During WW2 Japanese soldiers were not told to keep operational details a secret since it was assumed "family honour" would ensure they kill themselves when captured. The practice was an intelligence gift to the allies since most who were captured chose to live.

Hunger drove the "Arab spring" not Facebook. Everybody seemed to forget that there were rolling food riots in cities like Cairo and Aleppo shortly before the outbreak of hostilities. They were brought on by skyrocketing food prices due to record breaking droughts that were occurring in Australia, Russia, and the Fertile Crescent during the 2000's. In Syria alone, 2M people abandoned their farms and moved into the city looking for jobs, in a nation of 20M people it's not surprising that such internal displacement triggered a civil war. In fact it was shown in the diplomatic cables posted by wikileaks that at least one US diplomat predicted the Syrian war and even guessed the city where hostilities first erupted (due to the large influx of internal migrants).

Poverty alone is not enough inspire a terrorist response, but three days without bread will prompt most people to behave like a wounded animal. At that point you just need religion (or FB) to point the finger at someone they can blame for their predicament.

It's almost universally acknowledged that the GFC was caused by a LACK of regulation in the US mortgage market making it impossible for financial institutions to trust each others financial instruments ( ie: easier to game).

"Mostly" is the key word in your post. Morality cannot be defined as a list of do's and dont's that are mechanically obeyed precisely because it has a myriad of "edge cases" that require human interpretation. Many situations don't even have a 'right' answer and what is morally correct will depend on the person(s) interpreting the rules.

Also notice that when the zeroth law was added it just made matters worse because more laws allow for more contradictions, loopholes, and paradoxes, exactly like the evolved tax code of any nation you care to name.

Asimov's three laws are a metaphor that says you can't codify morality, AI is the vehicle he used to make that point.

Politics is all about points of difference, no matter how trivial, without those points of differences there would be no need for politics.

As a foreigner I believe that is the way it was intended, a president (any president) can veto a bill but they can't dictate what the bill contains.

We used to call it "the hot seat" back in the 70's, there was no such thing as 'suspension', you were either punished or expelled.

Although there have been threats to do so, this isn't happening in Oz any day soon, the court specifically warned the MAFFIA not to use US style extortion letters. Any letters they send must be pre-approved by the court. If they do it now they WILL be held in contempt and possibly disbarred for abuse of process.

When replying to a post I barely notice who wrote it. A reply post is not just a message for the author it's a statement for all of slashdot to consider. In other words it's about the content of the comment, not the identity of the poster.

I'm a prolific poster (5000+ last time I looked), I was a subscriber until dice took over. My Karma has been stuck on excellent for a decade and I get mod points every few weeks, yet haven't meta-moderated in years. I'm also modded troll quite frequently but it's never heartbreaking since I don't post to be popular. I normally blow my mod points on a single story that I don't want to comment on.

Like most people, I get modded up when commenting on something I actually know about and modded down for ignorant comments about things I don't know much about.

Old fart Aussie software dev here, as recently as the early 90's Australia (and the US/UK) considered encryption techniques to be a "munition" for export purposes, it was illegal to export anything stronger than 48bit. Then some bloke put out some OSS called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), he had stayed within the regulations by using something like #define BITLEN 48, but also given the world an algorithm that could be trivially changed to any arbitrary length and re-compiled. This created a legal paradox that drove the customs people nuts, there was a huge fuss about it at the time but eventually the various governments realised the regulations were unenforceable and dropped/ignored them.

Aussies made a huge mistake at the last election. This mob have managed to politically unite Aussies (against them) in a way I haven't witnessed since the downfall of Gough Whitlam (IMO - due to GW's "sore loser" re-election campaign). Trust us, we have mandatory voting and will boot this embarrassing mob out the first chance we get. There isn't a sector of Aussie society they haven't upset in the past year alone, the only chance the conservatives have of winning is if they put Turnbull back in charge and allow him to purge the "tea party" types from the current cabinet, they have way to much power for the tiny slice of Aussie society that they represent.

That's an excellent point, under the current rules in Oz, Uber and it's drivers should be classified and regulated the same as any other limousine service. All dispatcher services (including Uber) should be treated like the current taxi dispatchers, that is have their feet held to the fire if they fail to ensure they are supplying a licensed and insured driver whose vehicle meets mandated standards.

Ex taxi driver here. - When things go really bad what recourse do you have against the driver other than posting a bad review on Uber? How do you propose to force bad drivers out of the industry when you have torn up the rule book? Are you suggesting we simply hand the taxi industry to Uber on a silver platter secure in the knowledge they will police themselves - because freedom?

There are good (and bad) historical reasons for the constraint but that is irrelevant to the ideology you have espoused. Let's take my home town of Melbourne as an example, there are 10,000 medallions (or "plates" as they are known here), that $5B in small business assets that will become worthless overnight if we follow the ideological path your suggesting. I doubt Uber are willing to cough up $5B in compensation for the taxi owners of Melbourne, my guess is they are expecting the government to fund the inevitable plate buy-back that would accompany dropping the requirement for medallions.

BTW: A "market" is a set of rules (artificial constraints) that govern trade, (eg:property law). A "free market" is one that is open to all. Therefore the highly regulated taxi industry is a "free market" in the original sense of the term.

Whatever the reason, simply dropping the requirement for a medallion (where it already exists) means you are deliberately screwing people who have paid as much as a house to own one, worked for decades to pay it off, and plan to sell it to fund their retirement. Changing the medallion rules to suit Uber's business model means bankruptcy is a certainty for a lot a very hard working small business folk, or (more likely) a huge compensation bill for the city/state.

In other words, if you change the market rules by removing medallions from where they already exist, everyone loses except Uber. Fine if Uber were offering some massive social benefit that outweighed those costs, but it's not, it's just a bunch of dodgy cheap-labour capitalists running a dispatch center "on the internet".