Not true, there was one last year in lockhart where a farmer shot his wife and three children (and then himself). That counts as a mass shooting because it satisfied the criteria of 4 or more killings.

Maybe if those links supported what you're saying, I could argue. Problem is firearm homicides and firearm suicides in Australia definitely did not peak in 1996/1997, as they had been trending downwards since the mid 1980's. The only thing is that 1996 had a big peak due to the Port Arthur massacre, but even then, more people were killed by firearms in 1992 than 1996. firearm homicides had been trending downwards since about the 1980's and there's no structural break to signify a change as a result of the buyback legislation. Similarly applies to firearm suicides.

You could check out this paper and get a better look at the statistics, and see that the gun buyback isn't all that it was cracked up to be.

But there are no regional inconsistencies when it comes to 3D printing firearms. Each jurisdiction requires that a firearm is registered. I believe this means that if a dealer (they are allowed to manufacture a firearm) were to 3D print a firearm and go through the correct procedure in getting it registered, it would be legal. If they do anything, they might just outright ban 3D printing firearms by making them unable to be registered and considered a prohibited weapon like semi automatics. But it seems futile, as it won't do anything to prevent illegal manufacture, as it's already considered an illegal firearm due to being unregistered.

Owning weapons is a common law right, however statute has the power to override and essentially revoke common law rights. As a result, we have no guaranteed rights in Australia (because our constitutions don't define any, except for free political speech and a right to vote, no those are the only two protected in our constitutions), because the parliament can just change it immediately.

So now we're seeing our democratically elected representatives debate, adjust, and they will pass laws regarding metadata retention. Is this a situation of the people speaking? Can you really suggest that metadata retention is something that the Australian public really want? Both sides of politics are agreeing to metadata retention in principle, so it's going to happen.

Yea, now you read about in the Australia media how they don't know how many illegal guns there actually are in Australia. Maybe comedians can be funny, but Jim Jeffries is certainly talking out of his arse. The Howard gun laws did nothing statistically speaking, there's even a research paper which shows that there are no statistical breaks as a result from the gun buyback. While it may make some people feel all warm and fuzzy, meanwhile we have a situation where firearms are being smuggled for organised crime, there's even local manufacture of machine pistols and other types of firearms here, which the police haven't been too keen on publicising at all. So Jim Jeffries rebuttle is hardly one when you insert some facts into the situation.

Typical bureaucracy; they'll solve the problem by just banning it again, so that it will be double banned. Surely double banned has got to be better than a singular ban...

The sad thing is, the official office apps are probably the worst ones to use. Word does some ridiculous scaling which wraps text, making it impossible to actually view a document as it was intended, meanwhile excel has an extremely reduced function set, to the point that any spreadsheet with some more useful formulas will no longer work.

I'd say it's a just too late. The Windows phone timeline is rocky, to say the least. While I like the OS, people who entered with WP7 got sold the dump, meanwhile, with WP8, there were some really good features, but the OS had severe limitations. Most of them got fixed with WP8.1, but they then got rid of some of the best features, and changed other things which really didn't need changing.

I think that if MS is happy to persist, the best windows phone can hope for is always going to be distant third. I say that as a rather happy user of it. The problem was, they were way too late to the party, and they brought too little. Where the other platforms had already sorted out most of their issues and were working on new tech and polish, MS still had to bring in rudimentary functions.

That's what I reckon, for what it's worth. The platform may be able to gain some market share, but if it does, it will be a slow hard grind.

I never got XP mode to run anything properly anyway.