Well, it’s a bit of a weird day… I’m actually going to commend the government of Australia for two things today. Weird, considering that the pary in power is one that I am almost diametrically opposed to, politically.

Firstly, I’d like to thank both Houses of Parliament here in Australia for making my MP3 library currently stored on my computer 25% completely-and-totally legal! Thank you so much for finally ruling that format-shifting from CD to MP3/etc is actually legal here down under! Congrats!

… oh, and as to that figure, yeah, 25%, I know, I know. That has a lot to do, however, with the limitations imposed by a 60GB internal drive, which currently has 10GB of anime and 6GB of WoW installed, as well as other apps and games and files and so on. If I actually put all my music on it, including all the OSTs I have backed up digitally, and then went and ripped all my disks, we’d be looking at easily 30-35% legal. Easy.

I mean, at the moment, 750 odd legal tracks out of 2800 odd tracks. If I did all of it, it’d easily be 2000 odd legal tracks out of 5000. Probably. ^^

Oh, and secondly (and somewhat more controversially) I’d like to applaud the members of Parliament for the results of their conscience vote on the use of therapeutic cloning today, which resulted in an 82 to 62 vote in favour of cloning embryos for use in stem cell research. Of course, being a geneticist here I’m a bit biased in the result, but I’m glad that the goverment hasn’t given in to the pressure imposed upon it and has made what I feel to be a correct decision here - yes, I’m aware of many of the rather sticky moral issues surrounding the notion of therapeutic cloning. These do, however, all fall from a religious implication of what forms life, and it’s really hard to be a scientist and look at it non-objectively. For myself, considering I’m non-religious, and considering the relatively solid links between forebrain development and conscious existence… yeah.

So thanks for making copyright law somewhat better in AU, guys - somewhat, though. It’s nice and all to be able to format shift… but making actual copyright infringement a criminal offence is just, to excuse my french, fucking ridiculous. And being unable to format shift DVD video is a bit stupid too, although that may have been altered in the amendments which I still need to read through. And thanks for making a decision based on merit, and not religious pressure. Well done.

Still not voting Coalition though. Two rights don’t fix up eight years of being completely screwed.

Alcata’riel.

-Andiyar