It could be that once a certain amount of kids are wrapped in cotton wool and not allowed to leave the house, eventually, any others that still are able, won't have anyone to interact with, hence, it just pushes willing kids/parents to socialise online, anyway.

I heard this idea when it comes to vaccines, that even though you might not vaccinate everyone, since just about everyone around someone who may be unvaccinated, will probably be vaccinated, as a result of that, they remain unlikely to contract a contagious illness and are benefiting from the high rate of vaccination. I'm not saying anyone should stop vaccinating at all, but going back to your concern, if your kids friends weren't able to come over or hang out due to their parents lack of permission, there's not much he or you could do about that.

Google in Australia, naturally, does the same thing. a few years ago, they paid approximately $AU74,000 in tax on about $AU1,000,000,000 in revenue. Yes it's not profit, but the metrics just tell you that it's woefully inadequate for such movement of money. Article for further reading

Probably not far off the mark. I'm noticing it in Australia, and not just in the public service, that hardware like tablets, don't appear to be solving anything or improving productivity, it mostly appears like as if they're shoehorning them in because people want them or they want to appear like they're keeping up with the times.

This is just absurd. There's plenty of non-bible material, or one could easily call it evidence that Jesus existed at the time and was crucified.

Depends which Christians. See, 10 is not exactly Christian, because Jesus himself claimed two to be of most importance, and at the last supper gave a new commandment. As a catholic, we don't really dwell heavily in the old testament, but there are other Christians who do, and it really muddies the waters when you group apostolic Christians (i.e. catholic and orthodox churches) with protestants and then evangelicals to complete nutters like the westboro baptist church amongst other nominally Christian sects and cults.

The 10 commandments are of jewish origin, and are respected by muslims as well, since they are included in the quran. They didn't come from Jesus, so the 'overtly Christian message' comment just seems to be way off the mark and most importantly, it is technically incorrect.

While governments shouldn't really get involved at all, with religions, because it will exhibit some favouritism, amongst a plethora of other reasons, the satanists in this instance just appear to be sectarians who desperately hate christians. I guess by being motivated by hate, they do display that they're practicing satanists, rather than just regular bigotry and intolerance present in religions.

You mean ex-prime minister Kevin Rudd's toy boy list. Abbott has only been PM since September. This is a problem he inherited.

The problem is, not that long ago, the Indonesians didn't consider Australia, a 'colonial outpost, a listening station for the UK and USA' but rather 'South Irian'.

I actually went to a talk by a Prof. Michelle Simmons on this last night, and asked that question. My understanding is that it would just does all the calculations at once, in a massively parallel operation (which obviously isn't efficient). I'm no computer scientist (just a mechanical and mechatronic engineer) and I don't really know anything behind quantum mechanics, but the other thing mentioned in the talk about a quantum computer is that it would have perfect security (her words), because, and now i'm relying on memory, a quantum computer doesn't store data like a classic computer, as it can't be perfectly replicated, so the quantum computer needs to keep the qubits active for as long as possible in the computer (hence the importance of the coherence time, as stated in the article). Because a quantum computer is an adiabatic system, it sends the 'energy' from one place to another. Eavesdropping would mean you reroute that energy, and it doesn't go to its intended place.

A lot of it went over my head, so take this with a spoon of salt, as I could have botched it up, but that's the gist of my understanding, and off-topic info

Stubborn IE users should be treated as addicts and sent to rehab.

Better do what he says...

It's not slavery, it's basically illegal migration by claiming to be a refugee. Rather than engage in the orderly process of getting a visa by getting approval of refugee status from the UN, they decide to go to Indonesia, pay a "people smuggler" who will organise things to get them into Australian waters, then ring some government department to send the navy to go pick them up because their little dingy is probably going to sink soon. Before getting picked up, they discard all their identification papers. Once being processed, they claim they're refugees, escaping persecution, ignoring the fact that they would have passed through four or five different countries who aren't persecuting them.

If they were neighbouring countries, it would be a different matter, but because they're travelling to Australia, I don't think a lot of them are genuine refugees, after all, they're not being persecuted in Indonesia. It's quite a terrible joke what the people smugglers do. If you look on a map to see where 'Christmas Island" is, in relation to Indonesia, you will see why they do it; because it's not ridiculously far from Indonesia and once in Australian waters, our government is compelled to do something. Unlike the US-Mexican border, where many people try to get into the USA and evade detection, in our case, there is absolutely no compulsion to avoid detection, they actually want to be picked up and processed, that way they can get legal entitlements (read: welfare).

Australia is a well-to-do country, and, while some of the immigrants will be escaping some form of persecution worthy of resettlement, a lot of them are economic migrants who are arriving by boat to avoid having to go through the proper, overly bureaucratic procedures. This is unfair to the people who haven't got the money to pay a smuggler. Apparently it's in the vicinity of ~$AU10,000 that people smugglers charge. It's not an insignificant sum of money.

With that brief background, my opinion is that the bribing, and general expenses around people smuggling, means that a lot of that cost is parked in the Indonesian economy. A few thousand Australian dollars is a huge amount in Indonesia, considering their largest currency denomination is worth about $AU10. I just get the feeling that the diplomatic problem is that they know it's happening, they know it's wrong, but they're on the beneficiary side to it, so they don't want it to change.

The NSA has very little to do with this. It's a broader issue with two countries playing politics and politicians trying to win elections. There's that underlying sentiment of the public, and politicians will generally play to nationalistic tendencies, to appear strong. It happened here, and the Indonesians, with an impending election, are doing same.

That's basically why Indonesia isn't liking what's happening. The people smuggling trade brings a lot of money into Indonesia; buying boats, bribing police and officials. Cutting it off is going to annoy quite a lot of people.

It's not the system though, it's the culture. Australia has historically been a fairly egalitarian society; far more so than the UK or the USA. That counts for a lot to this issue, because as a generalisation, for a lot of the time politicians actually worked to make the place better. I really don't think the system does anything when you have a country built around respect for your fellow citizen, because the system only serves as a constraint to prevent "bad things" from happening.

I think we are seeing a culture struggle, where you have the inner city middle class, who either directly or indirectly, work for the government, and then the suburban working class, who are engaged in small business, trades, manufacturing, pretty much everything else which isn't government work or something where you can maybe apply a communication or arts degree. The pendulum is swinging to those inner city people who invariably are in bureaucracies, government consultants, journalists and media people; positions of influence, and they have far more ready access to politics than your average dunny diver. As a result, they are writing the script to which politics is played. I think it's resulting in a culture struggle, and it's quite noticeable that you are starting to see that broad generalisation of inner city people feel superior to other Australians, and in a Randian manner, feel that their superiority entitles them to a greater say.