interesting point
"Perhaps this post is illegal, if not now then maybe retrospectivly in the future. I would not at all put it past them."
An interesting point. Didn't the UK courts recently rule that an online article is "published" every time it is accessed?
If so, a comment could become illegal if it was accessed during the run-up, even if it was posted previous to the run-up (assuming it would be illegal if published during).
In that light, the judgement makes sense to me. Before now I'd have said something was only published the first time it was made publicly available - in the same way that a magazine is published once and could find it's way to a doctor's waiting room to be read by lots of people over a period of time - which is about ten years if the waiting rooms I've seen are anything to go by.
So there could be pages out there that are fine right now but become illegal once an election is declared and then are fine again afterwards?
My personal opinion is to just ignore the internet, at least this time around - are people's views really going to be changed on who they vote for because of some crap they read on the web?
Will anyone give a shit about the election enough that they decide they're going to research the various options on the internet?
If the answer's yes then Google can shape our elections.
Fortunately Google won't be able to do that as everyone just votes for the same party as their parents do or did (those who don't like their families vote for the other party to spite them). The folks who vote Lib Dem are the ones who actually thought about it and realised that:
a) they're the least shit out of the lot of them
b) it doesn't make a blind bit of difference who's in office because ultimately it's Joe Public that actually screws the country up, not the politicians (60 million of us and a few hundred of them and yet it's all the politician's faults?)
This article is the sort of stuff I read The Register for.
And finally, that person in the lead in the Aussie elections couldn't run a bath.
AC 'cause I've never been to Australia ...