Sadly, the majority of Australians are sheep I think. (which is probably why Kiwi’s love it here).

When the Port Author massacre happened in Australia, our politicos took the public outrage as a good excuse to ban nearly all defensive or offensive weapons in Australia. People still get shot, only now the criminals are the only ones with guns and other weapons, and the police get to investigate our murders rather than justify our self defense. We’re not even allowed pepper spray for crying out loud! Retires getting beaten up in their own houses are becoming almost weekly news stories simply because there is no danger anymore to the criminals.

Now, in another show of rampant zealotry, Our current Labor government is not only planning on making ISP’s filter all of their traffic to restrict us to looking at only that which they deem suitable, but now it seems they plan to force all ISP’s to inspect all their traffic looking for possible copyright infringement so they can do the movie and music industry’s jobs for them.

Will someone please sack that idiot Stephen Conroy before we end up living in the Labor governments version of Taliban Afghanistan? I’m starting to wonder if this guy is actually being subsidised by movie and music companies. Just about every time he opens his mouth, it seems to cost us another right or freedom. Perhaps it’s time we got ourselves a constitution so the personal preferences of our transitory politions have less chance of becoming laws. More

Another example of Australian Stupidity is asking our government to push ahead with the emissions laws that just got knocked back. People, it’s sad but true that the cleanest large scale viable power generation we could have at this time is Nuclear, and Australia has backed away from that in fear. So telling our politicians to clean up our atmosphere is going to have only one real result. Low income people will suffer. Why? Well because the government doesn’t really have any new tech to roll out, they don’t have any new power generation methods or anything that could actually help the root of the problem. All they can do, is make it more expensive to process power and manufacture products.

Now what do companies do when their costs go up? Why they up their prices to consumers of course. So, your power bill goes up a thousand or so dollars a year, the power company pays the government the extra money they took from you, and business goes on as usual. Power usage won’t change much, and the government gets to look “green”, just for rooking the moronic sheep we call a populace.

People… The only net effect of these emission trading schemes is to make your life harder and take your money. There is no new technology or cheaper power options, it’s all about making it too expensive for you to use the power you do now (regardless if you already use the minimum you can already). That’s it! That’s all they government can do. Of course they can’t tell you that or you’d reject outright it so it’s shrouded in vaguarities and catch phrases to make it seem green. But wake up people, get a clue! This isn’t going to hurt the companies in question much, they will either get subsidised, or pass on the cost to us, or both. This is going to hurt our pockets and if you don’t believe that, your a fool.

So next time the government tells you how wonderful they are for pushing emission trading schemes, remember that what that actually means, is to make your life harder and much more expensive in the hope that you won’t be able to afford your current lifestyle and will therefor use less power.

Microsoft, who have been known to patent tiny and sometimes seemingly obvious things (timed mouse clicks for example) while riding on the shoulders of giants who often gave their truly revolutionary discoveries unencumbered by patents, has been bitten by the spurious software patent issue themselves. Microsoft Word it’s been ruled, is in breach of somebody else’s software patent (related to XML tagging). Better yet, an injunction forcing them to stop the sale of such infringing products has been granted also (Word and Vista). This has led to speculation that there may be something to the theory of Karma after all and that what goes around really might come around.

Sadly Microsoft has way too much money for this to make much of an impact on them. They’ll most likely pay the fine (290m), perhaps create a workaround and carry on business as usual. But still, the more money they have to hand out in the US, the EU and anywhere else that dislikes their practices, the more likely that at some point in the future, the board will realize that their version of business as usual isn’t really all that profitable anymore. Read more at Reuters.