And what is wrong with the Australian government representing the best interest of its people and not the interest of corp America? Why when Australia was negotiating the Malaysia solution for immigrants was the US putting pressure on Malaysia to tie any deal to plain packaging of cigarette to suit american tobacco interests? As an Australian I say bugger off to America trying to pervert my country and is purchasing interests for its own selfish / corporate reasons. What about America putting the pressure on New Zealand over Kim Dot Com - a raid that turned out illegal? Your rant completely fails to address my point, that it is entirely possible and probably that in many deals with China FUD is introduced by the US to suit its own interests, or Australia is pressured to create FUD to keep the US happy. What the f*ck are you talking about treasury bonds for? Or China investment? Or F15? It's bad enough our boys are being blown up in US wars (Still looking for the WMD, what was that even about? Oh yeah Oil) But to have the US and US coporate interests playing shenanigans for stock holders is a piss poor effort.

The way this works is: 1. Cisco lobby US gov. 2. US gov put pressure on Aus gov. 3. Aus gov create FUD about cisco rival. 4. Aus gov buy cisco. 5. Profit - cisco and US senators.

1. Create video that is insulting to muslims and islam. 2. Put this dudes name in the credits and his business address etc. 3. Profit? Crowdsourcing take down. You're welcome.

"is probably going to be enough to make me switch to an inferior carrier once my current plan ends." --- ha! Telstra is an inferior carrier, you really should be supporting iiNet. They are looking after their users rights, something Telstra has never done.

Or 15 year olds that are sexting... seriously that is the state of play now. You can be put on a sex offenders list for taking photos of yourself. Under these circumstances please explain who the victim is, the person knowingly taking photos of themselves and distributing them? Or the recent issue in Australia of a well know artist that painted children naked but without their bits showing and all the crazies came out the woodwork completely glossing over the difference between art and porn or even nudity and porn. Or how about Japan and their comics? I bet if real doll (TM) brought out a 12 year old model all the same arguments would be made including "think of the victims" despite there being no victims. Crazies gonna craze!

What about anabolic substances? No impairment, hell probably able to stack those boxes faster.

All that is needed is malware that randomly flags sites. The amount of submissions would create so much noise the system would be unable to serve its purpose. Game over.

So what your saying is the customer failed to roll out changes to a test environment before releasing to production and got burned. For mission critical systems no less, sound like someone needs to be fired, maybe even a whole team. It wasn't your bug and so your entitled to bill for fixing it, so in answer to the slashdot question - yes bill them for bugs.

Pshycologist

Yeah millions of Chinese stacked on top of each other would produce a lack of isolation.

Please leave the rest of the world alone. Thankyou.

A lot of what your saying is BS. But lets focus on one specific.

Birth rates are generally pretty close with less than a .1% variance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio As for taking chances growing up meaning more boys die... citation please (i expect you have none as collecting data on this would be impossible). What about gender specific diseases such as breat cancer altering that ratio? What about the impact of certain mental illnesses being different between the sexes? Perhaps men have a higher rate of birth (again less than .1%) because they are more likely to be affected by X chromosome health issues and a higher birth rate is a built redundancy.
What biological expense of child birth? Women live longer than men. If women incur a 'biological expense' death rates certainly don't support your argument. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827162,00.html
Please provide data confirming that women are risk adverse more so than men. Your bell curve argument is hack science and you argument(s) over all are weak. Your 'business requires the ability to take risk and so men are better at it' is long bow to draw as well. Australians richest woman (and one of the richest people in the world) is a woman, same for the PM, same for an ex New Zealand PM and the list goes on.

"We could not participate in the government’s Women-Owned Small Business program unless there was another female competitor,” -- you can still compete for tenders though, you know as one innovative company against a group of other innovative companies. What is really the issue is you don't want to compete against others... just a small subset. What is really the problem here is that the 'protection racket' only kicks in when there are two or more companies eligible for protection. What ever happend to ROI, competition and most suitable candidate? All this says indirectly is "If you can't beat the boys don't worry dear, we'll make a special playgroud just for you and your girlfriends, no matter how less capable you are. So much for "women doin it for themselves"

How about fireworks. Are fireworks at a wedding acceptable to you? Because you can bet if they started launching fireworks they get nailed as well. It is socially acceptable to fire guns in celebration in MANY countries, hell ANZAC day in Australia they fire guns, cannons, artillery all kinds of shit, they do it in the US as well, have you ever attended a military parade or funeral. Oh... what you mean is they should not fire guns in celebration while there is an occupying force in their country. Nice one. I wonder how many of those guns are relics supplied by the US to help fight the soviets. You're a dick.

"Few koalas live outside Australia, but the U.S. government designated the animal as endangered in response to a petition filed by animal-protection groups. The Australian government, which bans hunting and commercial use of koalas, sees no scientific evidence that it is likely to become endangered anytime soon." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0510_020510_TVkoala.html So basically the US who have no idea what is going on in Australia BOW DOWN TO SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS and list it as endangered. Meanwhile in Australia in certain areas Koalas are so prolific they are hurting their environment. As for the rain forrest MASSIVE amounts of Australian rainforest is protected. I can only guess what the BS in PBS stands for. You're a dick. If you really want to get pissed about something try the Japanese hunting wales for 'Research Purposes'... or better yet fix your own country first.