Sounds like a good idea.

Psychics take money from idiots, a license fee will be collecting from this revenue. Its like an optional tax on stupidity with the added benefit of cutting down on the amount of charlatans operating in the area.

This is pretty much the case in Australia.

Many of the polls are controlled by the Murdoch media and the Murdoch media has a vested interest in keeping the Liberal/National Party in power. The problem that Murdoch has is that the LNP has become massively unpopular. In order hide this Murdoch games the Newspoll by claiming a "3% margin of error" and applying the 3% in favour of the LNP. Other polls such as Ipsos or the Morgan poll have a far more grim view for the LNP. However this means that the best the Newspoll can claim is that the LNP will lose by a smaller margin.

However I dont believe that even these polls are reflecting the real situation. Most Australians are sick of the media's manipulation of polls and news during elections and we're definitely sick of the LNP. Right now the Labor party is looking at a landslide victory in 2017 that will dwarf Kevin Rudds victory in 2007. The bad news is, we've got another 2 years of Tony Abbott.

Because roundabouts consume a lot more land and are not that much safer for pedestrians.

Roundabouts actually consume the same amount of land as an intersection of similar traffic, they're also self regulating and dont require power. They're also more efficient and help the flow of traffic, with a crossroad or traffic light, you can only be using a maximum of two lanes, with a roundabout you can use all four at once.

The drivers are busy looking for traffic going around the circle and not compelled by personal protection to look both ways like they are at intersections

But it seems that it requires a higher quality of driver than is typical of your area.

At a roundabout you look both ways as you would for any intersection, not just for pedestrians but because people dont follow the rules. Think of it this way, when you're turning right at a T junction, do you only look for traffic approaching from the left?

Yes but this guy obviously didn't consider ego and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Remove all the road signs and make the rules unintelligible and you'll end up with a problem with attitudes like "I have right of way, am perfectly safe doing eleventy thousand KPH and can drive on the phone" making up their own rules which will make things more dangerous.

How? They cant even get Apple and google to comply 100% of the time and bypassing this is simple.

Steam barely does anything and Gog completely fails to give a shit. I can buy games that have been banned in Oz for years (Postal series) on Gog.

You're definitely not Australian or you'd realise how much bollocks you've just posted.

Yes, but what about the artists who aren't as big as Taylor Swift. Granted that these artists wont be making any money off recordings (they make almost all their money from touring) but the principle is still the same.

I have to admit, I'm having a hard time feeling any sympathy for either Apple or Tailor Swift in this scenario. Apple is an evil megacorp with a serious sociopathic bend and Taylor Swift is a cookie-cutter, factory farm, mass produced pop star with no talent designed to be as inoffensive as possible.

My initial advice would be to not purchase any Apple products, they've got contempt for both their customers and their suppliers, but also dont buy anything made by Taylor Swift. Go see a decent performer like the Foo Fighters or go see a local band that plays at a pub every Friday and Saturday night who really appreciates everyone who spends a dollar on seeing them.

Not sure if accidental or a deliberate and clever pun.

An easy (and capitalist) solution is to simply make copyright free for the first year and start charging per year after that.

The only issue with this I can think of is that it may encourage some no talent artists (I.E. most of them) to blatantly copy old works and sell them as their own, but this is easily fixed by having a longer automatic copyright term for commercial purposes only.

This is also something that is never and realistically can never be enforced.

By the sounds of it, most of the games are mobile games (I still have trouble accepting mobile games as proper games, they're the modern equivalent of the old flash games I used to play in a browser in the early 00's) so a lot of the sales will never take place in Australia, the method of distribution doesn't take place in Australia and the method of distribution is pretty much unstoppable. This is just government bureaucracy trying to say it's doing something.

However this is the kind of shit that happens when elect an ultra conservative government. As an Australian this wasn't even on my radar and realistically, still isn't because we have so many other problems such as the government trying to make it possible for them to strip citizenship (in the name of fighting teh terr'sts), trying to neuter the ABC, trying to strip the public health and education systems, increasing unemployment and destroying the economy. Australia elected it's own George W Bush in Tony Abbott and yes, we were warned.

You honestly think airlines haven't considered that. They figured out it costs more than it will save.

Besides that, do you think an airport rent-a-cop is going to tell Mr SteroidJunkie that he has to pay and Mr Tubby gets through for free he weighs more than the Chubster?

BTW, when you fly on light aircraft in commercial service like a Dash-8, you do get weighed because that plane has a very low MTOW. There's a reason they know it's unworkable.

Virgin still operates the EMB 190's between some cities on low volume flights. They're slowly being replaced by A320's and 737's though. But regional flights are still dominated by small jets, 717's Fokker 70's, Dash 8's and even old BAe146's.

The Regional jets aren't bad if they're being used correctly. I've flown between Panama and Santiago, DR on a EMB 190 and it was fine but COPA are actually a decent airline (checked baggage, free seat selection, food and drink) but that was only a 3 hour flight (as a fellow Aussie, you'd know that's a trip to the shops where we come from) and wasn't packed in like sardines. They had a 2-2 configuration in the seats so they were the same size as the ones on a 737. Airlines that try to cram a 2-3 or even 3-3 into an EMB E-Jet or 717 are insane.

Pretty much this.

However this means that they will have to allocate storage for baggage instead of selling that storage for cargo... Erm, which means ticket prices go up.

You can fly from LA to DC for $170 If you would like to remember how bad prices used to be, feel free to come to Australia where Perth to Sydney (roughly the same amount of air time) is around $400.

Realistically US airlines are going to need to do something about oversized carry ons but they're probably going to go along the same route as budget airlines in other parts of the world. Weight and size restrictions for carry ons.

As a side note, this is one of the reasons I prefer to fly Southwest when in the States. Having travelled from Australia I'm going to have a checked bag regardless of if I'm only spending a few days at my destination.

This sir, is completely and utterly not true.

The US uses US Customary Units. The Imperial system was established in the English parliament as the Weights and Measures act of 1824, near to some 50 years after the US cut the apron strings. To say they are advanced as the Imperial system is a utter falsification.

Switch to an IP voice provider. Then you just need an internet connection and a IP handest (or even a soft client). Only a fax machine requires an old style POTS analogue line in this day and age... and if you need a fax, get a separate line and a fax machine that doesn't accept calls.

I've set up Asterisk on an IP line for a few small businesses for just this purpose (killing spam and robocalls), just put it on a VM for no additional cost (well practically no running cost). Asterisk is not hard to set up at all and virtualising it makes backups and restores easy, all you need to do to kill most robocalls is to have an automated IVR menu that has a short welcome message (10-15 sec) and forces the user to press a key, something like "Welcome to Blah Co, Melbournes premier suppliers of organic, all natural, gluten free defence solutions. Please press 0 to talk to a representative."

At home, I've had my landline cut off for a decade. There is nothing I need it for and it's too expensive to robocall my mobile so I never get hassled.

BTW, if you really want the hardware for cheap, look second hand.

My main defence against robocalls is not having a landline telephone.

Its become completely unnecessary to have one in Australia as you can get landline internet without phone services these days. Cold calling mobile phones costs a lot more money so its not viable to do that. Even bulk SMS is too expensive (for once, the high cost of everything in Australia is working out in my favour).

As for corporate phones, every phone system these days has a provision for routing external calls to an IVR menu these days. All you need to do to kill robocalls is to have the welcome message go for 10-15 seconds and then force a keypress, the same as your method.