The did have a say - they had their say in 2007, and will have another say in only a couple of months.

Australians vote for their local members, and the party (or coalition) with the most members forms government.
The party then elects their leader, who becomes prime minister.

Labor elected Rudd initially, and now they decided to elect Gillard instead.
Also, she was deputy Prime Minister, and went as such into the election, so it's not like people were voting for Labor without the knowledge that she would have some power - and that she'd be filling in as PM from time to time anyway.

why?

I don't see any evidence that the filter will ever go through.
The government isn't even trying.

Even if they win the next election with a majority in the senate (and currently it's looking like they might not win at all), to put it before parliament Conroy is finally going to have to write down exactly what it is, which is something he's been utterly unable to do to this date.

it would be true though. There can be many different (and unrelated) sites hosted on one IP address, and of course there can be many different pages on each of those sites.

There's a big difference between logging the ip addresses used in tcp connections and actually inspecting the http and logging page requests.
(Not that I'm in favour of either of them)

What does the value of Telstra's shares right now have to do with the cost of building a national network over 8 years?

You don't need to practice civil disobedience publicly for it to be valid, but you do need to be ready to accept the consequences if/when you're caught

they have not implemented the filter at all, and will not implement the filter.

The filter only exists (and will only ever exist) in the imagination of Steven Conroy and non RTFAing slashdotters (ie. most of them).

it's never too soon!

EB Games have always had that policy. I would imagine some of their competitors do too.

That's not a counter example.

how is it more GUI-fied, or toy like than any other mainstream distro?

Also, the answer to your question is: because they have nothing to prove to anyone.

yes, so it would seem...

you know, copy and pasting a sentence and replacing a work in it is very easy, but it doesn't actually constitute an argument, despite what a number of slashdotters might think

I see nothing wrong with that syntax - it's pretty standard C++ style syntax, the same code is identical in pretty much any C based object oriented language.

Unless of course it was the libraries you had the problem with, not the syntax.

you cannot patent concepts in the first place. You can patent inventions.
Whilst some companies like to act like they have a patent on a concept, what they really have is a patent on a specific implementation of that concept (which may or may have some overly broad language that got past the examiners).

yup, level scaling bugged the hell out of me too.
Increasing the challenge should be done by having parts of the map or story require stronger characters, then the character just doesn't _do_ those things till they're strong enough.
And when there's been nothing but rats in a part of the map for ages, having it suddenly overrun by bears and mountain lions is just stupid. There's guards walking the paths night and day - the sudden infestation makes no sense.

Also, I hated the artificial quick-travel. It made the map way too small. Morrowind had realistic quick travel that made sense - boats, stilt striders and mages guilds. each of those methods had a cost - either in time or in money or both. The limitations of those methods also gave you another implicit goal - to create the perfect flying/leaping potion or spell...