Keeping Private Data out of Governments' Hands

Whenever a company says "we value your privacy" or "we will never pass your details onto third parties", there is always the implied, and sometimes expressly stated exception for "government and regulatory authorities as required by law" as has been revealed recently with regard to cloud service providers.

When companies or government agencies ask personal questions, if they really want truthful responses, there should be some line in the sand that sets a non-negotiable barrier against compulsion by the state to reveal the personal information.

A Comparison of the Engineers and Workchoices Cases

An essay from my study of constitutional law. I crammed the whole thing into a weekend, but it got pretty decent marks, and I managed to load it up with plenty of opinion, around the need to write down constitutional protections against government expansion of power and reduction of civil liberties, rather than relying on implied rights, which are doomed.

Other than converting it from a .docx into .html, it's as-is, including the poor-quality conversion itself. I probably should have cleaned it up according to the lecturer's comments, but meh. Anyway, here it is...

Critically compare and analyse the development and limits to the Australian Constitution by the High Court in its decision in Amalgamated Society of Engineers v Adelaide Steamship Co (“Engineers case”) (1920) and New South Wales v Commonwealth (“Workchoices case”) (2006).

Oaths and Affirmations

In Victorian legislation, section 21 of the Evidence Act 2008 requires sworn evidence to be given after an oath or affirmation. The difference between oaths and affirmations is that oaths are sworn to god, whereas affirmations are promises to the court.

This is faulty.

The Opes Prime Collapse and Phillip Thomas

The Opes Prime collapse is back in the media. This was where a stock-broking firm was lending money to people for them to buy shares, but until the money was paid back, Opes Prime technically owned the shares. When there were some defaults, Opes Prime ran out of money, went bust and started selling all the shares that other people thought they owned. This caused a minor collapse on the ASX as a variety of companies took plunges.

Solution to the Google+ Nymwars

Google is going through a lot at the moment due to their decision to not allow pseudonyms. This article details a lot of the opposition out there to their decision, but also guesses at the reasoning behind it.
It seems to me that the whole issue could be easily resolved with a slight model change.
Currently, you can find people by their real name, and that's the only name that people can use on Google+. But this doesn't help if you want to use your World of Warcraft screen name for some people and your real name for others.
So instead, what if you could just assign a name to each circle, and then, for each circle, say whether the name should be searchable?