A lot of the comments have been hating on hip-hop, and well, I can't say I blame them. Most of the stuff you hear is just the same old shit. Some boring harmony over a lifeless beat and some lyrics that are so dishonest that it's almost offensive. But then you get some people who take hip-hop and turn it into something wonderful.

There are/were quite a few jazz guys who are taking the chill groove of hip-hop and fusing it with jazz, adding beautiful harmonies and some honest expression. In the 90's there was Branford Marsalis and his group Buckshot LeFonque who mixed jazz, funk, hip-hop, rock and pop. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band fuse the New Orleans brass band sound with just about everything they encounter, including hip-hop (probably best heard on their album What's Going On?). Trumpeter Roy Hargrove has The RH Factor, who deal in a dirty club type of groove.

Then there are guys like Robert Glasper or Jason Lindner who seem to play a more modern jazz with a heavy hip-hop influence. More adventurous harmonic and rhythmic devices, more of an improvised nature, generally smaller groups, but still with that same spacious and cool feel, played in a way that someone could rap over top.

If you think you hate hip-hop but love beautiful, honest music then I implore you to check out some of these groups. They may spark an interest in the genre that will lead you to search for more... of course, when you come across some guy singing about his drugs, money and women, it's perfectly fine to politely tell him to fuck off. Just don't let those arseholes stop you from listening to good music, whatever genre they happen to be polluting.

In my experience, the Australian notes have gone through the dryer and come out without any noticeable damage. They don't hold up so well to ironing though... I was putting some fundraiser money I'd collected into an envelope and my OCD side got the better of me... wanted to flatten out a terribly crumpled $5 note so that it would sit nicely in the envelope. I put the iron on a low setting, and went to work, only to find my $5 not ending up a good 10% or so smaller than the others...

I'm having trouble finding any reference to a 100mb/s plan on either Optus' site or whirlpool.net

As for throttling once you've used a set amount of data, that's pretty much standard practice... it's not like they hide it.

Easier said than done... even in parliament question time all he does is waffle on about crap until his time is up.

I did like the little "I thank the senator for his attempt to answer the question" quip Ludlam threw in...

My 10.5.7 update was significantly smaller than what's listed in the summary. It was about 290mb for my third generation macbook pro. Why is it so?

I knew there was something familiar about this. I stumbled upon it on a slow day at work a couple of years ago. The video is dated 2007 at the end.

I recall someone busting Conroy's chops on the ABC radio show Media Watch a short while back. I also remember another ABC radio announcer slipping in some filter related questions to one of the people involved in a child porn ring bust. Something to the effect of:

interviewer: "What about filtering, does that help the problem?"
police guy dude: "Oh, they don't do anything."

I should really try and find a source for that. There were a few other radio shows talking about it as well (I think "Spoonman" on Tripple M dedicated an evening to the subject).

There were a few TV spots on morning chat show type programs, as well as a nice little piece on the 7:30 report. They all (and rather surprisingly for the morning shows) seemed to convey a nice message of "While childporn is bad, and it would be awesome to be able to get rid of it, this filter thing is just stupid." There were also various newspapers who had people blogging about the subject on their websites. I don't remember seeing a whole lot make it to print though.

Well, you have a number of options really. You can always use one of those proxies the kids at school use to access whatever social networking site they use. Sure, they'll attempt to block them all, but it's quite an impossible task, what with new ones popping up every couple of minuets or so.

You can always set up a VPN or tunnel through with SSH. I believe you can get access to an offshore server for a couple of dollars a month.

I guess you could always get a friend overseas to email you the page as well, and while I'm not sure if the filter will filter email content, they could always chuck it in a .rar or something and encrypt it. There's also nothing to stop them printing it out, putting it in an envelope and mailing it to you (at least, not yet anyway).

Okay, so the last two options are a bit shit in terms of convenience, but the point is that if you want the blocked content bad enough then there will still be a way for you to get it.

That's just the thing. Some of them don't. And none of them have a mandatory government controlled filter system. Obviously some ISPs provide filtering for their customers, but they're opt in. The only mandatory filter systems in place are in countries like China or Iran.

When the minister was asked why he lied out his arse he just dodged the question by prattling on about the trials until his time was up. Bastard.

It has before been alluded that it is just like what China have implemented, even in the senate. To quote Senator Conroy (the nut in charge of the department for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy).

From http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate/commttee/S11346.pdf.

No, you great twat, you can't, not when what you're proposing is so damn much like it.

There was a short ~5 minute interview with Mark Newton on one of the morning TV programmes (the one on Nine... don't recall the name), and there have been a couple of radio shows about it here and there (a few on the ABC, there was a great discussion on a Triple M show the other night too).

So word should hopefully be starting to spread around the general public about how bad this plan really is.