The stats may say that (is that globally, btw?), but in day to day life, as I said, I still see way more iPhones than anything else, at least in this part of the world. My suspicion is that a lot of Android sales are corporate (the phones my work provides are Androids for instance, and we are a big (100,000+ employee) company).
Which means that, per capita, we don't consume that much less than the Americans. Makes sense - both big countries with large distances to cover. I think the thing that pushes the Americans over the top is their harsher winters and reliance on heating oil in some areas.
Well keep in mind that iiNet, in the end, won its case. If they'd lost, and then this was revealed, then perhaps there would be a bit more of an outcry. So our least our courts gave the MPAA a bit of a smackdown...
(Not to mention the fact that I'd read this story in the newspaper at least three or four days ago, Slashdot is slow on the uptake!)
Calling a mobile phone from a LANDLINE phone attracts a higher cost than calling another landline phone, yes. Remembering that cell users don't pay for incoming calls in Australia, so the extra cost associated with calling a cell is absorbed by the caller. However, from a mobile phone, a call is a call is a call - they generally charge a single rate for 'national' calls regardless of whether they are cellular, landline, local or on the other side of the country. The exception to this is that some carriers offer free/cheap calls to other mobile phones on the same carrier (e.g. I get free Vodafone-to-Vodafone calls, which is nice because my wife and most of the rest of my family are on Vodafone too).
But as for per call fees on mobile plans? No, not really. Most plans here are so called 'cap' plans (which is a bit of a misnomer as it doesn't actually cap your costs). The way they work is:
- Each call and text etc. still has an inherent cost associated with it, e.g. 20c per text, 30c/min for national calls, 45c/min international calls etc.); but - You pay a flat monthly fee (say, $30), and for that $30 you get "$400 worth of value, plus 1 GB of data" (for example) - That pool of 'value' is consumed as you make calls and texts, according to the standard rates mentioned above. Unused 'value' does not carry over into the next month. The data is separately metered out of the 1 GB that comes with the plan.
It's a kinda confusing system admittedly, but it means the phone companies can advertise what sounds like an amazing deal: "$400 of calls for only $30!". But in practice it does mean that calls and texts are actually very cheap (i.e. figure out how many calls/texts you can make for that $400, and divide it by the $30 you actually paid). The carriers all offer a range of these cap plans, typically ranging from about $20 at the low end to $60-$70 at the high end. Personally I'm on Vodafone $20 cap - I pay $20, and get $180 worth of calls/texts. I never even use half of this, so that's fine by me.
The only people that actually pay those 'inherent' rates for calls and texts are pre-paid users. And even then, there are pre-paid cap plans too. You'd really only want to get the "$0 monthly, but pay the full cost for what you do use" type plan if you were a very light user (i.e. just a couple of calls a month that wouldn't add up to $20 or whatever the lowest-end cap plan was).
(PS. Half my family is American and so I'm over there quite a bit. I just use a prepaid ATT GoPhone MicroSIM and put it in my iPhone. ATT will tell you you aren't allowed to do this, because they won't allow iPhones on their network that weren't sold by them. But you just have to activate the SIM with the IMEI from a non-iPhone, then swap it into the iPhone... and it works. The GoPhone data packs are kinda expensive and don't allow tethering, but they are OK for someone who isn't in the country half the year!)
Yeah I think it depends on the complexity of the case. I have an LLB (Hons.) too but I wouldn't be relying on myself for something serious. But if I was just going to court to challenge a parking fine or something, I reckon I'd give it a go;)
A fair point (and I'm in Australia, so it's Wednesday here too), but the summary still seems odd, given that it links to an announcement on apple.com (i.e. the main, American domain for an American company, who presumably would tag press releases and market statements in a US time zone, given that they trade on the US share market).
I honestly don't think they are losing in the smartphone market. I still see 10 iPhones for every 1 Android device out there. In the US perhaps Android is a bit more competitive (due to your 'phone tied to the carrier' model, it means big phone companies like Verizon and Sprint actively advertise Android phones, which isn't really done anywhere else). But here (Australia), although Android phones are readily available (including some decent ones like the Galaxy S), they still don't sell anywhere near as well as iPhones (keeping in mind that a lot of people buy the phone direct from Apple here, outright, not locked into a carrier or plan or contract etc.)
It may eventually turn out that iPhone falls to less than 50% of the smartphone market (which isn't surprising since Apple is one manufacturer and Android is made by several companies who can combine their forces). But even then I wouldn't qualify that as 'losing' in the market.
I check Facebook and Twitter constantly, every day, and even I rarely exceed 100 MB/month on my cellphone. I don't really see how people can be pushing 1 GB a month with simple web surfing/email/apps, unless they are doing stuff involving streaming media of some description. Most apps use very little bandwidth - as do most mobile sites.
Yeah you guys in the US get ripped off on cell phone plans. Most everything else is cheaper in the US than elsewhere... but phone plans (and to an extent, internet connections) seem to be the exception. I live in Australia, and pay $20 a month for more calls/texts than I'll ever use and 1.2 GB of data on my smartphone (tethering permitted). Even the unlimited plans are only in the $40-50 range.
Mind you, it's only a small victory - we pay double what the Americans do for everything else (food, clothes, software, cars...)
I dunno. I'd certainly notice if where I lived got on average 2 C warmer (~3.5 F warmer). Hell, I've noticed it getting warmer in the 30 years I've already lived here (by ~1 to 1.5 C according to the stats). 2 C can be the difference between frosts and no frosts in areas like mine that only marginally dip below freezing on winter nights. It can be the difference between snowfall and no snowfall in areas that depend on building a snowpack for springtime meltwater (for irrigation etc.)
Or on the flip side, if it's hot, it's the difference between, say, 38 and 40 C (both hot, but I know which one I'd take).
The sky looks like that in most of Australia too... I know exactly what you mean by the sky overhead looking very dark/almost black too. I have to admit, first time I visited the northern hemisphere (Europe and US) one of the first things I noticed is how the sky is so hazy and "white" a lot of the time, rather than really blue.
However I'm not certain that's entirely to do with particulates and pollution from man-made sources. Humidity (or lack thereof) has a lot to do with it as well.
Having $600k but still having a mortgage repayment would be a perfectly possible situation in many places.
For example, $600k is equal to or less than the ~average~ house price in much of Australia, for instance. And in places like Sydney or Canberra it'll only buy you a pretty entry level house if you want to live anywhere even vaguely close to the city.
Of course, this being Slashdot you can usually make the default assumption that the GP is American, so this doesn't apply. But remember that property in much of the world is more expensive than the US. American property is perceived as being super cheap here, actually (a lot of quite middle-class people go over, buy up a few American houses for the price of a single place in Australia, and rent em out or renovate them and resell for a profit).
We are? My ISP has been dishing out both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (native, none of that tunnel broker crap) for the last year or two and I haven't experienced any problems. My computers all have globally addressable IPv6 addresses and preferentially connect to hosts via IPv6, as designed (falling back to v4 for hosts without AAAA records, of course).
The ISP's internal network and global backbone are also 100% IPv6.
There are probably bugs out there but I (nor the other several hundred thousand subscribers to my ISP) haven't noticed any...
The few older devices that just don't play are irrelevant. You don't switch your LAN over to IPv6-only... you run dual stack. Those devices that work with IPv6 will get an IPv6 AND and IPv4 address. Those that don't, will just get an IPv4 address. IPv6 is preferred over IPv4 if both are available, but if only v4 is, that's fine. Everything will still work.
My ISP has done native IPv6 for the last year or so. What this means in practice is that most devices in my house (all computers, tablets and smartphones) have an internal IPv4 (192.168.0.x), an internal IPv6, and a globally addressable IPv6 (prefix delegation via my ISP). The IPv4-only devices (game consoles, mostly) just have the internal IPv4 (and are NAT'ed behind a single global IPv4, as always, of course).
Heh, that's because that list itself is an IPv6-only site. There's no A (IPv4) record for it but there is an AAAA (IPv6) one: 2001:470:1:1b9::31
The site works fine here though (I have native IPv6 on my home connection and have for over a year now).
There isn't that much on the list though, to be honest. I don't think you'll really "need" dual stack for quite a few years yet (as in, it will be years before you actually notice you aren't able to access a significant number of sites because they are IPv6-only).
BUT, it takes time for ISPs to roll IPv6 out correctly and for users to upgrade their routers (if necessary) etc. So people should be starting to at least think about it now.
Yeah Internode don't have an unlimited plan, although a few Aussie ISPs do. Having said that, they have a 1 TB plan which frankly, might as well be unlimited (who consistently downloads 33 GB a day, every day?)
My ISP does IPv6. Not just a tunnel either - proper, native IPv6 (dual stacked) and has done so for the best part of the last two years. It's not particularly common yet, you're right, but it's far from non-existent. (And yes it's a normal, residential/consumer ISP - Internode)
Doesn't make any real difference to using the net, of course. Don't even remember I'm using it half the time until I see IPv6 addresses reported in various software, or when I'm pinging stuff:
C:\>ping www.google.com
Pinging www.l.google.com [2404:6800:4006:802::1014] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 2404:6800:4006:802::1014: time=11ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:802::1014: time=11ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:802::1014: time=10ms Reply from 2404:6800:4006:802::1014: time=11ms...
Yep. I work for an American company (big evil Oracle, if you must know), in Australia. Contract is a 38 hour week, and of course the statutory 20 days (4 weeks) leave. 37.5 to 40 hour weeks are absolutely entrenched in Australia and you won't find many contracts for more than this out there (except in some particular industries like mining and retail which have on-and-off working periods or other oddities).
Being an dual US and Australian citizen and having worked in both countries, I can safely say working life in Australia is considerably better. The pay is generally higher (or at least equivalent, once you compare the cost of living in the two countries), and vacation and sick leave entitlements are better. On top of all that, Australia has long service leave, which is an additional 2-3 months paid time off earned after you've been with one employer for a long time (ranges from 7 to 15 years, depending on which State you're in).
And the GDP/capita figure are misleading. The typical Aussie is way better off than the average American (in terms of disposable income and quality of life). It's just that America has most of the world's super-rich, which drags them up a bit when you look at averages. Australia has less super-rich, but also fewer poor. Most are in the "comfortably middle class" range (not to say life is good for everyone, but as a proportion of the population, far fewer are struggling in AU than the US these days).
Didn't know that... and you're right, that would make a big difference to the amount of revenue raised from a sales tax cf. a VAT. However in this thread I think we are mostly talking about taxation burden on the end-consumer (ignoring what might have happened to an item before that point), not on middlemen businesses, in which case VAT and sales tax are at least vaguely comparable.
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We pay quite a bit more for fuel in Australia than you do in the US, too. Not quite as much as Europe, but still considerably more.
As of today's exchange rate, fuel in my area of Australia is $6.34 USD/gallon.
Hell, my ~iPhone~ does this out of the box. It's nothing to do with Android or the phone itself, and everything to do with the telcos/carriers.
The stats may say that (is that globally, btw?), but in day to day life, as I said, I still see way more iPhones than anything else, at least in this part of the world. My suspicion is that a lot of Android sales are corporate (the phones my work provides are Androids for instance, and we are a big (100,000+ employee) company).
Which means that, per capita, we don't consume that much less than the Americans. Makes sense - both big countries with large distances to cover. I think the thing that pushes the Americans over the top is their harsher winters and reliance on heating oil in some areas.
We have a decent amount of oil (but not massive amounts). We do have a shitton of natural gas, coal and the majority of the world's uranium though...
Considering how small their population is (~10M IIRC), that must not be very much oil.
10M? Wow ... you must have 'recalled' that from the 1950s :) Greater Sydney/Newcastle/Wollongong alone is almost bigger than that these days...
Well keep in mind that iiNet, in the end, won its case. If they'd lost, and then this was revealed, then perhaps there would be a bit more of an outcry. So our least our courts gave the MPAA a bit of a smackdown...
(Not to mention the fact that I'd read this story in the newspaper at least three or four days ago, Slashdot is slow on the uptake!)
Calling a mobile phone from a LANDLINE phone attracts a higher cost than calling another landline phone, yes. Remembering that cell users don't pay for incoming calls in Australia, so the extra cost associated with calling a cell is absorbed by the caller. However, from a mobile phone, a call is a call is a call - they generally charge a single rate for 'national' calls regardless of whether they are cellular, landline, local or on the other side of the country. The exception to this is that some carriers offer free/cheap calls to other mobile phones on the same carrier (e.g. I get free Vodafone-to-Vodafone calls, which is nice because my wife and most of the rest of my family are on Vodafone too).
But as for per call fees on mobile plans? No, not really. Most plans here are so called 'cap' plans (which is a bit of a misnomer as it doesn't actually cap your costs). The way they work is:
- Each call and text etc. still has an inherent cost associated with it, e.g. 20c per text, 30c/min for national calls, 45c/min international calls etc.); but
- You pay a flat monthly fee (say, $30), and for that $30 you get "$400 worth of value, plus 1 GB of data" (for example)
- That pool of 'value' is consumed as you make calls and texts, according to the standard rates mentioned above. Unused 'value' does not carry over into the next month. The data is separately metered out of the 1 GB that comes with the plan.
It's a kinda confusing system admittedly, but it means the phone companies can advertise what sounds like an amazing deal: "$400 of calls for only $30!". But in practice it does mean that calls and texts are actually very cheap (i.e. figure out how many calls/texts you can make for that $400, and divide it by the $30 you actually paid). The carriers all offer a range of these cap plans, typically ranging from about $20 at the low end to $60-$70 at the high end. Personally I'm on Vodafone $20 cap - I pay $20, and get $180 worth of calls/texts. I never even use half of this, so that's fine by me.
The only people that actually pay those 'inherent' rates for calls and texts are pre-paid users. And even then, there are pre-paid cap plans too. You'd really only want to get the "$0 monthly, but pay the full cost for what you do use" type plan if you were a very light user (i.e. just a couple of calls a month that wouldn't add up to $20 or whatever the lowest-end cap plan was).
(PS. Half my family is American and so I'm over there quite a bit. I just use a prepaid ATT GoPhone MicroSIM and put it in my iPhone. ATT will tell you you aren't allowed to do this, because they won't allow iPhones on their network that weren't sold by them. But you just have to activate the SIM with the IMEI from a non-iPhone, then swap it into the iPhone ... and it works. The GoPhone data packs are kinda expensive and don't allow tethering, but they are OK for someone who isn't in the country half the year!)
Yeah I think it depends on the complexity of the case. I have an LLB (Hons.) too but I wouldn't be relying on myself for something serious. But if I was just going to court to challenge a parking fine or something, I reckon I'd give it a go ;)
A fair point (and I'm in Australia, so it's Wednesday here too), but the summary still seems odd, given that it links to an announcement on apple.com (i.e. the main, American domain for an American company, who presumably would tag press releases and market statements in a US time zone, given that they trade on the US share market).
Wednesday here...afternoon in fact. Closer to Thursday than Tuesday.
I honestly don't think they are losing in the smartphone market. I still see 10 iPhones for every 1 Android device out there. In the US perhaps Android is a bit more competitive (due to your 'phone tied to the carrier' model, it means big phone companies like Verizon and Sprint actively advertise Android phones, which isn't really done anywhere else). But here (Australia), although Android phones are readily available (including some decent ones like the Galaxy S), they still don't sell anywhere near as well as iPhones (keeping in mind that a lot of people buy the phone direct from Apple here, outright, not locked into a carrier or plan or contract etc.)
It may eventually turn out that iPhone falls to less than 50% of the smartphone market (which isn't surprising since Apple is one manufacturer and Android is made by several companies who can combine their forces). But even then I wouldn't qualify that as 'losing' in the market.
I check Facebook and Twitter constantly, every day, and even I rarely exceed 100 MB/month on my cellphone. I don't really see how people can be pushing 1 GB a month with simple web surfing/email/apps, unless they are doing stuff involving streaming media of some description. Most apps use very little bandwidth - as do most mobile sites.
Yeah you guys in the US get ripped off on cell phone plans. Most everything else is cheaper in the US than elsewhere ... but phone plans (and to an extent, internet connections) seem to be the exception. I live in Australia, and pay $20 a month for more calls/texts than I'll ever use and 1.2 GB of data on my smartphone (tethering permitted). Even the unlimited plans are only in the $40-50 range.
Mind you, it's only a small victory - we pay double what the Americans do for everything else (food, clothes, software, cars...)
I dunno. I'd certainly notice if where I lived got on average 2 C warmer (~3.5 F warmer). Hell, I've noticed it getting warmer in the 30 years I've already lived here (by ~1 to 1.5 C according to the stats). 2 C can be the difference between frosts and no frosts in areas like mine that only marginally dip below freezing on winter nights. It can be the difference between snowfall and no snowfall in areas that depend on building a snowpack for springtime meltwater (for irrigation etc.)
Or on the flip side, if it's hot, it's the difference between, say, 38 and 40 C (both hot, but I know which one I'd take).
The sky looks like that in most of Australia too ... I know exactly what you mean by the sky overhead looking very dark/almost black too. I have to admit, first time I visited the northern hemisphere (Europe and US) one of the first things I noticed is how the sky is so hazy and "white" a lot of the time, rather than really blue.
However I'm not certain that's entirely to do with particulates and pollution from man-made sources. Humidity (or lack thereof) has a lot to do with it as well.
Having $600k but still having a mortgage repayment would be a perfectly possible situation in many places.
For example, $600k is equal to or less than the ~average~ house price in much of Australia, for instance. And in places like Sydney or Canberra it'll only buy you a pretty entry level house if you want to live anywhere even vaguely close to the city.
Of course, this being Slashdot you can usually make the default assumption that the GP is American, so this doesn't apply. But remember that property in much of the world is more expensive than the US. American property is perceived as being super cheap here, actually (a lot of quite middle-class people go over, buy up a few American houses for the price of a single place in Australia, and rent em out or renovate them and resell for a profit).
We are? My ISP has been dishing out both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (native, none of that tunnel broker crap) for the last year or two and I haven't experienced any problems. My computers all have globally addressable IPv6 addresses and preferentially connect to hosts via IPv6, as designed (falling back to v4 for hosts without AAAA records, of course).
The ISP's internal network and global backbone are also 100% IPv6.
There are probably bugs out there but I (nor the other several hundred thousand subscribers to my ISP) haven't noticed any...
The few older devices that just don't play are irrelevant. You don't switch your LAN over to IPv6-only ... you run dual stack. Those devices that work with IPv6 will get an IPv6 AND and IPv4 address. Those that don't, will just get an IPv4 address. IPv6 is preferred over IPv4 if both are available, but if only v4 is, that's fine. Everything will still work.
My ISP has done native IPv6 for the last year or so. What this means in practice is that most devices in my house (all computers, tablets and smartphones) have an internal IPv4 (192.168.0.x), an internal IPv6, and a globally addressable IPv6 (prefix delegation via my ISP). The IPv4-only devices (game consoles, mostly) just have the internal IPv4 (and are NAT'ed behind a single global IPv4, as always, of course).
Heh, that's because that list itself is an IPv6-only site. There's no A (IPv4) record for it but there is an AAAA (IPv6) one: 2001:470:1:1b9::31
The site works fine here though (I have native IPv6 on my home connection and have for over a year now).
There isn't that much on the list though, to be honest. I don't think you'll really "need" dual stack for quite a few years yet (as in, it will be years before you actually notice you aren't able to access a significant number of sites because they are IPv6-only).
BUT, it takes time for ISPs to roll IPv6 out correctly and for users to upgrade their routers (if necessary) etc. So people should be starting to at least think about it now.
Yeah Internode don't have an unlimited plan, although a few Aussie ISPs do. Having said that, they have a 1 TB plan which frankly, might as well be unlimited (who consistently downloads 33 GB a day, every day?)
Yep, and in fact, as of a few days ago, the IPv6 option is now turned ON by default for new customers:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1845420
My ISP does IPv6. Not just a tunnel either - proper, native IPv6 (dual stacked) and has done so for the best part of the last two years. It's not particularly common yet, you're right, but it's far from non-existent. (And yes it's a normal, residential/consumer ISP - Internode)
Doesn't make any real difference to using the net, of course. Don't even remember I'm using it half the time until I see IPv6 addresses reported in various software, or when I'm pinging stuff:
C:\>ping www.google.com
Pinging www.l.google.com [2404:6800:4006:802::1014] with 32 bytes of data: ...
Reply from 2404:6800:4006:802::1014: time=11ms
Reply from 2404:6800:4006:802::1014: time=11ms
Reply from 2404:6800:4006:802::1014: time=10ms
Reply from 2404:6800:4006:802::1014: time=11ms
Yep. I work for an American company (big evil Oracle, if you must know), in Australia. Contract is a 38 hour week, and of course the statutory 20 days (4 weeks) leave. 37.5 to 40 hour weeks are absolutely entrenched in Australia and you won't find many contracts for more than this out there (except in some particular industries like mining and retail which have on-and-off working periods or other oddities).
Being an dual US and Australian citizen and having worked in both countries, I can safely say working life in Australia is considerably better. The pay is generally higher (or at least equivalent, once you compare the cost of living in the two countries), and vacation and sick leave entitlements are better. On top of all that, Australia has long service leave, which is an additional 2-3 months paid time off earned after you've been with one employer for a long time (ranges from 7 to 15 years, depending on which State you're in).
And the GDP/capita figure are misleading. The typical Aussie is way better off than the average American (in terms of disposable income and quality of life). It's just that America has most of the world's super-rich, which drags them up a bit when you look at averages. Australia has less super-rich, but also fewer poor. Most are in the "comfortably middle class" range (not to say life is good for everyone, but as a proportion of the population, far fewer are struggling in AU than the US these days).
Didn't know that ... and you're right, that would make a big difference to the amount of revenue raised from a sales tax cf. a VAT. However in this thread I think we are mostly talking about taxation burden on the end-consumer (ignoring what might have happened to an item before that point), not on middlemen businesses, in which case VAT and sales tax are at least vaguely comparable.