Why kill your self or debase your self on technology and procedures that are so randomly enforced, that it doesn't do any good anyways.

Because it's a fucking long drive from Sydney to Singapore or LA where my friends live?

This is probably a battle we'll end up losing.

We certainly will if we don't fight it. I'm with ath0mic on this: keep calling them on it, especially if they don't care.

Troll them back for larfs, maybe?

Or perhaps just understand that there's a difference between something published by a well-credentialed masthead with a long reputation for quality journalism and a throw-away 140-character blurb from @axethetax.

Come on, people. A bit of skill in discrimination when it comes to dots on a screen, please.

I can be as honest, passionate, brief, garrulous, deadpan, irreverent or whatever as you like, and I've found that it makes little difference. And by the time I get to the ballot box, guess what? Both of the two major parties -- which is all you will ever get in a mandatory preferential voting system -- offer the same shit. All that's left for the rest of us is to gripe about it in places like this, in newspaper letters to editors, in philippics written on ballot papers, or wherever. But then that gets back to 1: there's just not enough of us.

Why buy a CD when I can hear the music free on youtube?

Notwithstanding that I'm just a slashdot number posting randomly on the intertubes, but I have recently bought 5 CDs precidely because of what I saw free on YouTube.