> Gummi Bears... worked against a bunch of scanners that detect electrical charges within the human body, since gelatine has virtually the same capacitance as a finger's skin.
Ridiculous. Bovine Gelatine has a completely different capacitance from Human Skin. Only Human Gelatine could give that sort of result. Wait. Human. Gelatine. Gummi Bear. A barber shop quartet. Scopie. Illinois. Orca. A Big Fat Guy. Gummi Bear. Gummi. Gelatine. Human. People.
Yes. What's tragic about that is that Darwin sat on the theory of evolution for years. He though publishing it would anger God or some such nonsense. When Wallace wrote to him to share his thoughts, Darwin thought "Screw God! I have to beat this guy!"
PS. The Mod who flagged that a troll seriously needs to get a sense of humor.
This story is an amazing coincidence. I discovered relativity before Einstein, but I never published my findings. Do you agree recognition is long overdue?
> New Zealand Scientists Make Atom-Trapping Breakthrough
As a proud loud Australian I claim Mikkel Andersen as Australia's favourite son! Come on over matey. I also claim "Lord of the Rings" as one of Australia's greatest movies and "Crowded House" as our greatest band (hey... nothing since the 80's sounds right anyway). And that Kiwi who discovered the relationship between steroids and lung activation that must have saved a million premature babies... we own him too.
Labor deserved to lose this election, but the Liberals Abbott was an obvious fool, a technical ignoramus, an economic illiterate a sexist and a racist pig, and to cap it off was caught making unfunded promises.
I dearly wanted to boot Labor out, but the Liberals made it too hard to vote for them. So I voted Green, and grudgingly gave Labor my preference. But Labor has cleared learned nothing and Gillard has crowned Conroy as Communications Minister *AGAIN*!!!?
Neither major party has got the message. Would the Liberals please dumb Abbott and the other Howard misogynist dinosaurs WHO HAVEN'T GOT THE MESSAGE so we can vote for Turnbull next election and get a progressive centralist government?
Poor, Sweet commodore64_love... You see life is not that fair.
> If the credit card was stolen, then the loss should come out of the credit company's pocket, not Paypal or the Ebay seller. That's called a chargeback. When you use PayPal, you waive your right to a chargeback and agree to use Paypal's "dispute resolution mechanism".
> PLUS paypal is supposed to provide seller protection if the item was shipped to a verified address. Yes, I thought that too. But one time I had to use protection I found it has loopholes eBay use to shirk their responsibilities. Like their infamous 'funds protected by FIDC' slogan, all that meant was their own bank accounts were protected by the FIDC, just like any other bank account. It gave a false sense of security, just like Paypal 'protection'.
> If it were me I'd track down the buyer and demand back whatever product he stole. You have the address. He could be on the other side of the country. Are you going to drive across the country like that mad daiper-wearing astronaut to corner them? Unless it's a big ticket item you would spend more on gas? Even if they did live close you would need to take them to court which could take $$$ and years.
When Paypal locks an account for bogus reasons has anyone tried reporting it to the police or FBI as theft? If anyone in Paypal has ever muttered a word about using these policies to make money then its a conspiracy.
And as for the lard asses in Congress, it's appalling they have done nothing to legislate to bring PayPal to account.
This is ridiculous. If I buy a Chablis or a Burgundy I want a particular type of wine. So what that these wines originated in certain regions in France? I don't give a damn where it was made. I would say most people who drink them don't know or care either. The end result is that if I buy a Chablis in Australia they will need to call it "dry white". This doesn't help consumers, but it does help some wine producers in France trying to get a monopoly. I'm told by a French friend who is a wine buff that the Aussie wines he can buy are superior to French wines (seriously), so this makes the whole thing sound like a ploy to recapture an ailing market.
Banning moselle, port, and sherry? What idiot agreed to this? (BTW I thank OP for not capitalising the first letter of these very generic names.)
I suggest Aussie wine makers label their bottles "Not moselle", "Not port", "Not sherry". Nice way to thumb their noses at certain diary product-eating pacifist primates and the bureaucrats who agreed to this.
SCO's shareholders do have some assets left: A legitimate claim to sue the idiot CEO and lawyers who flew this once iconic company into a hillside.
And as tarnished as SCO's brand name is, it would still be an improvement for Xe nee Blackwater, Accenture nee Arthur Andersen, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Enron and BP.
> For example, a virtual environment could help medical students learn how to interview a patient or run a patient clinic.
Neither is a substitute for interacting with real patients or working at a real clinic. It may be less work for the medical student to play PC games, but for effective diagnosis you need to know what the patient looks like, how they walk, move, etc. How much are you going to get out of interviewing a Sim? Do these people think they can interact with a Sim the same way they would with a real patient (other than a pre-canned script)? Being able to play it in your underwear with a beer in your hand may sound more appealing to the current generation of med students, but it won't make them better doctors. Last thing we need is more lazy butts looking for a ride on easy street:
> In the survey, 80 percent of students said computer games can have an educational value.
In the survey run by a medical education company, 80 percent of students said they *think* computer games can have an educational value. There's a difference.
> according to a study published online in BMC Medical Education
BMC, might I suggest in your next press release announce you will deliver your product on iPads or on Facebook for even more publicity. I don't blame BMC for PR scamming, but I do blame the media for lazily reprinting any press release e-mailed to them.
Skype would do a lot better with their IPO if they did something to stop the porno spam. It's hard to recommend Skype so Grandma can talk to her grandkids when they are both going to have porno popups selling sex chat on her screen. This problem was reported to Skype years ago by many people but they've done bugger all to fix it. When I reported it they said turn off notifications... but then no one else could reach us. I pointed this out. They didn't care. They wouldn't take any action against the sex spammers either (despite giving them screen shots), I guess because they were making money off the sex chat. So we went from a few years ago when everyone was getting on Skype to today when our friends and family have deserted it.
So given the choice between a communications medium between family and friends, and a sex chat service, Skype went with the sex chat service and hoped families would put up with it. It's like Facebook looking the other way while hookers and drug pushers overrun their service. The good thing is the market is still wide open for a competitor to offer Internet phone services like Skype but do something to block spammers and scammers.
> Let's be honest. The reason the military doesn't want their own people to see the wikileaks documents is because it doesn't want them to realize what a complete farce this war (and by extension the war in Iraq) is.
At first I thought they were just being stupid, but what you say makes far more sense. Interestingly The DoD advised soldiers not to watch HBO's "Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone" because they may find it traumatic but there was more to it:
"Senior Army officials have scaled back their planned participation in an advance screening of a coming HBO documentary about an Army Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad because of fears that the graphic footage could demoralize soldiers and their families and negatively affect public opinion about the war, Army officials said Friday." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/14cnd-hbo.html
To me this is pretty lame. Sure, soldiers have to fight wars. But "negatively affecting public opinion" shouldn't be their concern. Leave that to the politicians who start wars. Soldiers fight wars, but they're not supposed to "encourage" them. The same applies to so-called "Media Units" in the military.
If you steal my loot in a raid I'll know your real name, and with a bit more googling everything there is to know about you:
Many of the vast unwashed masses on the net as spectacularly naive about their privacy. Take Gabrielle Romney, ex-lover of a right-wing political party figure in Australia. She wrote a letter to "The Age" bawling that they published her photo: "I am dismayed by the prominent publication of my photograph accompanying the article. To be targeted by a stalker is invasive, intimidating, and terrifying. As a private individual, one of the most debilitating aspects is the constant and unwelcome intrusion into one's life. Publishing my photograph has been a further violation of my privacy and dignity."
> Researchers have long known that mammals, including humans, lack a key enzyme -- one possessed by most of the animal kingdom and even plants -- that reverses severe sun damage
The story description is misleading. By careful omission it gives the impression that this enzyme is the only one that can repair sun-damaged DNA damaged by UV, emphasizing that humans lack it. OH CRUEL LORD! But we do in fact already have other enzymes that repair DNA damage and these are very old news. Ohio U. are just talking about one mechanism, but the press release makes it sound like the only one.
I'm not knocking either journal article. What they did was pretty cool, but would these people please learn to be honest in their press releases too? You would think they would have learned from Climategate?
> Can anyone offer real insight into why people vote this way?
It's a good question. Voters whine about the lack of choice, but always vote for the two majors. Often we hear of a protest vote, but the voters cower out at the last minute. It happened in Britain with the LDP. It will probably happen in Oz with the greens.
My theory is that most voters are uninformed, cowering simps who don't have the brains or the balls to pick the best candidate. Most of them vote for party X for the same reason they follow football team Y; because they always have, or their dad did and their mates do.
Try talking politics with someone. They'll tell you immediately who they like, but pry deeper and you'll find their reasoning ill-thought out. Winston Churchill said "The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with your average voter." Try it. Not to try and convert them to your cause, but just to see how shallow they are.
Gillard and Abbot are the most pathetic line up in living memory, yet one of them will win.
We've got an election three weeks away where voters will have the opportunity to throw out Julia Gillard. Gillard is Rudd's deputy who knifed him in the back to take his job, yet was party to all his unpopular decisions. She is continuing to support the web filter (though deferred implementing it until after the election).
In the other corner is Tony Abbott, a conservative catholic who is also pro-web filter (see earlier comments in Slashdot).
These are the two major parties in Australia. Their policies are so similar it's hard to tell them apart. One of them will win. What sort of a choice is this?
Sounds like Ceglia has legit claim, but Zuckenberg is richer than God and whoever has the most money can afford the better lawyers and bleed the other party into bankruptcy. Ceglia has nothing to lose. Zuckenberg has everything to lose.
> The Australian Privacy Commissioner has found Google guilty of breaching the country's Privacy Act when it collected unsecured WiFi payload data with its Street View vehicles.
The Australian Privacy Act is weak and ineffectual. I looked into it and discovered if you make a complaint against an organisation, the worst the commissioner can do is make a non-binding determination which has no legal or financial penalties against the violator. And they can keep doing what they're doing. You have no recourse. It's feel-good legislation that gives the public a reassuring feeling something is there, without having to do anything.
So say some organisation takes all your personal information and dumps it on the web for all to see. They will get a finding made against them, but can keep doing it. Your only recourse is if someone uses that information to commit a crime, you can use the privacy commissioner's finding as evidence when you're applying for damages. But you can't use it to order them to take that information down.
> I hope ICANN reconsiders and returns to latin+numbers only addresses.
ICANN is in the business of hyping domain name sales and cashing in on it. Look at their TLD selloff. Applying needs a $185K non-refundable "application fee" which ICANN claim they need to cover their oveheads. Justified if they read applications while drinking Dom Pérignon from a gold slipper. The only way to convince ICANN not to do something is to convince them it won't make them money. Speculators and squatters are still out there, so no chance!
Telstra is a sad case of a company. The ex-government telephone monopoly, it was privatized and the profits of that went into the "Future Fund." Sounds nice, but it's just a fancy name of for the public service pension fund. (You can almost imagine the delight on the faces of the public servants and politicians who thought this idea up - it's their pension fund!)
Telstra was run into the ground by a American CEO Solomon Trujillo. He was hired at a time that anyone with an American accent could get a CEO job in Australia. Aussies were that parochial. But Trujillo did a really crap job. He only installed ADSL2 at exchanges where competitors installed ADSL2. He didn't kiss the butt of the government of the day, which is the custom in Australia. Combine all that and the share price sagged. Telstra continued to offer the most overpriced and poorly serviced offerings, relying on ill-informed consumers who believed "You can't go wrong with Telstra." Hell. I've got two service complaints over a year old they still haven't fixed.
Sadly when the previous government sold off Telstra, they let them take all the wiring with them which means any ISP who sells an ADSL service must house it in Telstra's exchanges and over their wires. Telstra doesn't need to be competitive, which is why broadband in Oz is still so expensive. There is one competitor - Optus - who has their own cable, but they gave up before they wired half the country and being appointed as a duopoly (yes, the government before last actually did that!) they don't have to be competitive either: all they have to do is match Telstra, to the point Telstra and Optus offer the worst deals in the country.
A few days ago the government paid Telstra $11B for access to their wires and infrastructure and (believe it or not) to compensate them for the future loss of customers. That's right. I hate Telstra and can't wait to leave them, but the government is actually using my tax dollars to compensate a company for losing my business through their own sheer ineptitude.
Don't expect changes. After the disaster of the Telstra privatisation the Rudd ^H^H^H^H Gillard government are creating a new national broadband network... which is what that $11B is for. But they've also announced an intention to privatize it making exactly the same mistake as last time. One of the heads of this effort is Michael Kaiser, an Labour party politician (kicked out for electoral fraud) who is now earning $450K a year appointed without so much as a job interview.
And this, my friends, is why telecommunications in Australia is such a mess.
I'm with TPG who are probably the best value ISP in Oz, but cheap as they are for a big downloading plan you're still looking at $50 a month. Too much and it was adding up. Their basic plan is $30 a month for 12 Gb (4Gb peak and 8 Gb off-peak) which I can get by with. That 4Gb Peak I use it carefully so I don't go over. Last thing I want is near the end of the month when I'm hovering below some greedy program to update itself needlessly and push me over the edge!
Slashdot Mirror
> Gummi Bears... worked against a bunch of scanners that detect electrical charges within the human body, since gelatine has virtually the same capacitance as a finger's skin.
Ridiculous. Bovine Gelatine has a completely different capacitance from Human Skin. Only Human Gelatine could give that sort of result. Wait. Human. Gelatine. Gummi Bear. A barber shop quartet. Scopie. Illinois. Orca. A Big Fat Guy. Gummi Bear. Gummi. Gelatine. Human. People.
> I don't believe you.
I did. I really, really did. Honest.
Yes. What's tragic about that is that Darwin sat on the theory of evolution for years. He though publishing it would anger God or some such nonsense. When Wallace wrote to him to share his thoughts, Darwin thought "Screw God! I have to beat this guy!" PS. The Mod who flagged that a troll seriously needs to get a sense of humor.
Between frivolous law suits and driving across the country in diapers it's fair to say NASA may have problems with its recruiting program.
This story is an amazing coincidence. I discovered relativity before Einstein, but I never published my findings. Do you agree recognition is long overdue?
> New Zealand Scientists Make Atom-Trapping Breakthrough
As a proud loud Australian I claim Mikkel Andersen as Australia's favourite son! Come on over matey. I also claim "Lord of the Rings" as one of Australia's greatest movies and "Crowded House" as our greatest band (hey... nothing since the 80's sounds right anyway). And that Kiwi who discovered the relationship between steroids and lung activation that must have saved a million premature babies... we own him too.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/06/sir-graham-mont-liggins-obituary
Labor deserved to lose this election, but the Liberals Abbott was an obvious fool, a technical ignoramus, an economic illiterate a sexist and a racist pig, and to cap it off was caught making unfunded promises.
I dearly wanted to boot Labor out, but the Liberals made it too hard to vote for them. So I voted Green, and grudgingly gave Labor my preference. But Labor has cleared learned nothing and Gillard has crowned Conroy as Communications Minister *AGAIN*!!!?
Neither major party has got the message. Would the Liberals please dumb Abbott and the other Howard misogynist dinosaurs WHO HAVEN'T GOT THE MESSAGE so we can vote for Turnbull next election and get a progressive centralist government?
> I've done several chargebacks on paypal purchases.
Mod parent +1. I didn't realise you could still do this. Thanks for sharing that info.
Poor, Sweet commodore64_love... You see life is not that fair.
> If the credit card was stolen, then the loss should come out of the credit company's pocket, not Paypal or the Ebay seller.
That's called a chargeback. When you use PayPal, you waive your right to a chargeback and agree to use Paypal's "dispute resolution mechanism".
> PLUS paypal is supposed to provide seller protection if the item was shipped to a verified address.
Yes, I thought that too. But one time I had to use protection I found it has loopholes eBay use to shirk their responsibilities. Like their infamous 'funds protected by FIDC' slogan, all that meant was their own bank accounts were protected by the FIDC, just like any other bank account. It gave a false sense of security, just like Paypal 'protection'.
> If it were me I'd track down the buyer and demand back whatever product he stole. You have the address.
He could be on the other side of the country. Are you going to drive across the country like that mad daiper-wearing astronaut to corner them? Unless it's a big ticket item you would spend more on gas? Even if they did live close you would need to take them to court which could take $$$ and years.
When Paypal locks an account for bogus reasons has anyone tried reporting it to the police or FBI as theft? If anyone in Paypal has ever muttered a word about using these policies to make money then its a conspiracy.
And as for the lard asses in Congress, it's appalling they have done nothing to legislate to bring PayPal to account.
This is ridiculous. If I buy a Chablis or a Burgundy I want a particular type of wine. So what that these wines originated in certain regions in France? I don't give a damn where it was made. I would say most people who drink them don't know or care either. The end result is that if I buy a Chablis in Australia they will need to call it "dry white". This doesn't help consumers, but it does help some wine producers in France trying to get a monopoly. I'm told by a French friend who is a wine buff that the Aussie wines he can buy are superior to French wines (seriously), so this makes the whole thing sound like a ploy to recapture an ailing market.
Banning moselle, port, and sherry? What idiot agreed to this? (BTW I thank OP for not capitalising the first letter of these very generic names.)
I suggest Aussie wine makers label their bottles "Not moselle", "Not port", "Not sherry". Nice way to thumb their noses at certain diary product-eating pacifist primates and the bureaucrats who agreed to this.
SCO's shareholders do have some assets left: A legitimate claim to sue the idiot CEO and lawyers who flew this once iconic company into a hillside.
And as tarnished as SCO's brand name is, it would still be an improvement for Xe nee Blackwater, Accenture nee Arthur Andersen, Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, Enron and BP.
> For example, a virtual environment could help medical students learn how to interview a patient or run a patient clinic.
Neither is a substitute for interacting with real patients or working at a real clinic. It may be less work for the medical student to play PC games, but for effective diagnosis you need to know what the patient looks like, how they walk, move, etc. How much are you going to get out of interviewing a Sim? Do these people think they can interact with a Sim the same way they would with a real patient (other than a pre-canned script)? Being able to play it in your underwear with a beer in your hand may sound more appealing to the current generation of med students, but it won't make them better doctors. Last thing we need is more lazy butts looking for a ride on easy street:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/stressed-out-surgeons-or-tomorrows-easy-riders-20100806-11oik.html
> In the survey, 80 percent of students said computer games can have an educational value.
In the survey run by a medical education company, 80 percent of students said they *think* computer games can have an educational value. There's a difference.
> according to a study published online in BMC Medical Education
BMC, might I suggest in your next press release announce you will deliver your product on iPads or on Facebook for even more publicity. I don't blame BMC for PR scamming, but I do blame the media for lazily reprinting any press release e-mailed to them.
Skype would do a lot better with their IPO if they did something to stop the porno spam. It's hard to recommend Skype so Grandma can talk to her grandkids when they are both going to have porno popups selling sex chat on her screen. This problem was reported to Skype years ago by many people but they've done bugger all to fix it. When I reported it they said turn off notifications... but then no one else could reach us. I pointed this out. They didn't care. They wouldn't take any action against the sex spammers either (despite giving them screen shots), I guess because they were making money off the sex chat. So we went from a few years ago when everyone was getting on Skype to today when our friends and family have deserted it.
So given the choice between a communications medium between family and friends, and a sex chat service, Skype went with the sex chat service and hoped families would put up with it. It's like Facebook looking the other way while hookers and drug pushers overrun their service. The good thing is the market is still wide open for a competitor to offer Internet phone services like Skype but do something to block spammers and scammers.
http://www.google.com/search?q=skype+porn+spam
We seem to be made to suffer, it's our lot in life.
> Let's be honest. The reason the military doesn't want their own people to see the wikileaks documents is because it doesn't want them to realize what a complete farce this war (and by extension the war in Iraq) is.
At first I thought they were just being stupid, but what you say makes far more sense. Interestingly The DoD advised soldiers not to watch HBO's "Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone" because they may find it traumatic but there was more to it:
"Senior Army officials have scaled back their planned participation in an advance screening of a coming HBO documentary about an Army Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad because of fears that the graphic footage could demoralize soldiers and their families and negatively affect public opinion about the war, Army officials said Friday."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/14cnd-hbo.html
To me this is pretty lame. Sure, soldiers have to fight wars. But "negatively affecting public opinion" shouldn't be their concern. Leave that to the politicians who start wars. Soldiers fight wars, but they're not supposed to "encourage" them. The same applies to so-called "Media Units" in the military.
If you steal my loot in a raid I'll know your real name, and with a bit more googling everything there is to know about you:
Many of the vast unwashed masses on the net as spectacularly naive about their privacy. Take Gabrielle Romney, ex-lover of a right-wing political party figure in Australia. She wrote a letter to "The Age" bawling that they published her photo: "I am dismayed by the prominent publication of my photograph accompanying the article. To be targeted by a stalker is invasive, intimidating, and terrifying. As a private individual, one of the most debilitating aspects is the constant and unwelcome intrusion into one's life. Publishing my photograph has been a further violation of my privacy and dignity."
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/man-sent-more-than-100-sometimes-offensive-messages-to-exlover-20100726-10slv.html
Fair enough, but type her name into "Google" and you'll find yourself staring at her mug in facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/people/Gabrielle-Romney/528810959
Let me repeat what she said: "As a private individual, one of the most debilitating aspects is the constant and unwelcome intrusion into one's life."
If you're on Facebook, you're not a private individual.
> Researchers have long known that mammals, including humans, lack a key enzyme -- one possessed by most of the animal kingdom and even plants -- that reverses severe sun damage
The story description is misleading. By careful omission it gives the impression that this enzyme is the only one that can repair sun-damaged DNA damaged by UV, emphasizing that humans lack it. OH CRUEL LORD! But we do in fact already have other enzymes that repair DNA damage and these are very old news. Ohio U. are just talking about one mechanism, but the press release makes it sound like the only one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8053698
Seems to be a trend with journal articles: Release the journal article and a popular press article; Take huge liberties with the popular press article to guarantee widespread media coverage (and we guess future funding and sunscreen merchandising). Note Ohio U. is the source of the journal article and this press release:
http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20100725/550/researchers-discover-how-key-enzyme-repairs-sun-damaged-dna.htm
We saw the same thing recently with the silly "chicken or egg" article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jul/18/chicken-and-egg-conundrum-solved
I'm not knocking either journal article. What they did was pretty cool, but would these people please learn to be honest in their press releases too? You would think they would have learned from Climategate?
> Can anyone offer real insight into why people vote this way?
It's a good question. Voters whine about the lack of choice, but always vote for the two majors. Often we hear of a protest vote, but the voters cower out at the last minute. It happened in Britain with the LDP. It will probably happen in Oz with the greens.
My theory is that most voters are uninformed, cowering simps who don't have the brains or the balls to pick the best candidate. Most of them vote for party X for the same reason they follow football team Y; because they always have, or their dad did and their mates do.
Try talking politics with someone. They'll tell you immediately who they like, but pry deeper and you'll find their reasoning ill-thought out. Winston Churchill said "The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with your average voter." Try it. Not to try and convert them to your cause, but just to see how shallow they are.
Gillard and Abbot are the most pathetic line up in living memory, yet one of them will win.
We've got an election three weeks away where voters will have the opportunity to throw out Julia Gillard. Gillard is Rudd's deputy who knifed him in the back to take his job, yet was party to all his unpopular decisions. She is continuing to support the web filter (though deferred implementing it until after the election).
In the other corner is Tony Abbott, a conservative catholic who is also pro-web filter (see earlier comments in Slashdot).
These are the two major parties in Australia. Their policies are so similar it's hard to tell them apart. One of them will win. What sort of a choice is this?
Sounds like Ceglia has legit claim, but Zuckenberg is richer than God and whoever has the most money can afford the better lawyers and bleed the other party into bankruptcy. Ceglia has nothing to lose. Zuckenberg has everything to lose.
> The Australian Privacy Commissioner has found Google guilty of breaching the country's Privacy Act when it collected unsecured WiFi payload data with its Street View vehicles.
The Australian Privacy Act is weak and ineffectual. I looked into it and discovered if you make a complaint against an organisation, the worst the commissioner can do is make a non-binding determination which has no legal or financial penalties against the violator. And they can keep doing what they're doing. You have no recourse. It's feel-good legislation that gives the public a reassuring feeling something is there, without having to do anything.
So say some organisation takes all your personal information and dumps it on the web for all to see. They will get a finding made against them, but can keep doing it. Your only recourse is if someone uses that information to commit a crime, you can use the privacy commissioner's finding as evidence when you're applying for damages. But you can't use it to order them to take that information down.
http://www.privacy.org.au/Papers/OFPCPteSectReview0412.doc
> I hope ICANN reconsiders and returns to latin+numbers only addresses.
ICANN is in the business of hyping domain name sales and cashing in on it. Look at their TLD selloff. Applying needs a $185K non-refundable "application fee" which ICANN claim they need to cover their oveheads. Justified if they read applications while drinking Dom Pérignon from a gold slipper. The only way to convince ICANN not to do something is to convince them it won't make them money. Speculators and squatters are still out there, so no chance!
http://www.mindsandmachines.com/2010/01/icanns-credibility-in-the-balance-are-new-tlds-going-to-happen/
http://www.domainnamenews.com/up-to-the-minute/businesses-urge-icann-initiate-gtlds-delay/6121
http://domainnamewire.com/2009/02/25/icann-to-study-price-caps-on-domain-registrations/
http://www.dnforum.com/f17/icann-irt-final-report-abomination-wholly-unbalanced-thread-369416.html
TFA:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10432404.stm
> The submitter adds, "Believe it or not, the Tuesday thing is relevant. Well, sort of. It's ambiguous."
Why even say that? Anyone who does these puzzles likes to figure it out by themselves.
Telstra is a sad case of a company. The ex-government telephone monopoly, it was privatized and the profits of that went into the "Future Fund." Sounds nice, but it's just a fancy name of for the public service pension fund. (You can almost imagine the delight on the faces of the public servants and politicians who thought this idea up - it's their pension fund!)
Telstra was run into the ground by a American CEO Solomon Trujillo. He was hired at a time that anyone with an American accent could get a CEO job in Australia. Aussies were that parochial. But Trujillo did a really crap job. He only installed ADSL2 at exchanges where competitors installed ADSL2. He didn't kiss the butt of the government of the day, which is the custom in Australia. Combine all that and the share price sagged. Telstra continued to offer the most overpriced and poorly serviced offerings, relying on ill-informed consumers who believed "You can't go wrong with Telstra." Hell. I've got two service complaints over a year old they still haven't fixed.
Sadly when the previous government sold off Telstra, they let them take all the wiring with them which means any ISP who sells an ADSL service must house it in Telstra's exchanges and over their wires. Telstra doesn't need to be competitive, which is why broadband in Oz is still so expensive. There is one competitor - Optus - who has their own cable, but they gave up before they wired half the country and being appointed as a duopoly (yes, the government before last actually did that!) they don't have to be competitive either: all they have to do is match Telstra, to the point Telstra and Optus offer the worst deals in the country.
A few days ago the government paid Telstra $11B for access to their wires and infrastructure and (believe it or not) to compensate them for the future loss of customers. That's right. I hate Telstra and can't wait to leave them, but the government is actually using my tax dollars to compensate a company for losing my business through their own sheer ineptitude.
Don't expect changes. After the disaster of the Telstra privatisation the Rudd ^H^H^H^H Gillard government are creating a new national broadband network... which is what that $11B is for. But they've also announced an intention to privatize it making exactly the same mistake as last time. One of the heads of this effort is Michael Kaiser, an Labour party politician (kicked out for electoral fraud) who is now earning $450K a year appointed without so much as a job interview.
And this, my friends, is why telecommunications in Australia is such a mess.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/how-to-get-a-450000-job-no-ads-required--just-a-nice-word-from-the-minister-20100209-no66.html
http://www.smh.com.au/business/sol-trujillo-was-worse-than-he-looked-20100211-nv22.html
http://www.moneymorning.com.au/20091202/kris-sayce-scam-telstra.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly
I'm with TPG who are probably the best value ISP in Oz, but cheap as they are for a big downloading plan you're still looking at $50 a month. Too much and it was adding up. Their basic plan is $30 a month for 12 Gb (4Gb peak and 8 Gb off-peak) which I can get by with. That 4Gb Peak I use it carefully so I don't go over. Last thing I want is near the end of the month when I'm hovering below some greedy program to update itself needlessly and push me over the edge!