Well the message would just be dropped if you sent it to a non-mobile phone.
But who in their right mind would try SMSing a landline number? In most places mobile numbers look different than landline numbers (start with a particular prefix, or have a different number of digits etc.)*
*(North America is a notable exception here... IIRC, mobile numbers don't look any different than landline numbers in the US and Canada, so I suppose you could accidentally SMS a landline number there)
It's not really overpriced on most modern plans (which either have unlimited texting for a flat fee, or simply include a number of free texts per month that is more than most people need).
I'm on a low end cap plan on Vodafone (Australia) that gives me $180 of 'value' for $20 a month. That 'value' is just a bucket which I can use on calls, data, SMS or whatever. If I used the whole lot on SMS (nominally priced at 28 cents each, but that's not what you actually pay), it'd be:
180.00 / 0.28 = 642 SMS per month.
Given that I pay $20, that's equivalent to 3 cents per SMS. Ok so this is still overpriced if you consider it just as 'data' and figure it out as $/MB... but you are paying for the ability conveniently to communicate a short, non-time-critical message, not for 160 bytes (or whatever) of 'data'. That's worth 3 cents to me.
And that's on my super-low-end plan. The cost on the higher plans would be much, much lower (effectively under 1 cent per SMS).
Agree though that it was kinda overpriced ten or more years ago (I remember paying 22 cents per SMS in the late 90s).
A good post and I fully agree. Just thought I'd provide an example though of one of the "few isolated areas" you mention where there is an undersupply problem and prices aren't really falling much, if at all.
I live in Canberra and we have the highest rents in the country, believe it or not (higher even than Sydney, insane for a small city of ~400,000 people). Property prices (to buy) are second highest by most counts (below Sydney, but not by much).
So OK, one reason for this the fact that the ACT has the highest average income in the country (so there's a bit of 'pricing what the market will bear' in there). But it's not the sole, or even dominant, reason. The problem is that the ACT government is extremely slow with its land releases. They offer a small bit of land to developers each year. The competition for that land is therefore intense, especially considering the ACT's economy and population is growing quite quickly at the moment in comparison to the surrounding States (NSW, VIC). Canberra is starting to come of age to an extent - as a city that's only been around for 40 odd years (it was basically a sheep paddock with a few scattered houses before the 1960s), and no longer the majority-public-service place it was during the 1980s and early 90s. So land prices are high, and house prices are high.
Note that I don't particularly blame the ACT Govt. in this case as they are being cautious with land releases due to the fact that Canberra will, within the foreseeable future, start approaching the limits of where it can actually grow to (it's already hitting the NSW border on the north side, it's limited to the West by terrain (Tidbinbilla and Brindabella ranges) and to the south by Namadgi National Park... there's some opportunities to the east but would require destroying large parts of the Kowen plantation forests out there and the associated industry/profit that goes along with it). So they are trying to promote densification and infill in the existing footprint rather than releasing new land by the bucketload. Big winner in all this is the adjacent town of Queanbeyan in NSW, which enjoys significantly cheaper prices and is, due to the weird shape of the ACT, extremely close to inner Canberra (closer, in fact than most Canberra suburbs). Needless to say, it's growing very quickly compared to most other regional NSW towns.
Yep, though note that that table is using PPP (which is a fair way to look at things, as it considers the actual buying power of the local currency rather than just its exchange rate).
However if you do find a table listing median incomes by country based on pure exchange rate, AU currently kicks the crap out of US (due to the current AUD:USD exchange rate which is much higher for the last few years than it has been for many decades). Having said that, it's not really a fair way to compare things.People make more money in AU than the US on average (using current exchange rate to compare), but the cost of living is also higher, so that doesn't really mean that Australians have that much more disposable income to spend on things. I've lived in both countries for extended periods of time and in my experience it balances out to about the same (I made a bit less in the US than in AU, but most things were a lot cheaper).
Best of both worlds is if you can get paid in AUD while living in the US, as a few of my friends do... lucky bastards.
I only "holiday" in the US because half my family is there and it's nice to see them once in a while. Of course, I always have to visit them... they can never visit me because US employers seem to give them 30 seconds vacation time every decade or some such and they can never get off work to visit.
It does piss me off that only one entity on earth has my fingerprints - the US Government. Notwithstanding that fingerprinting is reserved only for criminals in the rest of the civilised world, not even my OWN government has mine - but that of a foreign country does? Grr.
Hehe. Yeah ZIP drives were awesome - used them a lot from 1996-2000ish. They filled the gap when floppy disks were too small, but CD burners and media were still too expensive for home or small-business users.
I still have a Pentium II 450 Mhz machine down the garage with a functioning internal ZIP drive (the older 100 MB ZIP, not the 'newer' 250 MB ones that never really caught on that much).
The delay is simply because the Australian TV networks have buy the content off the American producers. For the bulk of shows, they wait and see how well it does in the US before spending the money to buy it. They let the US audiences do the audience testing then make a judgement whether it's worth them buying it or not (so we don't get that phenomenon you see in the US sometimes where a show starts and only lasts a few weeks then gets cancelled).
For some popular shows though, they buy them ahead of time, and for those shows we get them ASAP (within a day or two). For instance we get the Wednesday 'Late Late Show' on Thursday (which is actually as quick as is possible due to the time zone difference - the Wednesday shows airs in the US around lunchtime Thursday Australian time).
Yeah my experience was mostly in Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota where 25 is pretty standard on residential streets... maybe 30 if it's a trunk road.
Agreed. You guys over in the States put Stop signs at almost every intersection. Was surprising to me as an Australian the first time I drove over there... in AU we tend to put stop signs only on the occasional intersection where the view of potential oncoming traffic is obstructed for some reason (e.g. there's a tall hedge along the side of the road until just before the intersection). But in the absence of any such obstructions, the ubiquitous Give Way (equivalent to US Yield) sign is used instead.
This, in combination with the considerably lower speed limits in suburban/residential areas, makes getting around suburbia in the US a lot slower than I was used to.
There's no such phrase as "honing in" on something.
That phrase is similar to "intensive purposes", in that it results from a perpetuated mishearing of another phrase. You can "home in" on something - the phrase is "homing in". But to 'hone' means to sharpen (one's blade, one's skills, one's wit etc.)
I am sure some will find some links that suggest that it's such a common mishearing that it has now become acceptable, but I don't agree. Both the Merriam-Webster (for US English) and the OED (for UK/Commonwealth English) state that "hone in" is an error.
I'm pretty sure yes, they will continue to run their activation servers for a long time. As you say, your license doesn't expire.
If in the bleak, distant future when robots rule the world you are still using XP and MS wants to turn off the activation servers they will probably release a patch to disable the activation stuff, or provide a 'golden key' as you say. I'm sure by then they won't care too much about potential piracy of a 20+ year old OS. (That'd be like them caring that I may or may not have some pirated floppy disks of DOS 6.22 sitting in my garage somewhere...)
Price has a lot to do with it. Mac OS upgrades are on the order of $30. Linux is free. A new copy of Windows costs significantly more (even if just an OEM copy).
Only if you live in a place where you need to actually refer to South Africa often enough to need an acronym for it. That'd be like complaining that WA refers to Washington state in America instead of Western Australia. Or that CA can be California (state code), or Canada (country code). All depends on where you are.
But if you really want to get pedantic, SA (or technically, AU-SA) is the official state code for South Australia under ISO 3166-2. South Africa is ZA.
Six States... and two Territories (ACT and NT). While they are constitutionally treated a bit differently than the states (e.g. less representatives in the Federal Senate), they both also have their own legislatures/governments.
So for most intents and purposes, Australia has 8 separate 'subdivisions' that are analogous to States in the USA (even if two of them are not technically States).
You don't even need to be l33t, you just buy from another jurisdiction (whether interstate or overseas) that doesn't 'ban' them.
I put the word 'ban' in quotes because, in all Australian States except WA and NT, it is NOT illegal to own/watch/play RC (refused classification) material. It is merely illegal to be a business ~selling~ that material. It is the act of "selling unclassified material" that is illegal rather than anything about the content per se. For instance, even if it's an episode of a completely inoffensive kids show or something, it's still illegal to sell it if it hasn't actually ~been~ rated. Doesn't matter what the content is.
Yes, she's been living here in Australia for many years - we're aware that she still has to file. The exemption is up in the high $90,000s/year these days, and even if she went over this, she still wouldn't owe, as she'd get a credit for foreign tax paid (to the Australian govt.) provided that tax is equal to or greater than what she'd owe the IRS (which it usually is for mid to high incomes... it's only at low incomes where US tax rates exceed Australian tax rates)
As an aside, not many other countries tax do what the US does and require people to file if they are citizens if they didn't actually earn anything in the US (or indeed have any connection to the US anymore whatsoever). It's retarded. If the shoe was on the other foot and I moved to the US permanently and still had Australian citizenship, I wouldn't have to file Australian tax returns (provided I genuinely earned $0 in Australia)
The US always did this too - up until quite recently if you entered the US on a visa waiver, you had to surrender the green tear-off portion of the card when you exited the US (typically they stapled it in your passport so you couldn't forget). The only difference is that Australian card has a few more details and they collect it at an actual immigration checkpoint (rather than the airline collecting it on behalf of the DHS).
Now that the US has moved to that ESTA system and you don't get a physical visa waiver card anymore, you don't have to submit anything on departure. But they still know when you leave - it's just all done electronically now.
Also the reason Australia collects that card on departure isn't just to prevent fleeing criminals and prevent visa overstayers. Australian citizens fill it out too - it's so they know where you're going so that if there's a disaster overseas, they know who's out of the country and potentially who might be affected, so DFAT can try and contact you or your relatives.
At first (i.e. for the first half of release day), the Australian site was loudly proclaiming "4G!!!!" in large font in the headings. That's the problem. They rapidly changed it once they realised they were going to get in trouble, but the site you're seeing now is quite different than how it appeared on launch day.
Precisely. My American wife moved here to Australia after we got married and at first was ineligible for a whole bunch of (mostly goverrnment) jobs because, although she was a legal permanent resident of Australia, she wasn't a citizen. It was nothing to do with her being 'from' a different country, it was citizenship that mattered.
Now though she's got her Australian citizenship and those jobs have opened up to her (she's a dual citizen, as she retained her US citizenship too), despite the fact that she clearly (once you hear her speak) isn't 'from' Australia. So yeah, "country of origin" and "citizenship" are two unrelated things - the latter is an acceptable thing to ask about, the former isn't.
Plenty of people here (south-eastern Australia) can easily power their whole home, and then some, from a rooftop panel array (at least for most of the year... mid-winter gets a little trickier). Yes solar isn't good enough for baseline power load, but it still push out enough power to run a home if the conditions are right (and they are right in many places on earth).
I lived in a completely solar-powered place for a while (in northern NSW) and it was fine. Very rarely needed to draw extra power from the grid. Running three hair driers at once might do it, but how often does that happen? (Heating and cooking were gas, by the way... and they are traditionally the things that chew up insane amounts of power if they are electric - exclude those and most home appliances simply don't require that much power)
True, though putting these things in domestic homes is likely to lead to at least a few incidents where nutcases try and break one open, or one malfunctions in a decidedly non-pretty fashion etc.
The iPhone has both those things. It has an option "wipe device after 10 failed attempts". Additionally, if this feature is turned on, any password attempts after the fifth attempt have an exponentially-increasing delay applied (up to several hours between the 9th and 10th attempt).
However, this won't do anything to prevent this kind of attack, because it's being done internally by jailbreaking the device and running arbitrary code on it, not via the standard UI.
I use complex passcode on my iPhone. But I also set the "require passcode after X minutes locked" to 5 or 10 minutes, rather than the default "instantly". Chances are, if I lose my phone or have it stolen, it won't be within 5 minutes of me last touching it. But I find that it eliminates a lot of the passcode-entering because I tend to use my phone for little bits within a few minutes of each other, then it might be hours before I touch it again.
Plus you get pretty fast at entering it after you've had some practice.
There's also an option to use a >4 digit, but still completely numeric passcode. This provides some additional security (i.e. 100 million combinations instead of 10 thousand, using 8 digits instead of 4), but is still easy to enter quickly because you are only presented with the numpad on the phone, rather than the full keyboard with itty bitty keys that's hard to unlock in a hurry.
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Well the message would just be dropped if you sent it to a non-mobile phone.
But who in their right mind would try SMSing a landline number? In most places mobile numbers look different than landline numbers (start with a particular prefix, or have a different number of digits etc.)*
*(North America is a notable exception here ... IIRC, mobile numbers don't look any different than landline numbers in the US and Canada, so I suppose you could accidentally SMS a landline number there)
It's not really overpriced on most modern plans (which either have unlimited texting for a flat fee, or simply include a number of free texts per month that is more than most people need).
I'm on a low end cap plan on Vodafone (Australia) that gives me $180 of 'value' for $20 a month. That 'value' is just a bucket which I can use on calls, data, SMS or whatever. If I used the whole lot on SMS (nominally priced at 28 cents each, but that's not what you actually pay), it'd be:
180.00 / 0.28 = 642 SMS per month.
Given that I pay $20, that's equivalent to 3 cents per SMS. Ok so this is still overpriced if you consider it just as 'data' and figure it out as $/MB ... but you are paying for the ability conveniently to communicate a short, non-time-critical message, not for 160 bytes (or whatever) of 'data'. That's worth 3 cents to me.
And that's on my super-low-end plan. The cost on the higher plans would be much, much lower (effectively under 1 cent per SMS).
Agree though that it was kinda overpriced ten or more years ago (I remember paying 22 cents per SMS in the late 90s).
A good post and I fully agree. Just thought I'd provide an example though of one of the "few isolated areas" you mention where there is an undersupply problem and prices aren't really falling much, if at all.
I live in Canberra and we have the highest rents in the country, believe it or not (higher even than Sydney, insane for a small city of ~400,000 people). Property prices (to buy) are second highest by most counts (below Sydney, but not by much).
So OK, one reason for this the fact that the ACT has the highest average income in the country (so there's a bit of 'pricing what the market will bear' in there). But it's not the sole, or even dominant, reason. The problem is that the ACT government is extremely slow with its land releases. They offer a small bit of land to developers each year. The competition for that land is therefore intense, especially considering the ACT's economy and population is growing quite quickly at the moment in comparison to the surrounding States (NSW, VIC). Canberra is starting to come of age to an extent - as a city that's only been around for 40 odd years (it was basically a sheep paddock with a few scattered houses before the 1960s), and no longer the majority-public-service place it was during the 1980s and early 90s. So land prices are high, and house prices are high.
Note that I don't particularly blame the ACT Govt. in this case as they are being cautious with land releases due to the fact that Canberra will, within the foreseeable future, start approaching the limits of where it can actually grow to (it's already hitting the NSW border on the north side, it's limited to the West by terrain (Tidbinbilla and Brindabella ranges) and to the south by Namadgi National Park ... there's some opportunities to the east but would require destroying large parts of the Kowen plantation forests out there and the associated industry/profit that goes along with it). So they are trying to promote densification and infill in the existing footprint rather than releasing new land by the bucketload. Big winner in all this is the adjacent town of Queanbeyan in NSW, which enjoys significantly cheaper prices and is, due to the weird shape of the ACT, extremely close to inner Canberra (closer, in fact than most Canberra suburbs). Needless to say, it's growing very quickly compared to most other regional NSW towns.
Yep, though note that that table is using PPP (which is a fair way to look at things, as it considers the actual buying power of the local currency rather than just its exchange rate).
However if you do find a table listing median incomes by country based on pure exchange rate, AU currently kicks the crap out of US (due to the current AUD:USD exchange rate which is much higher for the last few years than it has been for many decades). Having said that, it's not really a fair way to compare things.People make more money in AU than the US on average (using current exchange rate to compare), but the cost of living is also higher, so that doesn't really mean that Australians have that much more disposable income to spend on things. I've lived in both countries for extended periods of time and in my experience it balances out to about the same (I made a bit less in the US than in AU, but most things were a lot cheaper).
Best of both worlds is if you can get paid in AUD while living in the US, as a few of my friends do ... lucky bastards.
I only "holiday" in the US because half my family is there and it's nice to see them once in a while. Of course, I always have to visit them ... they can never visit me because US employers seem to give them 30 seconds vacation time every decade or some such and they can never get off work to visit.
It does piss me off that only one entity on earth has my fingerprints - the US Government. Notwithstanding that fingerprinting is reserved only for criminals in the rest of the civilised world, not even my OWN government has mine - but that of a foreign country does? Grr.
Hehe. Yeah ZIP drives were awesome - used them a lot from 1996-2000ish. They filled the gap when floppy disks were too small, but CD burners and media were still too expensive for home or small-business users.
I still have a Pentium II 450 Mhz machine down the garage with a functioning internal ZIP drive (the older 100 MB ZIP, not the 'newer' 250 MB ones that never really caught on that much).
The delay is simply because the Australian TV networks have buy the content off the American producers. For the bulk of shows, they wait and see how well it does in the US before spending the money to buy it. They let the US audiences do the audience testing then make a judgement whether it's worth them buying it or not (so we don't get that phenomenon you see in the US sometimes where a show starts and only lasts a few weeks then gets cancelled).
For some popular shows though, they buy them ahead of time, and for those shows we get them ASAP (within a day or two). For instance we get the Wednesday 'Late Late Show' on Thursday (which is actually as quick as is possible due to the time zone difference - the Wednesday shows airs in the US around lunchtime Thursday Australian time).
Yeah my experience was mostly in Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota where 25 is pretty standard on residential streets ... maybe 30 if it's a trunk road.
Like so: http://cardriving.com.au/Photo/Driving_straight_ahead_through_an_intersection_on_a_minor_road_Give_Way_sign.JPG
Agreed. You guys over in the States put Stop signs at almost every intersection. Was surprising to me as an Australian the first time I drove over there ... in AU we tend to put stop signs only on the occasional intersection where the view of potential oncoming traffic is obstructed for some reason (e.g. there's a tall hedge along the side of the road until just before the intersection). But in the absence of any such obstructions, the ubiquitous Give Way (equivalent to US Yield) sign is used instead.
This, in combination with the considerably lower speed limits in suburban/residential areas, makes getting around suburbia in the US a lot slower than I was used to.
There's no such phrase as "honing in" on something.
That phrase is similar to "intensive purposes", in that it results from a perpetuated mishearing of another phrase. You can "home in" on something - the phrase is "homing in". But to 'hone' means to sharpen (one's blade, one's skills, one's wit etc.)
I am sure some will find some links that suggest that it's such a common mishearing that it has now become acceptable, but I don't agree. Both the Merriam-Webster (for US English) and the OED (for UK/Commonwealth English) state that "hone in" is an error.
I'm pretty sure yes, they will continue to run their activation servers for a long time. As you say, your license doesn't expire.
If in the bleak, distant future when robots rule the world you are still using XP and MS wants to turn off the activation servers they will probably release a patch to disable the activation stuff, or provide a 'golden key' as you say. I'm sure by then they won't care too much about potential piracy of a 20+ year old OS. (That'd be like them caring that I may or may not have some pirated floppy disks of DOS 6.22 sitting in my garage somewhere...)
Price has a lot to do with it. Mac OS upgrades are on the order of $30. Linux is free. A new copy of Windows costs significantly more (even if just an OEM copy).
Only if you live in a place where you need to actually refer to South Africa often enough to need an acronym for it. That'd be like complaining that WA refers to Washington state in America instead of Western Australia. Or that CA can be California (state code), or Canada (country code). All depends on where you are.
But if you really want to get pedantic, SA (or technically, AU-SA) is the official state code for South Australia under ISO 3166-2. South Africa is ZA.
Six States ... and two Territories (ACT and NT). While they are constitutionally treated a bit differently than the states (e.g. less representatives in the Federal Senate), they both also have their own legislatures/governments.
So for most intents and purposes, Australia has 8 separate 'subdivisions' that are analogous to States in the USA (even if two of them are not technically States).
Simple map showing location of the 8 States/Territories here
The Office of Film and Literature Classification (a statutory authority set up by legislation, though not strictly part of 'the government') does it.
You don't even need to be l33t, you just buy from another jurisdiction (whether interstate or overseas) that doesn't 'ban' them.
I put the word 'ban' in quotes because, in all Australian States except WA and NT, it is NOT illegal to own/watch/play RC (refused classification) material. It is merely illegal to be a business ~selling~ that material. It is the act of "selling unclassified material" that is illegal rather than anything about the content per se. For instance, even if it's an episode of a completely inoffensive kids show or something, it's still illegal to sell it if it hasn't actually ~been~ rated. Doesn't matter what the content is.
Yes, she's been living here in Australia for many years - we're aware that she still has to file. The exemption is up in the high $90,000s/year these days, and even if she went over this, she still wouldn't owe, as she'd get a credit for foreign tax paid (to the Australian govt.) provided that tax is equal to or greater than what she'd owe the IRS (which it usually is for mid to high incomes ... it's only at low incomes where US tax rates exceed Australian tax rates)
As an aside, not many other countries tax do what the US does and require people to file if they are citizens if they didn't actually earn anything in the US (or indeed have any connection to the US anymore whatsoever). It's retarded. If the shoe was on the other foot and I moved to the US permanently and still had Australian citizenship, I wouldn't have to file Australian tax returns (provided I genuinely earned $0 in Australia)
The US always did this too - up until quite recently if you entered the US on a visa waiver, you had to surrender the green tear-off portion of the card when you exited the US (typically they stapled it in your passport so you couldn't forget). The only difference is that Australian card has a few more details and they collect it at an actual immigration checkpoint (rather than the airline collecting it on behalf of the DHS).
Now that the US has moved to that ESTA system and you don't get a physical visa waiver card anymore, you don't have to submit anything on departure. But they still know when you leave - it's just all done electronically now.
Also the reason Australia collects that card on departure isn't just to prevent fleeing criminals and prevent visa overstayers. Australian citizens fill it out too - it's so they know where you're going so that if there's a disaster overseas, they know who's out of the country and potentially who might be affected, so DFAT can try and contact you or your relatives.
At first (i.e. for the first half of release day), the Australian site was loudly proclaiming "4G!!!!" in large font in the headings. That's the problem. They rapidly changed it once they realised they were going to get in trouble, but the site you're seeing now is quite different than how it appeared on launch day.
Precisely. My American wife moved here to Australia after we got married and at first was ineligible for a whole bunch of (mostly goverrnment) jobs because, although she was a legal permanent resident of Australia, she wasn't a citizen. It was nothing to do with her being 'from' a different country, it was citizenship that mattered.
Now though she's got her Australian citizenship and those jobs have opened up to her (she's a dual citizen, as she retained her US citizenship too), despite the fact that she clearly (once you hear her speak) isn't 'from' Australia. So yeah, "country of origin" and "citizenship" are two unrelated things - the latter is an acceptable thing to ask about, the former isn't.
Plenty of people here (south-eastern Australia) can easily power their whole home, and then some, from a rooftop panel array (at least for most of the year ... mid-winter gets a little trickier). Yes solar isn't good enough for baseline power load, but it still push out enough power to run a home if the conditions are right (and they are right in many places on earth).
I lived in a completely solar-powered place for a while (in northern NSW) and it was fine. Very rarely needed to draw extra power from the grid. Running three hair driers at once might do it, but how often does that happen? (Heating and cooking were gas, by the way ... and they are traditionally the things that chew up insane amounts of power if they are electric - exclude those and most home appliances simply don't require that much power)
True, though putting these things in domestic homes is likely to lead to at least a few incidents where nutcases try and break one open, or one malfunctions in a decidedly non-pretty fashion etc.
The iPhone has both those things. It has an option "wipe device after 10 failed attempts". Additionally, if this feature is turned on, any password attempts after the fifth attempt have an exponentially-increasing delay applied (up to several hours between the 9th and 10th attempt).
However, this won't do anything to prevent this kind of attack, because it's being done internally by jailbreaking the device and running arbitrary code on it, not via the standard UI.
I use complex passcode on my iPhone. But I also set the "require passcode after X minutes locked" to 5 or 10 minutes, rather than the default "instantly". Chances are, if I lose my phone or have it stolen, it won't be within 5 minutes of me last touching it. But I find that it eliminates a lot of the passcode-entering because I tend to use my phone for little bits within a few minutes of each other, then it might be hours before I touch it again.
Plus you get pretty fast at entering it after you've had some practice.
There's also an option to use a >4 digit, but still completely numeric passcode. This provides some additional security (i.e. 100 million combinations instead of 10 thousand, using 8 digits instead of 4), but is still easy to enter quickly because you are only presented with the numpad on the phone, rather than the full keyboard with itty bitty keys that's hard to unlock in a hurry.