I'm well aware of the situation as I've been following it for over half a decade since the former Attorney-General Michael Atkinson first put the kybosh on R18+.

Unfortunately in SA the Labor party that is the government is controlled by a "Catholic right" faction. The former AG held a lot of sway in that faction until he finally went so off the rails they tapped him on the shoulder and replaced him with the current guy, so you can probably deduce why the government never directed the former AG in how to handle the issue.

I do agree with what John Rau is proposing though as I've always wondered why we have M and MA ratings as they seem so similar.

It's about time the Labor party pulled its finger out.

Unfortunately, this announcement is nothing more than an attempt to distract the vapid media from the SA Labor party's woes of last week:

* The worst opinion poll in the party's history.
* A Labor MP was arrested for child pornography offences.
* A minister resigned without explanation less than three months into the job.

So far it's been a pretty mild summer here in my part of down under (all crops are being harvested late) until this weekend. It's also been terribly inconvenient weather as well... every weekday when I leave for work it's warm and sunny and the ocean is nice and calm so I think "can't wait to get the boat out on the weekend", but then the wind starts blowing sometime on Friday night and doesn't stop blowing until sometime on Sunday night which means the water is too rough.

No wind this weekend for once, but the forecast for today was 41 so we went out before sunrise this morning to do some squidding. We bagged a few dozen, but the sun was stinging our skin by 8:30am thus indicating an accurate forecast so we came back in at 9am to seek shelter indoors and spent most of the day sitting in air-conditioned comfort and watching the cricket.

Terribly inconvenient.

Top-shelf games push systems to the limits. If you have split screen you have to render and perhaps simulate multiple scenes per video frame. Memory and processing power are scarce resources. If you scale back your graphics then critics and players pan you for having "shit grafix" compared to the other top-shelf title with no split-screen multiplayer and your sales suffer.

If you'd have said six months ago that Tony Abbott had a good chance of being Prime Minister, you'd have been mercilessly mocked. Back then, Kevin Rudd was the Most. Popular. Prime Minister. Ever. for some reason and the Liberal party was in a complete mess.

Now, Kevin Rudd is nursing some knife wounds in his back delivered by his deputy not even two months ago and Tony "Mr Personality" Abbott is in the running for the top job. How did it all go so wrong? Well, that's a long story...

You wish for a system where the carrot (i.e. pork) is replaced with the stick (i.e. 'discipline'). So if someone on principle votes against his party, what happens? Is he thrown out of the party? Replaced with someone else? Then it's a dictatorship since the voted-in individual is being replaced by a party-chosen puppet.
It depends upon what party you are a member of.

Of the two major parties in Australia, the Labor party does not allow dissent and MP's who vote against the party line (cross the floor) are kicked out of the party. The Liberal party, on the other hand allows dissent and doesn't kick you out of the party for crossing the floor. It's rather rare for it to happen and if you do it can certainly harm your future in the party.

Labor and its supporters are always quick to make political hay out of any dissent within the Liberal party, but at least from my point of view I think it's better that you can speak out against party policy than have to swallow your integrity and toe the party line.

The funny thing though is that quite a few people in Australia wish our politicians were a bit more like they are in the USA and not so beholden to the party line. The grass is always greener on the other side. :)

Here in Australia, we have centuries worth of the stuff in reserve with more being found each year. There's currently a mad scramble on to develop fields and LNG export facilities. In addition to that there's the recent development of coal seam methane technology.

Optus turned to shit when earlier this year they unilaterally decided to start charging $2.20 to mail their bills under the guise of "being green".

Not even the banks I have accounts with are crooked enough to charge for mailing statements.

Although I can't be bothered to read the PDF, I take it the good doctor hasn't heard of a little thing called ODX?

It's short for Olympic Dam eXpansion, a project by the world's largest mining company, BHP Billiton, to create the largest mine the world has ever seen. We're talking about an open cut mine that will eventually be over one kilometre deep and multiple kilometres in diameter where they'll be shifting more than one tonne of ore out of it every second, 24/7 for 100 years or more. They keep upgrading the reserve estimates because they haven't found the true extent of the ore deposit, which alone accounts for something like 30% of known reserves. Currently the mine produces around 5,000 tonnes each year, which isn't the largest (Ranger in the Northern Territory is) but if the expansion goes ahead on the scale they're planning then it will be spitting out much, much more.

Then there's some other large deposits in Western Australia that are only now being developed as a change of government has seen the ban on Uranium mining lifted. It's even worse in the eastern states of Australia, as they have prohibited even exploring for uranium. Hooray for the luddite Labor party! The party that is okay in South Australia and federally to be mining and exporting it, but not using it here and won't even entertain discussion of the pros and cons of Australia adopting nuclear energy.

So if there's a shortage then the price will rise (which it did in the last few years because of fears of running out of the cheap bombs) and that will spur miners to start mining already known deposits that couldn't be mined profitably at lower prices. It will also spur further exploration and eventually the price will rise high enough that it becomes more economical to reprocess spent fuel, which is apparently 90-95% still good.

There's enough Uranium out there that we'll never run out for centuries, and then there's Thorium if fusion continues to forever be 40 years away.

THIS is a road train. =]