online petitions can work...

...so long as they are conducted carefully and representatively. The various recent GetUp petition campaigns have achieved wonders.

The outrageous eleventh-hour attempt to pass legislation to have asylum seekers detained offshore, where anything can be done to them, away from prying public eyes was defeated. 78,000 signatures from Australians bolstered the courage of senators and MPs who stood for sanity in this stupid immoral mess we have now for a parliament. In the next 6 weeks dissenting politicians will be under great pressure to cave and allow the legislation. Now, more than ever we need YOU to sign and raise the count to 100,000 or more to show them that we don't want human abuses in our name. It is illegal and immoral and it is counterproductive.

Don't just complain, do something. Sign the petition. It works.
http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/NoChildInDetention

(One of the people who operates GetUp is Evan Thornley -- philanthropist, self-made millionaire, founder of internet search engine LookSmart, on the Board of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the Council of Melbourne University, and owner of Pluto Press.)

2006 not 06

It's funny you know... only a few years and the cause of the y2k bug has already been forgotten. Sure it didn't cause major problems, but that was largely because legions of smart people got to work retrofitting checks to ensure most of the errors were caught, and the most dangerous ones got fixed first. Other wacky things still happened, like seniors getting sent invitations to kindergartens and newborns being asked to register to vote. It all could have been avoided if people wrote the whole year instead of just the last two digits. But if there's one thing we learn, it's that people tend not to learn. Everybody still writes the year as just the last two digits. But that's understandable because it takes sooooo much effort to write those other two digits.

2006... oh man! I'm just gonna have to rest for a while now. That was so hard!