Of course, making their policies so easily accessible makes it easy to decide that it would be crazy for me to vote for the LDP above *any* of the major parties :).

Their perhaps laduable views on some social policy does not make up for their fetishization of property rights and the free market, along with their other economic views that they propound.

And indeed, in the last Australian Federal election, a minor party managed to win the seat of Melbourne demonstrating that a vote for them was definitely not wasted :).

(Sufficient people put them first on their voting papers that one of major parties was eliminated in the "instant-runoff" before them. Now the Greens are probably the biggest minor party and there were some details which favoured them, but nevertheless, Melbourne strikes me as the leftmost city in Australia, so the result doesn't appear too unusual.)

As noted by one of the article commentators, jointly holding a patent doesn't allow you to use it defensively against the other joint holders, and it might be difficult to use it to protect other manufacturers building, say, Android phones. So, this could be the reason that joint bidding was dimissed by google.

+1 to the Awesome bar from me :).

Well, I've already moved Green/Independent (even the Democrats if they field a canditate) up my voting list, but the Liberals would have to drop Abbot before I'd even consider voting them above Labour. There's still a lot to prefer about Labour over Liberals, especially if the stupid schemes can be frustrated in the Senate. While putting Abbot in for a term might sound good, I can still remember thinking that the previous Labour government needed some time in opposition and what resulted from that :(. Still, there is still time to do some letter writing to politicians and raise their fears, that might make a difference when it comes time to assign portfolios :).