The Attorney General (Brandis) specifically ruled it out in a press conference. Sure he's a lying arsehole and I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him, but that's why we have independent courts that won't let him change his mind now without more legislation specifically enabling it.

We all know that Brandis has no clue what 'metadata' data means, there's plenty of clips on YT attesting to his ignorance. Turnbull and Brandis are ideological 'enemies' within the same party, both are strong candidates for the current PM's job (who is in the same ideological camp as Brandis). My guess is that Turnbull has convinced him to announce those things won't be included. Turnbull is an "old fashioned" conservative who wants to lead the party back toward the center after it's violent lurch to the "bogan right" at the last election. He's a previous party leader and he has sunk more than one of these proposals in the past from the inside, I'm fairly confident he will do the same again this time around, assuming the announcement by Brandis hasn't already done that.

You sure you're not an Aussie?

Be careful what you wish for. I for one certainly don't want Melbourne to copy Athens just because the current government are a pack of "one term" cunts. Besides there are plenty of large political protests in Melbourne on all sorts of issues. Those people just don't attach the same priority to this issue as you do. If you want to know what gets Melbourne "out on the streets" then have a look at the tag cloud in thislist of Melbourne protests covering several recent years, privacy, the internet, and ASIO don't even rate a tag.

By world standards Aussies have an active and peaceful protest culture and I would like it to stay that way. Just because masses of people are not smashing shop windows and burning cars while protesting about what personally upsets you today doesn't mean everyone is complacent about politics in general. The fact you can't perceive that makes me think that you're the one who isn't paying attention to the local political climate. If you are really serious then get out on the street yourself and tell others why you are there, with social media and the like it's never been easier and cheaper to organise a protest about your pet issue.

Agree but for different reasons. Abbot and his mates have turned us into the butt of every redneck joke on the world stage. However I checked outside just now and the sky still isn't falling, just the same old political horse trading and hyperbole that's surrounded this issue for the last 20+yrs. That's not to say we won't eventually extend our data retention rules to match what has been the norm in the EU for at least a decade - ie: 2yrs. The idea the information could be useful in an Aussie divorce is simply laughable. Unless of course it's kiddy porn, in which case you have much bigger legal problems than a simple divorce and you won't be seeing your kids for a long time anyway.

Yeah. yeah, is all a giant conspiracy involving just about every scientific institution on the planet and at least 195 nations, it stretches back to 1958 when the National Academies of Science told the US government the same thing.

The IPCC do not propose remedies.

Roy Spencer? - 10 to 1 the data is stratospheric temps presented as surface temps..

Yes people's attitude to dst very much depends on where you live, people in Queensland where the sun is also high in the sky all year round also don't see any sense in it because in Qld an Az it's daylight at both ends of the work day anyway. Here in Melbourne where dawn/twilight stretches out much longer and the length of daylight changes more dramatically with the seasons it makes sense and people overwhelmingly support it. Go a similar distance south again and the winter day becomes shorter than workday so again it won't makes sense to someone who lives in (say) Northern Scotland.

The answer we have in Oz is that the two states (with the same UTC offset) have different time zones in summer, both of them are happy, a queenslander will not demand we drop it anymore than we demand they copy us. The only people who become confused are people who are confused about far more than just the time of day.

Because the vast majority of workers do not have the luxury of flexible hours, an assembly line needs everyone to synchronize their timekeeping or it simply does not work, in fact the majority of work in the "real world" fundamentally depends on more than one person being in the same place at the same time. So if you can't change the nature of the work, the only option is to change the arbitrary hands off the clock that synchronizes it. Most places have 6 months each way, which seems a fair compromise between driving to and from work in the dark. If you don't want to be part of DST then use UTC, you will never have to change your clock again!!!

On the contrary, it's bad design that leads to irreconcilable differences which cause all kinds of headaches.

Correctly handling time in computers is trivial from a (new) design POV, simply store everything in UTC and translate it to whatever the local display requires, if the original local version of the UTC timestamp is important then you also store the tz offset and dst flag, best to do this anyway since unimportant things have a habit of becoming important soon after release.

Unfortunately the kind of implementation you allude to is far to common in the commercial world, worse still it's software "engineers" who are to blame because their original design either failed to consider different time zones or believed they were unimportant. As developer's we can promote an understanding of UTC, so next time you're writing code to display tz information, suggest that UTC should also be displayed. Online video games are a prime example of what I'm talking about, events are advertised for US time zones, would it really hurt to add UTC for the already neglected customers down here in Oz who understand what it means wrt to their local time? "Simplifying" UTC for customers is the root of the problem, you can't do that without losing information or making the display conversion horrendously complex.

In other words - "teach a man UTC and he will eat fish fingers all day" - or something like that.

Accurately maintaining the official tz table is another thing altogether, it's accuracy is at the mercy of political whim, and there's nothing in the known universe more baffling than whim.

My alarm clock is still flashing because the power went out for 3hrs a month ago, the Marvin the Martian wall clock in the kitchen has had a dead battery for several years, the antique clock in the lounge was broken when I found it, the microwave is on the same setting as when I bought it 10yrs ago, the car radio has been wrong since I replaced the car battery five years ago. The TV and my computers automatically adjust themselves, I don't own a mobile phone or a watch. Oddly my life has not fallen to bits due to my disdain of clock watching, a disdain that probably stems from punching clock cards in the 70's and 80's.

Disclaimer: I have an unusually accurate "inner clock", I can normally guess the time to within +/-15 min, I don't have to think about it, the approximate time in my head is "just there" when I want it. I thought everyone could do this until I was well into my 40's when a new lady friend started calling it a "party trick". The really odd thing is that I actually have to do the mental arithmetic for a few days after a DST change to keep my inner clock in sync with the correct time..

Here in Melbourne, DST means my street is clogged with the parked cars of beachgoers in the evening, and yeah it definitely keeps the small shopping strip alive. Like many people in IT I have flexible working hours, neither I, or my boss, or his boss, gives a flying fuck what the clock says. However the vast majority of workers are not so fortunate, for them it's fixed hours or nothing. So if these people want to change the clock so more daylight is available after they knock off why should I care?

A lot of blue collar workers don't have the "luxury" of flexible work hours, getting up early won't change the length of daylight after they knock off for the day, the only option they have is to fuck around with the clock and make others get up early with them. White collar workers generally have a lot more flexibility.

I think it implies most people don't give a fuck, after all is said and done it's just an arbitrary number used to mark events. Although I'm always surprised at how many people know the exact time of the train they catch to work, personally I have no idea, I go to the station a train turns up within 10min and I get on it.

The US can't disguise the X-37B as space junk anymore than they can disguise a battleship as a fishing boat. The military of any nation will only tell you two things; 1) what they want you to believe and 2) what you already know.