I am sure you are not convinced, correct?
Not really. Personally when it last came time for me to upgrade, I choose a Macbook because of:
- Decent balance between battery life, weight and performance.
- Has a trackpad which absolutely beats the crap out of whatever it is they're shoving into HPs and Dells. No annoying click miss-detection, no locking up and not responding because it's dirty, and can left/right click and vertical/horizontal scroll from anywhere on the touchpad.
- It comes pre-installed with OS-X which I find to be the nicest OS to use.
- The machine itself looks really nice. No ugly Intel CPU, Intel Graphics, MS Windows.etc. etc. stickers stuck all over the case. No pointless tacky LEDs and mostly useless media buttons which the maker couldn't be bothered integrating with the main keyboard.
Maybe it's not suited to everybody but the GFX, HDD.etc. specs are half the story at best. For me personally they were a minor factor compared to what I listed above.
Since you asked. As a non-climate scientist, although I don't place blind faith in climate scientists, I do think that when the vast majority of people who are dedicating their lives to studying the climate and are consequently vastly more knowledgeable about it than I am are saying that we're contributing to global warming, then there is probably a good case that we are.
I especially don't buy the crap about scientists speaking out against global warming being shut out of the dialogue. Global warming is the trillion dollar question of our age. If there was serious doubts then governments around the world would be all over it, trumpeting it everywhere. It's much easier politically to do nothing than something.
Most importantly global warming or not it's obvious that we can't continue our current consumption patterns. We're using up our non-renewable resources and are going to need something to replace them and soon.
Anyway those are my thoughts. And for the record my part of doing something for the environment (and more importantly my wallet) is to walk and take the train/bus; not own a TV; and keep only a laptop (Rather than the typical desktop + laptop) and to avoid heating/air-con especially heating which at least in my part of the world can be solved nicely by wearing more clothes.
It sounds to me like the study is being sponsored by the oil and car industries.
Now now, I doubt it had anything to do with them. More likely two professors realised they could make a lot of money by saying something extremely controversial and having the worlds media promote their shitty book.
The grains fed to farm animals and dogs are most certainly fertilized with fossil fuels.
Vast majority of the energy still comes from the sun. Good old photosynthesis. I'm sure if you were interested though you could compare the amount of fossil fuels used to power a car for a year vs the amount used to grow a years worth of food for a dog or whatever.
From TFA:
"In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido."
Isn't most of the food we give to dogs.etc. the remains of stuff that we produce but don't eat? Chicken necks,.etc. Seems like a very shallow method of calculation. Also I do hope in their book they go into a lot more detail about where they got those statistics!
hey compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle's eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog's.
What a load of bullshit. We fuel SUVs using fossil fuels which adds to the carbon cycle, hence contributing to global warming. Now, if we were powering our pets of fossil fuels as well then we could easily compare them.
Ever lived in a country where you don't speak the language natively? That alone would can be enough to make people want to move home.
Racism can be another factor. It's can be hard enough to live in a place where you clearly don't fit in in the first place. Let alone if you have people treating you like some sort of criminal for stealing 'their' jobs.
Finally human rights and personal liberty are very very broad and abstract concepts. Making absolute statements about them being championed in one country or not in another masks the reality of a much more complex situation. For example there is quite a lot of economic freedom in China and much greater chances to rise through company ranks would represent freedom to many.
Not only that but the situation changes relative to your personal circumstances. An Indian citizen living in India enjoys the right to vote and influence his government. Living in America until he gets citizenship he can't vote or influence his government. Tell me again where he has more liberty?
When I entered into Japan it was really extremely easy. I showed my visa and was then asked if I spoke Japanese. I said yes and was directed in Japanese to place my hands on the finger print scanner and look into the camera. The entire immigration process took about a minute and before I was cleared to go through. The only question I was asked is if I spoke Japanese. Which I presume had to do with working out whether to direct me in English or Japanese.
Of course as an anti-terror policy it is somewhat silly. The only terrorist attacks I know of in Japan have been committed by Japanese. About the only outside group that might consider a terror attack on Japan is North Korea and being a tall white guy, I don't exactly look North Korean... But I guess applying it fairly beats racial profiling.
On the other hand, crime by Chinese residents is a big and growing problem in Japan. So I can understand them wanting to clamp down on immigration procedures and so on. It's just a matter of executing it in a fair, professional and efficient way which from what I've seen they're doing.
Great that will make up for the 200billion we apparently lose to piracy! Seriously who could come up with/report such an obviously out of the world BS statistic while keeping a strait face.
My laptop doesn't have a serial or parallel connector on it. Sure It'll take time but eventually there is no reason this couldn't succeed in complete replacing current connectors. It won't however if we just whinge about extra connectors and refuse to do anything.
If I get e-mails from banks that I have no relation with, it is usually spam and gets instantly deleted.
If I get an email from _ANY_ bank, relationship or not, then I _ALWAYS_ assume it's spam and delete it. I also pass this advise onto anyone who asks me about security.
The families who took the money were on the edge of desperation - looking for any way out.
No they were stupid and didn't understand economics. I remember a few years ago when prices rises were already slowing down, I was having beers with some friends and they were going on about self help books and how property investment was the way to make big bucks. They completely missed the fact that the market simply can't sustain indefinite rises above the rate of inflation. Such rises mean that loan payments take up an increasingly large proportion of income. As loan payments take up a higher proportion of income, affordability goes down. Eventually demand bottoms out and something has to give.
Once we recover though I'm sure we'll see another bubble. People are stupid and an entire industry was built around the fallacy that housing market could sustain indefinite growth above the income growth rate.
Most of AustraliaÃ(TM)s population is concentrated in two widely separated coastal regions ((http://www.worldbook.com/wb/Media?id=mp000282). ).
I'm well aware of Australia's population distribution. But thanks for not actually answering my post. As I said several times in my post, I was comparing Australia's _URBAN_ areas to Japan's _URBAN_ areas.
I'm not sure what the unrelated statistics are all about. Although interesting you should raise the ACT statistics. At 137people/km2 the population density of the ACT is 1/3 of that of of the whole of Japan, which kinda just backs up my point. Of course Canberra itself is denser than that. Black mountain and the bushland around it and the large undeveloped areas out towards Gungahlin and bellow Belconnen (I lived in the ACT for 3 years), pull down the population density. But then so does the fact that the Japanese archipelago is 70% mountainous pull down Japans statistics. The important point is that, and I'll stress this again to make sure you get it this time, Japan's _URBAN_ areas are much more dense than Australia's _URBAN_ areas. Anyone who's ever seen Japanese suburbia in comparison to Australian suburb would immediately understand what I mean. Even mid-size Japanese cities are packed together far more densely than even Sydney, which is in truth the densest of the Australian cities. This means that any would be companies developing infrastructure can cover a much larger number of potential customers for cheaper.
Also, Telstra doesn't own the entire infrastructure. They own the infrastructure connecting you and your ISP. How your ISP connects to the rest of the internet is up to them. For example, I think alot of alternative ISPs go with PIPE networks. Since download limits depend on your ISP's connection with the rest of the internet it doesn't really have all that much to do with Telstra's wholesale monopoly. Now here is the good bit thanks to shared infrastructure (Everyone uses Telstra's) it's been very easy for ISP's to setup and go nationwide in Australia. Go to Whirlpool and looking at the number of ISPs for you area. You'll probably find 20+ at least. That's competition.. real competition. Switching (aka. Churning) between ISP's using Telstra's infrastructure is also dead easy. All the elements for a competitive market at the retail level have been in place and working for a number of years.
Splitting up Telstra finally completely breaks the conflict of interest between Telstra's wholesale and retail branches, which is good. But truth is ACCC regulations were already such that at the retail ISP level there's been a very competitive market for a number of years.
Now based on the way you keep on saying "Your country" and "Your government", I'm wondering if you're Australian, if not I guess I should forgive you for not really understanding much about the Australian situation but anyway. Australians access huge amounts of overseas content. So what Youtube is hosted locally. You think the average bittorrent user cares where they're downloading from, of course not! Even alot of supposedly "Oceanic" or "Australian" webservers are actually hosted in the US. Classic example is WOW whose Oceanic servers are actually located in the US... Japanese in comparison access almost entirely local content. As I said previously the two are not comparable.
I dealt with this in my reply to the grand parent bellow but basically the same thing applies to Japan. It's a very mountains country (About 70% mountains) with large areas of comparatively low population density. Japanese urban areas are _MUCH_ denser than Australian urban areas. Anyone who's been to the two countries could tell you that.
Japan is a similarly isolated island country, and yet affordable 1 gbps connections are proliferating in urban areas.
Funnily enough I'm living in Japan atm and had a feeling that someone would raise it. Here's a few fun-facts about Japan. The total land area of Japan is about 370,000km2 or about 1/20 the size of Australia. 70% of this is land is mountainous and quite sparsely populated. Furthermore, the Tohoku and Hokaido regions in the north are cold and still quite sparsely populated (Comparatively speaking) with agriculture being dominate. Shikoku in the south is similarly less densely populated.
The large majority of the population lives along the East coast of the south half of Honshuu (the main island). This can be rough divided into Tokyo and its surrounds in the north-east on the Kanto plain and the Toukai and Kinki regions in the West where Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe.etc. are.
Given the way the Japanese population is concentrated into such a small area, it follows that Japanese cities everywhere are simply _MUCH_ denser than Australian cities. (I'd offer statistics but the methods of division are so different that there is no real way to compare the two). It's extremely obvious to anyone who's been to the two countries.
Higher population density = lower cost per person for delivering service. For every kilometre of cable it lays a Japanese company can reach _far_ more customers than an Australian company can.
Secondly Japan has much less need for overseas bandwidth than Australia does. Language and culture means Japanese internet users are focused on Japan. Even on p2p networks they're much more likely to be accessing Japanese language material, from other Japanese people. Australians comparatively are culturally and linguistically part of a much larger area and consequently be it through p2p downloads or normal browsing access much more overseas content.
Finally, gigabit connection or not (they're not as common as you suggest), you're not likely to get more than about 8-10mbps (I.e. ~1mB/s) downloading from overseas. That's just the speed of your connection to the ISP, the rest of the infrastructure doesn't really support those speeds.
Anyway, if download limits weren't necessary the market would've taken care of them by now. In case you haven't noticed Australian ISP's have been locked in harsh competition for several years driving prices down and speeds up. So no my attitude is not "mind-numbingly ignorant" as you put, I just have more of a grasp of reality.
Things take time to change. This is a good first step. Alternative ISP have made vast inroads in the Australian market and competition has increased massively.
I first got broadband in 2003 on a 2 year conract, 512/128 1gb download limit (with uploads counted!) and excess charges for $70AUD a month through Telstra.... In 2004, I bought out the contract and switched to iiNet... 256/64kbps 4gb download limit (Uploads not counted) with excess usage capping for $60AUD. Oh how things have changed since then. I'm not living in Australia now, but last year I was on ADSL2+ (Upto 24mbps we usually got about 8-10mbps) with a 30gb download limit and speed capping for $60AUD per month. Despite 5 years of inflation prices have fallen, speeds have risen by 16x+ for many and download limits have risen by a factor of 10 at least and caps rather than excess usage charges are now the norm.
Telstra still holds a significant share of the market, but they're by no means dominant. True structural separation will remove the final barriers that competing ISPs have been complaining about.
On a side note, God I'm sick of Australians complaining about their internet access! Our urban areas aren't particular dense and most of our data comes from and goes to overseas locations requiring expensive to maintain communications satellites and underground cables. Despite that for about $60AUD ($50USD) most people have access to ADSL2+ with a generous download allowance (35gb looking at iiNet, 25 with no peak/off peak split looking at Internode). Furthermore, even if you don't have access to ADSL2+, 1.5mbps ADSL1 or cable is almost definitely available. Not only that but we're looking at massive new infrastructure rollouts in the next few years, which should see the final gaps fixed.
Of course genericness isn't a global rule. The Wall Street Journal especially is specialised for a specific readership. The market is big enough that it can accommodate papers targeted at specific audiences or trying to grab attention through attention grabbing shock headlines.
However, The average daily newspapers column is often little more than a republication of whatever has been in the news the previous evening, generally drawn from the same AP/Reuters/... news feed. It's the news... but late and covered in ads. The remainder is generally filled up with book/movie reviews, a generic business column, letters to the editor (Bonus points for the crazy factor because that elicits responses), sports and classifieds. Now people don't need an ad-filled rag to get this stuff anymore and these newspapers especially are dying.
As for your local newspaper, well neutrality is always a matter of perception. In my experience neutrality tends to me slightly left/slightly right of centre. Depending on which side you're on the other can seem biased.
I mean they'll have to put more effort into getting those article reads. With newspapers they could just stick generic content up and be done with it. Now people can be selective and generic content won't get anywhere near the 1,000,000 views or whatever they might wish.
People have never really paid for news stories. You think $15 could possibly cover the costs of printing and delivering a months worth of papers? Advertising always paid for the content, which in the endless search for neutrality to avoid losing any ad-viewers (Erm, readers...) has helped drive the quality to zero.
Of course that said it would be nice to see this create actual incentives for news organisations to create good quality content in a much more competitive environment. Since, I doubt they'll ever be able to attract significant readership with another generic sports and book/movie promotion (Erm, culture...) column.
I went several months without being able to access my uni-wireless last year from my macbook. Eventually I got round to sitting down and trying to fix it. It turned out that although it was set to use DHCP if I had IPV6 enabled that would totally fail. I'm not sure of any reason why I should need to specifically disable IPv6 (which I think is enabled by default on OSX 10.5 + as well), in order to be able to connect specifically to that network, but I did.
I've also had times when windows file sharing would fail without entirely disabling the firewall on OSX. With my settings it should've automatically created an exception, however for whatever reason it didn't.
Of course, getting windows machines to see each other on the network can be a similarly "fun" experience. Or getting windows machines to connect to an ad-hoc network wireless network hosted of an OS-X system. I had one time attempting to connect to a network (connect not create) when Vista told me that my password was not long enough and needed to be at least 6 characters. WTF, I wasn't setting a password I was entering the password for another network!
Either way I'll limit my complaints to that. But the point is networking is a pita on any system.
Assuming that you're referring to the profit maximising point, then even by your definition prices would be effected by piracy, as piracy shifts the demand curve. Of course pricing is actually much more complex than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pricing).
Either way a game company needs to make enough profit that their company is a profitable investment. Given that Profit = Sales - Costs and Sales = Price * Volume, and that piracy reduces the sales volume, then there would seem to be a pretty straightforward case that higher piracy means that in order to continue to be profitable a company will have to raise prices to make up for the lower sales volume.
Secondly, it's about trying to create artificial scarcity, which seems to me to be all the wrong strategy.
I've heard this a lot, however, without what you call 'artificial scarcity' do you have a better way of compensating creators for their work? If we want to leave it to the free market then creators do indeed need the right to license their work as they see fit, at a price they see fit.
DRM is a (partial) solution to a very real problem. That is without something in place to limit their ability to do so, people are, in general, selfish bastards who'll happily take advantage of someone elses work without compensating them for it. Again if you have a better means of solving this problem, then by all means tell us!
Sorry I don't think that's been a factor at all. The device has been promoted as a life style package with points such as easily being able to look up restaurant reviews, the nice cut and paste functionality, good navigation software and the ability to read manga on being emphasized in commercials.
Now of course none of those points are particularly original and infact I have a bottom of the range Japanese phone that can do all of those things. However the iPhone does make them convenient, does look good and isn't shockingly expensive. Especially in a nation where mobile phones play such a large part in day to day life.
There are plenty of Chinese people who have lots of opportunities to say what they think of the government.
Firstly there is overseas students and so on. Thing is if you talk to them, you'd find that most of them don't think of the government as the borg and feel that a lot of Westerners are very much misinformed about the state of affairs in China. Imagining it as some sort of Maoist control state.
Secondly there is the media within China, which has had a significant role in breaking corruption and abuse stories and even yes looking at government policies in a critical fashion. No they can't touch on the issues such as Tianmen or Tibet. However that doesn't prevent there from being lively and dynamic reporting in other areas.
Furthermore, I can't see how the collective internet reaction is a yawn. Every time a story about China comes up there's plenty numbers of posts rapidly moderated to +4/5 that are just plain wrong in their factual basis and seem to still be imagining China as a 1960's Maoist state.
Fact is that China is a huge complex state, not some borg like entity under the control of an evil central mind. Most Chinese industry is privately run and even most state corporations have to compete or face collapse. Given this they serve their own interests not the interests of the central government. Provincial level governments in China are very powerful and have their own interests they compete for. A large part of the press is privately run and even the public corporations have to compete for readership. If they just regurgitate propaganda then their readership will go elsewhere. The central government like any other government is split up into competing ministries each working towards their own ideas and interests. Furthermore there are conservative factions who advocate more careful reform and greater state control and liberal factions who want fast reform and so on.
Point is there's no way the central government can maintain complete control over all that, guiding the entire country in a single direction. Let alone have the time (or care enough to) mastermind a subtle scheme of propaganda aimed at western internet users based on the idea that by consistently releasing bad articles about China they will desensitise people. Which is what you seem to be suggesting. Anyway, it would seem to me that the only effect of such a scheme would be to reinforce peoples preconceived notion that China is evil.
Come now try thinking a bit wider than the US. The events so far resemble the way the case would likely be handled in most, if not all western justice systems as well. There's almost certainly a degree of corruption in any system. That doesn't, however, prevent any given system from handling some or even dare I say the majority of cases in a reasonably just and forthright manner.
However it would seem that just because this case happened in China that a lot of slashdoters are grasping at straws trying to somehow or another paint the authorities as evil doers in this case.
Fact is most of the Chinese economy is built on private enterprises. Furthermore, most of the Chinese press is privately run tabloids etc and even the publicly owned companies have to compete for profits to survive. Furthermore, given that a large part of their readership is reasonably smart and discerning, they can't just act as a propaganda mouth piece for the government or their readers will go elsewhere. Their is a lot of corruption in China, but the authorities have been trying to clean that up and the press has played a significant role in breaking stories of abuse and so on.
Most importantly though there is nothing at all in this case to indicate that the powers that be were in any way involved at all and if people want to criticise them maybe they ought to wait until there is something to criticise them for... It's not like there is a shortage...
So an unlicensed privately run boot camp to treat internet addiction beats a child to death. The police launch an investigation remaining silent on the mater while it is underway. After appropriate investigations they take action and shut down the camp and arrest those responsible. All this is reported to the public through the media.
Sounds to me like that is exactly how this would play out in any western democracy as well. Maybe, just maybe, the Chinese as well think it's terrible that a child is beaten to death and wish to punish those responsible. But no it couldn't be a genuine pursuit of justice, must just be a facade to protect the powers that be...
Slashdot Mirror
I am sure you are not convinced, correct? Not really. Personally when it last came time for me to upgrade, I choose a Macbook because of: .etc. etc. stickers stuck all over the case. No pointless tacky LEDs and mostly useless media buttons which the maker couldn't be bothered integrating with the main keyboard.
.etc. specs are half the story at best. For me personally they were a minor factor compared to what I listed above.
- Decent balance between battery life, weight and performance.
- Has a trackpad which absolutely beats the crap out of whatever it is they're shoving into HPs and Dells. No annoying click miss-detection, no locking up and not responding because it's dirty, and can left/right click and vertical/horizontal scroll from anywhere on the touchpad.
- It comes pre-installed with OS-X which I find to be the nicest OS to use.
- The machine itself looks really nice. No ugly Intel CPU, Intel Graphics, MS Windows
Maybe it's not suited to everybody but the GFX, HDD
Since you asked. As a non-climate scientist, although I don't place blind faith in climate scientists, I do think that when the vast majority of people who are dedicating their lives to studying the climate and are consequently vastly more knowledgeable about it than I am are saying that we're contributing to global warming, then there is probably a good case that we are.
I especially don't buy the crap about scientists speaking out against global warming being shut out of the dialogue. Global warming is the trillion dollar question of our age. If there was serious doubts then governments around the world would be all over it, trumpeting it everywhere. It's much easier politically to do nothing than something.
Most importantly global warming or not it's obvious that we can't continue our current consumption patterns. We're using up our non-renewable resources and are going to need something to replace them and soon.
Anyway those are my thoughts. And for the record my part of doing something for the environment (and more importantly my wallet) is to walk and take the train/bus; not own a TV; and keep only a laptop (Rather than the typical desktop + laptop) and to avoid heating/air-con especially heating which at least in my part of the world can be solved nicely by wearing more clothes.
It sounds to me like the study is being sponsored by the oil and car industries.
Now now, I doubt it had anything to do with them. More likely two professors realised they could make a lot of money by saying something extremely controversial and having the worlds media promote their shitty book.
The grains fed to farm animals and dogs are most certainly fertilized with fossil fuels.
Vast majority of the energy still comes from the sun. Good old photosynthesis. I'm sure if you were interested though you could compare the amount of fossil fuels used to power a car for a year vs the amount used to grow a years worth of food for a dog or whatever.
From TFA: "In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido."
.etc. the remains of stuff that we produce but don't eat? Chicken necks, .etc. Seems like a very shallow method of calculation. Also I do hope in their book they go into a lot more detail about where they got those statistics!
Isn't most of the food we give to dogs
hey compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle's eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog's.
What a load of bullshit. We fuel SUVs using fossil fuels which adds to the carbon cycle, hence contributing to global warming. Now, if we were powering our pets of fossil fuels as well then we could easily compare them.
Ever lived in a country where you don't speak the language natively? That alone would can be enough to make people want to move home.
Racism can be another factor. It's can be hard enough to live in a place where you clearly don't fit in in the first place. Let alone if you have people treating you like some sort of criminal for stealing 'their' jobs.
Finally human rights and personal liberty are very very broad and abstract concepts. Making absolute statements about them being championed in one country or not in another masks the reality of a much more complex situation. For example there is quite a lot of economic freedom in China and much greater chances to rise through company ranks would represent freedom to many.
Not only that but the situation changes relative to your personal circumstances. An Indian citizen living in India enjoys the right to vote and influence his government. Living in America until he gets citizenship he can't vote or influence his government. Tell me again where he has more liberty?
When I entered into Japan it was really extremely easy. I showed my visa and was then asked if I spoke Japanese. I said yes and was directed in Japanese to place my hands on the finger print scanner and look into the camera. The entire immigration process took about a minute and before I was cleared to go through. The only question I was asked is if I spoke Japanese. Which I presume had to do with working out whether to direct me in English or Japanese.
Of course as an anti-terror policy it is somewhat silly. The only terrorist attacks I know of in Japan have been committed by Japanese. About the only outside group that might consider a terror attack on Japan is North Korea and being a tall white guy, I don't exactly look North Korean... But I guess applying it fairly beats racial profiling.
On the other hand, crime by Chinese residents is a big and growing problem in Japan. So I can understand them wanting to clamp down on immigration procedures and so on. It's just a matter of executing it in a fair, professional and efficient way which from what I've seen they're doing.
Great that will make up for the 200billion we apparently lose to piracy! Seriously who could come up with/report such an obviously out of the world BS statistic while keeping a strait face.
My laptop doesn't have a serial or parallel connector on it. Sure It'll take time but eventually there is no reason this couldn't succeed in complete replacing current connectors. It won't however if we just whinge about extra connectors and refuse to do anything.
If I get e-mails from banks that I have no relation with, it is usually spam and gets instantly deleted.
If I get an email from _ANY_ bank, relationship or not, then I _ALWAYS_ assume it's spam and delete it. I also pass this advise onto anyone who asks me about security.
The families who took the money were on the edge of desperation - looking for any way out.
No they were stupid and didn't understand economics. I remember a few years ago when prices rises were already slowing down, I was having beers with some friends and they were going on about self help books and how property investment was the way to make big bucks. They completely missed the fact that the market simply can't sustain indefinite rises above the rate of inflation. Such rises mean that loan payments take up an increasingly large proportion of income. As loan payments take up a higher proportion of income, affordability goes down. Eventually demand bottoms out and something has to give.
Once we recover though I'm sure we'll see another bubble. People are stupid and an entire industry was built around the fallacy that housing market could sustain indefinite growth above the income growth rate.
Most of AustraliaÃ(TM)s population is concentrated in two widely separated coastal regions ((http://www.worldbook.com/wb/Media?id=mp000282). ). I'm well aware of Australia's population distribution. But thanks for not actually answering my post. As I said several times in my post, I was comparing Australia's _URBAN_ areas to Japan's _URBAN_ areas.
I'm not sure what the unrelated statistics are all about. Although interesting you should raise the ACT statistics. At 137people/km2 the population density of the ACT is 1/3 of that of of the whole of Japan, which kinda just backs up my point. Of course Canberra itself is denser than that. Black mountain and the bushland around it and the large undeveloped areas out towards Gungahlin and bellow Belconnen (I lived in the ACT for 3 years), pull down the population density. But then so does the fact that the Japanese archipelago is 70% mountainous pull down Japans statistics. The important point is that, and I'll stress this again to make sure you get it this time, Japan's _URBAN_ areas are much more dense than Australia's _URBAN_ areas. Anyone who's ever seen Japanese suburbia in comparison to Australian suburb would immediately understand what I mean. Even mid-size Japanese cities are packed together far more densely than even Sydney, which is in truth the densest of the Australian cities. This means that any would be companies developing infrastructure can cover a much larger number of potential customers for cheaper.
Also, Telstra doesn't own the entire infrastructure. They own the infrastructure connecting you and your ISP. How your ISP connects to the rest of the internet is up to them. For example, I think alot of alternative ISPs go with PIPE networks. Since download limits depend on your ISP's connection with the rest of the internet it doesn't really have all that much to do with Telstra's wholesale monopoly. Now here is the good bit thanks to shared infrastructure (Everyone uses Telstra's) it's been very easy for ISP's to setup and go nationwide in Australia. Go to Whirlpool and looking at the number of ISPs for you area. You'll probably find 20+ at least. That's competition.. real competition. Switching (aka. Churning) between ISP's using Telstra's infrastructure is also dead easy. All the elements for a competitive market at the retail level have been in place and working for a number of years.
Splitting up Telstra finally completely breaks the conflict of interest between Telstra's wholesale and retail branches, which is good. But truth is ACCC regulations were already such that at the retail ISP level there's been a very competitive market for a number of years.
Now based on the way you keep on saying "Your country" and "Your government", I'm wondering if you're Australian, if not I guess I should forgive you for not really understanding much about the Australian situation but anyway. Australians access huge amounts of overseas content. So what Youtube is hosted locally. You think the average bittorrent user cares where they're downloading from, of course not! Even alot of supposedly "Oceanic" or "Australian" webservers are actually hosted in the US. Classic example is WOW whose Oceanic servers are actually located in the US... Japanese in comparison access almost entirely local content. As I said previously the two are not comparable.
I dealt with this in my reply to the grand parent bellow but basically the same thing applies to Japan. It's a very mountains country (About 70% mountains) with large areas of comparatively low population density. Japanese urban areas are _MUCH_ denser than Australian urban areas. Anyone who's been to the two countries could tell you that.
Japan is a similarly isolated island country, and yet affordable 1 gbps connections are proliferating in urban areas.
.etc. are.
Funnily enough I'm living in Japan atm and had a feeling that someone would raise it. Here's a few fun-facts about Japan. The total land area of Japan is about 370,000km2 or about 1/20 the size of Australia. 70% of this is land is mountainous and quite sparsely populated. Furthermore, the Tohoku and Hokaido regions in the north are cold and still quite sparsely populated (Comparatively speaking) with agriculture being dominate. Shikoku in the south is similarly less densely populated.
The large majority of the population lives along the East coast of the south half of Honshuu (the main island). This can be rough divided into Tokyo and its surrounds in the north-east on the Kanto plain and the Toukai and Kinki regions in the West where Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe
Given the way the Japanese population is concentrated into such a small area, it follows that Japanese cities everywhere are simply _MUCH_ denser than Australian cities. (I'd offer statistics but the methods of division are so different that there is no real way to compare the two). It's extremely obvious to anyone who's been to the two countries.
Higher population density = lower cost per person for delivering service. For every kilometre of cable it lays a Japanese company can reach _far_ more customers than an Australian company can.
Secondly Japan has much less need for overseas bandwidth than Australia does. Language and culture means Japanese internet users are focused on Japan. Even on p2p networks they're much more likely to be accessing Japanese language material, from other Japanese people. Australians comparatively are culturally and linguistically part of a much larger area and consequently be it through p2p downloads or normal browsing access much more overseas content.
Finally, gigabit connection or not (they're not as common as you suggest), you're not likely to get more than about 8-10mbps (I.e. ~1mB/s) downloading from overseas. That's just the speed of your connection to the ISP, the rest of the infrastructure doesn't really support those speeds.
Anyway, if download limits weren't necessary the market would've taken care of them by now. In case you haven't noticed Australian ISP's have been locked in harsh competition for several years driving prices down and speeds up. So no my attitude is not "mind-numbingly ignorant" as you put, I just have more of a grasp of reality.
Things take time to change. This is a good first step. Alternative ISP have made vast inroads in the Australian market and competition has increased massively.
I first got broadband in 2003 on a 2 year conract, 512/128 1gb download limit (with uploads counted!) and excess charges for $70AUD a month through Telstra.... In 2004, I bought out the contract and switched to iiNet... 256/64kbps 4gb download limit (Uploads not counted) with excess usage capping for $60AUD. Oh how things have changed since then. I'm not living in Australia now, but last year I was on ADSL2+ (Upto 24mbps we usually got about 8-10mbps) with a 30gb download limit and speed capping for $60AUD per month. Despite 5 years of inflation prices have fallen, speeds have risen by 16x+ for many and download limits have risen by a factor of 10 at least and caps rather than excess usage charges are now the norm.
Telstra still holds a significant share of the market, but they're by no means dominant. True structural separation will remove the final barriers that competing ISPs have been complaining about.
On a side note, God I'm sick of Australians complaining about their internet access! Our urban areas aren't particular dense and most of our data comes from and goes to overseas locations requiring expensive to maintain communications satellites and underground cables. Despite that for about $60AUD ($50USD) most people have access to ADSL2+ with a generous download allowance (35gb looking at iiNet, 25 with no peak/off peak split looking at Internode). Furthermore, even if you don't have access to ADSL2+, 1.5mbps ADSL1 or cable is almost definitely available. Not only that but we're looking at massive new infrastructure rollouts in the next few years, which should see the final gaps fixed.
Of course genericness isn't a global rule. The Wall Street Journal especially is specialised for a specific readership. The market is big enough that it can accommodate papers targeted at specific audiences or trying to grab attention through attention grabbing shock headlines.
However, The average daily newspapers column is often little more than a republication of whatever has been in the news the previous evening, generally drawn from the same AP/Reuters/... news feed. It's the news... but late and covered in ads. The remainder is generally filled up with book/movie reviews, a generic business column, letters to the editor (Bonus points for the crazy factor because that elicits responses), sports and classifieds. Now people don't need an ad-filled rag to get this stuff anymore and these newspapers especially are dying.
As for your local newspaper, well neutrality is always a matter of perception. In my experience neutrality tends to me slightly left/slightly right of centre. Depending on which side you're on the other can seem biased.
I mean they'll have to put more effort into getting those article reads. With newspapers they could just stick generic content up and be done with it. Now people can be selective and generic content won't get anywhere near the 1,000,000 views or whatever they might wish.
People have never really paid for news stories. You think $15 could possibly cover the costs of printing and delivering a months worth of papers? Advertising always paid for the content, which in the endless search for neutrality to avoid losing any ad-viewers (Erm, readers...) has helped drive the quality to zero.
Of course that said it would be nice to see this create actual incentives for news organisations to create good quality content in a much more competitive environment. Since, I doubt they'll ever be able to attract significant readership with another generic sports and book/movie promotion (Erm, culture...) column.
I don't think that is just open source software.
I went several months without being able to access my uni-wireless last year from my macbook. Eventually I got round to sitting down and trying to fix it. It turned out that although it was set to use DHCP if I had IPV6 enabled that would totally fail. I'm not sure of any reason why I should need to specifically disable IPv6 (which I think is enabled by default on OSX 10.5 + as well), in order to be able to connect specifically to that network, but I did.
I've also had times when windows file sharing would fail without entirely disabling the firewall on OSX. With my settings it should've automatically created an exception, however for whatever reason it didn't.
Of course, getting windows machines to see each other on the network can be a similarly "fun" experience. Or getting windows machines to connect to an ad-hoc network wireless network hosted of an OS-X system. I had one time attempting to connect to a network (connect not create) when Vista told me that my password was not long enough and needed to be at least 6 characters. WTF, I wasn't setting a password I was entering the password for another network!
Either way I'll limit my complaints to that. But the point is networking is a pita on any system.
based on what the market/gamer can bear
Assuming that you're referring to the profit maximising point, then even by your definition prices would be effected by piracy, as piracy shifts the demand curve. Of course pricing is actually much more complex than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pricing).
Either way a game company needs to make enough profit that their company is a profitable investment. Given that Profit = Sales - Costs and Sales = Price * Volume, and that piracy reduces the sales volume, then there would seem to be a pretty straightforward case that higher piracy means that in order to continue to be profitable a company will have to raise prices to make up for the lower sales volume.
Secondly, it's about trying to create artificial scarcity, which seems to me to be all the wrong strategy.
I've heard this a lot, however, without what you call 'artificial scarcity' do you have a better way of compensating creators for their work? If we want to leave it to the free market then creators do indeed need the right to license their work as they see fit, at a price they see fit.
DRM is a (partial) solution to a very real problem. That is without something in place to limit their ability to do so, people are, in general, selfish bastards who'll happily take advantage of someone elses work without compensating them for it. Again if you have a better means of solving this problem, then by all means tell us!
Sorry I don't think that's been a factor at all. The device has been promoted as a life style package with points such as easily being able to look up restaurant reviews, the nice cut and paste functionality, good navigation software and the ability to read manga on being emphasized in commercials.
Now of course none of those points are particularly original and infact I have a bottom of the range Japanese phone that can do all of those things. However the iPhone does make them convenient, does look good and isn't shockingly expensive. Especially in a nation where mobile phones play such a large part in day to day life.
There are plenty of Chinese people who have lots of opportunities to say what they think of the government.
Firstly there is overseas students and so on. Thing is if you talk to them, you'd find that most of them don't think of the government as the borg and feel that a lot of Westerners are very much misinformed about the state of affairs in China. Imagining it as some sort of Maoist control state.
Secondly there is the media within China, which has had a significant role in breaking corruption and abuse stories and even yes looking at government policies in a critical fashion. No they can't touch on the issues such as Tianmen or Tibet. However that doesn't prevent there from being lively and dynamic reporting in other areas.
Furthermore, I can't see how the collective internet reaction is a yawn. Every time a story about China comes up there's plenty numbers of posts rapidly moderated to +4/5 that are just plain wrong in their factual basis and seem to still be imagining China as a 1960's Maoist state.
Fact is that China is a huge complex state, not some borg like entity under the control of an evil central mind. Most Chinese industry is privately run and even most state corporations have to compete or face collapse. Given this they serve their own interests not the interests of the central government. Provincial level governments in China are very powerful and have their own interests they compete for. A large part of the press is privately run and even the public corporations have to compete for readership. If they just regurgitate propaganda then their readership will go elsewhere. The central government like any other government is split up into competing ministries each working towards their own ideas and interests. Furthermore there are conservative factions who advocate more careful reform and greater state control and liberal factions who want fast reform and so on.
Point is there's no way the central government can maintain complete control over all that, guiding the entire country in a single direction. Let alone have the time (or care enough to) mastermind a subtle scheme of propaganda aimed at western internet users based on the idea that by consistently releasing bad articles about China they will desensitise people. Which is what you seem to be suggesting. Anyway, it would seem to me that the only effect of such a scheme would be to reinforce peoples preconceived notion that China is evil.
Come now try thinking a bit wider than the US. The events so far resemble the way the case would likely be handled in most, if not all western justice systems as well. There's almost certainly a degree of corruption in any system. That doesn't, however, prevent any given system from handling some or even dare I say the majority of cases in a reasonably just and forthright manner.
However it would seem that just because this case happened in China that a lot of slashdoters are grasping at straws trying to somehow or another paint the authorities as evil doers in this case.
Fact is most of the Chinese economy is built on private enterprises. Furthermore, most of the Chinese press is privately run tabloids etc and even the publicly owned companies have to compete for profits to survive. Furthermore, given that a large part of their readership is reasonably smart and discerning, they can't just act as a propaganda mouth piece for the government or their readers will go elsewhere. Their is a lot of corruption in China, but the authorities have been trying to clean that up and the press has played a significant role in breaking stories of abuse and so on.
Most importantly though there is nothing at all in this case to indicate that the powers that be were in any way involved at all and if people want to criticise them maybe they ought to wait until there is something to criticise them for... It's not like there is a shortage...
So an unlicensed privately run boot camp to treat internet addiction beats a child to death. The police launch an investigation remaining silent on the mater while it is underway. After appropriate investigations they take action and shut down the camp and arrest those responsible. All this is reported to the public through the media.
Sounds to me like that is exactly how this would play out in any western democracy as well. Maybe, just maybe, the Chinese as well think it's terrible that a child is beaten to death and wish to punish those responsible. But no it couldn't be a genuine pursuit of justice, must just be a facade to protect the powers that be...