Humodour

Preferential voting is the system Australia has used in the lower house for around 100 years, and it has worked very, very well. It certainly prevents certain very illogical situations. The country that perhaps needs preferential voting even more than the UK or America is Canada (although all 3 of them dearly need it). As for you not wanting certain people to have their voice properly heard at the ballot box, Wals, what the **** is that all about? Indecisive? You think somebody is indecisive if they vote for their favourite party (say Libertarian Party) but want to make sure that if the Libertarians don't win the seat that their vote for the Libertarians doesn't lead to a weakening of the vote for a party they'd otherwise also prefer, leading to the party they least prefer winning the seat (which is what happens under first-past-the-post)? Screw your small-minded elitist attitude. And yes, you're wrong. There are a few countries which can lay claim to being the worlds oldest continuous democracies (including Iceland, IIRC), but the UK is definitely and pretty obviously not one of them.

Value does not exist. You are merely a creation of my mind.

I hope I get to play as Gordon Freeman in DotA 2. Or maybe a vortigaunt! Or the G-Man...

China's rise is over-hyped. I would like to remind everybody that the world still consists of strong entities all over - Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, Latin America as a whole, India, South-East Asia as a whole, even Russia, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the other Commonwealths, America... and I'm sure there's a few countries in Africa that are relevant - maybe South Africa, Morocco, Nigeria. We're leaving an era of American dominance, certainly, but we're not entering an era of Chinese dominance because so many other countries are rising strongly at the same time, while existing power-players will remain strong.

Believe it. We've been able to teleport particles like photons for ages now. These particles are bosons, not fermions. I don't think we've been able to teleport fermions (e.g. protons, neutrons, atoms). It relies on a quantum property called 'entanglement'. What's unique about this discovery is that we can teleport the particles both accurately and quickly. No, it is not faster than the speed of light AFAIK. I'll be able to tell you more after I've taken quantum mechanics next year I guess. Haha. Here's the PhysOrg article on it (the link you provided is now broken): http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-quantu...eakthrough.html Here's the wiki link for quantum teleportation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation It says this: EDIT: So to clarify, this is a good breakthrough for most types of quantum computing!

No such a word. Stupid - more stupid - most stupid :Grammarnazi: Est

I like how the worms are crawling out of the woodwork to bag out Valve for having the balls to run with something completely different.

Good ol Krezack. Always ready to remind you how your country sucks. Oh, no, America is pretty great. You've just got lots of silly people residing there.

Over half the people in America may be idiots, but at least they're not subservient idiots like over half the people in Russia. See it's not racist 'cause I insulted them both equally. Well, mostly equally.

The Dutch and Japanese governments have both funded studies into illegal music downloading which both came back reporting it was of net benefit to the industry.

Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, and Portal are my favourite Valve games. HL2, HL2: Ep 2, and L4D1&2 are good games but not in the same league. I am hit by that Win 7 crash on first loading screen with Portal 2 so I'll have to wait for Valve to patch it. A good thing, really; I should study this long weekend.

Smartphones are amazing. Get one. If only for Wikipedia and Google at your fingertips anywhere. Just don't buy Apple products (i.e. avoid iPad, iPhone). The Android range are awesome and have good privacy (turn off the GPS if you're afraid someone will track you anymore than they already can simply be the fact that any mobile phone is on the grid). Personally I have an 'old' Nokia N900. I believe they're discontinued now. Except I've tried lots of smartphones since and nothing quite compares to it. Helps that it has a full Firefox browser and the processing power to run it smoothly. On that note anybody know if you can download Firefox for Android? I don't want those ****ty mobile browsers which load mobile versions of sites.

Vologic.

I, too, have recently spent 3 years in a Buddhist monastery. Brothers?

Steve Jobs can also suck my **** while he's at it. More dirt on Apple: International Trade court sides with Nokia and HTC in Apple's lawsuit against them: http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2011/04/20...ainst-apple.htm Meanwhile Apple's newer lawsuit against Samsung reeks of desperation, is full of inconsistencies, and is amusing considering Samsung is Apple's main chip and part supplier... talk about biting the hand that feeds: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383820,00.asp

I'm downloading it now... ****ty Internet connection in this old house so only getting 400kb/s speed. Considering all the hype and expectation I'm not sure it will manage to match the glory of Portal 1, but hey, I trust Valve well enough to supply me with a fantastic game regardless.

Australia will soon have subsidised universal fibre to the home, so I'm not too worried. Obviously the speed of fibre is the speed of light, but the switches being installed will deliver speeds of 1Gbps or 10Gbps to the end user (depending on when the area receives the rollout - later rollouts will receive faster switches due to falling equipment costs over time). From there, the investment opportunities and emergent technologies are elementary.

Well, your childish attitude aside, it's completely fair to juxtapose two social drugs, compare their harms, and ask people to think about why one of them is legal and the other is not. Alcohol is not harmless and to pretend otherwise is immature. I enjoy a pint of Kilkenny with my nachos as well as the next man, but I don't see why I should be stupid enough to pretend that in excess alcohol is not formidably bad for my health.

I find it hypocritical that you people are perfectly will to ignore any health advice about alcohol and pretend it is completely safe whilst simultaneously willing to judge and lecture those of us who partake in what are in fact healthier drugs such as psychedelics or marijuana. To which I shall respond by observing that your dope smoking has addled your wits! Because I have assiduously argued it should be legal. If sky diving is a matter for individual discretion then so too should cooking one's hippocampus like a fillet of duck. I am aware you have, and you'll notice I was using the 2nd person plural as a collective term, not specifically targetting you. As to the personal insult - well, it's baseless. I stopped smoking marijuana a while ago when I started uni again this year. Been cruising on a HD average for engineering maths, Spanish, and chemistry ever since. I highly doubt I've any problem with my faculties. BTW, more than the hippocampus I'd say it's the amygdala that gets wrecked by getting drunk.

I find it hypocritical that you people are perfectly will to ignore any health advice about alcohol and pretend it is completely safe whilst simultaneously willing to judge and lecture those of us who partake in what are in fact healthier drugs such as psychedelics or marijuana.

I did say that might be the case. It's far too easy to look everything up and give a spurious gloss of knowledgeability. Better if for the purposes of the discussion I expose my ignorance early on, I reckon. So thanks for setting me straight. So why is it that Britain virtually never has coalition governments? Voter behaviour? Soz, was sounding a bit arrogant, hey? But while this is a dry issue, it is important to the democratic health of a country, and as such I take it reasonably seriously. As to your last question, I don't know. I've thought about it a bit, and I guess it just comes down to tradition, cultural attitude, etc, yeah. For example, Australia has a system which is far more favourable to multiple parties and coalitions than Canada or the UK, and yet we still tend to hover around a 2.5 party system (although the past 4 or so years have started to significantly shatter this paradigm). I think part of it comes down to the fact that the UK and Canada have strong regional differences (e.g. Scotland in the UK, Quebec in Canada). In Australia, culture and ideology are far more uniformly distributed. When you apply this to the way seats are won in the lower houses of these countries, it does make sense to get the type of results you do.

No, if anything, it just shows the need for preferential voting. It's a minor alteration to your current electoral system, but a huge increase in the democratic fairness of elections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Where the hell did that come from? You ARE aware that Canada, like Britain and America, and unlike the rest of the world, still uses that horrible first-past-the-post system, right? Coalition governments can form regardless of whether that system exists because all that need happen is for multiple different parties to collectively have a majority of seats and they can form a coalition. Basically: no, you're wrong. What's worse with Canadialand is that BECAUSE it has so many parties AND the first-past-the-post system, parties which are not supported by the vast majority of Canadians can win power simply by pulling more votes than any single other party (and this could happen in any first-past-the-past system). So a party could win government with 20% of the vote as long as all the other parties poll below 20%, even if the supporters of those various parties all agree with each other more than the party that one government. It's not democratic at all.