No, you can punish the big faceless organisation by not purchasing tickets from them in the first place, but urinating on the floor of the plane will only punish the FAs who already have a very hard and sometimes dangerous job, and might not be in a position to "look for a new job".

The cop-out is you claiming that you can treat people in such a disgusting manner because of your assumption that they're able find a less degrading job at their whim.

That's the "they are just doing their job" cop-out. If they aren't happy with the consequences of working for an organization that denies people their basic human dignities, then they should be looking for a new job. To give them a pass because they are just little people in the machinery of a big faceless organization is to give the big faceless organization a pass.

Once could argue though that the FAs have a choice in exercising common sense... which dictates that when a guy/gal [or a baby/toddler] has to go, you let them go.

Well, next step is to physically restrain and drug passengers as they take their seats - all in the interests of safety. :-)

With all due respect on the aisle thing, if I'm on a long-ish flight, fall asleep after eating whatever, and I have to pee badly enough, stand aside and let me use the lav, or I'll just piss in my paints in the aisle and let the cleaning crew on the ground deal with it...

If it works, why not? Are you going to claim some kind of Bacon allergy?

Surely people on Slashdot won't dismiss a functional idea because it makes you laugh?

Let me fix that for you:

Satire of a political figure that we don't like is legitimate use of a domain.

What would happen if the domain in question was called "Obama: Fascist President" or some such? I mean, disregarding the obvious racism aspect for a moment.

I'm no fan of Stephen Conroy's Great Wall of Australia, but the owners of the site in question can't have any claim to legitimacy if they fraudulently use someone else's name to register it.

I have a laptop and I've only used my optical drive to load software. How do people normally get around that with netbooks that come without optical drives?

Sounds like a typical college twit with a chip on their shoulder who saw nothing wrong with purposely baiting authorities. We only have her side so of course she wants to come off as clean and pristine, yet the items and such on her point to either someone incredibly stupid or someone intentionally trying to cause a scene.

The problem is, you don't cause scenes where people put their lives on the line every day. I don't care what stupid tripe you think you know or learned at home. The real world is a whole different place and it don't care what you think. In some areas of the world the last thing you want to do is bring notice to yourself. Check points are the last place in the world I would want to screw up.

Evidence, please.

The empirical evidence from the current regime is that where a game is refused classification, the publisher will almost always make the necessary alterations (toning down certain amounts of gore etc) in order to achieve an MA15+ rating. The current system has thus been reasonably effective -- ensuring that games are made suitable for a 15+ audience, and given that anyone in the 15-18 category is unlikely to be prevented from accessing a title simply by its having a higher rating that is a defensible approach (by which I mean "there is an argument for it" not "it is the correct approach").

To respond to your specific comments -

Children in Australia are very easily able to afford to purchase computer games -- at current prices, a game is likely to be around one to two months' pocket money (not counting additional money from a part-time job, which many 15-18 year olds have).

Regarding BitTorrent, the speed with which a title can be downloaded (ie, the number of active downloaders) isn't actually relevant to availability. There's no part of classification law that says "it's better if you have to leave the download going overnight". The speed of the download isn't difficulty-to-obtain, it's just latency-to-obtain, and I doubt anyone would consider a few extra hours of waiting significant.

In reality, the vast majority of items made illegally available to minors are purchased from shops in defiance of 18+ ratings: cigarettes and alcohol. The number of 16 year-olds who can get a PS3 to play an illegally downloaded game, while large, is much fewer than the number who can get cigarettes illegally from the local store. From an evidence-based perspective, if you want to prevent illegal access by minors, it really is physical availability from shops that should be targeted.

I would avoid making any ultimatums. The problem with ultimatums is that you have to follow through, and that puts the other party in charge of your actions.

And most matters should -not- be confidential. If we are going to waste our tax dollars on a court case all records kept from it should be public. Don't take it to court if it is confidential, otherwise we have press manipulating facts that should be public.

Frankly, I find it amazing that Usenet is still on anyone's radar. Even the alt.binaries groups. It's been a long time since I've found an ISP that includes a free usenet server. The reliable ones are the ones that you have to pay for, and honestly, if you're going to pay to pirate things, you're probably doing it wrong.