom you call, how often, when from where etc. for most people connected to telephone systems in the civilised world is an amazingly powerful tool for profiling individuals. People worried about 24 hour video of them miss the point. In fact, such info might be preferable as it would lower the chances of the door being smashed in one midnight due to a Type I error.
Of course they have much more than that. They have Google's amazing database of per IP web usage meta-data, Apple & Googles databases for their GPS equipped iOS and Android devices. And then some.
Recordings of conversations or video of activities are soooooo C20th. With suitable advances they will of course become so C22nd eventually. For now, they are no where near as powerfully mined as the kind of usage metadata NSA has procured from the marketers.
No sense being narcissists about it, not everything is about "us."
I'm not in the US. I'm a narcissist who plans overthrowing the old word order from my island bunker somewhere in the South Pacific;) (.au). By 'us' I meant humanity.
We could certainly do with a lot less people going around saying Math is hard. That's defeatist thinking. Math is easy!
If memory serves me correctly a few years ago slashdot ran a story linking to some research comparing high school maths performance internationally. One of the findings was that in those countries where the students rated maths "easier" or "more enjoyable" the general level of mathematical ability was lower than in those countries where the students rated maths as difficult.
The fact of the matter is that maths is hard. That's only defeatists thinking if you are not up for the challenge.
That sounds good, and they tried just that, in a project called DIMHRS.
Yup sorry, my bad, realised this later. Hard to comprehend that 10 yrs of development time and $1bill won't get you a decent pay-roll system these days.
Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code."
While it's true that COBOL is meant to be self documenting, there is, in a 7 million line project, a difference between understanding any particular section of code and being able to comprehend the entire structure of the project. If that structure is undocumented, you will have a lot of reading before you grasp the program globally. Apparently the "failures" that were being experienced were not leading the maintainers to the appropriate sections of code and such a global understanding had become necessary.
I know it breaks one of the cardinal rules of software development, but if you have a cool billion to throw at the problem and the existing mess cannot be fathomed, perhaps starting afresh is an idea...
Thanks. And for the avoidance of doubt I meant to write: The nations most widely circulated paper informs it's readership that the Australian government is now the ENEMY.
Not to disagree with most of your points, but managing a hostile media is exactly the skill that is needed by any government.
I do not completely disagree with you. I've often bemoaned the poor work of the current Labor propaganda department. They took a straight talker like Julia and made her sprout goobledygook like her predecessor, promised us the "Real Julia" and gave us more goobledygook. The approach to embedding advertising-like catch phrases into speeches exposes speakers to ridicule, especially in these days of easy mash-ups. Compare this the Abbott's effective 3 point "Stop The..." mantra, or the clever dog-whistle "A bad tax based on a LIE," where the 'lie,' of course, means to various audiences either the broken election promise or the Science itself. Abbott has, for the most part, been a supremely effective opposition leader (I think his blood pledge was dangerous and unnecessary over-extension, he did not need to lock himself potentially into calling a double dissolution, but we'll see how that pans out), and I can but admire his skill. He is a formidable politician, and anyone who convinces themselves he is "an idiot" is perhaps engaging too much in projection.
However I've come to the view that it is not entirely fair, in part because the gatekeepers are so effective that the performance of ALP politicians is largely irrelevant. Any good performances are effectively kept from public view. I'll give an example below.
To return to media "management" per se.
As a contrasting example, the Libs did not fight criticism from the ABC by coddling them. They viciously attacked and undermined their reputation.
Good as a general principle, but it is the particulars the define the reality. Among the salient differences here are: a) The ABC does not enjoy 80% domination of any branch of the media, quite the opposite. b) The ABC is by their charter not permitted from fighting back, ie. they (with the exception apparently of Shaun Micallef who gets the jester's wild card) cannot adopt a partisan political position. And despite the general perception among non-viewers and non-listeners (ie. most of the population) that they have a "left-wing bias" review after review finds that not to be the case.
It's one thing to attack a media fly-weight with both hands legislatively tied behind its back, quite another to get into a bare-knuckle fight with Mike Tyson. Look what happened when Conroy did try to fight back. He ends up with his head posted over Stalin's body and surrounded by images of histories most notorious dictators in the nation's most widely read paper, while News Ltd's print monopoly rights are trumpeted as fundamental to Western freedoms
Short of actually acting like Stalin and sending in the tanks, (no we really don't want that) what is the Australian govt to do. Especially a minority government. Nor is this even an ALP vs LNP issue.
Now it can be argued that I'm overstating the influence of the print media and that the high correlation between having Murdoch's backing and obtaining government (pro-Whitlam 1972, anti-Whitlam 1975, pro-Hawke 1987 and so on). is mere coincidence. Arguably Keating's "sweetest victory" (won via an extremely effective GST scare campaign) and the current hung parliament are the two exceptions to News getting their man across the line. Which recent embarrassment perhaps accounts for the gloves coming off completely... this really has been the most vicious campaign since 1975. [Visit the archives and satisfy yourself by studying the tabloid press a month before each election... I did something similar for a semi-quantitative analysis of crime reporting and and law & order policies in NSW over several decades, it's actually very enlightening]. But I really do feel that the print media still enjoys perhaps a surprising amount of influence. Perhaps it's the greater authority afforded to the printed word especially by
On security and data retention, Senator Scott Ludlam of the greens is asking the right questions in the right places, though.
I agree. While the Greens hearts often seem (to those of us thus inclined) to be in the right place, I fear their the quality of their parliamentarians is often wanting. Ludlam, however not only has his heart in place, he is right across his portfolio (not only as it regards security and data rentention). His knowledge and understanding is at least the equal of the minister- and shadow minister-'s. IMO by far the Greens most impressive member. Not bad for a BA!
Slashdot Mirror
Government is much more terrifying because it is always there protecting itself rather than its citizens.
There is no need to be terrified of a government where there is democracy and a public that is well informed of its activities.
Though I've since grown accustomed to it, when PEP 308 was first resolved the grammar of the conditional expression ("X if C else Y"), placing the conditional as it does in between the choices, struck me (and not me alone) as particularly odd. Does this reflect your mischievous sense of humour, or am I missing something because I'm not Dutch?
Spoiler Alert: It occurs to me that I ought to add that the "gross betrayal" experienced by more radical leftists in Spain itself, Anarchists and Trotskyists alike, eventually took a more direct turn than mere annoyance at the Communist's turning back the clock as regard farm and factory collectivisations. The leadership of the POUM in particular did not fare well in the face of Stalin's ire.
Orwell wrote 1984 after beeing delusional on how the communists behaved during the Spanish civil war, where he inititially fought for the communists.
Orwell never fought for the actual Communists (i.e. the Russian aligned Communist Party), he fought for the POUM (which was a Trotskyist group). The exigencies of Russian foreign policy (Stalin wanted an anti-fascist alliance with Britain and France) caused the Communists to be the conservatives on the Republican side. For example, everywhere the Communists (as opposed to various Trotskyist and Anarchist groupings) gained control, factories which had spontaneously been "collectivised" by their work force were returned to the hands of the prior private owners.
The musn't upset bourgeois Britain and France line (the vanity of which reached it's denouement at the Munich conference) being pursued, at Stalin's behest, by the Communists in Spain was natural perceived by more radical leftists as a gross betrayal. Orwell saw it as such. Orwell too perceived the danger of the requirements of State taking precedence over the liberation of workers. I'm not sure how you think he was being "delusional?!" Disillusioned perhaps, but then he obviously didn't hold the Communists in high enough regard to fight with them in the first place.
I recommend reading his Homage to Catalonia, not only because it clarifies the meaning of works such as Animal Farm and 1984, but because it's a damn good read.
In this case, you need to create a (written and involved to amend) constitution.
Ah, but who needs a written constitution when you are protected by golden threads?
The OP presented a definition that currency is only issued and backed by governments. I would agree legal tender can be defined that way but most consider currency a broader term than legal tender.
You may very well be correct, which is exactly why I wrote "it's safer to say ... legal tender."** Of course the term under consideration in this case was 'money.' What, if anything, distinguishes 'money' from 'currency' from 'legal tender' in a technical (whether legal or economic) and coherent sense, notwithstanding the what most consider (usually without too much considering), becomes less clear the more one considers it. Colloquially, either 'money' or 'currency' can of course be used in any number of senses.
Personally, I cannot declare OP wrong for using 'currency' as a synonym for 'legal tender' any more than I can declare another wrong for distinguishing between them. It may well be that currency is any exchange technology, (by which I mean something which derives the greater part of its value from its use in exchanging other goods or services), which definition would clearly encompass BitCoin. Then again it is perhaps exclusively the official exchange technology. So this dispute largely devolves into argument by definition and even argumentum ad dictionarium, which is best avoided by agreeing on a particular set of definitions prior to the argument. Of course it is another matter when a judge is called upon to determine what definition the law will henceforth accept.
In the end, we have a system that leaves it up to judges.
Indeed, and as someone who has had to read a fair number of judgments, I find this particular one to be wanting.
I would be surprised if any court rules that bitcoin is not currency.
Or, more pertinently, not money. I wouldn't be surprised either way, but I would be interested in reading the legal analysis which led to such a determination. This is what is sadly lacking in the present opinion.
[** I do this when I'm feeling timid. In a less cowardly mood, I'll simply declare money to be what is, from place to place, legal tender. Swashbuckling, no? Currency is perhaps any exchange technology, (by which I mean something which derives the greater part of its value from its use in exchanging other goods or services), which definition would clearly encompass BitCoin. Then again it is perhaps exclusively the official exchange technology. ]
Presenting as proof, any particular definition of 'currency' or 'money' when the question is what constitutes an apt definition of 'currency' (or 'money'), is begging the question. In fact both these terms prove so difficult that even someone like Allan Greenspan can famously admit that he does not know what money is. (Which is actually wisdom notwithstanding the lampooning he received). And observers such as Steve Forbes can declare that Whatever [Bitcoin] Is, It's Not Money! (Not sure I find his reasoning any more convincing than the current judge's)
And one could equally quote the classical money theorist Georg Friedrich Knapp's quip to the effect that "money is whatever is accepted at government pay offices" to argue the bitcoin is not money. Though perhaps it's safer to say that legal tender is what can be used to a) dispose of tax liability (or fines) and b) to coerce a creditor to settle a debt. Whether money is or is not something other than legal tender is an open question.
Given the highly difficult and contentious nature of 'money' and/or 'currency,' I have to agree with OP that this judge's determination, based largely on the idea bitcoin can be exchanged for conventional currencies, is somewhat lacking. I say this as a lawyer and someone with an interest in money theory. Here is how superficially the magistrate judge disposes of this thorny question:
First, the Court must determine whether the BTCST investments constitute an investment of money. It is clear that Bitcoin can be used as money. It can be used to purchase goods or services, and as Shavers stated, used to pay for individual living expenses. The only limitation of Bitcoin is that it is limited to those places that accept it as currency. However, it can also be exchanged for conventional currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, Euro, Yen, and Yuan. Therefore, Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money.
One hopes a superior court would provide a more considered evaluation as to what constitutes 'money' for the purposes of these Acts.
You could start off with your common-or-garden variety spam filter and increase the linguistic sophistication for your defences from there ...
C'mon, given the technology that exists to spy on you everyday, CAPTCHAs are a really dumb way to deal with this problem. I mean, if we can land a man on the moon ... oh yeah we can't any more, forgot.
Each time I swear it was an Aztec chant out of the Necronomicon to raise the evil dead.
Well that explains the Poltergeist at my place, but it still doesn't help me access the damn site!
The quickest way to get PWND is to give someone else physical access to your device.
In the 2011 Pwn2Own contest, Charlie Miller and Dion Blazakis "PWND" the Iphone 4 using a mobile Safari vulnerability.
Relevance?
That mobile hacks are possible hardly disproves OP's point (or addresses it any pertinent way).
What is the "consideration" given to the patient, in exchange for giving up copyright? Clearly it isn't dentistry ...
No, it is dentistry. The assignment of copyright constitutes part payment for the provision of dental services, the balance being paid in legal tender.
Reducing that logic to the extreme, the fact that a free dentists practises elsewhere would mean that no dentist can charge anything for dentistry.
I suppose it's remotely possible that the patients were trading their copyright for dentistry, but that seems a pretty thin argument.
Now I think you are getting closer to the most obvious point of legal attack. The contract fails not for want of consideration, but because this kind of term is so far outside the ordinary nature of an agreement for the provision of dental services, so unreasonable, that it would require the proverbial "red hand" (UK law but similar cases exist in may CL jurisdictions) to bring it to the notice of patients. Patients wouldn't have imagined that they were trading copyright for dentistry and such a term must be specially brought to their attention. Alternatively this most likely falls foul of the relevant statutory prohibition on the formation of unfair contracts.
Nice try though, you have to give her that.
and they haven't even taken into consideration compression tellaphone has really low audio quality so it should take that much space when compressed
Even without storing actual conversations the knowledge of whom you call, how often, when from where etc. for most people connected to telephone systems in the civilised world is an amazingly powerful tool for profiling individuals. People worried about 24 hour video of them miss the point. In fact, such info might be preferable as it would lower the chances of the door being smashed in one midnight due to a Type I error.
Of course they have much more than that. They have Google's amazing database of per IP web usage meta-data, Apple & Googles databases for their GPS equipped iOS and Android devices. And then some.
Recordings of conversations or video of activities are soooooo C20th. With suitable advances they will of course become so C22nd eventually. For now, they are no where near as powerfully mined as the kind of usage metadata NSA has procured from the marketers.
No sense being narcissists about it, not everything is about "us."
I'm not in the US. I'm a narcissist who plans overthrowing the old word order from my island bunker somewhere in the South Pacific ;) (.au). By 'us' I meant humanity.
Expect more articles like this that downplay the scale of the NSA.
Yeah it's a mere 12 exabytes (and of course Moore's law won't apply ... ahem), on us. Nothing to see here kids, just move along.
We could certainly do with a lot less people going around saying Math is hard. That's defeatist thinking. Math is easy!
If memory serves me correctly a few years ago slashdot ran a story linking to some research comparing high school maths performance internationally. One of the findings was that in those countries where the students rated maths "easier" or "more enjoyable" the general level of mathematical ability was lower than in those countries where the students rated maths as difficult.
The fact of the matter is that maths is hard. That's only defeatists thinking if you are not up for the challenge.
That sounds good, and they tried just that, in a project called DIMHRS.
Yup sorry, my bad, realised this later. Hard to comprehend that 10 yrs of development time and $1bill won't get you a decent pay-roll system these days.
Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code."
While it's true that COBOL is meant to be self documenting, there is, in a 7 million line project, a difference between understanding any particular section of code and being able to comprehend the entire structure of the project. If that structure is undocumented, you will have a lot of reading before you grasp the program globally. Apparently the "failures" that were being experienced were not leading the maintainers to the appropriate sections of code and such a global understanding had become necessary.
I know it breaks one of the cardinal rules of software development, but if you have a cool billion to throw at the problem and the existing mess cannot be fathomed, perhaps starting afresh is an idea ...
Gotcha.
Maybe they didn't care how that would be read outside the US.
That's kinda encompassed in not thinking to hard about it, yeah.
I know I don't.
Perhaps there's a future for you as a House Democrat then.
Maybe the folks proposing this didn't think too hard about how the word 'national' will be read outside the US.
You Americans deserve what you're about to get.
And the rest of us are about to get what they deserve too.
They should move to North Carolina, where the legislature outlawed sea level rise.
Too right. I can't fathom these Global Warming advocates... who in their right mind actually wants catastrophic climate change?!!
I say we vote to keep the climate just as it is thank you very much.
Thanks. And for the avoidance of doubt I meant to write: The nations most widely circulated paper informs it's readership that the Australian government is now the ENEMY.
Anyway, events have rather overtaken us ...
Not to disagree with most of your points, but managing a hostile media is exactly the skill that is needed by any government.
I do not completely disagree with you. I've often bemoaned the poor work of the current Labor propaganda department. They took a straight talker like Julia and made her sprout goobledygook like her predecessor, promised us the "Real Julia" and gave us more goobledygook. The approach to embedding advertising-like catch phrases into speeches exposes speakers to ridicule, especially in these days of easy mash-ups. Compare this the Abbott's effective 3 point "Stop The ..." mantra, or the clever dog-whistle "A bad tax based on a LIE," where the 'lie,' of course, means to various audiences either the broken election promise or the Science itself. Abbott has, for the most part, been a supremely effective opposition leader (I think his blood pledge was dangerous and unnecessary over-extension, he did not need to lock himself potentially into calling a double dissolution, but we'll see how that pans out), and I can but admire his skill. He is a formidable politician, and anyone who convinces themselves he is "an idiot" is perhaps engaging too much in projection.
However I've come to the view that it is not entirely fair, in part because the gatekeepers are so effective that the performance of ALP politicians is largely irrelevant. Any good performances are effectively kept from public view. I'll give an example below.
To return to media "management" per se.
As a contrasting example, the Libs did not fight criticism from the ABC by coddling them. They viciously attacked and undermined their reputation.
Good as a general principle, but it is the particulars the define the reality. Among the salient differences here are: a) The ABC does not enjoy 80% domination of any branch of the media, quite the opposite. b) The ABC is by their charter not permitted from fighting back, ie. they (with the exception apparently of Shaun Micallef who gets the jester's wild card) cannot adopt a partisan political position. And despite the general perception among non-viewers and non-listeners (ie. most of the population) that they have a "left-wing bias" review after review finds that not to be the case.
It's one thing to attack a media fly-weight with both hands legislatively tied behind its back, quite another to get into a bare-knuckle fight with Mike Tyson. Look what happened when Conroy did try to fight back. He ends up with his head posted over Stalin's body and surrounded by images of histories most notorious dictators in the nation's most widely read paper, while News Ltd's print monopoly rights are trumpeted as fundamental to Western freedoms
Short of actually acting like Stalin and sending in the tanks, (no we really don't want that) what is the Australian govt to do. Especially a minority government. Nor is this even an ALP vs LNP issue.
Now it can be argued that I'm overstating the influence of the print media and that the high correlation between having Murdoch's backing and obtaining government (pro-Whitlam 1972, anti-Whitlam 1975, pro-Hawke 1987 and so on). is mere coincidence. Arguably Keating's "sweetest victory" (won via an extremely effective GST scare campaign) and the current hung parliament are the two exceptions to News getting their man across the line. Which recent embarrassment perhaps accounts for the gloves coming off completely ... this really has been the most vicious campaign since 1975. [Visit the archives and satisfy yourself by studying the tabloid press a month before each election ... I did something similar for a semi-quantitative analysis of crime reporting and and law & order policies in NSW over several decades, it's actually very enlightening]. But I really do feel that the print media still enjoys perhaps a surprising amount of influence. Perhaps it's the greater authority afforded to the printed word especially by
On security and data retention, Senator Scott Ludlam of the greens is asking the right questions in the right places, though.
I agree. While the Greens hearts often seem (to those of us thus inclined) to be in the right place, I fear their the quality of their parliamentarians is often wanting. Ludlam, however not only has his heart in place, he is right across his portfolio (not only as it regards security and data rentention). His knowledge and understanding is at least the equal of the minister- and shadow minister-'s. IMO by far the Greens most impressive member. Not bad for a BA!