replying to undo incorrect moderation

Standing may not be so hard to come by if a lot of this material truly can't be copyrighted. Crowdsource the licence fee and the cost of a decent lawyer, make the material available for free in a very public manner, and wait for them to come to you.

I also wonder if this agreement would get them around being hit with a FOI request every time something new is released.

Nope, didn't miss it. In theory they could - but for any given skillset there is only a finite amount of demand in the job market. So in this world where everyone has gone and started their own business are we just going to abandon the aged to their fate and not have anyone wait tables?

I do see where you are coming from but let me give you a counter-example.

Let's say company X employs 100 people at the absolute minimum they can get away with. Management is well rewarded for keeping costs down and a profit is made. Come Friday night the owner and management can afford to go out for dinner and a movie and do so. The owners of the local cinema and restaurant look around, see about six bums on seats, decide they can't afford this crap and let staff go and doesn't provide much business.

Alternately, company X is forced to pay a livable wage and come Friday night everyone can afford to go out. The local restaurant owner sees a full house and a queue any says, 'hell, I'm going to need another cook and a couple more waitstaff.' Come Monday morning, he's on the phone to company X to place a good sized order.

My point is, concentrating wealth tends to limit consumption in many ways. Even if that money is reinvested it's likely going elsewhere and still bleeding the local economy dry.

And so begins a race to the bottom. We can make more profit employing people at cents per hour fourteen hours a day, seven days a week so if you want to work that's what we're offering... and back to my point about wealth concentration. I'm happy for trade to be flowing in all directions but I would be delighted if my government would say that if you're not meeting minimum work standards with regard to work hours, pay against the cost of living, safety, etc then you're not selling that crap in my country directly or indirectly. That aside I'm not a fan of protectionism. I've seen first-hand the effects of US farm subsidies on markets and how that affects other people.

So let's say, for the sake of argument, that everybody went and got these magical skills which gave us all 'options'. I doubt that very much would change. The guy working in aged care might be a skilled structural engineer, the guy picking fruit in the scorching heat might be a diesel mechanic and the poor girl who has to serve coffee to self-righteous fools probably has a better grasp of computer science than most of us will ever dream of. Why? Because there are only so many jobs available and a significant proportion of them are crappy, low-paying jobs - and that is the fault of how the market economy is set up.

So you don't view the raping, pillaging, and generally making an ass of yourselves as a problem? After all no Frenchman could have a problem with GIs bursting into his home at night demanding women or accosting "anything with a skirt" on the street could they? The French had a saying along the lines of with the Germans we camouflaged the men but with the Americans we had to hide the women.

Now don't get me wrong - the liberation of France was a tremendous thing and well worthy of gratitude from the French people despite the fact that they suffered horribly in the bombings leading up to Normandy. We can argue about whose army behaved more or less abominably but to claim that nothing wrong was done to the French is simply laughable.

Of course not. Back then kids learned about guns and respected them... or rather acted like stupid juveniles with access to firearms

I have a hunch that the dog and the robot aren't going to get on very well

If the money is still in the account, no. But if the bank that received the transfer has transferred that money out of the jurisdiction or exchanged that record in a database for a briefcase full of large denomination notes they're not going to be particularly keen on rolling the original transaction back.

Purely out of curiosity, are you familiar with the case you're referencing?

Because a mother losing her baby daughter to a dingo attack and then being falsely convicted of her murder (with the outlandish suggestion it was a cult sacrifice from certain media outlets) hardly seems the subject for humor. In terms of justice the initial trial was comparable to the Salem witch trials complete with racism, bad forensics, mishandled evidence, dubious expert witness testimony, religious hatred, and a large dose of media sensationalism. The mother did several years of a life with hard labor sentence before she was finally exonerated. It's the Lindy/Azaria Chamberlain case for the record.

Indeed. I had an American friend visiting and it was decided that a group of us would go to the beach. The guy who was going to drive announced that he would be ready just as soon as he got his thongs on. Now to an Australian that would be referring to a pair of cheap footwear. Our American guest understood something very different by thongs and was having second thoughts about whether this trip was something he wanted to participate in if that's what the guys were going to be wearing.

It is inherently worse, in my opinion, because it takes up a great chunk of screen real estate. It also makes it harder when you're trying to do phone support for a relative novice. Trying to describe the appearance and location of a particular icon (assuming they're even on the right tab) takes longer than telling them to select this from this menu.

Given that we're talking about online forums the odds are you'll find plenty of heat. Illumination, not so much. Oh, and plenty of pitchforks.

Don't laugh. There was a bit of a scandal a while back when a New Zealand job agency that was presumably paid to get people off unemployment benefits was paying for plane tickets to send long term unemployed to Australia.

That's a very simplistic view. Consider the situation where militants enter an area they don't like - such as the Christian quarter, fire their rocket and go home. An Israeli military response, be it firing back or occupation, at the source of the rocket is pretty much a win-win for them. This is not a hypothetical situation. It happened repeatedly and probably will again.

While this is undoubtedly bad for author/artist/etc rights I see the far greater attack being on anonymous speech. There are many, many really good reasons why someone would speak anonymously through a variety of mediums.

Consider a woman who writes satirical prose on female rights from Saudi Arabia, a citizen attempting to bring down a despotic government, a person who happens to photograph a powerful person doing something they shouldn't or a three letter agency involved in arguably treasonous activities, or simply a person who would be fired if their boss found out about the views they were expressing; should they lose the right to control their work to a commercial free-for-all simply because it wasn't prudent for them to identify themselves as the creators of their work at the time?