Why they always have to call it piracy... Oh well, I suppose I do understand why. I just don't like it.
Yup, the implication is that copying movies and music is a lot like blowing up homes with cannonballs, plundering villages and raping the governor's daughter.
I don't know why that got modded down, I would personally have left it be
I agree with that. In fact, I don't think it was flamebait, offtopic or troll. Look at my last journal entry, linked to on my sig, for my opinions about it
SEOUL (Reuters) - A huge explosion rocked North Korea near the border with China three days ago, producing a mushroom cloud that sparked speculation that Pyongyang might have tested an atomic weapon, Yonhap news agency reported on Sunday.
The South Korean agency said the blast on Thursday in Kimhyungjik county in Ryanggang province appeared much worse than a train explosion that killed at least 170 people in April. It quoted some sources as saying the latest blast was unlikely to have been a nuclear test.
Thursday was the 56th anniversary of North Korea's founding. The reclusive communist state often stages extravaganzas and big events to mark important anniversaries.
South Korean intelligence officials said they were monitoring the news, but declined detailed comment on the reports, which were based on ``informed sources'' in Beijing and in Seoul.
The reports surfaced as South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the United States were seeking to persuade North Korea to return to the negotiating table to discuss its nuclear weapons ambitions. The North, which threatened at earlier talks to test an atomic bomb, has said it doubts more negotiations will help.
``There were rumors that the explosion was much bigger than the one at Ryongchon train station and the United States is showing a big interest as the blast was seen from satellites,'' Yonhap quoted an unnamed source in Beijing as saying.
The cause had yet to be determined but the source said Washington was not ruling out the possibility that the blast may be linked to a nuclear test.
Yonhap quoted other unnamed officials as saying it was probably not an accident, although it also quoted one source in Washington as saying it was unlikely to have been a nuclear test. It quoted another source as saying it could be a forest fire.
Yonhap reported a mushroom cloud up to 2.5 miles in diameter was spotted after the blast in remote Ryanggang province in the country's far northeast near to known missile bases.
The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions the Bush administration had received recent intelligence reports that some experts believed could indicate North Korea was preparing to conduct its first nuclear weapons test explosion.
South Korean government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Train wagons exploded at the Ryongchon railway station on April 22, killing 170 and injuring an estimated 1,300. The blast was believed to have been caused by a train loaded with oil and chemicals hitting a power line.
SEOUL : A huge explosion rocked North Korea's northern inland province of Ryanggang last week, triggering a mushroom cloud at least two miles in radius, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.
The explosion appeared to be stronger than an April 22 blast that killed more than 150 people and wounded some 1,300 others in Ryongchon near the western tip of North Korea's border with China, it said Sunday.
The latest blast took place in Kimhyungjik county near the Chinese border on September 9, when North Korea marked the 56th anniversary of its founding, Yonhap said, citing unnamed sources in Beijing.
"The United States was known to have shown its keen interest in the explosion after spotting its traces by satellite," the source was quoted as saying.
South Korea's unification minister Chung Dong-Young said Seoul had received an unsubstantiated report on the explosion in North Korea.
"We have received an unsubstantiated report on traces of an explosion in North Korea," he told reporters after a meeting of security-related officials. The unnamed source in Beijing said the blast had prompted speculation in Washington that the explosion was possibly related to a nuclear experiment, it said.
Chung, however, played down the possibility of a North Korea's nuclear weapons test.
He said the South Korean government was not aware of the scale of the blast but Yonhap quoted a diplomatic source in Seoul as saying the blast triggered a mushroom cloud with a radius of 3.5 to four kilometers (2.4 miles).
"The explosion occurred at around 11 am. But it is not clear yet whether the explosion is related to an intentional nuclear experiment or a simple accident," he was quoted as saying.
He noted the site of the explosion was not far from the North's missile base, according to Yonhap.
The New York Times reported on its Web site Saturday that US President George W. Bush and his top advisers have received intelligence reports describing a confusing series of actions by North Korea that some experts believe could indicate the country is preparing to conduct its first nuclear weapons test.
Citing unnamed senior officials with access to intelligence, the newspaper said US intelligence agencies appeared divided over the significance of the new North Korean actions.
The suspicious activities included the movement of materials around several suspected test sites, including one near a location where intelligence agencies reported last year that conventional explosives were being tested that could compress a plutonium core and set off a nuclear explosion, The Times said.
But officials have not seen the classic indicators of preparations at a test site, in which cables are laid to measure an explosion in a deep test pit, according to the report.
US officials said if North Korea proceeded with a test, it would probably be with a plutonium bomb, perhaps one fabricated from the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that the North has boasted in the past few months have been reprocessed into bomb fuel, the report pointed out.
However, some analysts in agencies that were the most cautious about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction have cautioned that they do not believe the activity detected in North Korea in the past three weeks is necessarily the harbinger of a test, The Times reported.
Some analysts fear that a successful nuclear weapon test by North Korea could change the balance of power in Asia, perhaps leading to a new nuclear arms race there, the paper said.
but at least the world is safe now from the bad Conan the Barbarian art he had in his tacky palaces
Yeah, but we still have to put up with Kim Jong Il's unbridled love of Titanic, and his habit of telling everyone all about it. I think I know which one's more deserving of a U.S. military response.
Those nukes aren't for protection against China I can tell you that
Actually, China is the closest thing North Korea has to a friend. The threats of nuclear development are for three main reasons: intimidate South Korea and Japan; provide more material for propaganda and awe at the power of the state; and most importantly, as a bargaining device to use with the rest of the world (namely the U.S.) to secure more aid, avoid sanctions, etc. Anyway, if North Korea is testing nukes, their bargaining power just increased exponentially. It's also a massive failure of international diplomacy in respect to Pyongyang and all attempts to manage North Korea.
Am I the only one who is getting bored with the future? I can only see aliens trying to kill Earth so many times
If you are referring to the fantasy side of SF, then what you say is very valid. But, at least with the SF writers here, the point of science fiction and their view of the future is to provide a commentary of society today by emphasizing certain issues. Fantasy is about escapism; this sort of SF is about current ideas and provoking thought about our present situation and is really the opposite of escapism. That sort of science fiction really doesn't get old, in my opinion, if it continues to be relevant to our society and encourage discussion and thought about it.
Colonialism...the developing world has been strong-armed into affording IP protection to foreign ideas... A guy in Maastricht worked out that if every Burundi copy of Windows were legitimately purchased, the country would have to turn over 67.65 months' worth of its total GDP to Microsoft. This is the impending disaster, a new form of colonialism that makes the old forms look gentle and beneficent by comparison
I don't know about the historic forms of colonialism appearing "gentle and beneficent", but I think this is a particularly insidious way the developed world can extort from and suppress the developing. Eventually the developed world's fundamentally impalpable IP and financial management of the rest of the world will burst. What will matter in the end is that the manufacturing capacity is in Asia, the cheap farmland and farm labour spread across the third world and the IT solutions in India. Britain lost its position as "workshop of the world" after the 1870s (already happened in the U.S.) and it took only one major war to make it lose its financial centrality (all the U.S. really has left). How long can the developed world as it currently is really hold on to its unnatural domination? Kudus to Doctorow to his very apt parallels between the old and new colonialisms.
...if you look at it one way, it's easy. In the simplest sense, the left is about change, the right is about preserving the status quo. Science fiction writers are preoccupied with change because they speculate about the future. Then again, I think that vastly oversimplifies the libertarian tone and anti-fascism of much science fiction. Science fiction authors tend to look into the future and expect the consolidation of powers, which scares them. Because they think more than the average person about the negative side of the current course of humankind, they are more inclined to want to change it.
I regret reposting so soon, but I've been reading the thread and I have to ask, Does BlackBerry succeed in actually being a good phone or a good PDA? MSNBC says it has "four hours talk time and eight hours standby". With battery life like that, how can this be a useful phone? If BlackBerry has adopted a "more conventional phone form factor", what's it like to use as a PDA? Really, does integrating phone and PDA really provide a better and more convenient experience or does it just implement the worst of both worlds - a smaller screen than a straight PDA and worst battery life than a non-smart phone? Wouldn't it just be better to buy two separate devices?
PC Mag and Forbes have reviews and InfoSync has a detailed news article. Forbes provides some perspective to the objective of integrating personal organizer with phone. PC Mag reads a bit like a spec list. I found the MSNBC review provided already more interesting, but you can look for yourself.
I can trust the consensus of 15 independent websites
Unfortunately, if I search on Google for say, "pan-Slavism", I get fifteen articles copied from Wikipedia - many of which don't admit that they are copied. Misinformation becomes the basis for more misinformation - and you can't use that as a proof for the correctness of the original misinformation.
Under normal, closed source projects, this would spell doom for the software.
And their work would probably be lost, and any new project that wanted continue their type of work would have to write everything all over again just to reach the existing level of functionality - which is a waste of time and effort. Instead, the pre-existing project is forked. Open from closed source is an innovation in distribution equivalent to modular/OOP from procedural in development in allowing and encouraging reusability. Reusability then facilitates easier extension - like the sort of improvements we're seeing with X.org.
There have already been a few posts about how annoying it will be to listen to people talking on their phones in the plane. What alarms me is the opening paragraph of the article: "Business travelers who think there are not enough hours in the day, take note: in two years there may be a few more at your disposal." It reminds me of a TIME article I read a while ago that speculated that since the 1970s, the only real change technical innovations have made to our lives is to end the way in which our lives are tethered to our work. Not many new appliances like washing machines that make work more convenient have emerged but what we do have, i.e. the Internet/email and mobile phones/pagers, are claimed to make it so easy to keep in touch with work that your workday certainly doesn't end once you leave the office and probably never really ends at all. If we've already lost home as a sanctuary from work, the airplane is probably one of the last places where we are out of touch enough to get some sleep or actually relax. So will allowing phone usage on planes have a positive effect on our lives? Referring to the regular business travellers mentioned in the article, Will it improve their productivity or will it just remove the last place they could rest and hence in the end actually damage their productivity by damaging their health?
According to this movie, you already can use mobile phones on planes and the only reason you're not allowed to is because airline companies want to charge you more to use their phone services! Then again, it does have a fear of flying class fight off a hijacker, then drop a bioweapon into the sea next to a major U.S. city in order to "defuse" it, so perhaps I can't count 100% on its accuracy.
Seeing the detail that has been missing may help people realize just how violent war really is.
I don't agree with that - not when war movies have HD level of image and sound quality already. If anything, it just places real war and real death in the context of entertainment - a sort of "I hope you enjoyed 'Bad Boys II'; stay tuned for more footage from Najaf".
When war footage is packaged in the form of television and juxtaposed to entertainment or news anchors with meticulously arranged hair and placed within a red border with some text from a special font on it, actual death and fighting is trivialized. Turning war into eye candy, which Cuban seems enthused about, is really just an extension of this mentality.
This sort of thing sounds good in the simplest sense but is very, very rarely ever thought through properly, or at all. Personally, I would love to eliminate discrimination - in every form. One of those forms not so easily eliminated is socio-economic. How do you abolish the hopelessness of the poor? Did you think about how the incredible racism of the past has left blacks in America and Australia (for example) in devastating, inescapable poverty? There is not equality. We can't act on the assumption that removing regulation will unveil a fair and balanced world. Scrapping affirmative action will result in a place that can boast equality, but away from the ideals of a vocal middle-class, has nothing of the sort. Your shallow notions play in typical fashion on the way in which "positive discrimination" is counter-intuitive. But please, think about it more deeply. Hopefully, once you and I die, we will have fixed up this shitty world we've inherited and race can stop mattering. For the moment, though, we can't leave people behind in our blind belief that it already doesn't.
"The present is a product of the past." Male/female/black/white have not traditionally been treated equally, and the current employment landscape still reflects its history. That can't just be ignored in the idealistic minority's hurry to move on. We can dream of true equality without regulation, but for the moment this and and this need practical solutions.
I searched and ended up back here again! Slashdot's summary should only be the first step, not the final freaking destination! What the hell is wrong with this planet?!
A shapeless squiggle which is utterly unlike your normal signature, but which is, nevertheless, all you are able to produce when asked formally to identify yourself. Muslims, whose religion forbids the making of graven images, use albuquerques to decorate their towels, menu cards and pyjamas.
"During the early years of the ALP, the Party was referred to by various titles differing from colony to colony. It was at the 1908 Interstate (federal) Conference that the name "Australian Labour Party" was adopted. In its shortened form the Party was frequently referred to as both 'Labor' and 'Labour', however the former spelling was adopted from 1912 onwards, due to the influence of the American labor movement." More here.
It's not a news event. It's just 'the way things are now' and an excuse to discuss it. Personally, I think looking at the news beyond just definite events is useful for seeing gradual change. Not everything happens suddenly, or with obvious milestones. This is one such case.
Slashdot Mirror
Why they always have to call it piracy... Oh well, I suppose I do understand why. I just don't like it.
Yup, the implication is that copying movies and music is a lot like blowing up homes with cannonballs, plundering villages and raping the governor's daughter.
Maybe it's not an entirely fair term.
I don't know why that got modded down, I would personally have left it be
I agree with that. In fact, I don't think it was flamebait, offtopic or troll. Look at my last journal entry, linked to on my sig, for my opinions about it
(not the same as the other NY Times article)
Big Blast, Mushroom Cloud Reported in N.Korea
By REUTERS
Published: September 12, 2004
Filed at 0:08 a.m. ET
SEOUL (Reuters) - A huge explosion rocked North Korea near the border with China three days ago, producing a mushroom cloud that sparked speculation that Pyongyang might have tested an atomic weapon, Yonhap news agency reported on Sunday.
The South Korean agency said the blast on Thursday in Kimhyungjik county in Ryanggang province appeared much worse than a train explosion that killed at least 170 people in April. It quoted some sources as saying the latest blast was unlikely to have been a nuclear test.
Thursday was the 56th anniversary of North Korea's founding. The reclusive communist state often stages extravaganzas and big events to mark important anniversaries.
South Korean intelligence officials said they were monitoring the news, but declined detailed comment on the reports, which were based on ``informed sources'' in Beijing and in Seoul.
The reports surfaced as South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the United States were seeking to persuade North Korea to return to the negotiating table to discuss its nuclear weapons ambitions. The North, which threatened at earlier talks to test an atomic bomb, has said it doubts more negotiations will help.
``There were rumors that the explosion was much bigger than the one at Ryongchon train station and the United States is showing a big interest as the blast was seen from satellites,'' Yonhap quoted an unnamed source in Beijing as saying.
The cause had yet to be determined but the source said Washington was not ruling out the possibility that the blast may be linked to a nuclear test.
Yonhap quoted other unnamed officials as saying it was probably not an accident, although it also quoted one source in Washington as saying it was unlikely to have been a nuclear test. It quoted another source as saying it could be a forest fire.
Yonhap reported a mushroom cloud up to 2.5 miles in diameter was spotted after the blast in remote Ryanggang province in the country's far northeast near to known missile bases.
The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions the Bush administration had received recent intelligence reports that some experts believed could indicate North Korea was preparing to conduct its first nuclear weapons test explosion.
South Korean government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Train wagons exploded at the Ryongchon railway station on April 22, killing 170 and injuring an estimated 1,300. The blast was believed to have been caused by a train loaded with oil and chemicals hitting a power line.
From here
SEOUL : A huge explosion rocked North Korea's northern inland province of Ryanggang last week, triggering a mushroom cloud at least two miles in radius, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.
The explosion appeared to be stronger than an April 22 blast that killed more than 150 people and wounded some 1,300 others in Ryongchon near the western tip of North Korea's border with China, it said Sunday.
The latest blast took place in Kimhyungjik county near the Chinese border on September 9, when North Korea marked the 56th anniversary of its founding, Yonhap said, citing unnamed sources in Beijing.
"The United States was known to have shown its keen interest in the explosion after spotting its traces by satellite," the source was quoted as saying.
South Korea's unification minister Chung Dong-Young said Seoul had received an unsubstantiated report on the explosion in North Korea.
"We have received an unsubstantiated report on traces of an explosion in North Korea," he told reporters after a meeting of security-related officials. The unnamed source in Beijing said the blast had prompted speculation in Washington that the explosion was possibly related to a nuclear experiment, it said.
Chung, however, played down the possibility of a North Korea's nuclear weapons test.
He said the South Korean government was not aware of the scale of the blast but Yonhap quoted a diplomatic source in Seoul as saying the blast triggered a mushroom cloud with a radius of 3.5 to four kilometers (2.4 miles).
"The explosion occurred at around 11 am. But it is not clear yet whether the explosion is related to an intentional nuclear experiment or a simple accident," he was quoted as saying.
He noted the site of the explosion was not far from the North's missile base, according to Yonhap.
The New York Times reported on its Web site Saturday that US President George W. Bush and his top advisers have received intelligence reports describing a confusing series of actions by North Korea that some experts believe could indicate the country is preparing to conduct its first nuclear weapons test.
Citing unnamed senior officials with access to intelligence, the newspaper said US intelligence agencies appeared divided over the significance of the new North Korean actions.
The suspicious activities included the movement of materials around several suspected test sites, including one near a location where intelligence agencies reported last year that conventional explosives were being tested that could compress a plutonium core and set off a nuclear explosion, The Times said.
But officials have not seen the classic indicators of preparations at a test site, in which cables are laid to measure an explosion in a deep test pit, according to the report.
US officials said if North Korea proceeded with a test, it would probably be with a plutonium bomb, perhaps one fabricated from the 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that the North has boasted in the past few months have been reprocessed into bomb fuel, the report pointed out.
However, some analysts in agencies that were the most cautious about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction have cautioned that they do not believe the activity detected in North Korea in the past three weeks is necessarily the harbinger of a test, The Times reported.
Some analysts fear that a successful nuclear weapon test by North Korea could change the balance of power in Asia, perhaps leading to a new nuclear arms race there, the paper said.
- AFP
but at least the world is safe now from the bad Conan the Barbarian art he had in his tacky palaces
Yeah, but we still have to put up with Kim Jong Il's unbridled love of Titanic, and his habit of telling everyone all about it. I think I know which one's more deserving of a U.S. military response.
Those nukes aren't for protection against China I can tell you that
Actually, China is the closest thing North Korea has to a friend. The threats of nuclear development are for three main reasons: intimidate South Korea and Japan; provide more material for propaganda and awe at the power of the state; and most importantly, as a bargaining device to use with the rest of the world (namely the U.S.) to secure more aid, avoid sanctions, etc. Anyway, if North Korea is testing nukes, their bargaining power just increased exponentially. It's also a massive failure of international diplomacy in respect to Pyongyang and all attempts to manage North Korea.
But for fantasy it can get boring to see the same thing over and over with only little variations.
That I agree completely with.
Am I the only one who is getting bored with the future? I can only see aliens trying to kill Earth so many times
If you are referring to the fantasy side of SF, then what you say is very valid. But, at least with the SF writers here, the point of science fiction and their view of the future is to provide a commentary of society today by emphasizing certain issues. Fantasy is about escapism; this sort of SF is about current ideas and provoking thought about our present situation and is really the opposite of escapism. That sort of science fiction really doesn't get old, in my opinion, if it continues to be relevant to our society and encourage discussion and thought about it.
Colonialism...the developing world has been strong-armed into affording IP protection to foreign ideas... A guy in Maastricht worked out that if every Burundi copy of Windows were legitimately purchased, the country would have to turn over 67.65 months' worth of its total GDP to Microsoft. This is the impending disaster, a new form of colonialism that makes the old forms look gentle and beneficent by comparison
I don't know about the historic forms of colonialism appearing "gentle and beneficent", but I think this is a particularly insidious way the developed world can extort from and suppress the developing. Eventually the developed world's fundamentally impalpable IP and financial management of the rest of the world will burst. What will matter in the end is that the manufacturing capacity is in Asia, the cheap farmland and farm labour spread across the third world and the IT solutions in India. Britain lost its position as "workshop of the world" after the 1870s (already happened in the U.S.) and it took only one major war to make it lose its financial centrality (all the U.S. really has left). How long can the developed world as it currently is really hold on to its unnatural domination? Kudus to Doctorow to his very apt parallels between the old and new colonialisms.
...if you look at it one way, it's easy. In the simplest sense, the left is about change, the right is about preserving the status quo. Science fiction writers are preoccupied with change because they speculate about the future. Then again, I think that vastly oversimplifies the libertarian tone and anti-fascism of much science fiction. Science fiction authors tend to look into the future and expect the consolidation of powers, which scares them. Because they think more than the average person about the negative side of the current course of humankind, they are more inclined to want to change it.
I regret reposting so soon, but I've been reading the thread and I have to ask, Does BlackBerry succeed in actually being a good phone or a good PDA? MSNBC says it has "four hours talk time and eight hours standby". With battery life like that, how can this be a useful phone? If BlackBerry has adopted a "more conventional phone form factor", what's it like to use as a PDA? Really, does integrating phone and PDA really provide a better and more convenient experience or does it just implement the worst of both worlds - a smaller screen than a straight PDA and worst battery life than a non-smart phone? Wouldn't it just be better to buy two separate devices?
PC Mag and Forbes have reviews and InfoSync has a detailed news article. Forbes provides some perspective to the objective of integrating personal organizer with phone. PC Mag reads a bit like a spec list. I found the MSNBC review provided already more interesting, but you can look for yourself.
I can trust the consensus of 15 independent websites
Unfortunately, if I search on Google for say, "pan-Slavism", I get fifteen articles copied from Wikipedia - many of which don't admit that they are copied. Misinformation becomes the basis for more misinformation - and you can't use that as a proof for the correctness of the original misinformation.
Under normal, closed source projects, this would spell doom for the software.
And their work would probably be lost, and any new project that wanted continue their type of work would have to write everything all over again just to reach the existing level of functionality - which is a waste of time and effort. Instead, the pre-existing project is forked. Open from closed source is an innovation in distribution equivalent to modular/OOP from procedural in development in allowing and encouraging reusability. Reusability then facilitates easier extension - like the sort of improvements we're seeing with X.org.
There have already been a few posts about how annoying it will be to listen to people talking on their phones in the plane. What alarms me is the opening paragraph of the article: "Business travelers who think there are not enough hours in the day, take note: in two years there may be a few more at your disposal." It reminds me of a TIME article I read a while ago that speculated that since the 1970s, the only real change technical innovations have made to our lives is to end the way in which our lives are tethered to our work. Not many new appliances like washing machines that make work more convenient have emerged but what we do have, i.e. the Internet/email and mobile phones/pagers, are claimed to make it so easy to keep in touch with work that your workday certainly doesn't end once you leave the office and probably never really ends at all. If we've already lost home as a sanctuary from work, the airplane is probably one of the last places where we are out of touch enough to get some sleep or actually relax. So will allowing phone usage on planes have a positive effect on our lives? Referring to the regular business travellers mentioned in the article, Will it improve their productivity or will it just remove the last place they could rest and hence in the end actually damage their productivity by damaging their health?
The point was that according to the movie they don't interfere.
According to this movie, you already can use mobile phones on planes and the only reason you're not allowed to is because airline companies want to charge you more to use their phone services! Then again, it does have a fear of flying class fight off a hijacker, then drop a bioweapon into the sea next to a major U.S. city in order to "defuse" it, so perhaps I can't count 100% on its accuracy.
Seeing the detail that has been missing may help people realize just how violent war really is.
I don't agree with that - not when war movies have HD level of image and sound quality already. If anything, it just places real war and real death in the context of entertainment - a sort of "I hope you enjoyed 'Bad Boys II'; stay tuned for more footage from Najaf".
When war footage is packaged in the form of television and juxtaposed to entertainment or news anchors with meticulously arranged hair and placed within a red border with some text from a special font on it, actual death and fighting is trivialized. Turning war into eye candy, which Cuban seems enthused about, is really just an extension of this mentality.
This sort of thing sounds good in the simplest sense but is very, very rarely ever thought through properly, or at all. Personally, I would love to eliminate discrimination - in every form. One of those forms not so easily eliminated is socio-economic. How do you abolish the hopelessness of the poor? Did you think about how the incredible racism of the past has left blacks in America and Australia (for example) in devastating, inescapable poverty? There is not equality. We can't act on the assumption that removing regulation will unveil a fair and balanced world. Scrapping affirmative action will result in a place that can boast equality, but away from the ideals of a vocal middle-class, has nothing of the sort. Your shallow notions play in typical fashion on the way in which "positive discrimination" is counter-intuitive. But please, think about it more deeply. Hopefully, once you and I die, we will have fixed up this shitty world we've inherited and race can stop mattering. For the moment, though, we can't leave people behind in our blind belief that it already doesn't.
"The present is a product of the past." Male/female/black/white have not traditionally been treated equally, and the current employment landscape still reflects its history. That can't just be ignored in the idealistic minority's hurry to move on. We can dream of true equality without regulation, but for the moment this and and this need practical solutions.
I searched and ended up back here again! Slashdot's summary should only be the first step, not the final freaking destination! What the hell is wrong with this planet?!
From ALBUQUERQUE, you say?
ALBUQUERQUE (n.)
A shapeless squiggle which is utterly unlike your normal signature, but which is, nevertheless, all you are able to produce when asked formally to identify yourself. Muslims, whose religion forbids the making of graven images, use albuquerques to decorate their towels, menu cards and pyjamas.
"During the early years of the ALP, the Party was referred to by various titles differing from colony to colony. It was at the 1908 Interstate (federal) Conference that the name "Australian Labour Party" was adopted. In its shortened form the Party was frequently referred to as both 'Labor' and 'Labour', however the former spelling was adopted from 1912 onwards, due to the influence of the American labor movement." More here.
Participating in one's government in a free society should be a choice
Mandatory voting system.
Regardless of your opinion on whether or not it should be, participating is a legal requirement for Australian citizens over 18.
It's not a news event. It's just 'the way things are now' and an excuse to discuss it. Personally, I think looking at the news beyond just definite events is useful for seeing gradual change. Not everything happens suddenly, or with obvious milestones. This is one such case.