Australian Govt Censors Notes From Secret Anti-Piracy Talks 177
An anonymous reader writes "It looks as if the Australian Government really doesn't want the public to know what's going on in its closed-door talks with ISPs and the content industry. The Attorney-General's Department has applied the black marker to almost all of the information contained in documents about the meetings released under Freedom of Information laws. The reason? It wouldn't be in the 'public interest' to release the information. Strange how the public seems to have a high degree of interest in finding out what's being talked about."
Re:Internet Villain of the Year (Score:5, Informative)
It's strange how they know what we shouldn't know. Bunch of UN communist stooges. Bring back Guy Fawkes.
Guy Fawkes was just the fall guy.
The leader of the group was actually Robert Catesby who was a Jesuit who wanted to replace King James and the English government with the 9 year old daughter of King James. Catesby was a bit of a religious extremist himself, described as a crusader by his friends and relatives. Guy Fawkes was a soldier who had fought in the Spanish Netherlands, hence he was tasked with guarding the gunpoweder the rebellion kept in a storehouse under the House of Lords, he was not the core of the Jesuit rebellion. Fawkes may have been historically the most famous, but it was Catesby's head that was put on a pike in front of the House of Lords.
To be frank, I dont like the likes of Conroy, I like the idea of giving control of the internet to a bunch of religious rebels even less. OK, Conroy is a religious twat as well, but he'll never get his way, the Labor backbench would have a little rebellion of their own, his filter has failed twice before in the house.
Re:Internet Villain of the Year (Score:5, Informative)
Catesby might have been a religious extremist, but then, so was James I. His persecution of Catholics is what drove the Gunpowder Plot. The distinction between the Gunpowder Plotters and James I wasn't that one was religious and the other isn't - it's that one was Authority and the other was Rebellion. You might as well say you don't like Conroy, but don't like the idea of putting a bunch of dead Englishmen in charge either - it's a strawman. That's not what the OP was saying.
Re:Sickening, (Score:5, Informative)
Be careful with your suggestions, someone might actually do it ;-)
A visit to Wikipedia (with recent numbers from the CIA World Factbook) learns that Argentina, Panama, Turkey, Estonia, Paraguay, Peru, Lithuania, Uruguay, Ecuador, Kosovo, Suriname, Colombia, Israel, Sweden, Costa Rica, Guinea, Latvia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Poland, Luxembourg, Honduras, South Africa, Austria, Slovakia, Macedonia, Brazil, Guatemala, Venezuela, Finland, Germany, Albania, Malta, Iceland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Switzerland, The Bahamas, Belgium, El Salvador and New Zealand all have bigger economic growth than Australia.
Depending on how you define the western world, they might not all be part of it, and I may have forgotten a couple. But the point is, Australia is not by a long shot "pretty much the only growing economy in the western world."