I bet you believe in UX too.

Why does it matter what colour a hammer is? What function does the colour have?

A hammer is the same basic shape it has been in for millennia. A flat sided lump of metal attached to a handle. Even the claw hammer is over 500 years old and looks very similar to a modern claw hammer.

The biggest innovation in hammers in the last 100 odd years was switching from wooden handles and leather wraps to plastics and polymers. Even then, this is a slow evolution rather than a radical change and was mainly done to save costs and did not in any way alter the function of the hammer.

Metro is like redesigning a hammer to have the head in the middle of the handle. Its change for changes sake and ends up being less usable than the old design. However people like you will advertise it as "Hammer 2.0" or the "iBanger" and claim it's magically superior despite all evidence to the contrary.

I can assure you, Metro is not all of "simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional" ... it's anything but, in fact unless you're doing fairly trivial tasks on a tablet.

This, a thousand times this.

The first thing I do with metro on a desktop is replace it with one of the many start menu alternatives. Metro is an interface I dont want on a phone, let alone a workstation. However I cant do this on servers as no IT organisation will permit it.

I press the windows icon to have something replace my entire screen. That is stupid as it completely breaks my concentration on my current task (and I dont log into servers just to stuff around), beyond this if you try clicking on down button it only flips between the metro screen and the programs screen, you have to press escape to get out of it.

Microsoft has slowly been fucking up a very usable GUI since Windows XP. The first thing I do on any new Windows 7 or Server 2008 box is to set the Taskbar buttons to "never combine". I never have so many applications open that I need them to be combined. Ironically, Apple and their bollocks User Experience pseudo-science are to blame for this.

So, are you a rapper, Dubstepper or Techno-er?

A few people with or capable of getting PHDs will join the armed forces for the challenge or career opportunities, this does not mean most who join the army are PHD candidates. In fact I'd say the average Rifleman/General Infantry recruit is quite the opposite.

Why would any other armed force, regular or otherwise be any different. You want to attract highly skilled people for highly skilled work, you need grunts for grunt work and there is a lot of grunt work to be done.

The only real difference is that in the west, joining the army is seen as a good move for a kid with limited prospects (meaning he didn't do too well in school) where as its an act of desperation to join al queda (meaning there was no high school to do well in and even digging ditches is a highly controlled and nepotist market).

Slow cooker != pressure cooker.

A slow cooker takes 6 hours to cook, a pressure cooker takes 30 minutes.

What you've got to remember is that the Qu'ran is selectively quoted out of context deliberately by people who have an irrational hate of Muslims. They do this because often the context doesn't support their point.

If you selectively quoted the bible, it looks just as bad. Zechariah 12:3 for example tells Christians to kill false prophets, Leviticus made it clear it's OK to keep slaves, then there is the well known example of Ezekiel 25:17 (think pulp fiction). In fact the entire story of Ezekiel 25 is pretty violent and advocates killing an entire people, the thing is, I know this is a story, a work of fiction the same as verses in the Qu'ran are poems built in the same manner. If you take individual parts of Ezekiel 25 it sounds like commands from god to kill the Ammonites, but in context its part of a story.

It's a case of "figures dont lie, but liars figure".

Erm, pretty much.

Almost all Christians ignore things like Leviticus on slaves, by the same token almost all Muslims dont take "kill the unbeliever" literally.

This. I know this argument borderlines on "no true scotsman" but you can argue that a lot of the people who join Islamic terrorist groups are proper Muslims. A lot wont follow the same tenants as are proselytised by the likes of ISIS, certainly this is the case with most western recruits. Then again, the tenants of groups like ISIS hardly represent the majority of Muslims.

This cannot be understated.

Well you can cross Australia off that list, there's no way ASIO is that competent.

They say that the CIA gets its bad news from CNN, ASIO gets its bad news from Slashdot.

iiNet/Internode/Westnet/etc are the last service-oriented consumer ISP in the marketplace

+1 to everything you've said.

There's a reason I'm still with iinet ADSL despite being able to get Telstra cable to my house. After the TPG deal I'm thinking I might just jump ship.

Then again, I'm the kiss of death for ISP's. A few months after I joined Westnet, they were acquired by iinet, a few months after joining Internode they were acquired by iinet, a few weeks after joining iinet the TPG acquisition was announced. I wonder who's big enough to buy Telstra.

Insurance companies in Australia do not provide lawyers, they handle the entire thing for you because _that_ is what you pay them for.

ISP's on the other hand, you pay for internet access, not legal access (they're internet service providers, not legal service providers). So offering legal assistance for free is pro bono.

I would. Mainly because anyone who uses the word "sheeple" ironically points out that they aren't creative enough to come up with a semi original or at least entertaining insult.

I have the same policy with a variety of other brainless insults that have no meaning, things like PC, SJW, Fanboi, Hater (especially this one, see my sig).

Also this topic has reminded me of this topical and classic XKCD (for extra karma whoring points).
https://xkcd.com/1013/

The first problem with the last election was primarily that Murdoch went on an unrelenting attack on Labor. Coverage was so skewed that it wasn't funny.

The second problem was that there were too many back room preference deals. More people voted for Labor than the Liberal party but because the Liberal party had a lot of preference deals with smaller parties they received enough to get them _just_ past the post.

Voter apathy is still a huge problem in Australia and our mandatory voting system is part of it. I still prefer our Instant Runoff Voting system but the 2013 election is a good demonstration of how no system is perfect.

I've actually lived in a Muslim country, in fact the largest Muslim country in the world.

I lived and worked in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for 6 months. There were bars I could get beer in (in fact they were open longer than bars in Australia were permitted to), bacon was never hard to find. I was never forced to convert, people were friendly, I'd have no hesitation about going back to Yogya despite it being predominantly Muslim.

What the anti-Muslims dont want you to realise is that 99.9% of Muslims just want to get on with their daily lives. They've got jobs, families, homes, friends and dont really care that much about holy wars, much the same as 99.9% of Christians, Taoists, Shintoists, Atheists, LeVeyan Satanists and so forth. Using a few nutjobs as a representative of all Islam is like condemning all westerner by analysing the KKK.

Oh, and before someone trots out the old "well why dont they do something about the crazies, blah, blah, blah". They do speak out against them. I was in Yogya when 7/7 happened in London, every single person, regardless of creed was appalled, the problem with crazies is that they dont listen to sane people. Beyond this, I find those who are the first to point fingers at normal Muslims for doing nothing tend to be the last to act against the radical elements in our own society, mainly because they tend to support that radical element (so pot, kettle, black).

Actually most cars sold in Australia aren't built here.

Also an Australian made V6 Camry (we call it the Toyota Aurion) costs the same as it does in other countries. So Holden/GM are a really bad example especially considering that Australian made cars aren't really exported (Holden have exported less than 10,000 VE and VF commo's, Ford exported 0 Falcons in the same time).

Price differentials are due to car manufacturers deliberately pricing cars higher in Australia, not the minimum wage.

Honda is a better comparison (but doesn't support your theory). Holden is not Chevy. Most of the Holden fleet is being supplied by Opel (Germany) or Daewoo (GM Korea). None of the American made cars are available here and when local manufacturing ceases (good riddance, the subsidies and protectionism can now stop) Holden are replacing the Commo with the Opel Insignia OPC as GM America have plainly said we're not making the Camaro or Corvette in proper hand drive.