I know this is not strictly on topic, but it is a technical support question that probably does not warrant starting a thread of its own.

On the 'Welcome to the Forum' page (the one that shows users currently online) just before I posted this, the 'Current General Discussions' list showed all but the first two topics in italics. I can't say as I have ever noticed this behaviour before. Does anyone know what this change in typeface means, why it comes about, or when it was first introduced?

All of the Recent Article Discussions titles listed on this page were in ordinary typeface.

For interest's sake, this is the post archiving prevented, modified only to permit this introduction:

"On one hand Justice Kirby appears to be critical of the arguably supine response of the previous Parliament to a demand by the US that Australia enact legislation in support of technological protection measures (TPM) under the provisions of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement. An Australian Parliament listening more to large corporations expressing their desires through influence over a foreign legislature, than a Parliament listening to its own constituency, is certainly how some lay observers saw this response.

On the other hand, Justice Kirby seems to wish to 'expand the franchise' with respect to the development of constitutional interpretation, perhaps particularly where implied meanings within the Constitution may be involved, by taking into account judicial views from other jurisdictions. This would seem to water down the protections that ordinary Australians see as existing in the relative difficulty of altering the Constitution, let alone with respect as to the support of the independence of the Australian High Court judiciary afforded by the all but 'life' tenure of such appointments.

Although not myself previously favouring prisoners having a vote, but because the judgement in that case arose from an arguably implied requirement of the Constitution with respect to representation, I accept this decision of the High Court, out of regard for the Constitution. I can only wonder at seeming absence of any judicial concern as to the 1984 conditional disfranchisement of an indeterminate, but much larger, number of British citizens who erstwhile had the vote. I can accept that ordinary citizenship legislation going back at least as far as 1948 may have appeared to justify this disfranchisement, but it would seem to me that it is implicit in Section 44 of the Constitution that any such citizenship legislation, to the extent that it disfranchised such British subjects or citizens, would have been unconstitutional. Is it that nobody has brought a case?

I have found Justice Kirby's Parable 2 from the article particularly useful in an Open Source forum discussion of Windows Activation and OLPC."

Graham Y,

I have googled for information and found a couple of my OLO comments.

I thought that the OLO was strictly for members only.

Welcome to the thread Danielle.

So far as I understand the OLO site, if you can view any content when you are not logged-in or have not even registered for membership (ie. posting rights etc.), then so can the world. Obviously this includes search engines like Google.

There are internal features of the OLO site that allow you, or any other user or guest, to view your posting history, and/or any number of your, or others', posts. Just clicking on an opening poster's name in the general discussion topic index will take you to that user's posting history, for example. Another way of getting there is by clicking the 'Users' button at the top left of any comments page, and then finding and clicking the user's ID in the large alphabetical list that (eventually) comes up.

The article discussion index currently lists this article: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7209 . It is an obituary of Lionel Hogg snr, father of Lionel Hogg jr, co-founder with Graham Young of OLO. The article is titled 'You wouldn't read about it'. One of the things OLO does, that the mainstream media increasingly fails to do, is to facilitate the expression and interchange of views on matters the subject of social and political debate in Australia. All too frequently these days on matters of real concern to members and guests, but for OLO, you wouldn't read about it.

It is true, as userID Cuphandle states here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1672#32395 , that "It appears to me that regardless of the subject posted on the Forum, the responses generally seem to be lacking in the hard statements needed to answer the interwoven questions posed! ....... Some people treat this Forum and it`s content as a daily "chat room", wasting time and space by innanely arguing "the for`s and the against`s" of subject matter created by their own process of side-tracking away from the original subject matter!".

OLO lets the world see who such posters are.

Cheers.