Considering all the revelations that have emerged about surveillance in those ten years, the possibility that it's not true seems barely worth considering.

I don't have any figures on hand, but it seems that people do still read them. And they certainly appear to have a huge influence on election outcomes.

News Ltd owns the only national daily paper, as well as the only daily paper in four state capitals, one territory capital, and a number of large regional centres - of the capitals, only Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra have competing daily papers. Admittedly, that covers nearly half the population - but that leaves a massive proportion of Australia dominated by Murdoch.

I don't think Murdoch's got much cause to be angry - he gets his way in pretty much everything. He's just a cynical, manipulative, evil scumbag. And i'm quite sure he's more than happy to be that way.

I'm waiting for that arsehole Murdoch to die - but given that his mum lived to over 100, i'm not holding my breath!

It's not nothing. It's a glimmer of hope for us here in Australia, that that piece of shit Murdoch could eventually lose his near monopoly in Australian newspapers - and, therefore, a significant part of his ability to manipulate the government. And not before time.

No way! There are things on Facebook that aren't satire?

1.8 what? If you're talking about deaths, then so what? The difference between 0.0018% and 0.0034% is minimal. But I'm talking about danger in general, not just danger of death. The chance of getting randomly bashed by a gang of drunken thugs on the streets of Kabul is zero - in London, it's high.

Humans are fauna and the UK is the most violent country I've ever been to (I grew up there). I worked in Afghanistan in 06 and 07 and people would comment on how dangerous it was walking around Kabul - I used to answer "not nearly as dangerous as it is walking around London". One difference between the two cities is that if someone kills you in Kabul, it will be for a reason - in London it's just as likely to be because they don't like your shirt.

Real jungles are very tame places compared to that concrete one.

Skype's peer to peer - not server based.

Who owns skype now?

If i have to use Windows, i install Geany - which is what i use on Linux in gui mode anyway. I only install Cygwin if i need more than just an editor.

Yeah, i do that quite a lot. Not echo usually, just cat. And not usually to add things (it's too easy to miss out an angle bracket and overwrite what's already there), but frequently to insert text in a new file.

Octal? Surely you mean binary. Or did it have 8-way switches? The machines i used to patch via the front panel toggle switches had 16 bit words, so we thought in hex.

True. Earth was populated for millions of years by organisms that polluted the atmosphere with oxygen.