Apparently the house pieces around the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney go up every time there's a big bushfire in the news, because you know that the fire commanders will use whatever it takes to keep fires away from there.

If Abbott gets pushed out by a Wet, Assange might get more support form the Liberals - remember that Turnbull's first major political activity was being the lead defence barrister in the Spycatcher case. At the very least, they could use Assange as a bargaining chip to help get better terms in the TPP, which would help get them forgiveness for the FTA.

The Greens (and, to a lesser extent, the Labor Left) are torn between supporting Assange for being anti-American (which gets lots of points with their most active members) and for opposing him for being an alleged rapist

Conceivably, a defendant could argue that the damage done is only the proportional loss from royalties paid by authorised distributors - that is, by uploading a song once, the damage done was the royalties that iTunes didn't pay, or the royalty portion of the price of a CD that would have been sold at Walmart (and that's counting downloads as lost sales).

The big issue is that if other companies also kow-tow to the "moral guardians" like this (and it obviously is that, since they're not doing it in other countries) then not going along with "industry standards" in protecting the innocent little kiddies is just asking to get sued by some church-backed soccer mom.

I don't know about where you live, but when I went to school we were taught enough sex ed to know the basic concepts of sex and masturbation by about 11, including the use and acquisition of contraception, STDs, and so on, and that was in a Catholic school[1] (although, IIRC, they didn't really explain how homosexuals had sex). That was on the basis that it was better to tell us as soon as we could understand, rather than letting us ask older siblings and so on and getting potentially garbled information. That means that it was actual policy to serve sexuality before they're into it.

I also remember that people in my cohort first began to think about sex as soon as the first pretty girl started to grow boobs (though it was a couple of years before anyone got her into bed, and it wasn't one of us) - if we'd put anywhere near as much effort into our studies as we did into perving on them, that last year of primary school would have been a lot more productive.

[1] in before the paedo priest jokes

It might well have been sexual for the guys involved, but if your 13yo finds that it is sexual for them, it is probably too late to hope that any kind of censorship will make them "normal" (not that abnormality is necessarily bad, of course).

Now, I don't know if the building in question actually was a consulate, but you do sometimes get them in obscure places: in my city, the British consulate is an antique shop, and the French consulate is, IIRC, in a restaurant, and the Italian one doubles as something else too. Since the old French consulate closed, the only "proper" consulate is the Greek one. Remember that consuls aren't necessarily full-time jobs, especially if your local ex-pat population is small.

The relevant local government could sent the DPRK a littering fine, if only for the entertainment value of sending a large number of bureaucrats running in circles trying to figure out what the diplomatic implications are if you want to take an unrecognised government's agency to court.

It is long and tedious, and involves you telling the government a whole lot of information they already know about you.

Also, several of the questions are leading: in the Australian census, they ask "What is your religion?", which gets an inflated answer compared to "Are you religious?If yes, which religion?", because people put down whatever religion their parents or grandparents were, or the church they were married in, rather then what they actually believe in. That then allows the Christian Lobby to claim that they represent far more people than they actually do.

(Also, God condemned census-taking in Kings, so there's a good religious argument against doing it.)

Knowing religion is somewhat useful, as it allows the government to make plans: for example, if they can predict how many children will be going to grant-maintained schools (or whatever they're called now), they know what is worth funding (and, more importantly, they can guess how many aren't going to state schools, and thus how many classrooms they don't need to build).

Even local councils might find it useful: if a denomination is in long-term decline (as Judaism is here) they can assume that there won't be much of an increase in the need for parking around a synagogue. OTOH, if a denomination is growing, they might ins is that they set aside land for future car parking around new facilities.

That said, the French system (with an almost impregnable wall between church and state) does have a certain appeal.

We know that Jedi is an entirely fictional belief system - if Lucas were inspired to write the films to teach us about the Force, there's no way he'd have been inspired to write The Phantom Menace. Even the dark side would have done a better job.

The Commonwealth Realms all agreed to make the necessary changes at CHOGM this year, but I don't know if they've all done it (it not being particularly urgent, one hopes). I think it can be done in all the realms using ordinary legislation rather than constitutional amendment, and there's no serious opposition to the idea, so it is just a question of procedure.

AIUI (although I haven't been following too closely), part of what was leaked in the 2DAY scandal was that the Duchess was pregnant with mixed-sex twins, but there's so much idle speculation (and total rubbish) that I've no idea if that's true.

In Australia, the Pirate Party (usual disclaimer) makes submissions to relevant enquiries and official bodies, and spend quite a lot of time arguing FOI requests with the government (the Greens and various loosely-affilaited organisations do the same thing with environmental issues), but they don't have the money or personnel to lobby politicians and senior officials directly the way the MAFIAA does. On the bright side, the Greens started off like that, and they're now the third most important party in the country, so with a lot of hard work, improvement is possible.

I've never understood why Americans stick with cups rather than using weights like everyone else. Measuring easily-compacted powders in cups is a bad idea because it is rather imprecise - I always weigh when consistency matters (and eyeball when it doesn't). Measuring lumpy things by volume is a PITA too - a cup of butter or of biscuit (cookie) crumbs is a right bugger to measure by volume.

When cooking, I use imperial units mostly (except temperature), but that's partly because my imperial weights are in nice powers of two and my metric weights are in arbitrary sizes (5g, 10g, 20g, 50g, 100g, 200g, 500g in various numbers), which meansI actually have to pay attention to my arithmetic, and partly because many of the rules I learnt regarding quantities and ratios were originally in imperial units (I learnt to cook from old English books).

(Also, everywhere I've lived cups and spoons have defined volumes in ml [1]- otherwise it would be impossible to mix volumes in a published recipe - but that doesn't make them good units for solids.)

Actually, the unibody shells have been painted for a while.

It is actually trivial: require all servers their law can reach to use one of their officially-approved CAs, for security and so on, of course. Then ignore any traffic from a "legitimate' business, and get on with MITM-ing the communications with everyone else. For international messages, just block or interfere with any message to or from a user they can't MITM unless it is a recognised "good" user (i.e. big business). Problem solved, near enough.