You have managed to make Telstra into one of the good guys. This is an unnatural state of affairs. Reality will snap back to normal, and as the man defying it, you may be in for some serious harm.
It says the funds will be raised by Macquarie, which is an investment bank. Who, exactly, in the current economic climate, going to give them that kind of money?
It is not FUD. The scheme proposed requires total interception of web traffic. That is more than Iran does, and puts us in the same league as the Great Firewall of China.
The point is not *what* is being filtered, it is that it is being filtered at all. Doing so is incredibly intrusive, has a deadening effect on free speech, and leaves open the door to police-state control of Australians' internet connectivity. We're supposed to be better than that.
As an aside, political speech is protected by the Constitution, according to the High Court of Australia.
Which raises an interesting point about whether this is constitutional, considering that this scheme will inevitably cause blocks to political speech due to false positives.
It's a sop to the Family First party Senator, Fielding. His mob are convinced porn is the Devil's Work. Idle playthings and all that.
To pass legislation in the Senate, the government needs its votes, plus the Greens, plus Nick Xenophon, plus Fielding. This is their way of trying to suck up to Fielding.
The last round of internet censorship laws came about when the previous government was sucking up to another god-bothering Senator who held the balance of power in his own right.
While the Greens are likely to strike this legislation down, it's important to stop it being introduced in the first place. You never know when Family First might get the balance of power -- so you want to teach major-party politicians the lesson that the Internet is a no-touch subject, thus stopping it from ever gaining traction in the *lower house*.
During the glory days of Japanese business, when Tokyo real estate was quoted at insanely high prices, an engineering firm came up with a design they called the 'Try 2004' which was essentially along the same lines. The idea was that it could fit into Tokyo bay and house around 750,000 people.
Their calculations suggested that it cannot be done with currently available materials. You need new materials with higher tensile and compressive strength than steel or concrete (I'm not a civil engineer, so forgive me if I've mucked up the terms). They suggested at the time that nanotechnology would bridge the gap.
This was in the early 90s. There was an even more ambitious plan circulated in the period called the X-seed, I think, which was essentially a man-made mountain.
Then the Kobe earthquake began the chain of events that plunged the Japanese economy into recession... and well, here we are, with this century's suddenly uber-wealthy economies talking about giant pyramid cities.
That very much depends on whose problem you're talking about.
If you're a web site worried about javascript library hosting, caching and such, this will help, a bit. Mostly to banish an annoyance.
If, on the other hand, you're a famous search engine who'd love to know more about who uses what javascripting libraries on which sites... well, this sort of scheme is just your ticket.
Every 4+ comment has the same "RISC|CISC is dead" comment talking about how x86 chips break down that massive, warty ISA into a series of RISC-like micro-ops for internal consumption. And that this has been the case since at least the Pentium Pro.
Read the article. Jon Stokes makes that point: but he also makes the point that in embedded processors, it does matter, because the transistor budget is much, much smaller than for a modern desktop CPU. It may come to pass in a few generations of die feature shrinking that we arrive back at the current situation of ISAs becoming irrelevant, but for the moment in the embedded space it does matter that you need to give up a few million transistors to buffering, chopping up and reissuing instructions compared to just reading and running them.
Remember, this is Jon Stokes we're talking about: he's the guy that taught most Slashdotters what they know about CISC and RISC as it is.
So even if we have agreed to allow our SysAdmin permission to read our emails, should we wish to it can be taken to a federal agency and acted apon. It is thus illegal to read emails, regardless of what they have signed. If someone with more info on this than me could enlighten me further, be much appreciated.
First I rang my local member, who referred me to Julia Gillard's office (she made the original idiotic statements). Her office referred me to the Attorney-General's office, as that's where it's coming from.
The nice functionary I spoke to there said it's a media beatup. Under Australian law it's illegal to intercept the communications of a third party without a warrant. There was some wondering about whether passing emails through a virus scan qualified as warrantless interception.
Rather than going through some court case about to settle the matter, it was felt that it would be easier just to amend the Telecommunications Interception Act instead.
So that's it. There's actually no story here at all. Though it did provoke me to write an angry rant before I started doing what the journalists should have done in the first place - check the facts.
One thing is for certain: any system is better than the West's out-dated plurality voting system.
You do realise that the USA is not the only country in "the West", surely?
Australia has had compulsory instant runoff voting (aka IRV, though we call it "preferential voting") for decades. It works pretty well. Systems like the Condorcet Method, Meek's Algorithm and Range Voting have some theoretical advantages, but they fail in one crucial respect: they are hard to count. Range Voting creates possibly hundreds of rounds of counting. The Condorcet Method creates exponential numbers of counts. The Meek algorithm is essentially only doable with a computer. In contrast, the maximum number of counts required in IRV is the number of candidates - 1. In most cases the election is settled in two rounds.
What I've learnt over the years as an interested student of voting methods and as a politcal hack and Parliamentary candidate is that voting systems in theory and voting systems in practice are not the same. You need more than the best system in terms of Arrow's Theorem, you need something that can counted quickly and which can be trusted. This implies more about the rest of the electoral system.
And so it is that I, like most Australians, read about the woes and tribulations that the USA goes through come election time, and I though I know it is rude to say this in public, I pity you.
IRV is simple to count and simple to understand. Number the boxes in order of preference. That it is compulsory in Australia helps to moderate our politics by ensuring that the almost the whole population turns out to vote, not just ultra-motivated special interest groups (churchies, to pick a purely random example).
We also go further to ensure the integrity of our vote. The Australian Electoral Commission is a statutory body, independent of government. It is appointed, not elected. Its employees are forbidden by law to be or have been members of any political party.
Every ballot box is numbered. It is signed out by an AEC employee and at least two party- or candidate-appointed scrutineers. Every ballot box is sealed with numbered tags. These too are signed off. Every ballot is initialled by an AEC employee to ensure it is official. Every voter is signed off the Electoral Roll when they present at a booth to vote. The ballot is overseen by the independent AEC and is also watched by party or candidate scrutineers, whose mutual hostility and watchfulness ensures that rules are observed.
The unsealing of ballot boxes is witnessed and signed off. Every box is counted going out and counted coming in. Every tag is counted going out and coming in.
The count is watched by scrutineers, who may challenge how a vote is being counted. They may also challenge the formality or informality of a vote -- whether the vote is allowed to be counted.
The count is conducted three times: once on election night to give a "two party indicative" count, which will usually show which party will form government. It is counted two more times, with scrutineers at every stage, before the formal declaration is made.
Mistakes are made, but as a system it is largely immune to the shennanigans I am constantly reading about here on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Incidentally, the Australian Electoral Commission also makes itself available for contract work. They mostly run ballots for unions and the like. They'd probably be available to run the Presidential election in November for a very reasonable rate.
It's there in black-and-white in the press release: "As previously announced in July 2007, Sun also plans to deliver Lustre servers on top of Sun's industry-leading open source Solaris ZFS solution".
Slashdot Mirror
You have managed to make Telstra into one of the good guys. This is an unnatural state of affairs. Reality will snap back to normal, and as the man defying it, you may be in for some serious harm.
It says the funds will be raised by Macquarie, which is an investment bank. Who, exactly, in the current economic climate, going to give them that kind of money?
It is not FUD. The scheme proposed requires total interception of web traffic. That is more than Iran does, and puts us in the same league as the Great Firewall of China.
The point is not *what* is being filtered, it is that it is being filtered at all. Doing so is incredibly intrusive, has a deadening effect on free speech, and leaves open the door to police-state control of Australians' internet connectivity. We're supposed to be better than that.
As an aside, political speech is protected by the Constitution, according to the High Court of Australia.
Which raises an interesting point about whether this is constitutional, considering that this scheme will inevitably cause blocks to political speech due to false positives.
It's a sop to the Family First party Senator, Fielding. His mob are convinced porn is the Devil's Work. Idle playthings and all that.
To pass legislation in the Senate, the government needs its votes, plus the Greens, plus Nick Xenophon, plus Fielding. This is their way of trying to suck up to Fielding.
The last round of internet censorship laws came about when the previous government was sucking up to another god-bothering Senator who held the balance of power in his own right.
While the Greens are likely to strike this legislation down, it's important to stop it being introduced in the first place. You never know when Family First might get the balance of power -- so you want to teach major-party politicians the lesson that the Internet is a no-touch subject, thus stopping it from ever gaining traction in the *lower house*.
That's why the EFF campaign is important.
For bonus points, he "couldn't remember" doing it because he was "too drunk".
Upon coming to office he launched a crusade against drinking.
The website linked to basically regurgitates material from a Google website about their data centres and a blog entry by a Microsoft data centre employee.
The original links are more informative than the rehash.
Dumb clients, fat clients, thin servers, retarded paywalls.
During the glory days of Japanese business, when Tokyo real estate was quoted at insanely high prices, an engineering firm came up with a design they called the 'Try 2004' which was essentially along the same lines. The idea was that it could fit into Tokyo bay and house around 750,000 people.
Their calculations suggested that it cannot be done with currently available materials. You need new materials with higher tensile and compressive strength than steel or concrete (I'm not a civil engineer, so forgive me if I've mucked up the terms). They suggested at the time that nanotechnology would bridge the gap.
This was in the early 90s. There was an even more ambitious plan circulated in the period called the X-seed, I think, which was essentially a man-made mountain.
Then the Kobe earthquake began the chain of events that plunged the Japanese economy into recession ... and well, here we are, with this century's suddenly uber-wealthy economies talking about giant pyramid cities.
Negative. Apple's actual genius is being considered geniuses for taking away features.
I don't think it's inevitable. In Australia at least we don't have the problem of riders.
Is to help Australian nerds the butt of "in Soviet Australia" jokes.
It definitely makes a nice change from being the internet retards of the anglosphere.
Most of the stories about Australia reaching the front page are of the "what new order-the-tide-to-go-out law are they passing now?" genre.
Easy. A head is the car of the list, the tail is the cdr.
Why is the HBR arguing something that's been settled since the 60s? :)
Well, what with the price of oil these days, even rockstars are feeling the pinch.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to fill up the tank on a Ferrari?
That very much depends on whose problem you're talking about.
... well, this sort of scheme is just your ticket.
If you're a web site worried about javascript library hosting, caching and such, this will help, a bit. Mostly to banish an annoyance.
If, on the other hand, you're a famous search engine who'd love to know more about who uses what javascripting libraries on which sites
Good community projects need inclusivity and transparency, there's no doubt.
Though getting millions and millions of dollars from Google probably helps. You know. A bit.
Every 4+ comment has the same "RISC|CISC is dead" comment talking about how x86 chips break down that massive, warty ISA into a series of RISC-like micro-ops for internal consumption. And that this has been the case since at least the Pentium Pro.
Read the article. Jon Stokes makes that point: but he also makes the point that in embedded processors, it does matter, because the transistor budget is much, much smaller than for a modern desktop CPU. It may come to pass in a few generations of die feature shrinking that we arrive back at the current situation of ISAs becoming irrelevant, but for the moment in the embedded space it does matter that you need to give up a few million transistors to buffering, chopping up and reissuing instructions compared to just reading and running them.
Remember, this is Jon Stokes we're talking about: he's the guy that taught most Slashdotters what they know about CISC and RISC as it is.
1. Don't.
It's more subtle than the headline or TFA makes out:
Lies, Damned Lies, and National Security
Intercepting Communications - now and then
That second link is a Senator's blog, by the way.
That's pretty much the problem they're trying to solve, as I found out by ringing the right office: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=521210&cid=23060106
And by way of full disclosure, I should point out that I ran as a candidate for a different political party at last year's Federal elections.
First I rang my local member, who referred me to Julia Gillard's office (she made the original idiotic statements). Her office referred me to the Attorney-General's office, as that's where it's coming from.
The nice functionary I spoke to there said it's a media beatup. Under Australian law it's illegal to intercept the communications of a third party without a warrant. There was some wondering about whether passing emails through a virus scan qualified as warrantless interception.
Rather than going through some court case about to settle the matter, it was felt that it would be easier just to amend the Telecommunications Interception Act instead.
So that's it. There's actually no story here at all. Though it did provoke me to write an angry rant before I started doing what the journalists should have done in the first place - check the facts.
And so it is with great sadness that I have to forgo tagging this story 'slashvertisement'.
You do realise that the USA is not the only country in "the West", surely?
Australia has had compulsory instant runoff voting (aka IRV, though we call it "preferential voting") for decades. It works pretty well. Systems like the Condorcet Method, Meek's Algorithm and Range Voting have some theoretical advantages, but they fail in one crucial respect: they are hard to count. Range Voting creates possibly hundreds of rounds of counting. The Condorcet Method creates exponential numbers of counts. The Meek algorithm is essentially only doable with a computer. In contrast, the maximum number of counts required in IRV is the number of candidates - 1. In most cases the election is settled in two rounds.
What I've learnt over the years as an interested student of voting methods and as a politcal hack and Parliamentary candidate is that voting systems in theory and voting systems in practice are not the same. You need more than the best system in terms of Arrow's Theorem, you need something that can counted quickly and which can be trusted. This implies more about the rest of the electoral system.
And so it is that I, like most Australians, read about the woes and tribulations that the USA goes through come election time, and I though I know it is rude to say this in public, I pity you.
IRV is simple to count and simple to understand. Number the boxes in order of preference. That it is compulsory in Australia helps to moderate our politics by ensuring that the almost the whole population turns out to vote, not just ultra-motivated special interest groups (churchies, to pick a purely random example).
We also go further to ensure the integrity of our vote. The Australian Electoral Commission is a statutory body, independent of government. It is appointed, not elected. Its employees are forbidden by law to be or have been members of any political party.
Every ballot box is numbered. It is signed out by an AEC employee and at least two party- or candidate-appointed scrutineers. Every ballot box is sealed with numbered tags. These too are signed off. Every ballot is initialled by an AEC employee to ensure it is official. Every voter is signed off the Electoral Roll when they present at a booth to vote. The ballot is overseen by the independent AEC and is also watched by party or candidate scrutineers, whose mutual hostility and watchfulness ensures that rules are observed.
The unsealing of ballot boxes is witnessed and signed off. Every box is counted going out and counted coming in. Every tag is counted going out and coming in.
The count is watched by scrutineers, who may challenge how a vote is being counted. They may also challenge the formality or informality of a vote -- whether the vote is allowed to be counted.
The count is conducted three times: once on election night to give a "two party indicative" count, which will usually show which party will form government. It is counted two more times, with scrutineers at every stage, before the formal declaration is made.
Mistakes are made, but as a system it is largely immune to the shennanigans I am constantly reading about here on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Incidentally, the Australian Electoral Commission also makes itself available for contract work. They mostly run ballots for unions and the like. They'd probably be available to run the Presidential election in November for a very reasonable rate.
It's there in black-and-white in the press release: "As previously announced in July 2007, Sun also plans to deliver Lustre servers on top of Sun's industry-leading open source Solaris ZFS solution".