Some parties are. Not all of them. The Pirate Party in particular opted out of those deals, and allocated preferences according to a vote of the membership. The party has also published its preferencing process online, which you can read at http://pirateparty.org.au/2013/08/18/preferencing-statement-for-federal-election-2013/

Incorrect. Assange is running in Victoria. The Wikileaks Party isn't fielding any candidates in Queensland whatsoever.

Eh, 2x2 spacing with Boreholes was always more effective over the long term than Forest and Forget. *idly wonders how many people reading this actually will get either of our references*

I'm sorry to say that the idea that regions are illegal in Australia is a popular misconception. The Copyright Amendment Act (2006) allows for the modification of DVD players to enable them to play DVDs from different countries, but does does not control the sale of DVD players, require region-free DVD players to be made available, or require an unlock to be made available. There was never a Supreme Court ruling on it. I suspect the Supreme Court case you're thinking of was specifically in relation to the game console chipping issue, but that one simply ruled that the consumers could legally break region coding with modifications (and that if it was impossible to break the region coding without also breaking stuff like the anti-piracy, then it was the console maker's own damn fault for linking the two in the first place).

Except the core of the issue here isn't with GPS....but with a map. Specifically, the flawed Apple Map. They looked at where the map indicated the city was (which was way off where it actually is), and attempted to navigate their way there through actual roadways.

That story talks about observers from the developing world, with very different circumstances for them back home. What about the observers from more developed nations?

I recall that several countries wanted to send election monitors to oversee the vote, and that at least one Republican AG was trying to prevent that happening. What happened with that?

A paperless office means more conservation of trees?

The sad thing is, there are going to be dozens of people reading your post whose first console was a PS1, who won't understand the joke you're making, and will take that as a serious reason to suggest the Wii U is weaker.

This is 2012, not 2006. We're not talking about the storage of the Wii, we're talking about the storage of the Wii U. So again...what makes you suggest they're not using a NAND flash memory based SSD here with the Wii U, which would have none of the kinds of speed problems you're talking about? In fact, it'd be significantly faster than the HDD's in the PS3 and 360, that's why they use them as boot drives in PC's.