Yep it's ridiculous. My wife and I live in Australia, and we are both Australian citizens. However, she is also a US citizen. So guess who has to do TWO tax returns every year, even though she hasn't stepped foot inside the US in 5 years and has no money, investments or assets there whatsoever. She doesn't even ever owe any tax on her US return anyway - since there's an AU-US tax treaty that exempts income for which she paid Australian tax on already. But she still has to file her US return...
It's utterly retarded. If the shoe was on the other foot, and I was living in the US with my Australian citizenship, I would not have to file an Australian tax return, as we tax on where the money was earned/residence, not whether you hold citizenship or not.
Yep. Open up ANY computer and take a look at the fine print on all those little connectors, cables, motherboard components etc. Guarantee you that 'Foxconn' is printed on several of them.:)
Yeah very true. There are three main places I look.
- The actual 'Startup' menu. Obvious but sometimes applications shove things in here.
- Registry. I use CCleaner as a nice front-end for this - it will allow you to either disable or completely delete startup tasks/programs from the registry. This is where most of the culprits live. Crap like Google Updater, Office preload stuff, iTunes helper (whatever the hell that does), random bits of junk from my video card driver that I don't need etc.
- Services (in Administrative Tools, or just run 'services.msc'). There's various ones you can disable depending on your setup. These usually require a bit of research to figure out what they do. Some are obvious though - Wireless Zero Config can be turned off if you don't have a wireless networking card (or don't use it). The defrag service can be turned off if you only run SSD drives (Win 7 makes sure this is off by default if you have only an SSD actually), or if you have HDDs but prefer to defrag manually. Etc etc. There's usually about half dozen Win 7 services you can safely turn off. In XP there's a lot more (Win 7 is actually pretty good at not loading services you don't need, compared to XP was).
Not daily, but regular enough (at least weekly... I run the backup script manually after doing any 'significant' change/work/progress in a game/etc).
However, only the OS, program files, and things like saved games are actually on the SSD anyway, so if it randomly fails then no serious harm done. The files I actually care about (documents, pictures, purchased music etc.) don't reside on the local machine at all, but on my NAS (which has 2 TB of space configured in RAID1).
I've always done that though, not just since getting an SSD. There are some SSD horror stories out there but mine is now 6 months old and still working well. I've had plenty of mechanical HDDs fail on me in my life anyway so I'd be backing up no matter what kind of drive I had.
Oh God, McAfee is evil. Especially when they have it locked down with a group policy that prevents you disabling it or changing the scan settings.
My work has it set to scan all files on both read AND write. Slow, yes. But nothing compared to the pain when you have to run a VM (which I do often), which itself is based on the same standard corporate desktop image. So you get McAfee in the VM scanning on every read and write operation, while a second instance of McAfee is also running on the host, scanning on every read and write operation (including operations caused by the VM). Arrrrgh!
From the beginning of the Windows boot process, to a fully populated and usable desktop, takes my home PC only 9 seconds (no exaggeration, I just timed it). The little Windows animation thing doesn't even half-finish before vanishing. In fact the BIOS takes significantly longer than loading Windows does.
The reason?
- New Corsair Force SSD; and - I made sure that nothing runs on startup that I don't need
The shut down is even more ridiculous. The "Windows is shutting down..." message barely flickers onto the screen before the machine shuts off.
So yeah, I don't use sleep at all now. Just power down and power back up later. Prior to the SSD my startup took at least 3 times as long (and that was with a 10,000 rpm Raptor, which is no slouch). Buying an SSD was the single best upgrade I have ever bought for any computer - $220 for a huge increase in responsiveness and usability.
For those not in the US, Google says* that the target in TFA is equivalent to ~4.3 litres/100km.
That figure is very close to the' 'official' stated fuel consumption of the Toyota Prius. So it's a pretty ambitious target considering we are talking about light trucks here.
* (Google's unit conversion feature continues to surprise me with what it can do - in this case turning a distance per volume and turning it into a volume per multiple of a different distance. Nifty.)
A fair point, but if your boss dumps you in some random hotel in the outer suburbs of Seoul for a 3 day business trip and you don't speak a word of Korean, the phone often gets better results.
No... there ARE no victims... yet. That's what the case is about.
AFACT tried to make iiNet disconnect its users. iiNet refused (hence no victims). AFACT took iiNet to court. If iiNet lose, then yes there may be victims in the future. But as of yet, the end users of iiNet's service haven't suffered anything and hence aren't party to the case.
Only if AFACT's lawyers are actually challenging iiNet on something in the Constitution though. That is, AFACT would somehow have to argue that that provision from the Copyright Act is somehow unconstitutional, which seems a very long bow to draw. I suspect therefore that this case is just a standard appeal to the High Court on some other legal matter, not a Constitutional one.
Then again I haven't actually read the previous cases or the article so I could just be wrong. I just have a gut feel the Constitution doesn't have much in it that you could use to knock down the carrier provisions from the Copyright Act with...
Actually Australia has penguins in various coastal locations anywhere in the southern half (approximately) of the continent. They aren't the same species as the stereotypical penguins you would think of when you think of Antarctica, though. Some of them look very different.
You're exactly right. It is legally just as sacrosant as the US Constitution. Hell, large parts of it were based ~on~ the US Constitution. And indeed you aren't the only one to note that it lacks one of the US Constitution's most well-known features.
The introduction of a formal Bill of Rights in Australia has been a hotly debated jurisprudential topic on and off for much of the last few decades. The arguments against include (broadly speaking), things such as:
- Common law protections and the principles of equity are good enough (there is some truth to this - common law protections in the UK and Australia are reasonably comprehensive); or - To list or precisely define rights, is to limit them (to those explicitly mentioned). Therefore no Bill of Rights please! (again, I can see some merit in this argument - the rights that are important today might not be important in the future, or rights we haven't even thought of today might become relevant, so if your Bill of Rights is difficult to amend it may become 'out of date' rather quickly)
The arguments for a Bill of Rights are obvious: the same ones that led to the US one. There is also some debate about whether such a Bill would actually be in the Australian Constitution (pretty unlikely IMO), in entrenched legislation ('normal' legislation, but with extra requirements to amend it that make it very difficult to overturn or change), or just a normal Act (with the standard options for repeal and amendment available).
Apologies if you knew all this already - unclear from your post whether you are American or Australian. But could be interesting reading for someone.:)
Well I don't usually use GPS much when I'm on holiday, or when I'm in my home country, since I know most of it pretty well after 30 years. But for me the biggest benefit of ubiquitous GPS (first on separate GPS devices, then on phones) is on BUSINESS trips.
The boss sends you to some random city/country you've never been to before. You land there at 8pm and the taxi takes you to a hotel somewhere. You have a meeting first thing tomorrow morning - how far away is the place you're going? Walking distance or will I need to get a taxi? Is there a train line near the hotel?
I'm feeling a bit hungry, I wonder if there's a convenience store nearby where I can buy a snack. It's 11pm, most things are shut and I'm in a strange city. I could wander around aimlessly until I find something or I could type in "7/11" or whatever on my phone and see all the nearby locations on the map in relation to me.
Even more importantly: argh - I'm out of cash, and this stupid shop doesn't accept card payments under . Where's the nearest ATM in this bloody city? Previously, a pain in the ass. Now, no problem at all.
Basically having GPS in my pocket at all times has made my business trips far less stressful!
Except that plenty of games you might wish to buy aren't released in aforesaid region that your device is locked to. Or, you move around regularly enough that you often aren't in the region you need to buy games for and have to pay for expensive shipping.
This might sound like an 'insane' thing to you, but if you are a citizen of multiple countries and you move REGULARLY (several times per year) between these (and other) countries, it's freaking annoying. I loved the DS because it was the only region-free console, handheld or otherwise, out there. Now it too has joined the region locking bandwagon.
I hate all forms of IP-geolocation/region locking/blocking crap: games, blu-rays, Steam downloads, Pandora not being available outside the US (even if you're a US citizen), TV sites and YouTube telling me "this video is not available in your region", etc etc. God it drives me nuts and makes my life needlessly complex on a daily basis. Yes with a bit of IT smarts you can usually get around it... VPNs, proxies, etc. But I hate that I have to fight to gain access to things I should normally be able to access (and in some cases, such as Steam games, have actually PAID FOR).
True but if you already have a home PC and/or console (for your serious gaming fix with proper controllers), and you already have a smartphone (which plays games on the move, albeit with crappy control scheme), can you REALLY justify a separate device just so you can enjoy a more 'home consoleish' experience for the small percentage of the day you want to game on the move?
If you were a very frequent traveller, yes, probably. But for most people the cost v extra benefit doesn't weigh up. And it gets worse when you consider the comparative cost of games on phones vs. handheld consoles.
Or put it this way:
- I had a DS, because at that stage, I had a old Motorola Razr that couldn't really play any decent games. - But I won't be getting a 3DS, because now I have a smartphone with plenty of very good (and cheap) games. Some of these games work well on touchscreen because they were designed for it. Others are more traditional consoleish games, which yes, are more annoying to control than their console equivalents, but otherwise are pretty damn close.
Yeah I think this is right. I would have been in the market for a handheld games device IF I didn't have a smartphone with a lot of very good games on it already. Sure a touchscreen is inferior to proper gaming controls. But it's "good enough" for the times when I need/want to play on the move. Not worth the extra expenditure and extra device to carry around, to have a separate portable games machine (provided you already have a console and/or PC at home for more serious and comfortable gaming).
Smartphones will never make a huge dent in the core gaming market (PCs and consoles) because the touchscreen controller (or lack thereof) sucks for serious gaming. But it'll wipe out the handheld market I reckon.
Of course the real risk to Nintendo, and something I think could easily happen in future, is that Apple release a home console. They already have the Apple TV. Whack a decently powered SoC in something like that (with graphical power on par with the current gen of consoles), design a proper wireless controller, and allow the download of games from the App Store infrastructure they already have set up. Wouldn't take much effort really. And Apple know there's huge money to be made from games (given that 9/10 of the App Store best selling apps are usually games at any given moment). Apple could EASILY do this and it would obliterate Nintendo's casual gaming market share I reckon.
No, please read the words in that Wiki article again, carefully:
- "Power to enforce content restrictions within Australia": this means they have the power to issue takedown notices for servers hosted within Australia hosting illegal content that is brought to their attention (fraudulent sites, phishing sites, child porn, counterfeit goods sellers etc.). Most countries, including the US, have organisations responsible for this.
- "Maintains a list that is provided for use in filtering software": yes, ACMA has a blacklist of sites that they maintain, and they provide that list to software developers that make filter software. That software is then purchased by/given to users who WANT a filter (for their kids, workplace, etc.) How is that different than in every other country where you can buy 'net nanny' type software. Sure it's a filter, but:
a) it's not ISP-level, it's software on your local machine; and b) it's not mandatory!
There is no ~mandatory, government-enforced/run~ filtering of the Internet in Australia. Just because ACMA maintains a blacklist doesn't mean that everyone has to use it. Currently, two or three ISPs do implement the filter (not because there's a law doing so, but because of their own internal commercial decisions), but you are free to use one of the hundreds of other ISPs out there if you don't like that.
This isn't really accurate. There is plenty of capacity. Domestic and international. We're a large area but we have a tiny population remember. We have approximately 8 Tbps total to the outside world at the moment but some of it's not even lit, and of the portion that's lit, it's nowhere near fully utilised. And that extra 5.12 Tb cable you mention is due to come online in the next 18 months. So there really isn't a capacity issue in Australia, and per capita, we are connected adequately.
Svalbard is an oddity (and has the benefit of being close to masses of capacity available in Scandinavia). Australia is at the end of the line, so to speak. You don't go through Australia to get to anywhere. This, combined with very small population, is a problem that will always mean our bandwidth infrastructure costs more. Actually it affects everything there, from the price of goods, to the ability of Australian airlines to compete with Asian and Middle Eastern carriers who are relatively more 'central' geographically, and hence can capture passengers not just from their local markets, but people merely transiting through their countries to other places.
Precisely. And then you have people like me (and probably like many Slashdotters) who fit into both target markets depending on the circumstances.
I enjoy tinkering with my PCs. Installing different OSes. Upgrading the hardware. The ability to run any arbitrary code I like on the thing, even if it might get me in trouble. It's a hobby like it is for most other Slashdotters. But then on the other hand, I don't want to do that on my phone. I want it to just work for the set of predefined tasks a phone is needed for. I'm willing to forego a bit of capability and flexibility for the reliability, simplicity and lack of 'having to maintain it and screw around with getting things set up and working'. I'm one of those 'use it like a microwave' people when it comes to phones. If I want to tinker, I have desktop PCs/laptops for that.
Different tools for different purposes. I'll always have the 'big box' desktop PC. But I'll also buy the shiny dumbed down appliances for certain things too.
I suspect a lot of this "PCs are dying", "no they aren't!" argument boils down to semantics. I note that you talk about your "laptop" as if it were distinct from your (presumably desktop) PC. But to me, a laptop is still a PC... just one in a smaller and more portable casing. Basically if it runs the same OS/software as a PC (i.e. Windows, Linux, Mac OS), it's a personal computer (virtual machines notwithstanding).
Not saying that's the 'right' definition, but it's the one that makes sense in my head, at least. Something like an iPad isn't a PC OTOH because I cannot run arbitrary code on it. It's an appliance. That doesn't make it bad... I enjoy using my iPad and there are certain tasks it excels at... but it's not a PC.
To clarify, I AGREE that attention should be brought to any comments regarding the curtailment of free speech. However, often, Slashdot actually makes it sound as if a certain thing occurred/a certain thing was said, when it wasn't. I'm talking about accuracy of facts here, rather than suggesting Slashdotters are overreacting to what they read.
Absolutely - but that doesn't excuse implied or explicit misrepresentation of what actually ~happened~. If you read Cameron's full speech you'll see he was actually quite positive about the role social media had in the response to the riots. He did not actually talk about 'shutting down' the networks. He asked if there might be a way to stop ~specific, identified~ people communicating using these platforms in emergency situations such as the riots.
In fact it actually says this in the summary - it's the headline that is the problem here.
"Square-Enix was notorious for doing that with Final Fantasy XI; the maintenance cycle always fell during Japanese off-hours (since they are a Japanese company and all) so when they'd turn the servers off in the middle of the night there us North American players would get the shaft in our prime time."
Hehe... welcome to the experience of gamers in Australia and New Zealand in basically every MMO in existence. Maintenance falls at some time in the early hours US time (say, 4am). Which is smack bang in Australian/NZ prime time. Australia/NZ isn't a big enough market to bother hosting local servers for, so we just get the same boxed US-region game as the US does, and connect to US-hosted servers (unlike our northern neighbours in Asia, who have a much larger population and hence local servers). Actually FFXI is actually one of the few where this problem doesn't affect us because Japan and Australia are only between 0 and 3 hours apart, depending on which area of Australia and what time of year it is.
Exactly right. Slashdot always does that: takes the worst possible misinterpretation of anything that a government, or anyone even vaguely related to government, says. Especially non-US governments. Even if it was an off hand comment, mere suggestion, or slip of the tongue from some random MP with negligible political influence, the Slashdot headline will read as if it is already an enacted, freedom-crushing law. Even if it's obvious to blind Freddy that it has no practical possibility of ever becoming reality.
That is the case here: Cameron knows full well that you can't 'shut down' social networks (you block one site/protocol/etc, and another pops up to take it's place - it's like the pointless battle against torrent sites etc.) He's just trying to score some political brownie points with certain segments of the population.
See also: compulsory Australian internet filter (which never existed, never had any hope of existing, and was never actually even introduced into Parliament as a Bill, let alone passed - but many on Slashdot who just read the headlines no doubt thought, and still think, that Australia has some kind of government-run filter). A couple of particularly vocal politicians were pushing it, but it could never have got through the Senate. In the end it became nothing more than a voluntary filter, blocking the tiniest handful of sites, and implemented by just two ISPs (who did so for their own commercial reasons, not due to a law).
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Yep it's ridiculous. My wife and I live in Australia, and we are both Australian citizens. However, she is also a US citizen. So guess who has to do TWO tax returns every year, even though she hasn't stepped foot inside the US in 5 years and has no money, investments or assets there whatsoever. She doesn't even ever owe any tax on her US return anyway - since there's an AU-US tax treaty that exempts income for which she paid Australian tax on already. But she still has to file her US return...
It's utterly retarded. If the shoe was on the other foot, and I was living in the US with my Australian citizenship, I would not have to file an Australian tax return, as we tax on where the money was earned/residence, not whether you hold citizenship or not.
Unlikely. Don't think the Maori traditionally speak much Japanese.
Yep. Open up ANY computer and take a look at the fine print on all those little connectors, cables, motherboard components etc. Guarantee you that 'Foxconn' is printed on several of them. :)
Yeah very true. There are three main places I look.
- The actual 'Startup' menu. Obvious but sometimes applications shove things in here.
- Registry. I use CCleaner as a nice front-end for this - it will allow you to either disable or completely delete startup tasks/programs from the registry. This is where most of the culprits live. Crap like Google Updater, Office preload stuff, iTunes helper (whatever the hell that does), random bits of junk from my video card driver that I don't need etc.
- Services (in Administrative Tools, or just run 'services.msc'). There's various ones you can disable depending on your setup. These usually require a bit of research to figure out what they do. Some are obvious though - Wireless Zero Config can be turned off if you don't have a wireless networking card (or don't use it). The defrag service can be turned off if you only run SSD drives (Win 7 makes sure this is off by default if you have only an SSD actually), or if you have HDDs but prefer to defrag manually. Etc etc. There's usually about half dozen Win 7 services you can safely turn off. In XP there's a lot more (Win 7 is actually pretty good at not loading services you don't need, compared to XP was).
Not daily, but regular enough (at least weekly ... I run the backup script manually after doing any 'significant' change/work/progress in a game/etc).
However, only the OS, program files, and things like saved games are actually on the SSD anyway, so if it randomly fails then no serious harm done. The files I actually care about (documents, pictures, purchased music etc.) don't reside on the local machine at all, but on my NAS (which has 2 TB of space configured in RAID1).
I've always done that though, not just since getting an SSD. There are some SSD horror stories out there but mine is now 6 months old and still working well. I've had plenty of mechanical HDDs fail on me in my life anyway so I'd be backing up no matter what kind of drive I had.
Oh God, McAfee is evil. Especially when they have it locked down with a group policy that prevents you disabling it or changing the scan settings.
My work has it set to scan all files on both read AND write. Slow, yes. But nothing compared to the pain when you have to run a VM (which I do often), which itself is based on the same standard corporate desktop image. So you get McAfee in the VM scanning on every read and write operation, while a second instance of McAfee is also running on the host, scanning on every read and write operation (including operations caused by the VM). Arrrrgh!
From the beginning of the Windows boot process, to a fully populated and usable desktop, takes my home PC only 9 seconds (no exaggeration, I just timed it). The little Windows animation thing doesn't even half-finish before vanishing. In fact the BIOS takes significantly longer than loading Windows does.
The reason?
- New Corsair Force SSD; and
- I made sure that nothing runs on startup that I don't need
The shut down is even more ridiculous. The "Windows is shutting down..." message barely flickers onto the screen before the machine shuts off.
So yeah, I don't use sleep at all now. Just power down and power back up later. Prior to the SSD my startup took at least 3 times as long (and that was with a 10,000 rpm Raptor, which is no slouch). Buying an SSD was the single best upgrade I have ever bought for any computer - $220 for a huge increase in responsiveness and usability.
For those not in the US, Google says* that the target in TFA is equivalent to ~4.3 litres/100km.
That figure is very close to the' 'official' stated fuel consumption of the Toyota Prius. So it's a pretty ambitious target considering we are talking about light trucks here.
* (Google's unit conversion feature continues to surprise me with what it can do - in this case turning a distance per volume and turning it into a volume per multiple of a different distance. Nifty.)
A fair point, but if your boss dumps you in some random hotel in the outer suburbs of Seoul for a 3 day business trip and you don't speak a word of Korean, the phone often gets better results.
No ... there ARE no victims ... yet. That's what the case is about.
AFACT tried to make iiNet disconnect its users. iiNet refused (hence no victims). AFACT took iiNet to court. If iiNet lose, then yes there may be victims in the future. But as of yet, the end users of iiNet's service haven't suffered anything and hence aren't party to the case.
Only if AFACT's lawyers are actually challenging iiNet on something in the Constitution though. That is, AFACT would somehow have to argue that that provision from the Copyright Act is somehow unconstitutional, which seems a very long bow to draw. I suspect therefore that this case is just a standard appeal to the High Court on some other legal matter, not a Constitutional one.
Then again I haven't actually read the previous cases or the article so I could just be wrong. I just have a gut feel the Constitution doesn't have much in it that you could use to knock down the carrier provisions from the Copyright Act with...
Actually Australia has penguins in various coastal locations anywhere in the southern half (approximately) of the continent. They aren't the same species as the stereotypical penguins you would think of when you think of Antarctica, though. Some of them look very different.
You're exactly right. It is legally just as sacrosant as the US Constitution. Hell, large parts of it were based ~on~ the US Constitution. And indeed you aren't the only one to note that it lacks one of the US Constitution's most well-known features.
The introduction of a formal Bill of Rights in Australia has been a hotly debated jurisprudential topic on and off for much of the last few decades. The arguments against include (broadly speaking), things such as:
- Common law protections and the principles of equity are good enough (there is some truth to this - common law protections in the UK and Australia are reasonably comprehensive); or
- To list or precisely define rights, is to limit them (to those explicitly mentioned). Therefore no Bill of Rights please! (again, I can see some merit in this argument - the rights that are important today might not be important in the future, or rights we haven't even thought of today might become relevant, so if your Bill of Rights is difficult to amend it may become 'out of date' rather quickly)
The arguments for a Bill of Rights are obvious: the same ones that led to the US one. There is also some debate about whether such a Bill would actually be in the Australian Constitution (pretty unlikely IMO), in entrenched legislation ('normal' legislation, but with extra requirements to amend it that make it very difficult to overturn or change), or just a normal Act (with the standard options for repeal and amendment available).
Apologies if you knew all this already - unclear from your post whether you are American or Australian. But could be interesting reading for someone. :)
Well I don't usually use GPS much when I'm on holiday, or when I'm in my home country, since I know most of it pretty well after 30 years. But for me the biggest benefit of ubiquitous GPS (first on separate GPS devices, then on phones) is on BUSINESS trips.
The boss sends you to some random city/country you've never been to before. You land there at 8pm and the taxi takes you to a hotel somewhere. You have a meeting first thing tomorrow morning - how far away is the place you're going? Walking distance or will I need to get a taxi? Is there a train line near the hotel?
I'm feeling a bit hungry, I wonder if there's a convenience store nearby where I can buy a snack. It's 11pm, most things are shut and I'm in a strange city. I could wander around aimlessly until I find something or I could type in "7/11" or whatever on my phone and see all the nearby locations on the map in relation to me.
Even more importantly: argh - I'm out of cash, and this stupid shop doesn't accept card payments under . Where's the nearest ATM in this bloody city? Previously, a pain in the ass. Now, no problem at all.
Basically having GPS in my pocket at all times has made my business trips far less stressful!
Except that plenty of games you might wish to buy aren't released in aforesaid region that your device is locked to. Or, you move around regularly enough that you often aren't in the region you need to buy games for and have to pay for expensive shipping.
This might sound like an 'insane' thing to you, but if you are a citizen of multiple countries and you move REGULARLY (several times per year) between these (and other) countries, it's freaking annoying. I loved the DS because it was the only region-free console, handheld or otherwise, out there. Now it too has joined the region locking bandwagon.
I hate all forms of IP-geolocation/region locking/blocking crap: games, blu-rays, Steam downloads, Pandora not being available outside the US (even if you're a US citizen), TV sites and YouTube telling me "this video is not available in your region", etc etc. God it drives me nuts and makes my life needlessly complex on a daily basis. Yes with a bit of IT smarts you can usually get around it ... VPNs, proxies, etc. But I hate that I have to fight to gain access to things I should normally be able to access (and in some cases, such as Steam games, have actually PAID FOR).
True but if you already have a home PC and/or console (for your serious gaming fix with proper controllers), and you already have a smartphone (which plays games on the move, albeit with crappy control scheme), can you REALLY justify a separate device just so you can enjoy a more 'home consoleish' experience for the small percentage of the day you want to game on the move?
If you were a very frequent traveller, yes, probably. But for most people the cost v extra benefit doesn't weigh up. And it gets worse when you consider the comparative cost of games on phones vs. handheld consoles.
Or put it this way:
- I had a DS, because at that stage, I had a old Motorola Razr that couldn't really play any decent games.
- But I won't be getting a 3DS, because now I have a smartphone with plenty of very good (and cheap) games. Some of these games work well on touchscreen because they were designed for it. Others are more traditional consoleish games, which yes, are more annoying to control than their console equivalents, but otherwise are pretty damn close.
Yeah I think this is right. I would have been in the market for a handheld games device IF I didn't have a smartphone with a lot of very good games on it already. Sure a touchscreen is inferior to proper gaming controls. But it's "good enough" for the times when I need/want to play on the move. Not worth the extra expenditure and extra device to carry around, to have a separate portable games machine (provided you already have a console and/or PC at home for more serious and comfortable gaming).
Smartphones will never make a huge dent in the core gaming market (PCs and consoles) because the touchscreen controller (or lack thereof) sucks for serious gaming. But it'll wipe out the handheld market I reckon.
Of course the real risk to Nintendo, and something I think could easily happen in future, is that Apple release a home console. They already have the Apple TV. Whack a decently powered SoC in something like that (with graphical power on par with the current gen of consoles), design a proper wireless controller, and allow the download of games from the App Store infrastructure they already have set up. Wouldn't take much effort really. And Apple know there's huge money to be made from games (given that 9/10 of the App Store best selling apps are usually games at any given moment). Apple could EASILY do this and it would obliterate Nintendo's casual gaming market share I reckon.
No, please read the words in that Wiki article again, carefully:
- "Power to enforce content restrictions within Australia": this means they have the power to issue takedown notices for servers hosted within Australia hosting illegal content that is brought to their attention (fraudulent sites, phishing sites, child porn, counterfeit goods sellers etc.). Most countries, including the US, have organisations responsible for this.
- "Maintains a list that is provided for use in filtering software": yes, ACMA has a blacklist of sites that they maintain, and they provide that list to software developers that make filter software. That software is then purchased by/given to users who WANT a filter (for their kids, workplace, etc.) How is that different than in every other country where you can buy 'net nanny' type software. Sure it's a filter, but:
a) it's not ISP-level, it's software on your local machine; and
b) it's not mandatory!
There is no ~mandatory, government-enforced/run~ filtering of the Internet in Australia. Just because ACMA maintains a blacklist doesn't mean that everyone has to use it. Currently, two or three ISPs do implement the filter (not because there's a law doing so, but because of their own internal commercial decisions), but you are free to use one of the hundreds of other ISPs out there if you don't like that.
This isn't really accurate. There is plenty of capacity. Domestic and international. We're a large area but we have a tiny population remember. We have approximately 8 Tbps total to the outside world at the moment but some of it's not even lit, and of the portion that's lit, it's nowhere near fully utilised. And that extra 5.12 Tb cable you mention is due to come online in the next 18 months. So there really isn't a capacity issue in Australia, and per capita, we are connected adequately.
Svalbard is an oddity (and has the benefit of being close to masses of capacity available in Scandinavia). Australia is at the end of the line, so to speak. You don't go through Australia to get to anywhere. This, combined with very small population, is a problem that will always mean our bandwidth infrastructure costs more. Actually it affects everything there, from the price of goods, to the ability of Australian airlines to compete with Asian and Middle Eastern carriers who are relatively more 'central' geographically, and hence can capture passengers not just from their local markets, but people merely transiting through their countries to other places.
Precisely. And then you have people like me (and probably like many Slashdotters) who fit into both target markets depending on the circumstances.
I enjoy tinkering with my PCs. Installing different OSes. Upgrading the hardware. The ability to run any arbitrary code I like on the thing, even if it might get me in trouble. It's a hobby like it is for most other Slashdotters. But then on the other hand, I don't want to do that on my phone. I want it to just work for the set of predefined tasks a phone is needed for. I'm willing to forego a bit of capability and flexibility for the reliability, simplicity and lack of 'having to maintain it and screw around with getting things set up and working'. I'm one of those 'use it like a microwave' people when it comes to phones. If I want to tinker, I have desktop PCs/laptops for that.
Different tools for different purposes. I'll always have the 'big box' desktop PC. But I'll also buy the shiny dumbed down appliances for certain things too.
I suspect a lot of this "PCs are dying", "no they aren't!" argument boils down to semantics. I note that you talk about your "laptop" as if it were distinct from your (presumably desktop) PC. But to me, a laptop is still a PC ... just one in a smaller and more portable casing. Basically if it runs the same OS/software as a PC (i.e. Windows, Linux, Mac OS), it's a personal computer (virtual machines notwithstanding).
Not saying that's the 'right' definition, but it's the one that makes sense in my head, at least. Something like an iPad isn't a PC OTOH because I cannot run arbitrary code on it. It's an appliance. That doesn't make it bad ... I enjoy using my iPad and there are certain tasks it excels at ... but it's not a PC.
To clarify, I AGREE that attention should be brought to any comments regarding the curtailment of free speech. However, often, Slashdot actually makes it sound as if a certain thing occurred/a certain thing was said, when it wasn't. I'm talking about accuracy of facts here, rather than suggesting Slashdotters are overreacting to what they read.
Absolutely - but that doesn't excuse implied or explicit misrepresentation of what actually ~happened~. If you read Cameron's full speech you'll see he was actually quite positive about the role social media had in the response to the riots. He did not actually talk about 'shutting down' the networks. He asked if there might be a way to stop ~specific, identified~ people communicating using these platforms in emergency situations such as the riots.
In fact it actually says this in the summary - it's the headline that is the problem here.
"Square-Enix was notorious for doing that with Final Fantasy XI; the maintenance cycle always fell during Japanese off-hours (since they are a Japanese company and all) so when they'd turn the servers off in the middle of the night there us North American players would get the shaft in our prime time."
Hehe ... welcome to the experience of gamers in Australia and New Zealand in basically every MMO in existence. Maintenance falls at some time in the early hours US time (say, 4am). Which is smack bang in Australian/NZ prime time. Australia/NZ isn't a big enough market to bother hosting local servers for, so we just get the same boxed US-region game as the US does, and connect to US-hosted servers (unlike our northern neighbours in Asia, who have a much larger population and hence local servers). Actually FFXI is actually one of the few where this problem doesn't affect us because Japan and Australia are only between 0 and 3 hours apart, depending on which area of Australia and what time of year it is.
Exactly right. Slashdot always does that: takes the worst possible misinterpretation of anything that a government, or anyone even vaguely related to government, says. Especially non-US governments. Even if it was an off hand comment, mere suggestion, or slip of the tongue from some random MP with negligible political influence, the Slashdot headline will read as if it is already an enacted, freedom-crushing law. Even if it's obvious to blind Freddy that it has no practical possibility of ever becoming reality.
That is the case here: Cameron knows full well that you can't 'shut down' social networks (you block one site/protocol/etc, and another pops up to take it's place - it's like the pointless battle against torrent sites etc.) He's just trying to score some political brownie points with certain segments of the population.
See also: compulsory Australian internet filter (which never existed, never had any hope of existing, and was never actually even introduced into Parliament as a Bill, let alone passed - but many on Slashdot who just read the headlines no doubt thought, and still think, that Australia has some kind of government-run filter). A couple of particularly vocal politicians were pushing it, but it could never have got through the Senate. In the end it became nothing more than a voluntary filter, blocking the tiniest handful of sites, and implemented by just two ISPs (who did so for their own commercial reasons, not due to a law).