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The plan does not come with a free phone. The plan comes with a phone that you make payments on built into the connection payments contract. After you phone is stolen you must continue to make payments and it is up to you to organise a replacement phone. http://help.telstra.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/17260. If you choose to buy a second hand replacement phone then you should go here http://www.amta.org.au/pages/amta/Check.the.Status.of.your.Handset to make sure it is not stolen. Of course you can pay extra, for premium care ie handset insurance policy and they will replace a stolen phone.

Note that is an internationally registered numbered so phones are bricked in all countries that co-operate.

I know in Australia they have lifted the ban on surcharges when using a credit card. Many companies now charge 2%, though these are generally either greedy or cheap. Other companies advertise "less for cash" (though you can get cash price when using EFTPOS (debit cards))

Isn't telstra an evil price gorging monopoly? One who actively sell mobile handsets?

Now that is entertaining.

The reason? The computer was a smoking wreck from lightning strike. He didn't want to call the manufacturer because they would charge him for support.

You have to pay for DTMF?

And I thought Telstra was bad. They do some crappy things but not this.

Voice: "Please enter your phone number"
Me: Enters Phone Number ...wait at least 15 if not 45 minutes
Operator: "Can you tell me your phone number, please?"

I've taken to stating bluntly that "I've already entered my phone number, isn't it in front of you?". God, I hate that - why waste my time entering my damned phone number and then ask me it AGAIN?

Telstra (http://www.telstra.com/) has this stupid voice recognition system which incidentally, doesn't really work:

Telstra: "Please say your phone number."
Me: "I want to talk to a Fsdjfdsfjng person."
[repeat about 5 times] ...and voila, you get put on a different queue. /me stupid Telcos

DSL

Here in Australia the main telco is majority owned by the Federal Government. The share price is crashing because if people getting VOIP or mobiles and this is impacting Government revenue forecasts.

Currently we have a whole lot of anti terrorist legislation about to be passed, with some features which take rights away from normal people suspected of being terrorists.

If the security services went to the Government and said that this VOIP stuff is enabling (suspected) terrorists to evade wiretaps, then perhaps this inconvenient service could be made to go away.

That is how I see it happening, anyway.

You obviously haven't come across Telstra then.

I don't actually understand what's new about this... speaking as an Australian:

First of all, the plans to privatise Telstra have been around for AGES and this is certainly nothing new.

Secondly and perhaps more notably, I thought that the telco was already split into wholesale/retail. At least, there is currently a wholesale and retail website, which are presumably registered and separate businesses...:

• http://www.telstrawholesale.com.au/
• http://telstra.com/

Completely different as far as I can see...

I didn't think that argument existed in the first place.

Typically from Asia: Thailand, India and so on.

Thanks to the efforts of our local telco mostly-monopoly, it's actually cheaper at the wholesale level to call from overseas, just like from here in Perth it's much cheaper to fly to Bali than Sydney. I once worked for a bloke who would make a call to a Sydney number from his mobile, then hang up. Sydney would recognise the calling number, and pass the information to a site in Japan, which would ring him back. He would then dial the number he really wanted and Japan would connect them. Two calls from Japan were much cheaper than a direct call mobile-to-mobile through a single tower which was more or less in line of sight. Economists have a lot to answer for.

Well, here in regional Australia, I pay about US$60/month (including phone line rental charges) for an ISDN connection that does 128/128kbps. Of course, that drops to 64/64 when someone is on the phone.

The lack of downtime is amazing too... the phone and internet were only down for a total of a few weeks last year.

There is no download limit either, except for a vague statement about "excessive use" in the Acceptable Use Policy. They say that as long as you don't download over 1GB, you should be fine.

Plus I get a warm fuzzy feeling from sending money to our benevolent telecommunications monopoly each month.

Beat this for an amazing deal. I don't miss the fact that we don't yet have cable or ADSL here at all! :(

Isn't an SMS a short ( <1second) call to a messaging centre? When I took my GSM phone from Australia to Europe in 1997, the charge for sending an SMS was A$0.11, which represented the cost of a short international call to the Australian message centre. An SMS sent from Australia was charged at A$0.25 at the time (and remains above A$0.20 still). When SMS became wildly popular in Australia, the phone companies must have been rubbing their hands together with glee. Since 1997 the companies have begun charging extra (A$0.75) for "International TXT" (though during my search I found that Orange doesn't, to their credit).

I'm sure an SMS wouldn't cost the phone companies more than $0.02 to deliver. Otherwise, how could Telstra afford to offer 200 messages per night? Admittedly to other Telstra customers, but still...

• Series 60 OS (and the associated higher resolution screen)
• 1.3 Megapixel or higher camera
• Expandable memory
• Better quality screen
• Faster UI

• Very average screen
• Poor quality camera
• UI could be faster
• Joystick could be better
• No MP3 ringtone support
• Not much memory (3.5MB)

• We have a Universal Service Obligation enforced by law which requires that access to communication services be equal in rural areas to high density cities. In a very large country with a very low population density, that increases the cost of providing the service.
• We are geographically isolated. Undersea fibre links cost a lot of money to run and maintain. Why is this such a big deal? We predominatently want Internet content from other English-speaking countries. Asian countries have very cheap broadband because most of their bandwidth use is domestic (most content they want is locally hosted). Not so with Australia - we produce relatively little content, but consume loads of it (so we generally pay the majority of the cost of the link rather than sharing the cost with the other countries we peer with).
• Domestic IP traffic costs even more to carry than international IP traffic. There isn't enough scale on the long-haul interstate fibre connections for the price to fall to reasonable levels.
• Our biggest (49% privately owned) telco owns all the core infrastructure (exchanges, local loop, ADSL hardware), and are more interested in making a healthy profit than delivering affordable services.

FWIW, we can get 1.5Mbps at home, we just pay shitloads for it...

Here is my idea

You could do worse than to have a look at Retriever from 80-20 software. One of their top sales guys demoed the product to me about 9 months ago - it does integrated searching and categorisation (without having to pre-load metadata tags), similar to the search engine used by Telstra in Oz. Try searching for 'broadband' - it categorises the search results automatically (look at the left hand margin) without requiring document authors filling in masses of mandatory property sheets.

Having had a quick scan of their web page ("Check those URLs!"), it appears they are repositioning Retriever away from the individual use towards an enterprise-wide solution (e.g. point it at your file servers and Exchange box), but there might be some mileage in a single-user copy. I recall there was an evaluation version at one point, however all that's there now is a video you could look at.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with 80-20.

Aegilops

You can get the linux version here.
You may have to wait to download the file, as they only allow 30 concurrent downloads, but I am getting 211Kb/sec down, so that's okay.
16 minutes into the download I am 80% done.

Can only see the Windows download there. Also seems to be at http://games.telstra.com/gamearena/resources/files /?action=details&id=6570

The planet-earth project is building a realtime, immersive, user-created map of the whole world and everything in it. It's inspired by Earth from Snow Crash, among other things. We're building an open platform called 3map, Free Software under the GPL.

We now have running code and actual funding from the Telstra Broadband Fund. We're on a one-year timeline. Contributors are more than welcome ;)

And there are many regional IXes, besides things like the AUSBONE. WAIX, the Western Australian IX, is a good example of this done fairly well. Almost every ISP with a presence in the state has a presence, as well as several other big transport providers (Singtel, Comindico, etc).

There are a few main problems with Australian peering. First, certain big, nasty corporations profit too much from providing rip-off transit services by refusing to peer with IXs. Secondly, said companies have really stupidly designed broadband solutions involving tunneling most traffic interstate -before- providing endpoint connectivity. Thus local peering is impossible thanks to stupid design. Minus one for incentive.

The second issue is one that this will hopefully help address - BGP size. Unfortunatly, Australian BGP feeds are notoriously poluted thanks to various hacks and tricks in our national transit networks. This causes everyone a headache, as keeping a full BGP feed on a router (for both routing -and- accounting puposes) is expensive. Route tables are pretty memory hungry, and most backbone infrastructure is still driven by Cisco routers. Extra ram is not cheap, assuming you have the grunt to hold the table anyway.

The third problem is consumer oriented. Australian ISPs -have- to make money currently because Transit is expensive here. Even with this change, transit will still be far more expensive than in most other places in the world. While solutions to this are being worked on (new links and companies trying to bypass the traditional monopolies), this means Australian consumers are almost always traffic capped and either shaped or billed after a 3-6gb allowance.

It's not 1gb, but it's still a pain. Now, the problem is that in Western Australia we are lucky. Most ISPs give free access to the WAIX for their customers. This is fast and a major cost cutter for everybody. The IX has a lot of excellent resources - mirrors abound for everything.

However this does not happen in most other states. Or to a limited extent. Part of this is the age-old ingress/egress problem (just because a traceroute going OUT, eg a http -request- goes via a IX, the charged incoming data usually won't) presenting both confusion and billing problems. This leads to the second part, where most IXs, eg AusBone, do -not have a well maintained list of freely peered resources available-.

Billing is a pain for ISPs in other states as it's very hard to tell if something is freely available, and providing this as a marketing ploy (technically IXes are good... netadmins will be happy, finance may be happy - but given the outlay for ram for BGP, etc, -somebody- has to convince marketing it's a good idea :) is difficult at best. The WAIX has several fairly well maintained lists of resources, many which local ISPs list on their websites. This provides user incentive.

AND A MAJOR GROWTH POINT. Users, if provided with a list of resources available at a freely exchanging peering point, are more likely to try and convince their providers to participate. It's simply.

... and that is pretty much Australian Internet Exchanges 101... from my uneducated point of view of course :)

And there are many regional IXes, besides things like the AUSBONE. WAIX, the Western Australian IX, is a good example of this done fairly well. Almost every ISP with a presence in the state has a presence, as well as several other big transport providers (Singtel, Comindico, etc).

There are a few main problems with Australian peering. First, certain big, nasty corporations profit too much from providing rip-off transit services by refusing to peer with IXs. Secondly, said companies have really stupidly designed broadband solutions involving tunneling most traffic interstate -before- providing endpoint connectivity. Thus local peering is impossible thanks to stupid design. Minus one for incentive.

The second issue is one that this will hopefully help address - BGP size. Unfortunatly, Australian BGP feeds are notoriously poluted thanks to various hacks and tricks in our national transit networks. This causes everyone a headache, as keeping a full BGP feed on a router (for both routing -and- accounting puposes) is expensive. Route tables are pretty memory hungry, and most backbone infrastructure is still driven by Cisco routers. Extra ram is not cheap, assuming you have the grunt to hold the table anyway.

The third problem is consumer oriented. Australian ISPs -have- to make money currently because Transit is expensive here. Even with this change, transit will still be far more expensive than in most other places in the world. While solutions to this are being worked on (new links and companies trying to bypass the traditional monopolies), this means Australian consumers are almost always traffic capped and either shaped or billed after a 3-6gb allowance.

It's not 1gb, but it's still a pain. Now, the problem is that in Western Australia we are lucky. Most ISPs give free access to the WAIX for their customers. This is fast and a major cost cutter for everybody. The IX has a lot of excellent resources - mirrors abound for everything.

However this does not happen in most other states. Or to a limited extent. Part of this is the age-old ingress/egress problem (just because a traceroute going OUT, eg a http -request- goes via a IX, the charged incoming data usually won't) presenting both confusion and billing problems. This leads to the second part, where most IXs, eg AusBone, do -not have a well maintained list of freely peered resources available-.

Billing is a pain for ISPs in other states as it's very hard to tell if something is freely available, and providing this as a marketing ploy (technically IXes are good... netadmins will be happy, finance may be happy - but given the outlay for ram for BGP, etc, -somebody- has to convince marketing it's a good idea :) is difficult at best. The WAIX has several fairly well maintained lists of resources, many which local ISPs list on their websites. This provides user incentive.

AND A MAJOR GROWTH POINT. Users, if provided with a list of resources available at a freely exchanging peering point, are more likely to try and convince their providers to participate. It's simply.

... and that is pretty much Australian Internet Exchanges 101... from my uneducated point of view of course :)

I'm on a 3gig cable plan from Telstra. We have gamearena that serves demos, game servers and various game files. A month ago they pulled all the linix isos off the free server and advertised a new paid file server. Basically, I have to pay for linux. Most people ask for it to be sent to them via newsgroups, just like the old dialup days. Theres a lot more info at whingepool

But why aren't there native versions of COGS for my operating system?

Well... Windows is obviously the target of choice for the majority of game developers. Some game developers are cool enough to release versions of their software that runs on other operating sytems, and we applaud that. However, the simple fact is, Windows is by far the most popular operating system for gaming and as such receives the majority of our attention and efforts.

But COGS is spyware!

COGS isn't spyware. COGS reports and stores some information which is vital to the service. On a technical level, COGS retrieves the MAC address for your network card - a (theoretically) unique ID which is used to identify you as a unique user.

Spyware is traditionally considered as software which gathers information about your browsing habits and reports it to advertising agencies. COGS does not do this.

GameArena has no direct interest in your MAC address. If we really wanted to, we could probably get that information from the BigPond routers or something.

Banning isn't the only reason they are implementing this. According to the FAQ,

"A major issue with [people finding/connecting through other gamebrowsers such as GameSpy, in-game-browsers, etc] is that users would frequently be playing on the GameArena servers whilst being almost totally unaware of the other services offered by GameArena, for example the files library, the ladders, GameCreate, the messageboards, and the statistics. "

I have a feeling that the real intention behind this is to make sure that their other services are promoted to people playing on their servers. I'm not going to argue if this is a good or bad thing, but I believe that it is the real reason behind the requirement.

Nice work Whirlpool, getting mentioned on Slashdot.

Simon and Dan should be getting a nice fat brown paper bag from Telstra this month.

I can take pride in the fact that the Australian courts have in recent times said "no, I don't think so" to a lot of the bullshit that the xxAA organisations have tried to foist upon us re: DRM. Unfortunately our Prime Minister (who we recently re-elected because he distracted us with the whole "Tampa crisis" and the "shadow" of illegal immigration) rarely takes time to remove his lips from the arses of the United States and US corporations in order to make such an independent decision, which would require vision (and more importantly - balls). So I'm not holding my breath for something from government protecting consumer rights. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), who handles most consumer complaints, is unfortunately pretty much a toothless tiger. They still haven't got Telstra into line over their virtual monopoloy of the telecommunications market, which is responsible for high prices (of Telstra and their competitors, who use Telstra's backbone and hence must pay their so-called "wholesale" prices) of local calls and DSL.

I can take pride in the fact that the Australian courts have in recent times said "no, I don't think so" to a lot of the bullshit that the xxAA organisations have tried to foist upon us re: DRM. Unfortunately our Prime Minister (who we recently re-elected because he distracted us with the whole "Tampa crisis" and the "shadow" of illegal immigration) rarely takes time to remove his lips from the arses of the United States and US corporations in order to make such an independent decision, which would require vision (and more importantly - balls). So I'm not holding my breath for something from government protecting consumer rights. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), who handles most consumer complaints, is unfortunately pretty much a toothless tiger. They still haven't got Telstra into line over their virtual monopoloy of the telecommunications market, which is responsible for high prices (of Telstra and their competitors, who use Telstra's backbone and hence must pay their so-called "wholesale" prices) of local calls and DSL.

I can take pride in the fact that the Australian courts have in recent times said "no, I don't think so" to a lot of the bullshit that the xxAA organisations have tried to foist upon us re: DRM. Unfortunately our Prime Minister (who we recently re-elected because he distracted us with the whole "Tampa crisis" and the "shadow" of illegal immigration) rarely takes time to remove his lips from the arses of the United States and US corporations in order to make such an independent decision, which would require vision (and more importantly - balls). So I'm not holding my breath for something from government protecting consumer rights. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), who handles most consumer complaints, is unfortunately pretty much a toothless tiger. They still haven't got Telstra into line over their virtual monopoloy of the telecommunications market, which is responsible for high prices (of Telstra and their competitors, who use Telstra's backbone and hence must pay their so-called "wholesale" prices) of local calls and DSL.

Subject: What are the limits of web site visitor tracking?

There is a very interesting story in this, but the Slashdot editors didn't think so.

RedSheriff tracks visits to web sites, and claims to be "the world's largest interactive media business intelligence specialist". RedSheriff claims "incomparable accuracy" using "superior patented technology" that "records user activity at the source, giving clients unprecedented access to data that accurately describes user behaviors". This raises a question: How much can they know about you?

To investigate RedSheriff claims, I visited the web sites of two of RedSheriff's clients, Telstra and Virgin Direct's Virgin Money.

(I prepared by turning off JavaScript and Java in Opera's File/Preferences/Multimedia menu, and selecting "Throw away new cookies on exit" in Opera's Privacy Preferences.)

I went to the Telstra home page and downloaded the HTML source. (Wow, the Telstra home page is ugly.) In the source I found mention of a RedSheriff JavaScript file, http://telstra.imrworldwide.com/a1.js. I downloaded that. (Save the effort of re-configuring your browser by just right-clicking on the link and selecting "Save target as".) Virgin Money's site has a different RedSheriff Javascript file, http://server-uk.imrworldwide.com/a3.js. Do a search for "Red Sheriff", with a space.

Then I downloaded a RedSheriff Java program that I found mentioned in the Telstra and Virgin Money home page sources, http://server-au.imrworldwide.com/Measure.class. Embedded within this binary is RedSheriff's privacy policy web page address: http://www.redsheriff.com/privacy.htm. ("RedSheriff Cares about Your Privacy", it says, humorously trying to have it both ways in the same web site.)

Basically it seems that RedSheriff is carrying visitor tracking to the limits, including tracking unsuspecting novices who may foolishly but voluntarily give them personal information. Looking at the code, I don't see any attempt to go beyond the narrow boundaries of what the JavaScript and Java languages allow. However, I'm not sure I see everything the code is doing. Can someone help with this? What are the limits?

Slashdot had a story about RedSheriff, Sun Java Runtime Uploads Usage Data to RedSheriff? Judging from the comments, there is some doubt about who is RedSheriff's client in that situation. The story submitter defended his information, and no one seems to have done a verifying test. (It would be easy to hide encrypted references to RedSheriff sites within binary. It would be easy include something in the binary that was not in the freely distributed source.) Note that the first part of one of the RedSheriff Javascript URLs above contains the name of the client, Telstra.

Subject: What are the limits of web site visitor tracking?

There is a very interesting story in this, but the Slashdot editors didn't think so.

RedSheriff tracks visits to web sites, and claims to be "the world's largest interactive media business intelligence specialist". RedSheriff claims "incomparable accuracy" using "superior patented technology" that "records user activity at the source, giving clients unprecedented access to data that accurately describes user behaviors". This raises a question: How much can they know about you?

To investigate RedSheriff claims, I visited the web sites of two of RedSheriff's clients, Telstra and Virgin Direct's Virgin Money.

(I prepared by turning off JavaScript and Java in Opera's File/Preferences/Multimedia menu, and selecting "Throw away new cookies on exit" in Opera's Privacy Preferences.)

I went to the Telstra home page and downloaded the HTML source. (Wow, the Telstra home page is ugly.) In the source I found mention of a RedSheriff JavaScript file, http://telstra.imrworldwide.com/a1.js. I downloaded that. (Save the effort of re-configuring your browser by just right-clicking on the link and selecting "Save target as".) Virgin Money's site has a different RedSheriff Javascript file, http://server-uk.imrworldwide.com/a3.js. Do a search for "Red Sheriff", with a space.

Then I downloaded a RedSheriff Java program that I found mentioned in the Telstra and Virgin Money home page sources, http://server-au.imrworldwide.com/Measure.class. Embedded within this binary is RedSheriff's privacy policy web page address: http://www.redsheriff.com/privacy.htm. ("RedSheriff Cares about Your Privacy", it says, humorously trying to have it both ways in the same web site.)

Basically it seems that RedSheriff is carrying visitor tracking to the limits, including tracking unsuspecting novices who may foolishly but voluntarily give them personal information. Looking at the code, I don't see any attempt to go beyond the narrow boundaries of what the JavaScript and Java languages allow. However, I'm not sure I see everything the code is doing. Can someone help with this? What are the limits?

Slashdot had a story about RedSheriff, Sun Java Runtime Uploads Usage Data to RedSheriff? Judging from the comments, there is some doubt about who is RedSheriff's client in that situation. The story submitter defended his information, and no one seems to have done a verifying test. (It would be easy to hide encrypted references to RedSheriff sites within binary. It would be easy include something in the binary that was not in the freely distributed source.) Note that the first part of one of the RedSheriff Javascript URLs above contains the name of the client, Telstra.

I did as you said.

I turned off JavaScript and Java in Opera's File/Preferences/Multimedia menu. I selected "Throw away new cookies on exit" in Opera's Privacy Preferences.

Then I went to the Telstra home page and downloaded the source. (Wow, The Telstra home page is ugly.)

In the source I found mention of a RedSheriff JavaScript file, http://telstra.imrworldwide.com/a1.js. I downloaded that. (You can download the file by just right-clicking on the link and selecting "Save target as".)

Then I downloaded another RedSheriff Java program that I found mentioned in the Telstra home page source, http://server-au.imrworldwide.com/Measure.class.

Embedded within this binary is RedSheriff's Privacy policy web page address: http://www.redsheriff.com/privacy.htm.

Basically it seems that RedSheriff is carrying visitor tracking to the limits, including tracking unsuspecting novices who may give them personal information.

Looking at the code, I don't see any attempt to go beyond the boundaries of what the JavaScript and Java languages allow. However, I'm not knowledgeable enough to see everything the code is doing. Can someone help with this?

There is no "testing" required. Just look at the HTML source for the website http://www.telstra.com/

Now grep for "Red Sheriff".

There's a piece of HTML that tries several methods to get your browser to report your browsing habits to IMR Worldwide.

Nothing at all to do with Sun's JRE or JDK. Everything to do with Telstra thinking they're bigger than their boots.

Here's the link to Telestra's Linux downloads.

It's only the ISO's, unfortunately (no apt-get mirror). They keep them at GameArena, for whatever reason. Here is the Debian section.

It's only the ISO's, unfortunately (no apt-get mirror). They keep them at GameArena, for whatever reason. Here is the Debian section.

Nah, in my area its not so bad - we are part of a research project so we get a A$38.50 per month rebate. My total cost is A$50.50/month. However this is for 512/128 and a THREE GIG CAP, I can understand how the rest of the country is pissed off!!

Bastards.

lon32, a router in Telstra's Lonsdale St exchange in Victoria which these days handles ADSL connection has been down, according to Telstra's 1800 support number, for for days leaving a few hundred business ADSL uusers without connectivity for 95% of the time since Friday morning (its Tuesday Morning now). The Service Status page doesn't acknowledge this particular outage (though it does acknowledge three others).

I work for a IT Services customer and its worth noting the amount of problems customers who use ADSL ISPs with Telstra as their upstream provider have in comparison to others, particularly ISPs reselling RequestDSL (eg, BRD) or NC/Alternet (Netspace).

I'm no lawyer, but I know if someone wants to launch mass legal action against Telstra for this kind of shit then quite a few customers would be interested.

What do you mean exactly?

Here in Australia, we have a large company named Telstra. The Government spun off Telstra as a private company a few yeara ago and plans to completely sell off its remaining 51% in the near future.

The question is - why didn't the Government swallow the national infrastructure of bandwidth through cables, phone copper lines, exchanges, the whole lot -- and just sell off the operational company? Such an arrangement would mean that the government could restrict the possibility of monopolistic or oligopolistic behaviour should it ever emerge, while leaving the market to decide how it was going to self-assemble when competitors were introduced?

Those companies could then fund the collective growth and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure through public works. Bandwidth supply and demand would truly then be controlled by the market and the general affluence of the population.

Trucking and other transport companies work this way by paying taxes to the Government that maintains roads. Nobody minds that. What's so bad about transport as an industry model, that corporations need to own their own permanent copper cabling?

I am not an economist, I warn you. ;)

Vodafone Australia apparently offers ICQ from phone functionality, they can afford it possibly because they have no customers.

It is rumored that Telstra will be offering free SMS next year, I have no idea if there is any truth to that. In any case it's no good to me because I'm with Optus.

But I agree, 20c, or rather 22c inc GST to send 200 bytes of data across the network is ridiculous, hardly "excellent value" as the telcos describe it. Imagine if your ISP charged with those rates!

League

Yep there are no rules against that sort of thing in Rugby League

& Rugby League players cope ok without helmets, padding or ballet tights.

You're talking about Rugby Union, AKA 'rugby', which is altogether a different game to Rugby League, AKA 'league'.

League is quite different with much of the rucking 'n mauling replaced by tackles 'n 'play-the-balls'

'League' is pretty big in Northern England, the East coast of Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand's North Island & some of the older industrial towns of France. Although no where near as big as Union.

Also 'League' probably translates better to the small screen than any other football code

Football (Soccer), American Football, & Aussie Rules are great games to watch live, but they don't really translate well to the small screen (the games are too spread out). For example take the srimmaging & forward pass of American Football, which don't work well at all on telly (too much going on all over the place).

Where-as 'league' is perfect for telly - the camera just has to follow the ball to get all the action of almost continued 3 on 1 tackles.

Check this game here (Windows Media Player + broadband, unless you want a postage stamp size screen).

Yes you can now watch both Rugby League Test Internationals & 1st grade Club Rugby League on the web.

I did a quick browse and came across this. They sell everything from funnel cake machines to commercial candy apple makers, not to mention several sizes of cotton candy machines.

It might just be easier, however, to just use one of these.

- Freed

Eh? Telstra.com and BigPond Home use SSL when you login to account info. It would be very strange if BigPond Advance didn't.

Oh ... wait. This _is_ Telstra after all ... Who knows with those tossers.

If it's in a capital city, then there's heaps of competition. Every phone company has an ISP on the side (Telstra, iPrimus, Dingo Blue, etc.) So you'd better not be planning on competing with those sorts of people on price, because they've got good access to phone company equipment, and good economy of scale.

There are still some opportunities to set up in country towns; look at kisser, for example. If this is the sort of thing you're into, then you need to be looking to someone who is running such a service for advice.

As to equipment, you have three choices: UNIX, Microsoft, or easy-to-admin embedded boxes. (Cobalt are a good starting point for these.) OK, so I'm simplifying a little. My point is that you have to decide what you're most experienced with, and then keep it simple, stupid. Don't mix Windows and UNIX. Yes, they can be made to play nice, but no, you don't want to double your learning curve.

One of the really fun bits in Australia is dealing with the phone company. 56k modems, at the non-customer end, don't reside on the ISP's property; they reside in the phone company's local exchange. (One of my friends was bemoaning the loss of huge racks of modems covered in cool flashy lights that used to impress the hell out of visitors.) That means that you hae to deal with Telstra, and since they are still all but a monopoly (particularly here in W.A.), they aren't particularly interested in dealing with you. The result is likely to be a nightmare. I dumped my previous ISP simply because the dialup I was using sucked -- the modem at the phone company end couldn't hear me clearly, and my modem couldn't hear them clearly, and the result was dropped connections galore. Of course, if you want to stay down in 33.6k land, then you can put rack modems on your own premises (and you could probably pick up some cheap secondhand from other ISP's).

Broadband in Australia is actually pretty darn good. For a fee about twice that of a good dial-up service, you can get fast cable internet which is not heavily restricted (considering we don't have uberpipes to America fully running yet).

Both major cable services let you download a few hundred megs per day without worry -- a pretty sweet deal imho. Optus@Home is not download capped, but is upload capped at 8k/sec. Big Pond Broadband's 'Freedom' plan is capped at 64k/sec(16k/sec up), which is still pretty good.

There are also various ADSL and sattelite services running.

As an Australian, I'm pretty darn satisfied with our broadband availability. You can check out my site here: http://whirlpool.net.au

On a not-so-related note, here is an article of mine that got rejected recently:
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In late 1999, the Federal Parliament of Australia passed a piece of legislature, widely touted as the 'internet censorship bill'. One year later, it has been interesting to see what this bill has achieved: aside from a couple of locally hosted porn sites moving overseas, not much at all. Recently, the Australian Broadcasting Authority (the body responsible for implementing this bill) has acted on a number of complaints from users about various newsgroups, particularly those involving child pornography. Satisfied that the content is locally hosted, it has used this bill to issue a final take-down notice against Australia's largest ISP and phone co, Telstra. This has garnered a mixed reaction from Australian net users.

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The thing is... you don't get those to yourselves. The .US domain has a place on the net now more than ever, as the .net .org .com .edu's are being used globally rather than just by the US!

You're right about the US not settling for a .US domain, but it seems that some non-US sites are also not settling!

For example:

http://telstra.com/ & http://www.telstra.net/ - An Australian Telco

http://apcmag.com/ - An Australian PC Mag.

http://www.freedom2surf.net/ & http://www.f2s.com/ - An English ISP.


"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47

YYou should not fear your government. You should fear the corporations, whose power is far greater than your government, and who lack the restraint both of morals and of public opinion.

This post is one I've wanted to make on /. for a while and will probably make again...

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding between US and non-US /.-ers, and this post is mainly to US readers so that you understand some of the puzzled and angry responses you get to posts expressing dislike of government and the restrictions it places on freedom.

As an Australian, speaking of my impression about 'ordinary' Australians (responses, additions and criticism welcome), it is not our government we fear. We fear corporations, and we fear the free market.

At the moment our economy is in a boom cycle (probably at the tail end, judging from our falling dollar), but never have people been less happy with the economy.

Discussion of the free market by non-economists revolves around the negative impact of globalisation on job security and by extension, on happiness and social cohesion. (Remember as a small economy we have less to gain than the US).

In this, we see our government as our protector. When large companies go bankrupt owing their workers large sums, the government steps in and guarantees them money (or they do when the prime Minister's brother was on the board... :) ). When Telstra - the major telecommunications company - announces 10000 jobs to be cut, the government promises that the impact will be minimal and rural workers won't be hit.

Our present government, which is conservative, has had to appear to back off some economic policies in order to exploit this view of market-and-corporations-as-ultimate-enemy.

This is a point of view many posts seem dismissive of, seeming to think it is trivial and silly, thus denying themselves a chance of engaging with and convincing their opponent. Perhaps it is trivial and silly. Perhaps it is not.

Don't dismiss it. Refute it if you think it is wrong. There are a lot of people who hold it in varying degrees and you are not going to be able to argue some of your points of view without accepting that. Just step back a couple of paces in your arguments and argue from there.