Sure, but satire is still not a legitimate defence for fraud.

That said, it sounds like these guys provided sufficient evidence that they had a legitimate right to those domain names under AuDA's rules (at least, according to their own press releases) to make the extreme short notice of the cancellation very very dodgy indeed.

Can we please remember that this girl was a mortuary student? She was referring to doing something that everyone in her class was going to do. There's nothing wrong with enjoying your work/lessons.

Ok, maybe with embalming it's possible to enjoy your work to the point where it's a bit creepy and wrong, but the point here is that the only thing she was going to stick an embalming needle in the neck of was already dead.

IAAL. More to the point, I am a litigation lawyer. We (Australia) also have the "loser pays" system (although the actual phrase is "costs follow the cause").

Costs orders are discretionary. If a big corporation sues some little guy and the little guy loses, there is a good chance that the judge will not order him to pay the corporation's costs if the little guy had a reasonable, if ultimately unsuccesful, defence.

Also, you will almost never get all your costs back (particularly if you've hired an expensive lawyer - like corporations do). Some things just aren't covered by the usual costs orders, and the costs have to be reasonable in all the circumstances of the case. If you spend big to win a small case, don't expect to get much of that back.

In my jurisdiction, if you really shouldn't have carried on the case, or if you got a settlement offer that would have left you better off than the final judgment and you turned it down then, even if you won the case, you will get an indemnity costs order against you for all the other party's costs from the date of the offer. An indemnity costs order covers more things than a regular costs order.

Costs orders are **fun**.

Maybe you should have gone with "sounds alien" - might have clicked a few more gears into place for some.

If they make no money to speak of and give most of that to (tax deductable) charities then spend the rest on (tax deductable) running costs then I doubt that their tax bill is going to be very high. The admin for it would increase running costs though (tax deductably). If they have an accountant in their flock they should be able to get it gratis, surely :)

I don't think the OP is talking about lisps and stutters.

We've all seen the family out to dinner with mum and dad staring into space and the kids totally absorbed by their Nintendos. The prevalence of modern technology has created massive problems in the development of language skills in kids because it has made it so easy for them to avoid conversation.

It's a skill that has to be practiced just like everything else.

It becomes a vicious cycle as the child grows older - they know their speech isn't good, so they continue to avoid situations where it is necessary.

I've heard of otherwise normally intelligent teenagers who cannot express frighteningly simple things like "I like the way she looks in that dress" without a lot of effort. They speak like you would expect someone to speak after learning a foreign language for about three weeks - they have to think about the words and the order of the words, and they make stuff up that sounds plausible to cover the fact they know they are getting it wrong.

Computer games are part of the problem and I don't think they can be more than a minor part of the solution as theses kids need to learn the visual aspects of communication as well - body language and facial expressions. These people need face to face interaction that involves cooperative problem solving to encourage them to talk.

Reasonably complex board games are probably good - games like Risk maybe? I also think that something like D&D would probably be great for people with this sort of problem.

Don't count on it. I did the switch from IT to law... and now all I keep hearing about is these new companies being set up in India full of Harvard grads whose student visas ran out and who are maximising the low cost of living in India by offering to do all your legal paperwork at half the cost that a local lawyer can do it - ie, all the work normally done by junior lawyers.

These are people who for the most part have their law degrees from good universities in whatever country they're getting their work from, so they're just as good as any local lawyer for any work that doesn't actually involve showing up in person (ie, about 95% of legal work).

The legal industry is changing in the same way that IT has changed - less elegant customised solutions, more trying to hammer "out of the box" stuff into shape. I predict a serious downgrading of junior lawyer salaries in the near future - accompanied by a reduction in the number of positions made available in countries like the USA, UK, Australia etc.

Since this all happened in Victoria, the relevant offence is Unauthorised access, modification or impairment with intent to commit serious offence
and/or Unauthorised modification of data to cause impairment

According to that, the state of being "unauthorised" refers to entitlement, ie legal entitlement, rather than any sense of software authorisation (which a few people have rather misguidedly suggested is a valid interpretation).

So blue light is smaller than red light.

Say you've got a blue Mini and a big red Humvee driving along an empty road, and they come to a patch where the road condition is bad - lots of pot holes, lumps and so on. The Humvee can just power right on over it, but the little blue Mini has to go around all of the pot holes. Because of that, the further through the rough patch the two cars have gone, the further off route the Mini has had to go, until it's ended up going in another direction entirely.

My mum just left a copy of the book Where Did I Come From? on the bottom shelf in the living room. I used to love that book (and the sequel "What's Happening to Me", about puberty) when I was a little kid - the pictures are adorable and it's pitched at a good level.

Um, actually, in most parts of the planet there are laws such as "use offensive language" that are designed to prevent you from doing just that. Mind you, they're usually only enforced if and when people swear at actual police officers (there's a concept known as the "trifecta" in my jurisdiction - use offensive language, assault police and resist arrest - most people who get charged with one seem to end up being charged with all three).

Yes, because westerners who think multi-racial people are good looking (and naturally it is only westerners - no easterners could possibly think such a thing) are going to round up everyone who is monoracial and force them, at gun point if neccessary, to only breed with people from other mono-racial or mixed-racial backgrounds in order that their offspring can conform to this ideal.

Apparently Australia currently has the highest per capita infection rate so far. However, I don't think we've had any deaths here at all yet (apparently there are some people in intensive care though).