This isn't just about their own population. Violating the sovereignty of a friendly nation's embassy contravenes centuries of international law. This is the kind of action one would only expect from a rogue state.

Among other things, if they do this, you can expect the European Parliament to come down *hard* on one of their member states for violating international law, and therefore damaging the standing of the European Union in international negotiations.

The latest is that The Age has prevented the police from taking the computers through legal injunction. Nice to see that occasionally this kind of madness can be stopped sometimes.

Err, that's specifically what this is designed to solve. If you can show that prior art existed in public before the patent was filed, the patent is void. End of story.

Whereas currently, you have to prove that the patent troll didn't invent the item before the prior art existed. So you've got to go into this complicated discovery process to prove things one way or another. The first-to-file system solves a lot of the he-said she-said nature of current lawsuits as everything relevant is on the public record, simplifying them significantly.

Precisely. The advantage that Android retains over developing for iOS devices, though, is that if Amazon shoot down your application on whatever grounds (such as what happens with Apple), you can always be sure that you'll be able to find another app store to publish through.

What I think that we'll see is 'tiered' app stores - Amazon and perhaps a couple of other companies will run the top tiered app stores where everything is carefully checked and things like pornography is not allowed; then Google and a couple of other companies will run mid-tier app stores which allow pornography and run a relatively small amount of malware-checking; and then there'll be bottom-tier app stores which sell whatever to whoever, including completely illegal software. At least this means that developers won't be completely left out in the cold, although obviously the higher-tier store, the better for most things.

There's no doubt that Bin Laden is a fervent Islamist fundamentalist. Without doubt, he will not be satisfied with anything less than the subjugation and conversion of the entire world to Islam. The real question, though, is how does he continue to attract so many followers and so much support? The vast majority of people, no matter their religion, are perfectly happy spending their life living as best they can (being the "sheeple" that some around here seem to detest so much) - they wouldn't have anything to do with such dangerous ideology if there wasn't something driving them to do it. The way that those who want peace can win is by leaving fanatics left all alone.

As opposed to letting everyone starve? That's even eviler.

There is no such thing as free will in the first place.

*cough*
If there's no such thing as free will, there's no such thing as evil. Just saying.

I'd beg to differ, to be honest. Voting for your representative rather than your party sounds nice, and in fact before the previous election I supported the idea. Unfortunately, having that situation turn into a reality (3 independents now hold the balance of power here in Australia) has shown what that leads to: pork and unreliable ability to deliver the policies that the party was elected on. I hear a lot of Americans complain about the incompetence of their government; have you ever considered that perhaps it's because of the every-man-for-himself style of legislative body you have? Where every representative has to spend all of their time trying to wrangle things for their seats, as otherwise their seats would get nothing? What if all money spent in a state was purely on the basis of nation-wide policy, rather than individual bits of cash added into legislation purely to benefit the representative's chances of being voted back in? Maybe you wouldn't have so much ineffectiveness in your government

I'm not saying that our system doesn't have problems - far from it, and in many ways the US does it better. But I think that legislating for a whole nation rather than just bits of is a much better fit for a federal legislative body.

If you bother to RTFS, you'll note that they worked with the content providers - they shut the servers down themselves. No hacking involved.

Hey, that would have been a really good reason to do it. Unfortunately, the real reason was just to tie the lesson into an upcoming movie about Australia being invaded. She was just teaching the kids how to mount a resistance! :P

Ah, so you prefer the Thai model then, where every time an election happens, the losers' people are bussed into the capital to shut it down (airports, government buildings, etc.), crippling the economy? And then the government might resign, their opponents take over (despite their electoral loss), and then the previous government's supporters are bussed into the capital to shut it down all over again? Crippled government and anarchy - that's the way any respectable country should go.

This is related to why anything of the form [religion] [normal thing] generally just means [sucky] [normal thing].

While I'm not in favour of religion myself, Bach's body of work (amoung many, many others) might just disagree with you...

Every independent survey run found wide support for an R rating for games amoung the Australian community: Link (reference in there to a survey finding 88% support). Atkinson is considerably more conservative than his base on the issue - this is (or was) a politician's individual crusade, not him representing his electorate.

Err, nooo, the big difference is that densely populated Asia is not far enough north to be affected by this. Russia would be knocked out, Mongolia and Kazakhstan would be knocked out, and if it was a really, really bad storm, it might reach Beijing (but to be that bad it'd need to make it well into northern California). But most of China and all of southern and south-east Asia would be fine. Equally, Africa is pretty much immune - only Chile, Argentina, New Zealand's south island and the Australian state Tasmania would be affected in the southern hemisphere (well, along with the researchers at the Antarctic bases, obviously). Meanwhile, half of Europe's population and a fair chunk of the US's would be hit by this. Those densely populated places are where things would get really nasty.

Hmm, I wonder what the impact of fining a governing body whenever its legislative arm makes an unconstitutional law would be. If you, say, issued a fine of 0.001% of their next budget if a law is struck down by SCOTUS, and the money was distributed to all of the other governments in the USA (1/3 to the federal*, the rest to the other states), would people start caring if their representatives were passing stupid laws?

*If it *were* the federal government that passed it, the money should probably be split amoung the states of all of the lawmakers who voted against the bill.

Anywho, random thought.