The U.S. presidential campaign - boring.

The Australian Prime minister race? Yawn.

If you want an interesting election, looks like you have to go to Argentina.

And I thought American politics was amusing. Australia does things a bit different, and with even more transparency and hilarity. Seems that there isn't a fixed day for when elections are held. The sitting prime minister gets to pick the day within some range. The range was starting to run out, and Mr. Howard has been promising for weeks that he's going to set an election 'soon'. Yesterday was the day he called it. For November 24 - or about five weeks from now. Contrast this to the U.S. where they're fighting over an election that's a year away.

So although we know the opposition is Kevin Rudd - a guy who looks a lot like John Denver, and have known it for some time, the campaign has only just begun - and in five weeks it will be over.

Now John Howard has been taking a beating in the polls, mostly for not standing up to and disagreeing with 'the idiot'. So day one of the campaign starts off with a (drum roll please....) tax cut. If you can't beat 'em in the polls, and don't have a credible strategy, bribe the voters. You may laugh, but this tactic has been working for thousands of years.

I can hardly wait for day two. This promises to be quite an interesting election.

There are occasions when having IP location checking is a good thing. For instance Google notices that I'm in Australia (by mapping my IP address), and gives me the option to search for something in 'Australia only', or 'Search the web'.

I've noticed more and more software that is location aware. For instance a lot of the large electronic manufacturers do this to quickly point you to products for your local supply voltage and also to direct you to the nearest retailer that stocks their products. Software download sites often use it to choose 'mirrors' of the software that you can download without your data packets traversing multiple continents and oceans. 

Technically, it's not hard. I've done it myself. You just need to link to a Geo <-> IP database.

Sometime in the last 48 hours, it looks as if CNN became location aware. This is enough to make me protest. I'm presented with a new header bar that gives me Sydney weather info, so I know what's going on.  What I fear, is that I'll no longer be able to get U.S. news - which is my only reason for visiting CNN. Not that CNN is the best distributor of information. But it's the principal of the thing. Now that I know that they know where I am in the world, I cannot shake the feeling that I'll never know if the news page that I'm presented with represents actual US news, or some localized version of the news that was molded and massaged to suit the political and social leanings of the local population. You know why they do this of course. China. Now they can honor the Chinese government requests to subdue information that is ultimately going to China. So I feel like a Chinese dissident. In order to get American news - from America; I'm going to have to connect anonymously via a proxy server somewhere in the continental U.S.