Are we sure the decision is based on science and not emotion? After all, a lot of what people believe about organic foods, vitamins, vaccines, and herbal medicine is founded on bunk but people still believe in it. Are we sure Neonicotinoid Insecticides are not being banned because they're man made and evil sounding?

as long as they don't put rounded corners on it.

It seems like Verizon and AT&T spend millions that they collect from their monopoly of the spectrum and give it to politicians to who then make laws in their favor. http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=B08&year=a

The government sales of the free spectrum to the highest bidder is one of the biggest scams ever. Carrier-less mesh networking technology has been a viable alternative for a long time ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking ) but the government persists in licensing the most useful spectrum frequencies to the highest bidder for billions of dollars ( http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=about_auctions ) while restricting the unlicensed spectrum like 802.11 to limited frequencies with severe power restrictions.

Mod parent up. Making laws against cookies is nothing more than government self-promotional propaganda. Governments do this all the time to justify their power. One of the biggest cons ever is the government convincing you that you need them to protect you because you're not smart enough to look after yourself. And without the government protecting you people will do bad things to you -- with cookies. What the government does all the time is look for the slightest issue, create a law for it, and then try to take credit for preventing a problem that would never have happened anyway. The CANSPAM Act was an example of this. The reason you don't get spam in your inbox is because of filters, not because of government laws. Yet the politicians who pushed CANSPAM through the US Congress are convinced they have solved a problem. Folks, you don't need the government to make cookie laws, it's ridiculous.

GNU Octave is a very handy program to know: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

It seems like anything that even remotely challenges today's established copyright dogma is the modern day equivalent of blasphemy that deserves absolute censorship so the old fashioned doctrine of intellectual property can be allowed to continue, unchallenged by more futuristic ideas.

The reason the internet revolution did not originate in Australia.

Next will be the War on Violence.

You cannot block the piratebay because it's an idea. You can take away its domain and block its IP addresses but those are things that can be changed. The piratebay will live on because it's an idea. It cannot be suppressed by the authorities. It will always resurface.

20% and 40% seem like suspiciously rounded figures. I wish people wouldn't make claims without publishing the actual data including the control data and standard deviation. Have the rates ever varied as much during other 3-day periods when there was no phone outage? The story about the soccer player is anecdotal and establishes neither correlation nor causation as it's not even conclusive he was texting and a sample space of 'one' is meaningless.

Once you start letting the government regulate what words mean they'll have ultimate power over you because you've already confessed your ignorance and signaled you need help.

The point at which google goes too far with fixing its search results is not only when people will start looking for other search engines but also a time when the competition will step up to meet demand.

I suggest the Australian government get into the search business. There's obviously an opportunity here.

How do we know the researcher couldn't get the same results picking people at random? The article doesn't describe the method or contain a statement of the problem. What's the null hypothesis, sample space, control group?

Government attempts at censorship only make those sites more popular in accordance with the Streisand Effect. I suggest using the MafiaaFire Redirector Addon for Firefox. Since the US Government starting seizing domains I've found some excellent torrents sites I never before knew existed. Roja Directa is still up. You can access it here http://www.rojadirecta.es I for one am thankful my government is clueless as to how the Internet works.

Everything is genetically modified. It's called evolution. Large scale production of GM crops has been around for about 30 years and there's no evidence of any adverse affects in any of the data. This is like when Copernicus and Galileo said the Earth goes around the Sun, every body got freaked out. The irrational fear of science and discovery lives on in spite of facts.

I thought California had banned British libel cases so I wonder why the a California court is ruling against twitter in a Tyneside libel case?