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Every elected representative should stay in his election district and be only represented by a robot head and speaker in the parliament.

To this avatar-like representation the representative should have highbandwidth connection, so that his image and head movements as well as voice can be transmitted, and a back-channels showing the representative in his home-office the situation in the assemly room.

This way the taxpayer saves a lot by avoiding the cost of accomodation and transport for their representatives, while maintaining a dirtect contact between voters and representative locally iwithin the election district.

It has also the added benefit that lobbyists have more problems in contacting the legislative members and also contacts will be more visible as the voters will see who is contacting their elected representative - which can not when their representative is in Wahsington DC or their respective seat of government.

one possible product: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/278794,bell-labs-builds-telepresence-robots.aspx

Take this a step further Basically, it is NOT private owned. It is uncertain who owns it. So, not only is the CEO a top person of the communist party, but it turns out so are the other executives. This IS Air America.

Thats funny I thought that the CSIRO owned the patent on WIFI http://www.itnews.com.au/News/158194,csiros-wi-fi-patent-victory-earns-200m-and-counting.aspx

Said so from the land of 3 strikes-your-out.. seriously besides France, I thought Australia was the worst place to be if you're a pirate

Don't believe anything AFACT tells you. There are no baseball inspired laws in Oz against downloading, rumours of such were just another AFACT wet dream. The MO of these parasites is simple and obvious, make exaggerated claims in country A about what is done to "battle piracy" in country B, if country A is dumb/corrupt enough to actually implement it in law, reverse A with B and repeat.

Also it is not a crime to download copyrighted material in Oz since everything on the internet is copyright by default, sure AFACT can try and sue you in civil court for damages but it's never been done because the only damage they can claim is the real cost of the material, as such most cases would not even make the $50 minimum damages bar to get the case heard in the small claims court. If AFACT conducted themselves like their brethren do in the US (pay $X,000 or we will sue), I'm pretty sure they would be investigated by the authorities for racketeering and/or extortion (admittedly I may be giving them too much credit).

1. censorship - ISP voluntary filtering is up an' kicking (and don't give the "change your ISP", some of us can't do it)

2. Web browsing history retention - quote: ZDNet Australia broke the news on Friday that the Federal Government Attorney-General's Department was considering how it could best implement a data retention regime in Australia..
Please note: not "If it could implement..." but "how it could best implement...".

Now, sleep tight and sweet dreams.

Oh really, then why when I search for datacenter in a barn, this comes up first: Microsoft puts data centre in a barn (Jan 2011)

Yeah, I'm done alright.

In Australia a State Government used a ridiculously expensive "off the shelf" SAP payroll solution that turned into a complete disaster. A year later and staff still aren't being paid properly. Lots of finger pointing between IBM, SAP and Corptech who is the State Government's IT corporation. They paid $40M for software that didn't work, and still doesn't work.

Take that number in. $40M. Ridiculously overpriced even if it did work, but this doesn't even do that. Payroll isn't rocket science. A few competent programmers locked away for 6 months could do better. Far too much money is thrown at so-called 'enterprise software'.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/218348,ibm-under-fire-for-qld-health-bungle.aspx
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/351650/ibm_says_queensland_health_sap_failure_its_fault/
http://www.zdnet.com.au/qld-health-sap-woes-lead-to-cash-advances-339302381.htm
http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2010/05/07/215335_gold-coast-news.html
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/qld-health-pays-hefty-price-for-sick-payroll-system/story-e6frgakx-1225813063057
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/351608/updated_qld_govt_blames_ibm_health_payroll_bungle/

"He said that the phishing attacks were targeted specifically at employees .. The link in the body of the email took the user to a page that downloaded three malware programs – one that disables anti-virus software, another (iStealer) that is a Trojan keylogger to steal passwords, and a third (CyberGate) which offers hackers remote administration of the infected machine" ..link

Did any of this malware prompt for the admin password or where they already logged in as administrator. How they managed to write that story without once mentioning Microsoft Windows is incredulous. Solution: configure your email server to scrub all active content in emails. ie. Remove autorun scripts in msOffice files, mangle URL links and overwrite the header at the start of anything executable that's trying to download itself ...

In that case, Microsoft should no longer be able to blame business partners, contractors, customers, or whatever for their own problems, either.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/01/20/244979/Microsoft-blames-third-party-for-excessive-Windows-Phone-7-data.htm
http://theregoesdave.com/2009/10/15/microsoft-goes-schizo-starts-blaming-danger-for-lost-data/
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/70560,microsoft-blames-vista-insecurity-on-third-party-applications.aspx

You can't have it both ways, Microsoft. You want GM liable for software piracy in China, then you should be liable for Windows 7 phone phantom data usage.

It was the greens that negotiated this.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/249161,greens-win-foi-concession-on-nbn-co.aspx

I wasn't saying the people were dumb, just that the decision was short-sighted. Cerf has said so himself and he was basically the one who made that decision.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/245989,cerf-ipv6-crisis-is-imminent.aspx

Cerf, one of the key designers of the Internet's architecture, predicted that the long-anticipated exhaustion of the 32-bit address space available in the currently used IPv4 system was imminent.

"We're almost out of IPv4 address space. I'm a little embarrassed about that, because I'm the guy who decided 32-bit was enough. My only defence is that choice was made in 1977. I thought it was an experiment," he told attendees.

I have a feeling we'll need one in the US very soon (sometime this decade).

TOR: Congress prepares to follow Egypt with internet kill switch
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/246707,egyptians-turn-to-tor-to-organise-dissent-online.aspx

"Appelbaum, a high-profile associate of the Wikileaks whistleblowers' site, said the "irony was rich" in how the US Government that supported the pro-democracy protesters treated him on his return to the country and the experiences of an Egyptian democracy activist who was harassed on his return to Egypt as revealed in a Wikileaks cable."

There is more than enough talent being trained in Australia, what we lack is a communication and "digital economy" minister that actually knows something about IT. They guy got locked out of his own iphone FFS.

http://apcmag.com/how-conroys-daughter-wrecked-his-unsecured-iphone.htm

They guy is clueless and just keeps pushing his censorship agenda. Oh and the useless NBN.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/154249,nbn-useless-without-subsea-investment.aspx

Fingers crossed for CSIRO, last time they pulled a nice trick with the WiFI patent.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/216024,telstra-eyes-astronomical-pits-and-pipes-lease.aspx

Well I think that http://www.itnews.com.au/News/215939,nbn-co-to-buy-telstra-network-for-11-billion.aspx$11,000,000,000 counts as a "massive upside" in anyone's books...

TFA linked to the wrong article. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/232825,stallman-crashes-european-patent-session.aspx is the session Stallman "crashed", regarding software patents.

Stallman didn't crash the World Computer Congress presentation described in TFA's link http://www.itnews.com.au/News/233002,stallman-calls-for-end-to-war-on-sharing.aspx - he was giving the keynote! That's like saying Steve Jobs crashed the Apple Developers Conference presentation.

TFA linked to the wrong article. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/232825,stallman-crashes-european-patent-session.aspx is the session Stallman "crashed", regarding software patents.

Stallman didn't crash the World Computer Congress presentation described in TFA's link http://www.itnews.com.au/News/233002,stallman-calls-for-end-to-war-on-sharing.aspx - he was giving the keynote! That's like saying Steve Jobs crashed the Apple Developers Conference presentation.

Especially not when you realise that a vote for labour would censor every single one of those 75 videos. What's the point in the NBN if there's nothing to do on it?

However:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/223743,coalition-wont-support-internet-filter-report.aspx

Now explain this: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/221051,oracle-shuts-down-open-source-test-servers.aspx

It all seems like a bit of a double up.

While I'm no fan of Telstra here in Australia, they have recently trialed LTE at 75km using Nokia Siemens Networks equipment.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/215787,telstra-lte-trial-100-mbps-wireless-over-75km-cell.aspx

I know I'd prefer 100Mbps peak (88Mpbs average) over 2Mbps.

I'd like a Beowulf cluster of those ;)

Already, the telescope network has been used to image the heart of a galaxy called Centaurus A, which is 14 million light-years away and contains a supermassive black hole.

Observing the galaxy for ten hours, each of the six telescopes recorded up to 10 Tb of data. This was transmitted to Perth's Curtin University of Technology via KAREN and the 10 Gbps AARNET.

At Curtin, the data was processed on a local 160-core Beowulf cluster comprising a 100 Tb spinning disk and supported by petabyte storage at the iVEC supercomputing centre.

The cluster consolidated and processed the data into a final data set a "few" gigabytes in size, according to Curtin professor Steven Tingay.

Three days ago journalists from an Aussie IT magazine opened bank accounts using passport details published by the news media. http://itnews.com.au/News/168273,banks-accept-dubai-assassins-stolen-ids.aspx

I forgot to link to the story:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/168273,banks-accept-dubai-assassins-stolen-ids.aspx

That statement can only be true if you're talking about the original download. Distribution rights are far more expensive.

Who mod's this tripe up, when did the RIAA get mod points.

In a court of law you have to prove damages, if they want to prove damages from distribution they have to show clear evidence of distribution equal to the damages the damages being claimed. Given that the RIAA's case is on shaky evidence just for the downloading part and they cant prove how many times he shared the entire song(s) they can only claim for 1 license infringed. Then once that is proven they can only sue for actual damages incurred (US$0.35 per proven infringement).

But hey, I'm from this crazy nation called Australia where this kind of stand-over tactic is actually against the law, as in we'll see you in the criminal court next Tuesday and where judges can actually see through RIAA BS.

Australia is pushing for transparancy too: http://itnews.com.au/News/166965,greens-push-for-transparancy-on-secret-anti-piracy-talks.aspx

In a landmark legal ruling, IT services firm EDS has lost its ongoing case with broadcaster BSkyB after the British High Court ruled that the HP-owned company had lied about its expertise.

Google brings up the High Court of England and Wales as first result of "British High Court" so it appears we are victims of bad reporting.

But that not withstanding, the jurisdiction is in England as that's where the contract took place.

BTW, we Australians maintain to this day that Rupert Murdoch was never really an Australian.

As if this story wasn't interesting enough, the exec responsible for the CRM system lied about his internet degree, and got it from the same institution as the prosecutor's dog, Lulu, who achieved a better score. Too funny.

.. from hackers, thieves, terrorists and child pornographers, they'll roll over and accept it.
Of course, the "Christian Lobby" wants to extend the filter to cover much more than that.

They are upset because when notification of infringement is sent they essentially send it to the circular file and do nothing at all.

Sorry but they did do something with the notices, they forwarded them to the Western Australian police.

http://mobile.itnews.com.au/Article.aspx?CIID=160896&type=News

This hasn't started yet.

http://www.itnews.com.au/Gallery/156668,down-in-the-trenches---rolling-out-tasmanias-nbn-fibre-network.aspx

Have you actually been following the progress?

Stage 1 - Scottsdale, Smithton and Midway Point - were announced in Aug this year, will have backhaul fibre done by end of the year, homes physically connected in Mar 2010 and will have services available in June 2010.

Stage 2 - Deloraine, George Town, St Helens, Sorell, Triabunna, Kingston Beach and South Hobart - was announced last week - I expect a similar timeframe (ie. probably live in Oct 2010, but this is only my assumption.)

And yes, the installation of fibre has actually started (unless you believe these pictures are computer generated just to fool us.)

The coverage maps are available online and they cover the entirety of the towns/suburbs specified. Not just new estates. Not surprising, since Aurora Energy - the Tasmanian Government's partner in the successful NBN bid - has been running a brownfields FTTH trial since June 2007 in Devonport, New Town and part of South Hobart.
 

The internet vs pigeon test was done here just the other day ( spoiler: the pigeon won )

AU Legal Group Says ISP Allowed 100K Illegal Dowloads

Nice to know we have such great editors like kdawson who always keep their eye on the ball.

The issue use to be iiNet's supposed caching of said content. Possibly to do with this patent?

"... if you had clicked the second link in the article."

That's confusing. I quoted from the second link in the summary. The second link in the article, NSW starts school netbook rollout includes nothing about hackability.

Your excellent argument: However, that second link in the article does support your excellent argument about Slashdot supporting Microsoft advertising: 'According to Gillard, the netbooks came with "$5,500 of the latest Microsoft and Adobe software".'

Someone should send a letter to the Sourceforge, Inc. CEO, Scott Kauffman" and ask if Slashdot editors or anyone else at Sourceforge is allowed to accept money to run articles that are in fact advertisements.

Note that Mr. Kauffman is an advertising executive. That's helpful to my understanding, because, of all the technically-oriented companies with which I have had awareness over a period of decades, Sourceforge seems to me to be the most technically clueless. Everything Sourceforge does seems to me to be slightly below mediocre technically.

Sourceforge CEO Kauffman is said to have been involved with numerous companies, for example, PopTok This article is interesting: It's Alive!: PopTok Combines Emoticons With Movie Quotes. PopTok is an "Israeli company". Perhaps Mr. Kauffman's connections with Israel explain the fact that Slashdot has run several stories about Israeli startups that seem to be more schemes to get investor money than startups with real technical futures.

The Wikipedia article says, "Kauffman then spent time in turn with eCoverage, a direct-to-consumer online insurance company, Coremetrics, and (as President and CEO) MusicNow, an online music service partnered with FullAudio. In 2005, he ran the San Francisco-based digital-magazine service provider Zinio."

What is wonderful is that a government is realizing that making sure that students have laptops is an investment in the future of the country, and that everyone having the same system makes teaching easier.

Fuck http://www.itnews.com.au/News/156640,afact-raises-concern-over-unlimited-isp-plans.aspx ASPX: microsoft idiots

These worst-on-record, high-energy climatic phenomena -- hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, dust storms, etc. -- tell the real story of global warming. Burning fossil fuels emits energy into the atmosphere. Over a long period of time, that energy dissipates into the "cold" of outer space.

Over the past century, this injection of energy into the atmosphere was caused by the (very) roughly 1 billion Westerners. In the current century, there will be roughly 3 billion (including the Indians and the Chinese, who are buying cars left and right) apes who are injecting energy into the atmosphere.

Will the "cold" of outer space absorb enough surplus heat from the atmosphere at a sufficiently fast rate? Is anyone using a supercomputer to model this heat equation?

What sort of climatic catastrophy will occur when 3 billion apes -- with their automobiles, power plants, lawn mowers, etc. -- inject a daily, massive pulse of energy into the atmosphere?

Other than the network capacity issue they are pretty "wink wink nudge nudge" about P2P, and are only doing the bare minimum to appear to be complying with the governments wish to institute network filtering.

Is that a recent change? I was under the impression that Exetel was against it when used for piracy on moral grounds and had no issue with permanently disconnecting repeat offenders. From a brief search on Google I was able to locate an Exetel blog post from a year and a half back that states:

Of course, as far as copyright theft goes, Exetel has taken the hardest stance of any ISP that I know of, and we have done that since we began over four years ago. Not because of any implied threat or stretched interpretation of the Copyright Act. And certainly not because of any direct financial benefit (quite the opposite, from the 'outraged' emails sent from soon to be ex customers). Rather because, actually, it is the right thing to do. We have always made it very clear that thieves are not welcome.

Of course I do realise that P2P is frequently used for legitimate file transfers, but the "wink wink nudge nudge" you wrote seems to imply you believe they are lenient in their dealings with piracy. The blog post would indicate otherwise and outlines the process they take for disconnecting anyone that causes them to receive a copyright infringement notice. A more recent example of their P2P off-peak policy also seems to indicate they aren't very friendly towards P2P in general, regardless of what is being downloaded.

...but the other option is for all traffic to be slow if the links max out due to unrestricted P2P

Of course the real other option would be to provide the bandwidth they advertised for the service and set realistic quotas to keep it in check, like most of the other ISPs in Australia do, rather than giving all plans a flat 60GB bonus during certain hours of the day that they cannot actually provide when many users take advantage of it.

Ok, the Australian article does state that, but if you read the article linked through the slashdot submission we are currently discussing.

Chinaâ(TM)s industry and information technology minister Li Yizhong said manufacturers, internet users and organisations opposed to the plans had received the wrong message from his department and that installation was never planned to be compulsory.

He said Green Dam would be installed in public places and schools, but would be âoevoluntaryâ for other users who can choose whether to install a software disk that they will receive when buying a new computer.

But a bigger reason for this is the fact that there are very very strict laws against corporate influence on politics in Australia. And there are similarly tough regulations surrounding what companies are allowed to do when it comes to advertising, donations, etc etc.

Unfortunately not strict enough.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/25005,australian-high-court-rules-in-favour-of-modders.aspx
The High Court of Australia has ruled that Australian consumers and overseas travellers can buy cheaper computer games and hardware offshore and modify them locally.

Or to be able to play legally bought games from other markets. Damn those thieving consumers, wanting to use their legally purchased but cheaper products!

Gadens added in its statement that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) had stepped in as a friend of the court at Federal Court level to argue that regional coding was detrimental to consumer choice.

Can but ain't. They're all queuing up to opt-in;

Some ISPs, including one of the market leaders Orcon, have clearly stated they will opt out and instead offer voluntary filtering software to their subscribers.

Hopefully we IPREDator before we get the filters

Sorry, but IPREDator in recent discussion, has been flagged as not quite the knight in shining armour. Best we fall back on the likes of Tor or I2P.

... because nothing says "loser" so much as "I'll pay you to be my friend."

The median twitter user makes one post, then abandons the account.

Unlike other social networking sites like Facebook.com, men are almost twice as likely to follow other men on Twitter than they were to follow women, according to the study.

It doesn't mention mac usage ...

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/146975,just-a-few-on-twitter-do-all-the-tweeting---study.aspx

The Harvard study examined public entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users. The researchers studied in May the content created in the lifetime of the users' Twitter accounts.

It found that 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research.

More than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days.

The median number of lifetime "tweets" per user is just one, according the research.

Twitter gets a lot of hype, but aside from everyone who's doing it in an attempt to cash in one way or another, nothing to see there ...

they listed ubuntu, but oddly it's also on their "disappointing technologies page" see?

All on one page printer link: here.

http://www.itnews.com.au/Tools/Print.aspx?CIID=146459

The UK's track record for interception during ww1, ww2 and the cold war is rather impressive. The had the 'empire' listening, sorting and decoding.
Sure MI5, MI6, the yard, the SAS might have had a few publicity problems with spies, death squads ect.
ey Jane Blonde "'T' had been carrying the [unencrypted]storage device in her handbag, which she left on a transit coach in Columbia."
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/101888,mi6-scrapped-major-drug-operation-after-data-loss.aspx
But if told to find people in the UK who use computers to enjoy 'fetish' forums and sites, I think GCHQ should be able to find and sort that out.

See, to me the concept of winners paying taxes on a prize is utterly insane. It means pretty much any non-cash prize is likely to become a financial curse to most recipients.

One textbook example is this poor guy who missed out on a space trip because he couldn't afford to pay the taxes. Despicable to drive up someone's hopes like this.

Where I come from there are still taxes payable on prizes, but the amount is payable by the drawer, not the drawee. Much much more sensible, IMO.

But then again what do I know? I still think making customers pay to receive SMS messages is criminal too.