Wow, that sucks. The minimum wage here in Australia for full-time work is currently $606.40 per week (so, multiplying by 52, roughly $31,532.80 per year is the smallest possible salary you could be given for any job, graduate or not). Note that the USD, CAD and AUD are all within a few percent of each other in value, so while the figures aren't directly comparable, they are close enough that we can get away with not converting currencies I think.
$40k incidentally was exactly what my graduate wage was here in Australia. But that was in 2006. And even then it was probably in the low-mid range of IT graduate salaries. I wasn't on graduate salary for long though - was bumped up to $60k+ within the first 18 months, and similarly large raises in the few years following that. I should point out that this was actually with an American company, too (doing business in Australia).
Also, I used to think "well OK, Americans get paid less but they also pay less tax, so it balances out". But I plugged some numbers into some tax software and was quite surprised - the overall tax burden is pretty similar in the two countries. Australian Federal income tax is higher than US Federal tax, but once you add in social security, state income tax and other things that Australians don't pay... it's close to equal for typical middle-income people. The wealthy do pay significantly less tax in the US though (as your top tax brackets are lower, and don't kick in until higher income thresholds). The poor end up paying very little or no tax in both countries (though, they get there in different ways - in the US via deductions and in Australia because of low income offsets and the 0% tax bracket up to $18,000).
Having said that, there is one definite difference that partly offsets the effect of lower wages in the US - cost of living. Although our take-home pay for a given income might be roughly the same in both countries, you can buy more with that money in the US as most goods and services are cheaper. Fuel, for example, using today's prices and exchange rates is ~5.90 USD/gallon here, which would seem high to Americans (though cheap for many European countries!)
A gun won't help you survive much most likely, no. Australian farmers own guns... but not for survival. They use em for picking off foxes and other stuff threatening their stock.
Hmm odd. I've always 'known' the ~99% figure (I think it was actually 98.9%) and it was originally from a reputable source... I'll have to try and find it. I remember being surprised it was that close.
Nonetheless, Wolfram's figures seem to be accurate so (they concur with Lord Wiki) so I guess I'm wrong. Still a pretty big place though.
Indeed, which makes them more similar to the US/European conception of where a city begins and ends, rather than the Aussie one ('if I haven't left a built up area, it's still the same city' - as an Aussie I think that way myself, but it doesn't work in the denser populated areas in the northern hemisphere).
Er? I'm not talking about the area in TFA (which by the way I am quite familiar with). I was responding to the general 'no guns in Australia' post, referring to truly remote areas nowhere near any major highways). I would have thought mentioning massive cattle stations would make it obvious I'm not talking about the Mildura area, which relatively speaking isn't very remote.
Australia is ~99% the area of the lower 48 of the US - i.e. essentially the same size. Very convenient comparison when Americans ask you how big Australia is. Often they seem surprised for some reason though. I suspect it might have something to do with the way Mercator projection exaggerates the areas of places as you get further poleward (the US is significantly further north than Australia is south).
The US is 'wider' east to west, but Australia is quite a bit 'taller', north to south (especially if you include Tasmania).
Nope. The City of Gold Coast is a bona fide separate city. And a big one too - 6th largest population in the country (if you throw Tweed Heads in there too, though that doesn't contribute that much to the total):
Precisely. You'd have to be pretty thick to not realise something was wrong when you're going down some tiny dirt track, but intending to head to a town of 30k people like Mildura, which is on the intersection of a couple of major highways, including the Sturt Highway which being the major route between Sydney and Adelaide is heavily trafficked.
Good question. They were travelling to a reasonably sized town, in a regional area. The big clue should have been when they left a sealed road - despite the remoteness of most of Australia, a place of Mildura's size (30k+) will be accessible by proper state highways, which are virtually all sealed (a few exceptions, e.g. the Silver City Highway north of Broken Hill... but that's far more remote than the area we are talking about in TFA). Most people should have got the clue at that point that something was wrong. Secondly, even in very remote areas, things are usually signposted well.
The second clue would have been when they stopped seeing any other traffic. They weren't going seriously "outback" here, or to a place that was remote enough to bother with carrying provisions etc. They were travelling to a town in the country, but not a super-remote area. I mean, for one thing, Mildura is on the Sturt Highway which is THE major route between Sydney and Adelaide - it's not isolated by any means. They would have every expectation that a GPS would guide them there correctly. And an ACTUAL GPS (i.e. Garmin, Tom Tom etc.) would have, no issues at all. So would Google Maps, for that matter. But really if you are travelling long distances - use a proper GPS that doesn't depend on network connectivity to get the mapping data (or an app on your phone that allows you to pre-cache maps, and has a good data source).
Many travelling in remote areas will be farmers or pastoralists. Many of them will own guns (generally rifles or shotguns). Gun laws are indeed tough (and handguns are effectively banned, true), but there are legitimate reasons to own weapons (especially out in the remote areas) and many people out there do, legally.
Whether that means they'd typically travel with their weapons, I don't know. Probably not I imagine, unless they were travelling between distant parts of their own property (some of those cattle stations out there cover areas the size of small US states).
Parent poster here. Just thought I should also add that this is unique to Apple Maps. Google Maps in my experience is flawless across Australia. As is my stand-alone Garmin GPS.
The root cause of this, and many of the other errors in city location observed throughout Australia, is actually quite simple and I don't know why Apple haven't fixed it yet. It was a bit of a facepalm moment when I realised what was actually going on with the Australian maps on iOS6.
Basically there are two problems:
1. Apple Maps is marking the centre of local government areas (analogous to a county, for American readers) as a point location, rather than a name for a large area of land (i.e. it's treating them as locations you can navigate to); and
2. In the case that a search query matches both a local government area name, AND a town name... it preferences the local government area (which as mentioned, is being mapped as an exact point roughly in the middle of the area, generally in the middle of nowhere)
For example, follow the Hume Highway south from Sydney a little way and you will see a point marked as Wingecaribee, east of the highway, roughly in the vicinity of where the town of Moss Vale is (though, as noted, the GUI chooses to display Wingecaribee prominently, but doesn't mark Moss Vale or any other towns at all, unless you zoom in really close). The point marked as Wingecaribee is just a random spot in rugged forested terrain. Nothing's actually there. This is simply the centre of the Wingecaribee Shire. But there is no actual town called Wingecaribee so apart from looking weird, this doesn't hurt anything.
BUT... keep following the highway south and you will soon come to the next shire, Goulburn Shire. Again, the centre of this local government area is marked as a point, called "Goulburn" and again, it's not anywhere near anything. It's in the middle of some random farmer's field somewhere. BUT THIS TIME, we have a problem, because within Goulburn Shire, there is actually also a town called Goulburn. But if you search for 'Goulburn', you are directed to the centre of the Goulburn Shire, NOT the town. This is completely retarded, as noone ever searches for things by local government area name in Australia (many people don't even know the name of their LGA... they aren't as prominently known as counties in the US), and even if they did, wouldn't want to be directed to some arbitrary point near the middle of it with no regard for whether there's anything there.
This is what has happened in TFA too. There is a Mildura local government area. Within that, there is also a city called Mildura. But the city isn't marked; only the centre of the LGA. Which as stated, is in the middle of bloody nowhere.
Basically whoever processed the Australian mapping data has interpreted LGA (shire, county etc.) names as locality (town, city) names. And has given them prominence in both display and search results over actual localities. Should be simple to fix, surely. The data is there - it's just being used incorrectly.
I've often wondered how popular a kind of "MMO Minecraft" type game would be, where you start from a completely empty slate.
It'd be an MMO, with character classes and skills and items and crafting and PvP and mobs and all the other stuff that goes along with being an MMO. But, when the server starts, you have an empty world or continent. Nothing at all on it except natural terrain, plants, animals/mobs etc. It's then up to the players to mine the resources, build the cities, craft the weapons and armor etc. Like EvE Online, but not in space, mixed with Minecraft, but with better graphics and a proper class/skill/levelling system.
This could even extend to players or clans being able to physically purchase land and set permissions on who could build on or alter that area. Perhaps a particular clan would buy narrow strips of land running between settlements, and build roads or train tracks on that land (which the game mechanics would allow you to do, and which would permit much faster travel than walking). Others might become traders (since there's no NPC shops). Others might even offer secure storage facilities to players that had too much stuff to store in their personal inventory (i.e. they'd build some big, tough structure out of very-hard-to-destroy materials, allow people to put boxes inside with their stuff... the game would have to support some 'locked box' permissions system to ensure that the building owner couldn't just steal everyone's stuff etc.)
Would be quite interesting to see which people tried founding cities and trade hubs, and failed, and which succeeded. And why did they succeed? Could they offer people in that area better security than in other areas? Was the area closer to transport or resources?
Anyway yeah, just a thought. I would totally play that kind of game...sounds awesome. I love sandboxey stuff (and don't like most conventional MMOs that are story/quest driven and prohibit you from doing certain things).
Hey I'm a westerner and I liked L2 (and to a lesser extent, Aion). Played L2 for a good 6+ years. Aion just for a year or two (didn't like the lack of interesting economy and bind-on-equip items).
The thing that attracted me to Lineage II is that unlike many Western MMOs (cough, WoW), it doesn't hold your hand. The economy is player driven (most items are player-crafted instead of dropped, somewhat like EvE Online). PvP is open - anyone can attack anyone provided you aren't in town (...but there are consequences). Because it's about inter-clan politics and territorial control. And most of all because it requires you to work together to acheive things - you can't do much at all by yourself. You need to forge alliances to succeed. Grouping is far more effective than soloing. A big part of this is that the character classes were so specialised (at least, at first, up until they started giving healer/buffer/support classes decent attacking skills).
Now I am probably not the typical western gamer. I'd probably fit in well in Asia. But yeah, I wouldn't say L2 was a miserable failure... they had 8 or 9 servers running for quite a long period of time. It wasn't a raging success but it had a good western community. The problem is, everyone makes the comparison with the ridiculously-successful WoW... and everything looks like a failure compared to that. But WoW is the exception, not the norm.
Hell, to make the comparison even more relevant, two of NCSoft's MMOs older than CoH are still running: Lineage (in Korea only), and Lineage II (which still has both Korean AND Western servers up and running).
Lineage II is 'only' about 9 years old but Lineage 1 is ancient - similar era to the two you mention.
It's really quite common for place names not to be said the way they 'look', even when the same word/name/phoneme in other contexts, in the same language and dialect, is commonly pronounced a different way.
And that is the case all over the world. Lots of examples in the UK obviously, but also in the US. Mobile, AL springs to mind. Or the state of Arkansas.
Yep agreed. Three things that almost EVERY other OECD country has done or is doing curently that the US hasn't:
- Got rid of 1c coins, round cash transactions to nearest 5c - Replace $1 (and $2, if applicable) bills with coins - Replace linen bills with polymer (lasts way longer, harder to counterfeit, can go through the wash with no ill effects, don't get all crumpled up etc.)
Get on it guys! I like visiting the US but absolutely hate dealing with your money.
Interesting. The more I read about other English-speaking countries that transitioned to metric, the more I realise that we here in Australia seem to have 'converted' more than most of them. I'm 30 and have no idea about my height in feet. I'm 178 cm - that's all I have ever known.
I did know about the continued use of miles in the UK, but the "still thinking of height in feet" in Canada was new to me.
Are you sure about that? Thinking back to when we got rid of $1/$2 bills here in Australia and replaced them with coins, vending machine companies/parking meter operators etc. were some of the biggest supporters of the move - no more jammed bills in the mechanism! And no need to have separate slots for bills and coins... can just have a single coin slot. Simpler and easier to empty the machines and less likely to break.
The problem is you gave people a choice. You introduced $1 coins, but didn't take away the bills. It's default human nature to stick with the familiar - so if there's two equally easy paths, but one involves change (no matter how small), then people will avoid it.
In Australia the replacement of $1 and $2 bills with coins worked, I think, because the coins were introduced AND the bills were taken away at the same time. Well not "taken away"... any bills you had were still legal tender of course... but they just stopped producing them, and within a couple of years they were removed from circulation through natural attrition. This happens very quickly with highly circulated, low denomination bills like the $1 - I think I read that the average lifespan of a US $1 bill is only a couple of years.
As an aside, the colour, size and weight of the Sacagawea dollars are very very close to the Australian $1 coin. As an Australian that moved to the US, this meant I actually felt very comfortable with them and they literally 'felt' like a dollar to me, unlike the $1 bills. I have to admit though I did wonder why you called them such an awkward name... it's not like it even needs a "name". What's wrong with just "$1 coin"?
I understand that some Americans do confuse them with quarters due to their size/weight. Wasn't an issue for me though cause I really don't like quarters. Another artefact of growing up in Australia where the coins were 5c/10c/20c/50c - doing the math with 25c denominations has never felt natural to me so I subconsciously avoid it I guess. If something is 60c I really have to think "duhh so ok that's 2 quarters and a dime" (whereas back in AU it'd just be three 20c coins).
Yeah it'll be dual stack for a long, long time. Though must say, I currently have 11 devices connected to my internal home network, and 9 of them have a globally addressable IPv6 address. The Nintendo Wii and the WDTV Live are the only non-IPv6-capable devices in the house, apparently. The rest are all fine and grabbed a v6 address with no additional config needed.
(2 Windows machines, 1 Mac OS X, 2 Linux, 2 iPhones, 1 iPad and a D-link NAS, presumably running some embedded Linux).
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Wow, that sucks. The minimum wage here in Australia for full-time work is currently $606.40 per week (so, multiplying by 52, roughly $31,532.80 per year is the smallest possible salary you could be given for any job, graduate or not). Note that the USD, CAD and AUD are all within a few percent of each other in value, so while the figures aren't directly comparable, they are close enough that we can get away with not converting currencies I think.
$40k incidentally was exactly what my graduate wage was here in Australia. But that was in 2006. And even then it was probably in the low-mid range of IT graduate salaries. I wasn't on graduate salary for long though - was bumped up to $60k+ within the first 18 months, and similarly large raises in the few years following that. I should point out that this was actually with an American company, too (doing business in Australia).
Also, I used to think "well OK, Americans get paid less but they also pay less tax, so it balances out". But I plugged some numbers into some tax software and was quite surprised - the overall tax burden is pretty similar in the two countries. Australian Federal income tax is higher than US Federal tax, but once you add in social security, state income tax and other things that Australians don't pay ... it's close to equal for typical middle-income people. The wealthy do pay significantly less tax in the US though (as your top tax brackets are lower, and don't kick in until higher income thresholds). The poor end up paying very little or no tax in both countries (though, they get there in different ways - in the US via deductions and in Australia because of low income offsets and the 0% tax bracket up to $18,000).
Having said that, there is one definite difference that partly offsets the effect of lower wages in the US - cost of living. Although our take-home pay for a given income might be roughly the same in both countries, you can buy more with that money in the US as most goods and services are cheaper. Fuel, for example, using today's prices and exchange rates is ~5.90 USD/gallon here, which would seem high to Americans (though cheap for many European countries!)
A gun won't help you survive much most likely, no. Australian farmers own guns ... but not for survival. They use em for picking off foxes and other stuff threatening their stock.
Hmm odd. I've always 'known' the ~99% figure (I think it was actually 98.9%) and it was originally from a reputable source ... I'll have to try and find it. I remember being surprised it was that close.
Nonetheless, Wolfram's figures seem to be accurate so (they concur with Lord Wiki) so I guess I'm wrong. Still a pretty big place though.
Indeed, which makes them more similar to the US/European conception of where a city begins and ends, rather than the Aussie one ('if I haven't left a built up area, it's still the same city' - as an Aussie I think that way myself, but it doesn't work in the denser populated areas in the northern hemisphere).
Er? I'm not talking about the area in TFA (which by the way I am quite familiar with). I was responding to the general 'no guns in Australia' post, referring to truly remote areas nowhere near any major highways). I would have thought mentioning massive cattle stations would make it obvious I'm not talking about the Mildura area, which relatively speaking isn't very remote.
Australia is ~99% the area of the lower 48 of the US - i.e. essentially the same size. Very convenient comparison when Americans ask you how big Australia is. Often they seem surprised for some reason though. I suspect it might have something to do with the way Mercator projection exaggerates the areas of places as you get further poleward (the US is significantly further north than Australia is south).
The US is 'wider' east to west, but Australia is quite a bit 'taller', north to south (especially if you include Tasmania).
Nope. The City of Gold Coast is a bona fide separate city. And a big one too - 6th largest population in the country (if you throw Tweed Heads in there too, though that doesn't contribute that much to the total):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Australia_by_population
Precisely. You'd have to be pretty thick to not realise something was wrong when you're going down some tiny dirt track, but intending to head to a town of 30k people like Mildura, which is on the intersection of a couple of major highways, including the Sturt Highway which being the major route between Sydney and Adelaide is heavily trafficked.
Good question. They were travelling to a reasonably sized town, in a regional area. The big clue should have been when they left a sealed road - despite the remoteness of most of Australia, a place of Mildura's size (30k+) will be accessible by proper state highways, which are virtually all sealed (a few exceptions, e.g. the Silver City Highway north of Broken Hill ... but that's far more remote than the area we are talking about in TFA). Most people should have got the clue at that point that something was wrong. Secondly, even in very remote areas, things are usually signposted well.
The second clue would have been when they stopped seeing any other traffic. They weren't going seriously "outback" here, or to a place that was remote enough to bother with carrying provisions etc. They were travelling to a town in the country, but not a super-remote area. I mean, for one thing, Mildura is on the Sturt Highway which is THE major route between Sydney and Adelaide - it's not isolated by any means. They would have every expectation that a GPS would guide them there correctly. And an ACTUAL GPS (i.e. Garmin, Tom Tom etc.) would have, no issues at all. So would Google Maps, for that matter. But really if you are travelling long distances - use a proper GPS that doesn't depend on network connectivity to get the mapping data (or an app on your phone that allows you to pre-cache maps, and has a good data source).
Many travelling in remote areas will be farmers or pastoralists. Many of them will own guns (generally rifles or shotguns). Gun laws are indeed tough (and handguns are effectively banned, true), but there are legitimate reasons to own weapons (especially out in the remote areas) and many people out there do, legally.
Whether that means they'd typically travel with their weapons, I don't know. Probably not I imagine, unless they were travelling between distant parts of their own property (some of those cattle stations out there cover areas the size of small US states).
Parent poster here. Just thought I should also add that this is unique to Apple Maps. Google Maps in my experience is flawless across Australia. As is my stand-alone Garmin GPS.
The root cause of this, and many of the other errors in city location observed throughout Australia, is actually quite simple and I don't know why Apple haven't fixed it yet. It was a bit of a facepalm moment when I realised what was actually going on with the Australian maps on iOS6.
Basically there are two problems:
1. Apple Maps is marking the centre of local government areas (analogous to a county, for American readers) as a point location, rather than a name for a large area of land (i.e. it's treating them as locations you can navigate to); and
2. In the case that a search query matches both a local government area name, AND a town name ... it preferences the local government area (which as mentioned, is being mapped as an exact point roughly in the middle of the area, generally in the middle of nowhere)
For example, follow the Hume Highway south from Sydney a little way and you will see a point marked as Wingecaribee, east of the highway, roughly in the vicinity of where the town of Moss Vale is (though, as noted, the GUI chooses to display Wingecaribee prominently, but doesn't mark Moss Vale or any other towns at all, unless you zoom in really close). The point marked as Wingecaribee is just a random spot in rugged forested terrain. Nothing's actually there. This is simply the centre of the Wingecaribee Shire. But there is no actual town called Wingecaribee so apart from looking weird, this doesn't hurt anything.
BUT ... keep following the highway south and you will soon come to the next shire, Goulburn Shire. Again, the centre of this local government area is marked as a point, called "Goulburn" and again, it's not anywhere near anything. It's in the middle of some random farmer's field somewhere. BUT THIS TIME, we have a problem, because within Goulburn Shire, there is actually also a town called Goulburn. But if you search for 'Goulburn', you are directed to the centre of the Goulburn Shire, NOT the town. This is completely retarded, as noone ever searches for things by local government area name in Australia (many people don't even know the name of their LGA ... they aren't as prominently known as counties in the US), and even if they did, wouldn't want to be directed to some arbitrary point near the middle of it with no regard for whether there's anything there.
This is what has happened in TFA too. There is a Mildura local government area. Within that, there is also a city called Mildura. But the city isn't marked; only the centre of the LGA. Which as stated, is in the middle of bloody nowhere.
Basically whoever processed the Australian mapping data has interpreted LGA (shire, county etc.) names as locality (town, city) names. And has given them prominence in both display and search results over actual localities. Should be simple to fix, surely. The data is there - it's just being used incorrectly.
I've often wondered how popular a kind of "MMO Minecraft" type game would be, where you start from a completely empty slate.
It'd be an MMO, with character classes and skills and items and crafting and PvP and mobs and all the other stuff that goes along with being an MMO. But, when the server starts, you have an empty world or continent. Nothing at all on it except natural terrain, plants, animals/mobs etc. It's then up to the players to mine the resources, build the cities, craft the weapons and armor etc. Like EvE Online, but not in space, mixed with Minecraft, but with better graphics and a proper class/skill/levelling system.
This could even extend to players or clans being able to physically purchase land and set permissions on who could build on or alter that area. Perhaps a particular clan would buy narrow strips of land running between settlements, and build roads or train tracks on that land (which the game mechanics would allow you to do, and which would permit much faster travel than walking). Others might become traders (since there's no NPC shops). Others might even offer secure storage facilities to players that had too much stuff to store in their personal inventory (i.e. they'd build some big, tough structure out of very-hard-to-destroy materials, allow people to put boxes inside with their stuff ... the game would have to support some 'locked box' permissions system to ensure that the building owner couldn't just steal everyone's stuff etc.)
Would be quite interesting to see which people tried founding cities and trade hubs, and failed, and which succeeded. And why did they succeed? Could they offer people in that area better security than in other areas? Was the area closer to transport or resources?
Anyway yeah, just a thought. I would totally play that kind of game...sounds awesome. I love sandboxey stuff (and don't like most conventional MMOs that are story/quest driven and prohibit you from doing certain things).
Hey I'm a westerner and I liked L2 (and to a lesser extent, Aion). Played L2 for a good 6+ years. Aion just for a year or two (didn't like the lack of interesting economy and bind-on-equip items).
The thing that attracted me to Lineage II is that unlike many Western MMOs (cough, WoW), it doesn't hold your hand. The economy is player driven (most items are player-crafted instead of dropped, somewhat like EvE Online). PvP is open - anyone can attack anyone provided you aren't in town (...but there are consequences). Because it's about inter-clan politics and territorial control. And most of all because it requires you to work together to acheive things - you can't do much at all by yourself. You need to forge alliances to succeed. Grouping is far more effective than soloing. A big part of this is that the character classes were so specialised (at least, at first, up until they started giving healer/buffer/support classes decent attacking skills).
Now I am probably not the typical western gamer. I'd probably fit in well in Asia. But yeah, I wouldn't say L2 was a miserable failure ... they had 8 or 9 servers running for quite a long period of time. It wasn't a raging success but it had a good western community. The problem is, everyone makes the comparison with the ridiculously-successful WoW ... and everything looks like a failure compared to that. But WoW is the exception, not the norm.
Hell, to make the comparison even more relevant, two of NCSoft's MMOs older than CoH are still running: Lineage (in Korea only), and Lineage II (which still has both Korean AND Western servers up and running).
Lineage II is 'only' about 9 years old but Lineage 1 is ancient - similar era to the two you mention.
Hahaha, mod AC parent up...good one.
Nonetheless, 'Harvey' Bay it is.
It's really quite common for place names not to be said the way they 'look', even when the same word/name/phoneme in other contexts, in the same language and dialect, is commonly pronounced a different way.
And that is the case all over the world. Lots of examples in the UK obviously, but also in the US. Mobile, AL springs to mind. Or the state of Arkansas.
Well, maybe not ~directly~ at the sun :)
Yep agreed. Three things that almost EVERY other OECD country has done or is doing curently that the US hasn't:
- Got rid of 1c coins, round cash transactions to nearest 5c
- Replace $1 (and $2, if applicable) bills with coins
- Replace linen bills with polymer (lasts way longer, harder to counterfeit, can go through the wash with no ill effects, don't get all crumpled up etc.)
Get on it guys! I like visiting the US but absolutely hate dealing with your money.
Interesting. The more I read about other English-speaking countries that transitioned to metric, the more I realise that we here in Australia seem to have 'converted' more than most of them. I'm 30 and have no idea about my height in feet. I'm 178 cm - that's all I have ever known.
I did know about the continued use of miles in the UK, but the "still thinking of height in feet" in Canada was new to me.
Are you sure about that? Thinking back to when we got rid of $1/$2 bills here in Australia and replaced them with coins, vending machine companies/parking meter operators etc. were some of the biggest supporters of the move - no more jammed bills in the mechanism! And no need to have separate slots for bills and coins ... can just have a single coin slot. Simpler and easier to empty the machines and less likely to break.
The problem is you gave people a choice. You introduced $1 coins, but didn't take away the bills. It's default human nature to stick with the familiar - so if there's two equally easy paths, but one involves change (no matter how small), then people will avoid it.
In Australia the replacement of $1 and $2 bills with coins worked, I think, because the coins were introduced AND the bills were taken away at the same time. Well not "taken away" ... any bills you had were still legal tender of course ... but they just stopped producing them, and within a couple of years they were removed from circulation through natural attrition. This happens very quickly with highly circulated, low denomination bills like the $1 - I think I read that the average lifespan of a US $1 bill is only a couple of years.
As an aside, the colour, size and weight of the Sacagawea dollars are very very close to the Australian $1 coin. As an Australian that moved to the US, this meant I actually felt very comfortable with them and they literally 'felt' like a dollar to me, unlike the $1 bills. I have to admit though I did wonder why you called them such an awkward name ... it's not like it even needs a "name". What's wrong with just "$1 coin"?
I understand that some Americans do confuse them with quarters due to their size/weight. Wasn't an issue for me though cause I really don't like quarters. Another artefact of growing up in Australia where the coins were 5c/10c/20c/50c - doing the math with 25c denominations has never felt natural to me so I subconsciously avoid it I guess. If something is 60c I really have to think "duhh so ok that's 2 quarters and a dime" (whereas back in AU it'd just be three 20c coins).
Good catch, and yeah, that is a pretty solid argument. Mod parent up :)
Yeah it'll be dual stack for a long, long time. Though must say, I currently have 11 devices connected to my internal home network, and 9 of them have a globally addressable IPv6 address. The Nintendo Wii and the WDTV Live are the only non-IPv6-capable devices in the house, apparently. The rest are all fine and grabbed a v6 address with no additional config needed.
(2 Windows machines, 1 Mac OS X, 2 Linux, 2 iPhones, 1 iPad and a D-link NAS, presumably running some embedded Linux).