When it was first introduced, telemarketing calls pretty much stopped dead. For a while. But after a while they started coming back. And funnily enough all the people on the other end had American accents now (or were pre-recorded Americans). And indeed I asked one of them once where he was located, and he said Texas.
Of course, the Australian Do Not Call register only applies to calls placed in Australia. So they got around it by setting up operations in the US and calling back to Australia. I imagine they use some form of VoIP for the international leg otherwise the phone bills would be obscene.
Living in a place that has universal health care, it utterly astonishes me that anyone honestly would prefer no health care, to affordable (but not free) health care. Seriously? You actually want to completely forgo health cover to save a few bucks? I always knew that Americans were very individualistic and liked freedom of choice in things, but that seems like one choice that is not very wise to make. This isn't a troll or intending to flame... I guess I just do not understand the mindset that leads to this opinion.
I know some people think they are very healthy. But you never know. Things like cancer can spring up in otherwise healthy individuals for no apparent reason. Not to mention you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. And then you will be glad that, even if you are poor, there is a public health system that will pay for your treatment. Hell, I'm young (26), fit (I run 4km a day and don't overeat) and fairly healthy overall. But I am still OK with paying the 1.5% extra income tax that I do in my country to pay for the universal healthcare system.
Despite the above being modded funny, I thought it was 'veterinarians' too. Didn't know what 'VA' was either (the only thing that sprung to mind was the postal abbreviation for Virginia. So the headline confused the hell out of me until I read the summary;)
I don't think they use the word 'vets' as a common abbreviation for retired servicemen outside of North America. At least where I live, we might occasionally refer to them as 'war veterans', but that would never get abbreviated. For me, "vet" = someone that treats animals:)
The UK doesn't have a WRITTEN Constitution that you can point to as a single document and say "look - the Constitution!". It does have a series of other laws (beginning from the Magna Carta onwards) and common law jurisprudence/precedent that, when read together as a single body of law, form a Constitution.
Quite a few countries are like this - where only some (or none) of their Constitution is in the form of a written statute or document. The US on the other hand, having been formed 'from scratch' so to speak after the Revolution, had the advantage of being able to collate all their ideals into a single founding document.
Statistically, what are the chances of a perfect diversity trifecta of asian guy, black guy, and white woman? In an ad, pretty good.
In an American ad... yes, very good chances. I've noticed that in the US you tend to skew images for public consumption (such as ads or brochures) towards showing equal amounts of the major ethnic groups living in the US. Even when they actual statistical distribution of the population is nowhere near equal. Forgive my ignorance, but my uneducated guess is that perhaps there is a law in the US that says you must do this?
The country I live in (Australia) is fairly multicultural (we are a nation built on immigration much like the US, and a full 1 in 4 Australians alive today was born overseas). But in ads we still tend to show a mix of people that is statistically similar to what you'd see just walking around on the street. I.e. maybe two-thirds white, the rest Asian/southern European/Pacific Islander/Aboriginal etc.
I've never been to Poland. But you would sorta expect there to be far more Asians than blacks there, given history and geographical proximity between Asia/Europe (well really it's just one large continent of Eurasia).
Yes I don't think this is racist. In the country where I live, there are virtually no black people. I mean, it's a tiny, vanishingly small percentage. On the street I might see one per year, if I'm lucky. Plenty of east Asians, plenty of south Asians, plenty of Pacific Islanders and so on. But virtually no 'black' people of the appearance of the man in the pre-photoshopped picture (i.e. African/African-American looking).
Any advertisement that has a suspiciously equal-looking mix of smiling white, Asian and black people on it just screams "copy+paste from an American powerpoint slide/advertisement". Subtly it actually turns people off, I think ("this big-shot American company thinks it can just come in here and win business by recycling their stuff from home, without regard to local culture and customs etc"). If you never see a black person why would you feature them in an ad? It'd be the same if I went to Namibia or Ghana or something and tried to sell someone there a software solution by handing out glossy pictures of white/Anglos all over it - it would just seem a bit bizarre.
So no, not racist. Just a lazy and rushed job in producing local material for the MS Poland website:)
An extra 1% (or is it 1.5%?) on top of my regular income tax. And that only applies if you are reasonably well off... those on lower incomes don't pay a cent. Which is fair enough.
Ditto here in Australia. Movie tickets are like $16 now for an adult. America IP blocks Hulu for anyone outside the US. And Amazon STILL doesn't think Australia is a worthwhile market to open a store here (this baffles me honestly... ebay and paypal have thriving.AU sites, why not amazon?!)
Agreed. I bought Ghosts and The Slip on CD. Even though I had also freely downloaded them a month or two earlier.
I'm happy to buy good stuff, sold in a format that I like (choice of MP3, lossless FLAC etc) and unencumbered with DRM.
I'm not happy to slap down 100 bucks for a new computer game in a store and then find I need to sign up with Steam or some other online activation service to play the damn thing (even for completely offline games mind you!)
It used to be like that. Any vaguely modern router though should have UPnP which takes care of that for you. Assuming a standard home gateway kinda situation at least. If you are on your work's network or something then it's trickier. But what are you doing torrenting from work anyway?:O
Well FWIW as a single data point, my Wii gets pretty hardcore use. 2-4 hours a day, every day. Sometimes more. It's still rock solid after 2 years.
Again, I know this is only a single data point, but I do think Ninty makes good quality hardware! The only Wii-related failure I've had is that the motion sensing stopped working in one of the four Nunchucks I have. Probably because it got flung around and smashed on things one too many times, lol!
A lot of people like to think there's a huge conspiracy re the internet here. But there's not. It's simply a product of the fact that:
a) We are English speaking. We therefore source the VAST majority of our internet content from other English speaking locations (mostly the US). In the US, 90% of IP traffic is domestic and never leaves the US. In Australia, 90% of IP traffic has to be pulled all the way FROM the US.
b) We are an island with a small population, a very long way from anywhere else. There are a handful of undersea cables connecting us to the outside world. These cables are EXPENSIVE. We don't share big long land borders like the US. We don't have a big content-producing domestic population like the US.
c) Telstra is still a bit of a problem. They have a monopoly on the last-mile copper at the moment and charge through the nose for other ISPs to access it. This should hopefully change with the NBN, but that's probably good decade off being completely finished.
There's no great conspiracy. There have been ISPs that have tried to provide unmetered accounts. They have all gone bankrupt. 90% of our traffic is international and the access to those undersea cables costs too much not to meter. It is a unique situation... in other countries they consume far more domestic content, or have land borders, or simply don't have as far to travel (EU-US distance is way way less than AU-US distance, and has more pipes that are competing on price, due to the massive population on both sides). Remember... only 12% of the world's population live in the southern hemisphere. We are very isolated down here.
"The number of gun deaths are extremely low at around 30,000/year with roughly half of them are self inflected"
This just made me chuckle. Americans love guns so much that they think THIRTY THOUSAND PEOPLE A YEAR is a small price to pay for the second amendment. Lol, just lol...
Not wishing to turn this thread into a gun debate, but honestly... in my country we think it's a bad year if the number of gun deaths reaches double figures (i.e. 10 or over). The US population is 13.6x larger than hours, so let's say 10 x 13.6 = 136 people per year in US-adjusted figures. And we think that 136 people a year is a BAD year. 30,000 people? My God, that's like an apocalypse...
Seriously, ditch the guns guys - it's not the 1700s anymore. Sure I know the argument that people kill people, not guns. But guns sure make killing people quicker and easier. Guns make it more likely to kill on a whim. Not to mention it removes the immediacy of killing another person. It's a lot more difficult, mentally, to be up close to someone and stab them and get your hands dirty, than it is to shoot them safely from a distance. I think I could shoot someone if I had to. But I doubt I could ever stab someone, that's just too... ugh.
This scares me as I'm moving to the US permanently in a few years. I've lived most of my life up to this point in Australia where all my general doctors' visits put together over my entire life have cost me a grand total of.... zero. And that's without insurance (publicly funded).
Visits to specialists (which would include a sports med doctor like in your example) wouldn't be free. But for only 10 minutes they'd only be $50 or something (under the public system if you had no insurance), and virtually free (~$10?) if you did have insurance.
How can 10 minutes possibly cost 600 bucks, seriously?
Actually in most developed countries, flipping burgers and pumping fuel are perfectly good jobs and you can live on them easily. They don't carry the same undertones of being dirt poor.
The minimum wage in my country is (converted into US dollars at today's exchange rate): $12.74/hour USD. That's a lot higher than in the US, AFAIK. And most jobs pay more than the minimum wage (even mundane ones like supermarket cashier pay closer to 17-20 USD/hr).
Legislate a decent minimum wage that people can live on in the US. It would do wonders for your numbers in ALL KINDS of other social statistics (including life expectancy - people with more money can buy better quality food and health care).
It's similar in a way in Australia. There's definitely classes. But it's got nothing to do with how much money that people have. Indeed, the people who some would regard as lower class (living in the outer suburbs etc) often have heaps of money, huge houses etc etc.
It is, as the above poster said, more to do with culture, education, taste, attitudes to things etc. The lower classes will be more parochial and less well-travelled than the upper. Etc.
The recent US obsession with the word 'socialism' is quite hilarious. For two reasons:
a) No other country in the world would use that word to describe the sort of things being proposed by the current US administration. It's not "fixing the health system" to some, it's "omg socialismzzz!". I don't get it. A very strong word for a very mundane thing...
b) ALL first world, western countries have a many so called 'socialist' principles enshrined already. What the hell do you think income tax is? Retirement pensions? Free public education? etc... these are all fundamental in any western democracy. The US is just deciding to finally catch up and join the rest of us on health care too, it seems.
You guys in the US *NEED* to ban that HFCS stuff, seriously. It's been banned in Australia (and most other countries?) for as long as I've been alive.
In Australia, I've been roughly the same weight for the last decade, without consciously trying to eat a certain way. When I moved to the US for a year or two though (for work), I put on a good 10 kilograms (20 lb) very quickly. I don't think I changed my diet significantly. It must be what's IN the food rather than the amount over there.
Also, soda (e.g. coke) back here in Australia just tastes sooo much better than the US version. Cause it uses actual sugar, not HFCS. Anyway... get rid of the stuff! It's for your own good:)
In one very important way, no. Aion is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere near as grindy as Lineage II (or Lineage I for that matter).
Lineage II: you could count the number of genuine level 85s (the level cap) on a given western server on one or two hands. It has taken them literally years. I've played Lineage II hardcore for 5 years and I am only level 79 (which is a long, long, long way off 85 because of the insane exponential level curve at levels 75+... level 79 alone is equal to levels 1-78 combined, and it continues like that).
Aion: even a relatively casual player can hit the level cap (currently 50) in a few months.
They aren't even in the same order of magnitude when it comes to grind. Sure Aion is still tougher than WoW in that respect, but then again, WoW is ridiculously easy.
L2 is still the biggest single earner for NCSoft world-wide (based on the most recent Q4 2008 figures). This is despite it being over five years old. Lineage 1 (Which is ANCIENT... it's literally VGA graphics and must be 10+ years old surely) STILL brought in almost as much as L2 did last year.
If WoW is doing as well (worldwide) as either L1 or L2 on it's 10 year anniversary, I'll be very surprised.
Aion won't be a WoWkiller in the West. But it will attract enough players to be a financial success for NCSoft here. And frankly, they don't really care that much if Aion in the west gets 500k or 50k long-term subscribers... it's a drop in the ocean compared to their multi-million subscription figures in each of: Korea, Japan, China etc.
From my experience of living long term in all three of: Australia, USA and UK, there is far more actual power in the people's hands (at election time) in Australia than either of the other two.
Partly this is because Australia's population is quite low, so there's less 'layers' between the wishes of the people, and the politicians (one example: the Prime Minister of Australia happened walked right past me on the street in Sydney few weeks ago... but in America you will almost NEVER just 'happen to see the President' when you go out to lunch). Hell the previous Prime Minister went on a walk around the suburbs every morning and waved and said hi to people. Sure he had a few bodyguards trailing him, but nothing like the 30 guards, 20 armored vehicles etc that accompany the US President around.
But a bigger reason for this is the fact that there are very very strict laws against corporate influence on politics in Australia. And there are similarly tough regulations surrounding what companies are allowed to do when it comes to advertising, donations, etc etc. Far more stringent than in America. Sure there's still lobbyists and things in Australia. But realistically, the corporate world can't do much in politics in Australia, and they know it. In America, it's all about big business and corporations when it comes to setting the political agenda. In Australia, the issues that average people care about really can decide the elections. (See: Work Choices)
A final but more minor point is that we do have third and fourth political parties that actually matter. They aren't enough to actually take power away from the big two. But due to the preferences system that we have in Australia, it means that minor parties can influence things in Parliament and aren't just there to make up the numbers. In the US however there really is no serious alternative to the Dems and the Republicans.
Americans like to point to Australia and say "ha, your democracy isn't as good as yours, you don't even directly elect your head of State!". This is true. Our head of State is technically the Queen of England, and our Prime Minister isn't voted in by the people. But in practice, the Australian system reflects the wishes of the public a lot more quickly and more closely. (The Canadian system is like this too I believe, although I haven't spent enough time in Canada to comment).
Disclaimer: I'm Australian by birth but have lived 8+ years in the US and 4+ years in the UK. I also hold dual US and Australian citizenship, and love both countries dearly. Both have their strong and weak points. But when it comes to government, I'm afraid the Australian system is just... better.
SMS warnings like this are fairly common in many parts of the world (not only developing countries, either). Where I live in Australia does this too, when there is a city-wide threat (storm, fire etc... these are rare, but they do send out test messages once in a while too).
Nice thing about it is you don't need a list of phone numbers or anything. You just say "broadcast this message to every single device on these towers". Which in a developed country reaches 100% of the population. Not many people carry radios around with them, so I dare say SMS is much, much better than radio. Come to think of it, I don't know a SINGLE person without a mobile phone. Not one. Even including kids.
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What's really funny is that it goes both ways too.
We have a Do Not Call register in Australia as well. You can sign up for it here: https://www.donotcall.gov.au/
When it was first introduced, telemarketing calls pretty much stopped dead. For a while. But after a while they started coming back. And funnily enough all the people on the other end had American accents now (or were pre-recorded Americans). And indeed I asked one of them once where he was located, and he said Texas.
Of course, the Australian Do Not Call register only applies to calls placed in Australia. So they got around it by setting up operations in the US and calling back to Australia. I imagine they use some form of VoIP for the international leg otherwise the phone bills would be obscene.
Ah yes. Good point :)
Living in a place that has universal health care, it utterly astonishes me that anyone honestly would prefer no health care, to affordable (but not free) health care. Seriously? You actually want to completely forgo health cover to save a few bucks? I always knew that Americans were very individualistic and liked freedom of choice in things, but that seems like one choice that is not very wise to make. This isn't a troll or intending to flame ... I guess I just do not understand the mindset that leads to this opinion.
I know some people think they are very healthy. But you never know. Things like cancer can spring up in otherwise healthy individuals for no apparent reason. Not to mention you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. And then you will be glad that, even if you are poor, there is a public health system that will pay for your treatment. Hell, I'm young (26), fit (I run 4km a day and don't overeat) and fairly healthy overall. But I am still OK with paying the 1.5% extra income tax that I do in my country to pay for the universal healthcare system.
Despite the above being modded funny, I thought it was 'veterinarians' too. Didn't know what 'VA' was either (the only thing that sprung to mind was the postal abbreviation for Virginia. So the headline confused the hell out of me until I read the summary ;)
I don't think they use the word 'vets' as a common abbreviation for retired servicemen outside of North America. At least where I live, we might occasionally refer to them as 'war veterans', but that would never get abbreviated. For me, "vet" = someone that treats animals :)
The UK doesn't have a WRITTEN Constitution that you can point to as a single document and say "look - the Constitution!". It does have a series of other laws (beginning from the Magna Carta onwards) and common law jurisprudence/precedent that, when read together as a single body of law, form a Constitution.
Quite a few countries are like this - where only some (or none) of their Constitution is in the form of a written statute or document. The US on the other hand, having been formed 'from scratch' so to speak after the Revolution, had the advantage of being able to collate all their ideals into a single founding document.
For some light reading on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom
Statistically, what are the chances of a perfect diversity trifecta of asian guy, black guy, and white woman? In an ad, pretty good.
In an American ad ... yes, very good chances. I've noticed that in the US you tend to skew images for public consumption (such as ads or brochures) towards showing equal amounts of the major ethnic groups living in the US. Even when they actual statistical distribution of the population is nowhere near equal. Forgive my ignorance, but my uneducated guess is that perhaps there is a law in the US that says you must do this?
The country I live in (Australia) is fairly multicultural (we are a nation built on immigration much like the US, and a full 1 in 4 Australians alive today was born overseas). But in ads we still tend to show a mix of people that is statistically similar to what you'd see just walking around on the street. I.e. maybe two-thirds white, the rest Asian/southern European/Pacific Islander/Aboriginal etc.
I've never been to Poland. But you would sorta expect there to be far more Asians than blacks there, given history and geographical proximity between Asia/Europe (well really it's just one large continent of Eurasia).
Yes I don't think this is racist. In the country where I live, there are virtually no black people. I mean, it's a tiny, vanishingly small percentage. On the street I might see one per year, if I'm lucky. Plenty of east Asians, plenty of south Asians, plenty of Pacific Islanders and so on. But virtually no 'black' people of the appearance of the man in the pre-photoshopped picture (i.e. African/African-American looking).
Any advertisement that has a suspiciously equal-looking mix of smiling white, Asian and black people on it just screams "copy+paste from an American powerpoint slide/advertisement". Subtly it actually turns people off, I think ("this big-shot American company thinks it can just come in here and win business by recycling their stuff from home, without regard to local culture and customs etc"). If you never see a black person why would you feature them in an ad? It'd be the same if I went to Namibia or Ghana or something and tried to sell someone there a software solution by handing out glossy pictures of white/Anglos all over it - it would just seem a bit bizarre.
So no, not racist. Just a lazy and rushed job in producing local material for the MS Poland website :)
An extra 1% (or is it 1.5%?) on top of my regular income tax. And that only applies if you are reasonably well off ... those on lower incomes don't pay a cent. Which is fair enough.
Ah I found a link, it is indeed 1.5% of my taxable income: http://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/content.asp?doc=/content/17482.htm
But my post was more getting at the point that, no matter how you end up paying for it, there's no way 10 minutes can possibly be worth 600 bucks.
Ditto here in Australia. Movie tickets are like $16 now for an adult. America IP blocks Hulu for anyone outside the US. And Amazon STILL doesn't think Australia is a worthwhile market to open a store here (this baffles me honestly ... ebay and paypal have thriving .AU sites, why not amazon?!)
Agreed. I bought Ghosts and The Slip on CD. Even though I had also freely downloaded them a month or two earlier.
I'm happy to buy good stuff, sold in a format that I like (choice of MP3, lossless FLAC etc) and unencumbered with DRM.
I'm not happy to slap down 100 bucks for a new computer game in a store and then find I need to sign up with Steam or some other online activation service to play the damn thing (even for completely offline games mind you!)
It used to be like that. Any vaguely modern router though should have UPnP which takes care of that for you. Assuming a standard home gateway kinda situation at least. If you are on your work's network or something then it's trickier. But what are you doing torrenting from work anyway? :O
Well FWIW as a single data point, my Wii gets pretty hardcore use. 2-4 hours a day, every day. Sometimes more. It's still rock solid after 2 years.
Again, I know this is only a single data point, but I do think Ninty makes good quality hardware! The only Wii-related failure I've had is that the motion sensing stopped working in one of the four Nunchucks I have. Probably because it got flung around and smashed on things one too many times, lol!
A lot of people like to think there's a huge conspiracy re the internet here. But there's not. It's simply a product of the fact that:
a) We are English speaking. We therefore source the VAST majority of our internet content from other English speaking locations (mostly the US). In the US, 90% of IP traffic is domestic and never leaves the US. In Australia, 90% of IP traffic has to be pulled all the way FROM the US.
b) We are an island with a small population, a very long way from anywhere else. There are a handful of undersea cables connecting us to the outside world. These cables are EXPENSIVE. We don't share big long land borders like the US. We don't have a big content-producing domestic population like the US.
c) Telstra is still a bit of a problem. They have a monopoly on the last-mile copper at the moment and charge through the nose for other ISPs to access it. This should hopefully change with the NBN, but that's probably good decade off being completely finished.
There's no great conspiracy. There have been ISPs that have tried to provide unmetered accounts. They have all gone bankrupt. 90% of our traffic is international and the access to those undersea cables costs too much not to meter. It is a unique situation ... in other countries they consume far more domestic content, or have land borders, or simply don't have as far to travel (EU-US distance is way way less than AU-US distance, and has more pipes that are competing on price, due to the massive population on both sides). Remember ... only 12% of the world's population live in the southern hemisphere. We are very isolated down here.
Yeah, I did mean non-botted ;) I'm highly suspicious of anyone over around 82 actually. Not all of them. But most.
"The number of gun deaths are extremely low at around 30,000/year with roughly half of them are self inflected"
This just made me chuckle. Americans love guns so much that they think THIRTY THOUSAND PEOPLE A YEAR is a small price to pay for the second amendment. Lol, just lol...
Not wishing to turn this thread into a gun debate, but honestly ... in my country we think it's a bad year if the number of gun deaths reaches double figures (i.e. 10 or over). The US population is 13.6x larger than hours, so let's say 10 x 13.6 = 136 people per year in US-adjusted figures. And we think that 136 people a year is a BAD year. 30,000 people? My God, that's like an apocalypse...
Seriously, ditch the guns guys - it's not the 1700s anymore. Sure I know the argument that people kill people, not guns. But guns sure make killing people quicker and easier. Guns make it more likely to kill on a whim. Not to mention it removes the immediacy of killing another person. It's a lot more difficult, mentally, to be up close to someone and stab them and get your hands dirty, than it is to shoot them safely from a distance. I think I could shoot someone if I had to. But I doubt I could ever stab someone, that's just too ... ugh.
Anyway ... all very off topic, I know :)
In the words of the Onion ... holy living fuck.
This scares me as I'm moving to the US permanently in a few years. I've lived most of my life up to this point in Australia where all my general doctors' visits put together over my entire life have cost me a grand total of .... zero. And that's without insurance (publicly funded).
Visits to specialists (which would include a sports med doctor like in your example) wouldn't be free. But for only 10 minutes they'd only be $50 or something (under the public system if you had no insurance), and virtually free (~$10?) if you did have insurance.
How can 10 minutes possibly cost 600 bucks, seriously?
Actually in most developed countries, flipping burgers and pumping fuel are perfectly good jobs and you can live on them easily. They don't carry the same undertones of being dirt poor.
The minimum wage in my country is (converted into US dollars at today's exchange rate): $12.74/hour USD. That's a lot higher than in the US, AFAIK. And most jobs pay more than the minimum wage (even mundane ones like supermarket cashier pay closer to 17-20 USD/hr).
Legislate a decent minimum wage that people can live on in the US. It would do wonders for your numbers in ALL KINDS of other social statistics (including life expectancy - people with more money can buy better quality food and health care).
+1 to the above post.
It's similar in a way in Australia. There's definitely classes. But it's got nothing to do with how much money that people have. Indeed, the people who some would regard as lower class (living in the outer suburbs etc) often have heaps of money, huge houses etc etc.
It is, as the above poster said, more to do with culture, education, taste, attitudes to things etc. The lower classes will be more parochial and less well-travelled than the upper. Etc.
The recent US obsession with the word 'socialism' is quite hilarious. For two reasons:
a) No other country in the world would use that word to describe the sort of things being proposed by the current US administration. It's not "fixing the health system" to some, it's "omg socialismzzz!". I don't get it. A very strong word for a very mundane thing...
b) ALL first world, western countries have a many so called 'socialist' principles enshrined already. What the hell do you think income tax is? Retirement pensions? Free public education? etc ... these are all fundamental in any western democracy. The US is just deciding to finally catch up and join the rest of us on health care too, it seems.
This is very true.
You guys in the US *NEED* to ban that HFCS stuff, seriously. It's been banned in Australia (and most other countries?) for as long as I've been alive.
In Australia, I've been roughly the same weight for the last decade, without consciously trying to eat a certain way. When I moved to the US for a year or two though (for work), I put on a good 10 kilograms (20 lb) very quickly. I don't think I changed my diet significantly. It must be what's IN the food rather than the amount over there.
Also, soda (e.g. coke) back here in Australia just tastes sooo much better than the US version. Cause it uses actual sugar, not HFCS. Anyway ... get rid of the stuff! It's for your own good :)
In many ways yes.
In one very important way, no. Aion is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere near as grindy as Lineage II (or Lineage I for that matter).
Lineage II: you could count the number of genuine level 85s (the level cap) on a given western server on one or two hands. It has taken them literally years. I've played Lineage II hardcore for 5 years and I am only level 79 (which is a long, long, long way off 85 because of the insane exponential level curve at levels 75+ ... level 79 alone is equal to levels 1-78 combined, and it continues like that).
Aion: even a relatively casual player can hit the level cap (currently 50) in a few months.
They aren't even in the same order of magnitude when it comes to grind. Sure Aion is still tougher than WoW in that respect, but then again, WoW is ridiculously easy.
Lineage and L2 are amazingly long lived.
L2 is still the biggest single earner for NCSoft world-wide (based on the most recent Q4 2008 figures). This is despite it being over five years old. Lineage 1 (Which is ANCIENT ... it's literally VGA graphics and must be 10+ years old surely) STILL brought in almost as much as L2 did last year.
If WoW is doing as well (worldwide) as either L1 or L2 on it's 10 year anniversary, I'll be very surprised.
Aion won't be a WoWkiller in the West. But it will attract enough players to be a financial success for NCSoft here. And frankly, they don't really care that much if Aion in the west gets 500k or 50k long-term subscribers ... it's a drop in the ocean compared to their multi-million subscription figures in each of: Korea, Japan, China etc.
This guy has a point.
From my experience of living long term in all three of: Australia, USA and UK, there is far more actual power in the people's hands (at election time) in Australia than either of the other two.
Partly this is because Australia's population is quite low, so there's less 'layers' between the wishes of the people, and the politicians (one example: the Prime Minister of Australia happened walked right past me on the street in Sydney few weeks ago ... but in America you will almost NEVER just 'happen to see the President' when you go out to lunch). Hell the previous Prime Minister went on a walk around the suburbs every morning and waved and said hi to people. Sure he had a few bodyguards trailing him, but nothing like the 30 guards, 20 armored vehicles etc that accompany the US President around.
But a bigger reason for this is the fact that there are very very strict laws against corporate influence on politics in Australia. And there are similarly tough regulations surrounding what companies are allowed to do when it comes to advertising, donations, etc etc. Far more stringent than in America. Sure there's still lobbyists and things in Australia. But realistically, the corporate world can't do much in politics in Australia, and they know it. In America, it's all about big business and corporations when it comes to setting the political agenda. In Australia, the issues that average people care about really can decide the elections. (See: Work Choices)
A final but more minor point is that we do have third and fourth political parties that actually matter. They aren't enough to actually take power away from the big two. But due to the preferences system that we have in Australia, it means that minor parties can influence things in Parliament and aren't just there to make up the numbers. In the US however there really is no serious alternative to the Dems and the Republicans.
Americans like to point to Australia and say "ha, your democracy isn't as good as yours, you don't even directly elect your head of State!". This is true. Our head of State is technically the Queen of England, and our Prime Minister isn't voted in by the people. But in practice, the Australian system reflects the wishes of the public a lot more quickly and more closely. (The Canadian system is like this too I believe, although I haven't spent enough time in Canada to comment).
Disclaimer: I'm Australian by birth but have lived 8+ years in the US and 4+ years in the UK. I also hold dual US and Australian citizenship, and love both countries dearly. Both have their strong and weak points. But when it comes to government, I'm afraid the Australian system is just ... better.
SMS warnings like this are fairly common in many parts of the world (not only developing countries, either). Where I live in Australia does this too, when there is a city-wide threat (storm, fire etc ... these are rare, but they do send out test messages once in a while too).
Nice thing about it is you don't need a list of phone numbers or anything. You just say "broadcast this message to every single device on these towers". Which in a developed country reaches 100% of the population. Not many people carry radios around with them, so I dare say SMS is much, much better than radio. Come to think of it, I don't know a SINGLE person without a mobile phone. Not one. Even including kids.