A copy of software is worth no more than the media it is written on, the box it is packed in, and the paper the EULA is printed on.
+ (development cost + distribution cost + promotion cost + maintenance cost) / (number of units sold)
Now, that may be vanishingly small, but it's not 0. And, as a good American^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h citizen of a capitalist country, you surely don't expect any organisation to do it for no benefit, do you? Better add profit into the equation too...
Now, sit quietly and listen. Hear the silence? That's the sound of everybody else's limits, which are slightly higher than yours, not being hit.
And what about your young children, or your nieces and nephews, or your friends children - what's their limit set at?
And what will their children's limits be set at?
The distance between an idealist fighting the good fight and a silly old fart ranting against the evils of modern society is not that far. It's only about 20 years...
What really scares me is that for this to be successful, without some type of backlash from the user community, it would have to be forced on us.
You overestimate your fellow human beings. Like the apocryphal frogs in a pot of water, people won't think of jumping out until it's too late.
Just look around here in this thread. Already there's people saying "It's not a bad idea if it means (I | poor people) can get an OS for free". Let that simmer for a while. Then, let MS say "Here's out new OS - you can pay $RRP for the full version, $(RRP/2) for the upgrade version, $(RRP/3) for the lightly ad-supported version, or $token_amount for the full ad-supported version". Repeat for the new versions of e.g. Office, and another version or two of the OS, and pretty soon the vast majority of people are using an OS and apps which force-feed ads.
From there, it's just a short jump to "all versions, except the corporate version (priced out of reach of individual users), are ad-supported. And yes, you would like fries with that".
(There's even an "upside" to that - people will start spending more time at work just to get away from the ads on their home PC. Imagine how much that'll improve corporate productivity!)
Oh yeah, there'll always be the few rapidly aging old farts who reminisce about the "good ol' days", when there weren't ads on the Start menu or titlebar. Eventually they'll die off or be marginalised, to be replaced by the old farts who remember the days when they only got a few ads there. And eventually they too will die off or be marginalised, only to be replaced by your children - who are now old farts reminiscing about the good ol' days when you got better ads in the Start menu and titlebar, not like the crappy ads now that they beam directly into your cerebral interface implants...
Besides, it not an "unlicensed band" anyway - it's class licensed. Any equipment which operates in those bands has to meet certain stringent requirements with regards to maximum power, etc, in order to be operated without an operator's licence (which is why things like boosting your WiFi ERP beyond certain limits through the use of high gain antennas, etc, is illegal).
If, to take one example, the 2.4GHz band was truly unlicensed, your local regulatory authority couldn't stop you from hooking up a waveguide and external antenna to the magnetron of your microwave oven and splattering all the WiFi in the neighbourhood. But, because all such equipment is class licenced, you'd be operating it outside the conditions of the equipment license and they'll in fact come down on you like a ton of bricks...
The ACCC is known to Australians as the "consumer watchdog".
Yes, in much the same way as our PM is known as "Honest John" or redheaded guys are called "Bluey"...
Fact of the matter is, whilst they occasionally throw out nice little bones to the general public like PS2 mods & region-free DVD players, they're just as much a political arm of the government as any other. Witness the inevitable - and toothless - investigations into petrol pricing, etc, that seem to crop up with depressing regularity every 3 years or so, co-incidentally just prior to Federal elections.
Take a look at the history of ACCC enquiries, the number (surprisingly few) which were found to have breached the laws, and the number (even fewer) which were upheld on appeal to the government or the courts. Then, of the ones left, look at who they were against and what they were for - 90% are for trivial breaches of the various acts which resulted in almost no effect on consumers, The only other big important ones which come to mind were against transport companies and box manufacturers for price collusion - both of which have since been largely negated by market changes (i.e. one player buys out the other).
And this isn't a knock against the current government either, as much as I hate them - the same shit went on in all the previous incarnations of the ACCC under previous governments of both stripes. It's largely a toothless tiger which occasionally gets given a free set of badly-fitting dentures on Medicare and told to put on a show...
Having said all that, this is just dumb. Is the complaint that Google continued to run the ads (sorry, "sponsored links") after the advertiser was stopped? If that's the case, then isn't it the responsibility of the advertiser to inform the magazine/newspaper/website to stop?
Or is it the argument that Google is responsible for the validity and content of all ads it runs on behalf of 3rd parties? If so, there's going to be a hell of a lot of scared media and advertising companies very soon, and a bunch of trade practices lawyers rubbing their hands at the thought of all the jobs they'll soon have in those companies.
(Yes, I know the article seems to indicate it's the first option. I've seen it reported the other way elsewhere.)
As others have noticed this is nothing new, nor is it confined to the USA - APRA here in Aus have been doing this for years, veering either side of that fine line between legitimate licensing agency and standover merchants.
They're quite well-planned about it too. Not only do they try to shakedown established businesses, they also keep an eye on new business registrations and pay them a friendly visit before opening day. I've personally seen it happen twice - two guys turn up and knock on the door while we're still fitting out the shop, act like locals interested in what kind of shop it's going to be, then launch into an almost comical "oh, I bet you could here a radio being played in the workshop from out here - it'd be a shame if some nasty happened, like getting sued for not paying the licensing fee. Knowwhatimean, Guv?"
And it's not just "euros and cents" - at one stage at least, here you could choose between being 'nickel and dimed' to death by having to keep your own records and paying on a per-song basis, or pay several hundred dollars up-front for a blanket yearly license.
FWIW, here's the APRA page on the matter. According to them, you even need a non-retail license to copy music to your iPod for personal use. I wonder if anyone's actually bought one of those for that purpose?
Yeah, read the article. EE? Maybe in the slashdot / linux world, where people are so afraid of actual electronics that they purposely redesign in software things better accomplished in hardware (see most of the open source IR-Blaster type projects for a really depressing example of this - no need to be afraid of filters and demodulators, guys!).
I was building stuff of that sort of complexity 30 years ago, when I was 10. In fact, after reading the how it works, I bet I could have built it back then without resorting to a black-box microcontroller - a couple of oscillators, dividers, and hex/decade counters would do the trick.
I was going to mod you +1 Insightful, but you left out the actual option the insurance companies choose:
The insurance companies realise that by charging the fewer higher-risk customers more, they can charge the rest of their customers fractionally less. Thus, the insurance company makes more money, attracts more customers, and responsible people end up playing almost as much as they would anyway!
In other words, insurance companies are screwing you either way - regardless of whether your a chain-smoking crap-eating poor driver, or a non-smoking healthy-eating good driver.
The situation is rapidly approaching the point where it's almost worthwhile to take the money you'd pay in insurance and invest it yourself. The only problem with that it you're only averaging risk one way - temporally. It would be worth it if you could get a few people together, form some sort of co-op, hire some actuaries to gauge risk, set premiums appropriately... hey, then you could sell policies to other people, get greedy, screw them over bothways, and make shitloads of profit!
The robes and bibs? Standard barrister / Queen's Counsel attire - upper-level lawyers, basically. I believe it was only about 10 years ago that wearing of wigs (aka "dead sheep") was made optional instead of mandatory.
Note that this case is before the Federal Court, effectively the highest normal court in the land - the High Court, one last step above, is primarily for constitutional / government matters and final appeals of lower court decisions. I don't think normal solicitors can appear as primary counsel before the Federal or High courts - they have to hire a barrister or QC to present for them.
FWIW, strictly speaking we don't have 'lawyers' here; the legally-correct term is 'solicitors', although you'll see a lot of them advertising as 'lawyers'. 30+ years of American TV influence has conditioned people to expect/think of lawyers for legal matters, and they probably think 'solicitors' means 'young ladies who hang around city street-corners at night'...
I've got a Pixma MP500 - one of the first Canon multi-functions to use chipped cartridges; it's a couple of years old now and I believe the current equiv is the MP600. So far at least it seems these chips can't be reset.
Having said that, it seems to follow these rules:
Chip reaches certain count; printer reports "ink is getting low"; a 'low ink' flag is set somewhere (in the chip?)
When the prism reports ink is out a 'no ink' flag is set, and the printer will refuse to use that cartridge ever again.
The trick is to refill after getting the "low ink" message - the first time you do that, the printer driver will give you a "refilled cartridges are baby-eating evil, blah blah blah... Hold down the reset button for 3 seconds to continue" message. Provided you never let that cartridge get so low that the prismatic ink level detector is tripped, you can refill it endlessly. Once you run it down as far as the prism, however, it's new cartridge time.
Apart from that, it's a nice unit. The scanner is pretty good, it's pretty frugal with ink, the print quality is one of the best I've seen from an inkjet, and it prints CDs/DVDs. For under AU$300 (I paid AU$250; the MP600 RRP is currently AU$299), it's almost a bargain. And it'll auto-duplex! The 5 ink cartridges (Bk, + 3 colour & bk) run around AU$20 each new; refills can be had for about 1/2 that. A black cartridge lasts me 4~6 months; I haven't done a page count but I print 10~20 page lecture notes 4 times a week, plus assignments / other shit / etc.
As the OP said, he's in.au. Here, due to some legal oddities involving telephone numbers, it is copyrighted information. There's an ongoing case between Nine (who now own HWW, the TV guide aggregators) and IceTV over IceTV's provision of a downloadable guide service for PVRs. IceTV claim that their guide is based on history, common knowledge, and the network's own advertisements (i.e. facts & public knowledge); Nine claim that it's not - and even if it was, that doesn't matter, because it's the facts, not the collation of them, that's copyrighted. And strictly speaking, under Australian law, they're right.
As an aside, one of the other networks here has announced the introduction of Tivo. Many people seem to think that this will guarantee a free, hopefully EIT-based, EPG for everybody, based on conditions in the Broadcasting Services Act. To them, I'd say "go and read the Act - particularly, focus on the differences between the requirements for commercial broadcasters and national broadcasters (i.e. the ABC & SBS)". You'll see the Act was modified last year, and doesn't require commercial broadcasters to share guide information at all...
I haven't got it on hand, and it's been a while, but I seem to remember it being Sections 2 & 3, subsection 20-something?
And that's one of the things I emailed his office about (the rest were mostly DTV & public broadcaster related). The 'official' Labor policy is
parental education
PC-based filters
more resources/education for law enforcement, and
requiring ISPs to offer a 'clean feed'
Now, while I don't agree with the last (and I'm not really convinced about the second-last either), it's not quite the "Labor wants to filter ur Internetz!" spin you got from the media, is it? For a start it's optional (to the end-user), not mandatory...
My questions to his office about this were along the lines of "how would such a legislated responsibility sit with / affect the de-facto 'common carrier' status of ISPs in Australia?". The replies were well thought out, sensible, and in at least one case quite critical of certain members of his own party for making stupid, ill-informed, populist public statements. One particularly telling point on their cluefullness was that they knew - and named - the many ISPs here using both transparent and used-configured proxies on port 80, and included information on and links to ISP-based filtering being done in the UK and Europe.
On the other hand, from Coonan's office, I got a (snail-mailed!) form letter thanking me for my interest, with a URL scrawled almost illegibly on the back pointing to the government's list of 'approved' net-nanny software (that URL is now defunct - this was mid last year).
Seriously, if you're interested in this issue, fire off an email yourself to the offices of both of them. One (minor) criticism I have is that it can take a go or two to get past the front-line tard-filter both of them have in place (you can imagine the kind of emails they get every single day!), but if you act reasonable and show a clue or two you might be surprised at what you find out about each side.
I was pretty sure she said "gigabit" too - but the transcript said "gigabyte", so I went with that. I wasn't going to feck around with the whole video thing just to embarass the dopey cow even further.
And, sorry, it still makes no sense even in context - it's either conflating two totally different things (power vs bandwidth), or showing a basic lack of understanding of the very 'initiative' she's promoting. Read the rest of the transcript, or watch the video - it's clear that she's got no idea of what she's talking about and is just winging it from poorly-remembered briefing notes.
Look, I'd dearly love to believe the woman was a decent politician with a clue. I actually thought she might be one, particularly compared to the last couple we've had (Alston, for example, was just an arrogant arsehole). But, having read pretty much all the transcripts of Senate estimates committees related to her portfolio since she got the job, and seen the absolute feck-up she and her government have made of DTV and media legislation in this country, I've come to the conclusion that she's just arrogant and clueless about the actual practicalities of her portfolio.
I don't agree she's got a better grasp of it than Alston - at best, you can only say she presents better than he did (which isn't saying much). And she delegates the attack-dog role to someone else - Senator Fierravanti-Wells.
I've actually had some correspondance with her opposition counterpart, Senator Conroy. And while I'm not naive enough to believe that he has a clue either, at least his staff and advisors do (from the quality and intelligence of their replies). He certainly displays a better knowledge and understanding of the issues involved in the portfolio - ignore the press releases, soundbites, and electioneering; go and read the estimates committee transcripts and Senate Hansard to find out for yourself.
... taking 4.7 billion from the Future Fund is a direct abuse of powers. Whereas selling the public back their own asset in order to fund the government employee superannuation fund isn't?
(Hint: If sucessive governments - both Labor and Liberal, so no bias there - hadn't treated the government employee superannuation funds as consolidated revenue over the years, it would have been completely self-funding.)
(Hint #2: The same goes for the 'Social Services Contribution' - a tax / levy designed to pay for pensions - which dates back to early last century. You're still paying it; it's just been subsumed into general taxation - but it no longer goes towards paying for pensions...)
The whole 'Future Fund' is a con. The name is brilliant - it sounds good ; a visionary creation by a government focussed on looking ahead - until you realise it's nothing of the sort. It's sole purpose it to either a) replace money that's been misappropriated by governments in the past, or b) be absorbed onto con. revenue once everyone has forgotten its real purpose.
I mean, think about it. He's in the company of someone who can open doors in space and time, a mythical hero, and a mysterious being of supreme self-confidence. Occasionally assisted by an odd oracular figure, they're on the run from 2 unstoppable killing machines on a quest to assist a trapped angel so s/he can reveal the answer to a mystery.
What's 'oh-so-special' about Richard?
<spoiler> Compassion - he stopped to help someone in trouble, at considerable immediate personal cost (much more than he knew at the time). At the end, the favour is returned. </spoiler>
It's 'The Wizard of Oz', with Richard a considerably less annoying Dorothy...
... suddenly some magical gradients took over the lower part of the screen and advertisements started appearing
At least in Australia, that's not advertising (according to the non-binding voluntary non-guidelines of FACTS). As far as they're concerned, it's not counted as advertising unless it covers 100% of the screen.
I'm dreading the day they start running 719x575 "banners" over programmes...
Almost right, but the "Part"s are descriptive standards or references, not implementations. H.264 is not "MPEG-4 Part 10" - Part 10 describes a standard which is technically the same as H.264, but does not provide an implementation (beyond pointing at the ITU-T's H.264). It's a subtle difference, but important, and Wikipedia is not always clear on this.
It's a bit like reverse-engineering in a cleanroom environment - the various MPEG-4 parts describe exactly how things should work, then you'd pass it off to the developers to re-implement without being tainted by the original. The only real difference between MPEG-4 and what the PC BIOS cloners did (and the wireless / video firmware hackers in Linux / BSD development are doing) is that the MPEG-4 references themselves are covered by copyright and patent law. You can't take the specs and use them to produce an implementation, because that runs afoul of their licencing provisions. You could take an implementation, reverse-engineer it, and produce descriptive specs - but you'd want to be damned sure the descriptive specs you produced didn't look even remotely like the MPEG-4 group's specs...
FWIW, Part 7 is set aside for optimisations to the reference examples given in Part 5 (and I think Parts 2 & 3).
No recommendations toward their products. Recommendations are now against them when people come into my store... Believe me I have a great memory for the bad stuff that these companies do.
Believe me, I'm with you 100% on that. Some company screws me over, or does something to the World that I consider immoral / unethical / nasty, and they never see my business or money again.
But, seriously... what's left for you to sell? Once you take out anything affiliated with LG, Sony, Philips, Thompson, Vivendi, News Ltd, D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, etc, etc, etc, there's not much left...
(Maybe Hitachi - I can't think offhand of anything nasty they've been involved in.)
He's got something of a point though. When I bought my eMac a few years ago, I found myself in a brave new world where every bit of 'free' software I uncovered was a time or feature-limited shareware app.
Then I realised what the problem was: After nearly 20 years of PCs, DOS, Windows, and Linux, I already knew where to find the good stuff - and if I didn't, the kid next door did. On the Mac, I was starting afresh with no idea where to look, and the kid next door turned up his nose at me and went back to installing biohazard-symbol-shaped fan guards on his 'leet gamerz rig when I asked.
(VersionTracker wasn't much help then, and IMHO isn't much better now. 90+% of stuff you'll find in a search there is still unlabelled crippleware. PerversionTracker, OTOH, was fun while it was being updated;-)
Having said that, I still haven't found a good free FTP app - not really a problem for me as I've got iTerm and prefer command-line FTP anyway, but the fact remains. Transmit is the one everybody points at, but it's US$30 or more; SFTP is the other but last I looked (a while ago admittedly) it only did sftp, not plain old ftp...
I don't get what's supposed to be a PITA about installing RAM in a mini though - 2 butter knives and a #0 (or is it #00?) phillips (or is it pozidriv?) screwdriver. Harder than my MacBook, admittedly (which requires a #00 phillips and a thumbnail), but easier than the eMac (which requires a #1 phillips IIRC, plus a careful touch lest you destroy that screw which is seemingly made of margarine (it's softer than butter...))
When I bought my MacBook and friends commented on the glowing Apple logo on the lid, I explained "that's so people can tell how pretentious you are from the other side of the coffee shop!"
... this is why I now recommend Macs to anyone who won't actually enjoy solving the interesting problems Windows throws up...
Where are all the insightful posts like this when I've got mod points?
Because, seriously, this is spot on. I enjoy the little challenges of Windows - from chasing down drivers that don't suck, through dealing with 2 different apps that seemingly require 2 different versions of.NET, to wondering "how the hell can I find a font that contains a lower case sigma?".
But when I want to do something - be it checking email, browsing the web, writing a PHP script to bypass the local hegemony of HWW / PBL by exploiting a weakness in a News Ltd website, or just writing an assignment - I turn to my trusty old G4 eMac. If I want some sun, I take my shiny new MacBook out onto the verandah and work there.
Hopefully, this latest disappointment with Vista uptake will mean a RAM glut soon - then I can afford to put a real amount in that MacBook...
Slashdot Mirror
Now, that may be vanishingly small, but it's not 0. And, as a good American^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h citizen of a capitalist country, you surely don't expect any organisation to do it for no benefit, do you? Better add profit into the equation too...
Now, sit quietly and listen. Hear the silence? That's the sound of everybody else's limits, which are slightly higher than yours, not being hit.
And what about your young children, or your nieces and nephews, or your friends children - what's their limit set at?
And what will their children's limits be set at?
The distance between an idealist fighting the good fight and a silly old fart ranting against the evils of modern society is not that far. It's only about 20 years...
Just look around here in this thread. Already there's people saying "It's not a bad idea if it means (I | poor people) can get an OS for free". Let that simmer for a while. Then, let MS say "Here's out new OS - you can pay $RRP for the full version, $(RRP/2) for the upgrade version, $(RRP/3) for the lightly ad-supported version, or $token_amount for the full ad-supported version". Repeat for the new versions of e.g. Office, and another version or two of the OS, and pretty soon the vast majority of people are using an OS and apps which force-feed ads.
From there, it's just a short jump to "all versions, except the corporate version (priced out of reach of individual users), are ad-supported. And yes, you would like fries with that".
(There's even an "upside" to that - people will start spending more time at work just to get away from the ads on their home PC. Imagine how much that'll improve corporate productivity!)
Oh yeah, there'll always be the few rapidly aging old farts who reminisce about the "good ol' days", when there weren't ads on the Start menu or titlebar. Eventually they'll die off or be marginalised, to be replaced by the old farts who remember the days when they only got a few ads there. And eventually they too will die off or be marginalised, only to be replaced by your children - who are now old farts reminiscing about the good ol' days when you got better ads in the Start menu and titlebar, not like the crappy ads now that they beam directly into your cerebral interface implants...
Besides, it not an "unlicensed band" anyway - it's class licensed. Any equipment which operates in those bands has to meet certain stringent requirements with regards to maximum power, etc, in order to be operated without an operator's licence (which is why things like boosting your WiFi ERP beyond certain limits through the use of high gain antennas, etc, is illegal).
If, to take one example, the 2.4GHz band was truly unlicensed, your local regulatory authority couldn't stop you from hooking up a waveguide and external antenna to the magnetron of your microwave oven and splattering all the WiFi in the neighbourhood. But, because all such equipment is class licenced, you'd be operating it outside the conditions of the equipment license and they'll in fact come down on you like a ton of bricks...
Fact of the matter is, whilst they occasionally throw out nice little bones to the general public like PS2 mods & region-free DVD players, they're just as much a political arm of the government as any other. Witness the inevitable - and toothless - investigations into petrol pricing, etc, that seem to crop up with depressing regularity every 3 years or so, co-incidentally just prior to Federal elections.
Take a look at the history of ACCC enquiries, the number (surprisingly few) which were found to have breached the laws, and the number (even fewer) which were upheld on appeal to the government or the courts. Then, of the ones left, look at who they were against and what they were for - 90% are for trivial breaches of the various acts which resulted in almost no effect on consumers, The only other big important ones which come to mind were against transport companies and box manufacturers for price collusion - both of which have since been largely negated by market changes (i.e. one player buys out the other).
And this isn't a knock against the current government either, as much as I hate them - the same shit went on in all the previous incarnations of the ACCC under previous governments of both stripes. It's largely a toothless tiger which occasionally gets given a free set of badly-fitting dentures on Medicare and told to put on a show...
Having said all that, this is just dumb. Is the complaint that Google continued to run the ads (sorry, "sponsored links") after the advertiser was stopped? If that's the case, then isn't it the responsibility of the advertiser to inform the magazine/newspaper/website to stop?
Or is it the argument that Google is responsible for the validity and content of all ads it runs on behalf of 3rd parties? If so, there's going to be a hell of a lot of scared media and advertising companies very soon, and a bunch of trade practices lawyers rubbing their hands at the thought of all the jobs they'll soon have in those companies.
(Yes, I know the article seems to indicate it's the first option. I've seen it reported the other way elsewhere.)
As others have noticed this is nothing new, nor is it confined to the USA - APRA here in Aus have been doing this for years, veering either side of that fine line between legitimate licensing agency and standover merchants.
They're quite well-planned about it too. Not only do they try to shakedown established businesses, they also keep an eye on new business registrations and pay them a friendly visit before opening day. I've personally seen it happen twice - two guys turn up and knock on the door while we're still fitting out the shop, act like locals interested in what kind of shop it's going to be, then launch into an almost comical "oh, I bet you could here a radio being played in the workshop from out here - it'd be a shame if some nasty happened, like getting sued for not paying the licensing fee. Knowwhatimean, Guv?"
And it's not just "euros and cents" - at one stage at least, here you could choose between being 'nickel and dimed' to death by having to keep your own records and paying on a per-song basis, or pay several hundred dollars up-front for a blanket yearly license.
FWIW, here's the APRA page on the matter. According to them, you even need a non-retail license to copy music to your iPod for personal use. I wonder if anyone's actually bought one of those for that purpose?
Yeah, read the article. EE? Maybe in the slashdot / linux world, where people are so afraid of actual electronics that they purposely redesign in software things better accomplished in hardware (see most of the open source IR-Blaster type projects for a really depressing example of this - no need to be afraid of filters and demodulators, guys!).
I was building stuff of that sort of complexity 30 years ago, when I was 10. In fact, after reading the how it works, I bet I could have built it back then without resorting to a black-box microcontroller - a couple of oscillators, dividers, and hex/decade counters would do the trick.
And no, she's not that good looking...
He could have asked Democracy what it's like being dead...
I was going to mod you +1 Insightful, but you left out the actual option the insurance companies choose:
The insurance companies realise that by charging the fewer higher-risk customers more, they can charge the rest of their customers fractionally less. Thus, the insurance company makes more money, attracts more customers, and responsible people end up playing almost as much as they would anyway!
In other words, insurance companies are screwing you either way - regardless of whether your a chain-smoking crap-eating poor driver, or a non-smoking healthy-eating good driver.
The situation is rapidly approaching the point where it's almost worthwhile to take the money you'd pay in insurance and invest it yourself. The only problem with that it you're only averaging risk one way - temporally. It would be worth it if you could get a few people together, form some sort of co-op, hire some actuaries to gauge risk, set premiums appropriately... hey, then you could sell policies to other people, get greedy, screw them over bothways, and make shitloads of profit!
(As a matter of fact, I did wake up this morning and think "I wonder if I can buy the original Night Stalker on DVD?")
The robes and bibs? Standard barrister / Queen's Counsel attire - upper-level lawyers, basically. I believe it was only about 10 years ago that wearing of wigs (aka "dead sheep") was made optional instead of mandatory.
Note that this case is before the Federal Court, effectively the highest normal court in the land - the High Court, one last step above, is primarily for constitutional / government matters and final appeals of lower court decisions. I don't think normal solicitors can appear as primary counsel before the Federal or High courts - they have to hire a barrister or QC to present for them.
FWIW, strictly speaking we don't have 'lawyers' here; the legally-correct term is 'solicitors', although you'll see a lot of them advertising as 'lawyers'. 30+ years of American TV influence has conditioned people to expect/think of lawyers for legal matters, and they probably think 'solicitors' means 'young ladies who hang around city street-corners at night'...
Having said that, it seems to follow these rules:
- Chip reaches certain count; printer reports "ink is getting low"; a 'low ink' flag is set somewhere (in the chip?)
- When the prism reports ink is out a 'no ink' flag is set, and the printer will refuse to use that cartridge ever again.
The trick is to refill after getting the "low ink" message - the first time you do that, the printer driver will give you a "refilled cartridges are baby-eating evil, blah blah blahApart from that, it's a nice unit. The scanner is pretty good, it's pretty frugal with ink, the print quality is one of the best I've seen from an inkjet, and it prints CDs/DVDs. For under AU$300 (I paid AU$250; the MP600 RRP is currently AU$299), it's almost a bargain. And it'll auto-duplex! The 5 ink cartridges (Bk, + 3 colour & bk) run around AU$20 each new; refills can be had for about 1/2 that. A black cartridge lasts me 4~6 months; I haven't done a page count but I print 10~20 page lecture notes 4 times a week, plus assignments / other shit / etc.
Further background info, in handy bite-sized YouTube videos:
IceTV case - Lateline, 16/10/06
IceTV case - Lateline, 17/10/06
As the OP said, he's in .au. Here, due to some legal oddities involving telephone numbers, it is copyrighted information. There's an ongoing case between Nine (who now own HWW, the TV guide aggregators) and IceTV over IceTV's provision of a downloadable guide service for PVRs. IceTV claim that their guide is based on history, common knowledge, and the network's own advertisements (i.e. facts & public knowledge); Nine claim that it's not - and even if it was, that doesn't matter, because it's the facts, not the collation of them, that's copyrighted. And strictly speaking, under Australian law, they're right.
As an aside, one of the other networks here has announced the introduction of Tivo. Many people seem to think that this will guarantee a free, hopefully EIT-based, EPG for everybody, based on conditions in the Broadcasting Services Act. To them, I'd say "go and read the Act - particularly, focus on the differences between the requirements for commercial broadcasters and national broadcasters (i.e. the ABC & SBS)". You'll see the Act was modified last year, and doesn't require commercial broadcasters to share guide information at all...
I haven't got it on hand, and it's been a while, but I seem to remember it being Sections 2 & 3, subsection 20-something?
- parental education
- PC-based filters
- more resources/education for law enforcement, and
- requiring ISPs to offer a 'clean feed'
Now, while I don't agree with the last (and I'm not really convinced about the second-last either), it's not quite the "Labor wants to filter ur Internetz!" spin you got from the media, is it? For a start it's optional (to the end-user), not mandatory...My questions to his office about this were along the lines of "how would such a legislated responsibility sit with / affect the de-facto 'common carrier' status of ISPs in Australia?". The replies were well thought out, sensible, and in at least one case quite critical of certain members of his own party for making stupid, ill-informed, populist public statements. One particularly telling point on their cluefullness was that they knew - and named - the many ISPs here using both transparent and used-configured proxies on port 80, and included information on and links to ISP-based filtering being done in the UK and Europe.
On the other hand, from Coonan's office, I got a (snail-mailed!) form letter thanking me for my interest, with a URL scrawled almost illegibly on the back pointing to the government's list of 'approved' net-nanny software (that URL is now defunct - this was mid last year).
Seriously, if you're interested in this issue, fire off an email yourself to the offices of both of them. One (minor) criticism I have is that it can take a go or two to get past the front-line tard-filter both of them have in place (you can imagine the kind of emails they get every single day!), but if you act reasonable and show a clue or two you might be surprised at what you find out about each side.
I was pretty sure she said "gigabit" too - but the transcript said "gigabyte", so I went with that. I wasn't going to feck around with the whole video thing just to embarass the dopey cow even further.
And, sorry, it still makes no sense even in context - it's either conflating two totally different things (power vs bandwidth), or showing a basic lack of understanding of the very 'initiative' she's promoting. Read the rest of the transcript, or watch the video - it's clear that she's got no idea of what she's talking about and is just winging it from poorly-remembered briefing notes.
Look, I'd dearly love to believe the woman was a decent politician with a clue. I actually thought she might be one, particularly compared to the last couple we've had (Alston, for example, was just an arrogant arsehole). But, having read pretty much all the transcripts of Senate estimates committees related to her portfolio since she got the job, and seen the absolute feck-up she and her government have made of DTV and media legislation in this country, I've come to the conclusion that she's just arrogant and clueless about the actual practicalities of her portfolio.
I don't agree she's got a better grasp of it than Alston - at best, you can only say she presents better than he did (which isn't saying much). And she delegates the attack-dog role to someone else - Senator Fierravanti-Wells.
I've actually had some correspondance with her opposition counterpart, Senator Conroy. And while I'm not naive enough to believe that he has a clue either, at least his staff and advisors do (from the quality and intelligence of their replies). He certainly displays a better knowledge and understanding of the issues involved in the portfolio - ignore the press releases, soundbites, and electioneering; go and read the estimates committee transcripts and Senate Hansard to find out for yourself.
So, she was still referring to "a gigabyte of power" like she was on the 7:30 Report a few hours earlier, was she?
(Silly Americans are still dicking around with tubes - whereas we in Australia have Gigabytes of Power!)
... taking 4.7 billion from the Future Fund is a direct abuse of powers. Whereas selling the public back their own asset in order to fund the government employee superannuation fund isn't?
(Hint: If sucessive governments - both Labor and Liberal, so no bias there - hadn't treated the government employee superannuation funds as consolidated revenue over the years, it would have been completely self-funding.)
(Hint #2: The same goes for the 'Social Services Contribution' - a tax / levy designed to pay for pensions - which dates back to early last century. You're still paying it; it's just been subsumed into general taxation - but it no longer goes towards paying for pensions...)
The whole 'Future Fund' is a con. The name is brilliant - it sounds good ; a visionary creation by a government focussed on looking ahead - until you realise it's nothing of the sort. It's sole purpose it to either a) replace money that's been misappropriated by governments in the past, or b) be absorbed onto con. revenue once everyone has forgotten its real purpose.
I mean, think about it. He's in the company of someone who can open doors in space and time, a mythical hero, and a mysterious being of supreme self-confidence. Occasionally assisted by an odd oracular figure, they're on the run from 2 unstoppable killing machines on a quest to assist a trapped angel so s/he can reveal the answer to a mystery.
What's 'oh-so-special' about Richard?
<spoiler>
Compassion - he stopped to help someone in trouble, at considerable immediate personal cost (much more than he knew at the time). At the end, the favour is returned.
</spoiler>
It's 'The Wizard of Oz', with Richard a considerably less annoying Dorothy...
I'm dreading the day they start running 719x575 "banners" over programmes...
Almost right, but the "Part"s are descriptive standards or references, not implementations. H.264 is not "MPEG-4 Part 10" - Part 10 describes a standard which is technically the same as H.264, but does not provide an implementation (beyond pointing at the ITU-T's H.264). It's a subtle difference, but important, and Wikipedia is not always clear on this.
It's a bit like reverse-engineering in a cleanroom environment - the various MPEG-4 parts describe exactly how things should work, then you'd pass it off to the developers to re-implement without being tainted by the original. The only real difference between MPEG-4 and what the PC BIOS cloners did (and the wireless / video firmware hackers in Linux / BSD development are doing) is that the MPEG-4 references themselves are covered by copyright and patent law. You can't take the specs and use them to produce an implementation, because that runs afoul of their licencing provisions. You could take an implementation, reverse-engineer it, and produce descriptive specs - but you'd want to be damned sure the descriptive specs you produced didn't look even remotely like the MPEG-4 group's specs...
FWIW, Part 7 is set aside for optimisations to the reference examples given in Part 5 (and I think Parts 2 & 3).
But, seriously
(Maybe Hitachi - I can't think offhand of anything nasty they've been involved in.)
He's got something of a point though. When I bought my eMac a few years ago, I found myself in a brave new world where every bit of 'free' software I uncovered was a time or feature-limited shareware app.
;-)
Then I realised what the problem was: After nearly 20 years of PCs, DOS, Windows, and Linux, I already knew where to find the good stuff - and if I didn't, the kid next door did. On the Mac, I was starting afresh with no idea where to look, and the kid next door turned up his nose at me and went back to installing biohazard-symbol-shaped fan guards on his 'leet gamerz rig when I asked.
(VersionTracker wasn't much help then, and IMHO isn't much better now. 90+% of stuff you'll find in a search there is still unlabelled crippleware. PerversionTracker, OTOH, was fun while it was being updated
Having said that, I still haven't found a good free FTP app - not really a problem for me as I've got iTerm and prefer command-line FTP anyway, but the fact remains. Transmit is the one everybody points at, but it's US$30 or more; SFTP is the other but last I looked (a while ago admittedly) it only did sftp, not plain old ftp...
I don't get what's supposed to be a PITA about installing RAM in a mini though - 2 butter knives and a #0 (or is it #00?) phillips (or is it pozidriv?) screwdriver. Harder than my MacBook, admittedly (which requires a #00 phillips and a thumbnail), but easier than the eMac (which requires a #1 phillips IIRC, plus a careful touch lest you destroy that screw which is seemingly made of margarine (it's softer than butter...))
When I bought my MacBook and friends commented on the glowing Apple logo on the lid, I explained "that's so people can tell how pretentious you are from the other side of the coffee shop!"
Where are all the insightful posts like this when I've got mod points?
Because, seriously, this is spot on. I enjoy the little challenges of Windows - from chasing down drivers that don't suck, through dealing with 2 different apps that seemingly require 2 different versions of
But when I want to do something - be it checking email, browsing the web, writing a PHP script to bypass the local hegemony of HWW / PBL by exploiting a weakness in a News Ltd website, or just writing an assignment - I turn to my trusty old G4 eMac. If I want some sun, I take my shiny new MacBook out onto the verandah and work there.
Hopefully, this latest disappointment with Vista uptake will mean a RAM glut soon - then I can afford to put a real amount in that MacBook...