We may be half the size of California, but as a country we're one of only a very small handful European English-speaking countries (and I find Canada and the US hard to differentiate, and to be honest, NZ is extremely similar to us in all practical respects). This means that we are similar enough that our differences are cherished instead of feared as they are when they are TOO different in most other cases.

It's not surprising - you'd need to have a bulletproof case before you actually challenged a case in court and ran up the huge associated cost. For everything else you'd just settle.

I find your sig quite ironic in this context.

Because Steam has a lot of benefits to me. It's very easy and simple, and takes care of things like patching and installing for me. Cracking is harder work - not by much, but enough that I consider Steam to be a very acceptable trade.

FTFY, given that web apps can perform any task that native apps can perform

What's stopping them?

The only thing I can think of is cross-site scripting restrictions, but there are workarounds for that

I haven't had the same experience unfortunately. Most of my non-technical friends actually support it, due to "omg those pedophiles must be stopped!" mentality.

Why can't people think rationally as soon as children become involved?

So don't watch channels that do that! How do so many people not understand that just because something exists doesn't imply that you'll be forced to see it!

Seriously, there are a LOT of adults with young kids in the world. There is a very large demand for kid-friendly material, and that demand will be met! Stop fucking worrying about the evil porn monster jumping out and randomly slapping your kids in the face - any channel that did that would never get another viewer or ad dollar ever again!

So because some people don't/can't understand it, the argument has merit? I'd hope we were going for a higher level of reasoning than lowest-common denominator consensus.

To be honest, most of the gamers in that mindset are moving to the consoles, and I really don't have a problem with that. I have been enjoying the recent round of indy-style games immensely, and hope the trend continue.

Some of my favourite, non-graphically intense recent games:

• Alien Swarm
• World of Goo
• Braid
• Osmosis
• And Yet It Moves
• Plants Vs. Zombies

For 3d games, Half-Life 2's Source engine is the sweet spot. From then on, graphics have been good enough, and what makes a game "good" is the gameplay.

Well ... that's exactly what I meant! If R18+ is a lower, not an upper, limit then by definition there can't be anything Refused Classification.

I'm more pissed off at our government and society than pretty much anyone I know, yet where could I move? Every country seems to be fucked in their own special way

I believe the idea of an R18+ rating is that everything which is now considered "Refused Classification" just becomes "R18+" ... i.e. it's a lower, not an upper, limit to content

One effect of not having an R18+ rating means that there is immense pressure on the classification board to be very liberal with the 15+ rating, as companies spend millions of dollars making these games. This actually increases the chance of young kids seeing inappropriate content!

The trouble is, we've never really had any privacy - it's just been harder to find stuff out. Whereas you used to need a private investigator, you now just use the internet. Nothing really changed, just finding stuff out has (and will continue to get) easier to discover about people.

I don't really care about this too much - if the only obstacle to Bad Things happening is this some flimsy old-school notion of "privacy", we need to do some thinking.

Don't bet on it. I don't think Australia is intrinsically more inclined to being censored than other first-world, democratic countries - the majority of people are so scared of child porn trafficking that they will be OK with internet censorship as soon as their politicians find it politically convenient to bring it up.