As more companies move financial analysis to the cloud, I would expect that period of peak demand to occur. For example reporting run at the close of the month, quarter and financial year requires increased processing power. Another example is demand from ecommerce websites during peak times (e.g. black Friday). These occur at the same time for all companies.
The potential benefit for reasearchers is that cheaper cloud services could be available during off-peak times. The risk to investors is that availability of supply keeps increasing.
Many people are concerned about the range of an electric car. Currently the Tesla S has a range of 480km. If you can use solar panels to add 50% to that range, then it is 720km. That is some serious distance.
Our second car rarely travels more than 10km from home, so personally I'd be happy with a range of 100km and a price of under $30,000.
The Stuart Highway is a reasonable stretch of road. The road has been fully sealed since the mid-1980s. It is predominately flat with few that require slowing down. The biggest danger is probably kangaroos or cattle.
Let met tell you how it works in Australia. People don't worry about the cost of treatment when they are really sick
Before my son was 5 he managed to cut himself 4 times requiring 2-5 stitches each time and broke his finger. Each time we took him to the emergency department at the local public hospital waited less than an hour to be seen and were out of the hospital within 2 hours. That hospital provides the best healthcare for kids in the city. Total cost: $0. All I need to do was show my medicare card.
We also have private health insurance. Total cost is ~$4,000 year for top level cost (80% of most bills and no costs for hospital). My youngest daughter was born 8 weeks premature and we chose to be treated as a private patient in the public children's hospital. The total bill was around $15,000 of which we paid a few hundred. We could have opted to be admitted as a public patient and the only changes in treatment would have been that the duty registrar would have been the primary contact rather than the private specialist and my wife would have shared a room. If our daughter had been seriously ill, then the specialist would have looked after her anyway. There were babies next to us who were being treated as public patients who received much more expensive treatments at no cost.
The public hospital system falls down when you have a problem requiring "elective surgery" (e.g. hip or knee replacement) where the waiting times can be up to 18 months versus weeks as a private patient. The other deficiency is paying for equipment such as wheelchairs etc. may not be covered by the public system.
If I want to see my local GP, I have to pay a gap of around $20-$30, however if I have a concession card there is typically no gap. To fill a prescription costs either at most $30 or under $6 if you have a concession. Spend more than $1000 in a year and the government covers the rest.
We look at the USA and wonder with so much wealth, how can you be so uncaring?
Recently tried to have a database transferred from a client that we have who are supported by a leading global IT company with DBAs in India. They had issues transferring the file via sftp. I suggested compressing and splitting the file, and the response was "It is a database dump, which you cannot split." The really sad part is that in the email, I suggested using 7zip for the process.
After 4 weeks they gave up and the local office couriered the file to us on a hard disk!
It seems only fair to me that if Canonical wants to do their own thing, they'll have to put in the effort to maintain it. Because that is what this is about: Intel management decided that they're not going to pay their engineers to maintain code that benefits only Canonical.
This point of view I can appreciate and support, but the decision by Intel management means that they have removed functionality for purely political reasons. If they left the code in place and said 'unsupported', then Canonical could choose to continue development at their expense.
Dad recently purchased a Windows 8 laptop, but the FujiXerox DocuPrint 203A printer doesn't have a Windows 8 driver. Some posts suggest that it is a rebadged Brother HL-2040.
I was using Windows as an example of why closed sourced drivers are bad for hardware longevity. Should my parents throw out a perfectly useable printer simply becausse FujiXerox cannot be bothered to release a new driver?
This sounds like dumb management decision that hopefully community outrage will cause Intel to reverse.
I say this not because I support Canonical's decision to build XMir or even run Ubuntu, but because I don't think politics of this nature should see source code removed from kernel. I would encourage other kernel developers to re-apply the patches.
When will Linux finally use standard ABIs and APIs for drivers just like very other OS on the planet?
Ever had a perfectly useful piece of hardware (e.g. printer, scanner, etc.) and upgraded your computer with a new version of the Windows only to find that the latest operating system doesn't have drivers?
If you have, then you know the answer is hopefully never!
Binary incompatibility makes it more troublesome for companies to ship closed source drivers and makes it simpler to ship open source drivers. As a community we want to do everything we can to encourage open source.
While cost of flights was an issue, the other problem was the limited number of routes because of resident's objections to takeoff noise and sonic boom. It is plausible that if Boeing had developed a competitor that may have lessened political opposition in the USA to flights landing at airports.
IF Labor is outed, I really hope that the Tories have a minority government, so they'll force a double dissolution. That way the damage they can do to one of the strongest economies on the planet will at least be limited to what the Greens and minor parties approve of.
The Australian economy was strong because it entered the GFC with a surplus and cash in the bank. The Labor government the proceeded to spend that and drive the country in to $300 billion in debt. Between the last budget (May 2013) and July 2013, Labor mismanagement saw the deficit balloon from $5 billiion to over $30 billion. The Greens have been pushing Labor to spend even more. The good news is that everything points to the Greens having less influence in the next parliament.
Minor parties have a distinct advantage in a double dissolution because it halves the quota for a seat, so I'm not sure it will be seriously considered. I can only see the trigger being pulled if Labor infighting and back stabbing continues and they slip further in the polls after the election.
So we can vote for the Labor party which attempted to introduce the legislation to censor the internet in the last parliament or vote for the Coalition which voted against censorship and has come out and said there was a mistake in wording of the policy.
Let me tell you a personal story. When my daughter was six, she was playing a game on the computer. She had seen me search for her favourite characters, so she opened a web browser, typed "Charlie and Lola" and clicked search. I was in the room, but only half watching. I was very relieved when the links that turned up were for the kid's book.
I'm not in favour of censorship, but I can see the value for the government ensuring computer illiterate parents can make their kids jump through 3 hoops rather than stumble across content accidentally. Kids will soon learn at school how to work around any filters.
I'm looking for an web application I can use to do this, to make it easy for people who attend an event to share photos within a restricted group. Does MediaGoblin provide the ability for me to publish photos taken of family birthday parties, school events. etc. and restrict who views the photos to only family members / school members, etc.?
Yes, I'm fully aware that someone within the group can copy the photos and post them to facebook. That isn't really a concern because the assumption is that the person would also have been at the event and had an opportunity to take the photo (or a similar one). What I'm trying to facilitate is enabling Grandma to view the Christmas holiday photos, but not the school community.
Do you know what NBNCo charge for data (CVC)? $20Mbps / month. That means wholesale the cheapest plan would be 12/1Mbps @ $24 AVC + 12 * $20 CVC = $284/month to NBNCo, plus ISP's cost and profit margin. ISPs are left with three choices: expensive prices, congestion or quotas.
- Expensive prices don't work
- Congestion doesn't work well because people who only want a small amount of data leave, meaning the remaining customers are heavy downloaders, who might stay
- Quotas work because people causing the congestion pay for the upgrades to remove it
I realise this may not apply to the US because of monopoly providers, but it works well in Australia.
Internode attempted this in Australia with the "flatrate" plans, but they ended 2005, because enough low end users weren't attracted to the plans to balance out the top 10% of downloaders. It is well worth reading the detailed post by Simon Hackett (of Internet Toaster fame) explaining the reasons. You might be surprised that the CEO would write in such detail and openly the business.
The reality is that while it doesn't cost any more to provide 10Mbps or 1Gbps over the first piece of fibre from your home it does cost significantly more to route that data to it's end destination. People need to be prepared to pay for that, just like we pay for the amount of water and electricity consumed. Would people be complaining if the tap was left running all day?
Your great reference sounds like the Craig Thomson fan club from the comments. The linked article states that it is 173 charges relating to $28,000 of Health Services Union funds. The mere fact that it is called "Jacksonville" suggests a smear campaign against Kathy Jackson who first raised the allegations of corruption in HSU by Craig Thomson and colleague Michael Williamson.
What I see is evidence of Unions / Labor being more interested in internal politics than helping members / running the country.
I honestly did not expect a reply and you have proven that my assessment of you as a shill or Jones fan was in fact incorrect. Kudos.
Thanks. I'm no fan of Jones and thankfully don't live in the Sydney.
have skimmed through your response and see that I have some homework ahead of me. The shitty thing with politics is that despite having opposing views, we are both likely as right as each other.
I think you might find that once you look behind the media lines, that the reality is that a fibre connection doesn't automatically provide fast speeds and large quotas. I support FTTP, but not the pricing model that to quote Simon Hackett turns an abundant resource into a scarce resource.
The Craig Thomson case is far from over and it is more than likely that he will prevail in court. Craig Thomson was arrested in NSW by Victorian Police on credit card fraud charges. These charges total a little over $900 AUD and Craig was authorized for up to $50,000 per annum in work-related and incidentals.
The ABC reports that Police have Craig Thomson with 150 fraud charges. I'd be surprised if after a lengthy investigation by multiple parties. Mr McArdle (his lawyer) states that "That allegation [use of prostitutes] in the Fair Work matter is $7,000 - false as it is - out of a case that's $300,000." so I'm not sure where your figure of $900 comes from.
HSU's form national president Michael Williamson (a former colleague of Thomson) has been charged with misuse of $500,000 of union funds.
You would be surprised at how easy it is to vote in Australia.
- At a polling station it hasn't ever taken me longer than 30 minutes to vote
- All I need to provide is my Name & Address
- I can turn up at any of the polling stations in my electorate.
- If I happen to be outside my electorate and a reasonable distance, then I can vote at any polling station in the country.
- If I happen to be busy on polling day (almost any excuse will do), then I can submit an absentee vote via post.
The easy of the process probably helps to explain why voting is compulsory. Sometimes I even take the kids along for a bit of civics education.
On election night we have details for the almost all seats in lower house with a couple of hours. Only a few very close seats take longer if postal votes or a recount is required.
Frankly, most Australians (and New Zealanders) are surprised at how hard the rest of the world makes the process of voting.
I would like to apologize for previously calling you a paid shill. I now realize my error. Nobody would pay you for this shit.
Labor only promoted FTTP because Telstra refused to negotiate on FTTN.
Telstra was more than willing to negotiate as is evidenced by their submissions to the RFP 2007/09.
I guess you've forgotten that Telstra's bid was non-compliant? For a company of Telstra's size that was a deliberate action.
We are no longer dependent on Telstra.
Instead Labor is creating NBNCo which has an even tighter monopoly grip on infrastructure.
Labor only promised 1Gbps speed because just prior to the last election Google announced Google Fibre.
It took some time but Labor found a way to be able to offer it and keep the existing pricing. Most people don't (yet) care, but for Australia's forward-thinking technologists, this is a big win
Let me quote Quiqley for you: The reason we announced one gigabit was simply because when the government said you've got to provide at least 100Mbps, Google at the time made an announcement that they were providing 1 gigabit in the US. And suddenly we went from a situation facing [those] in the media saying 'what on earth does anyone need 100 megs for?' to saying 'this is already redundant, it is already out of date, you can't do one gig'," he told a Parliamentary inquiry into the benefits of the NBN in Sydney this morning.
I'm not sure that many people would call $150/month wholesale for 1Gbps, plus data charges a win, especially when so few peope will have access to those speeds.
Less than 5% are predicted to connect at 1Gbps in 2028
Predicted by who? You? NBNCo's own corprate plan shows in Exhibit 2.12 that downstream trends from 1985 - 2012 extrapolated to 2025 that demand for and reliance on gigabit services and beyond are more than likely. It is available and it cost us nothing ectra to have it made available.
I'm surprised that you've read the NBNCo Corporate Plan and missed Exhibit 8-4 Overall Fibre Subscriber Split by AVC Speed Tiers. You will find it that my numbers come from there. Have a read. Yes the hardware being installed will support 1Gbps, but not many will be able to afford the plans.
50% are predicted by Labor's NBN Corporate Plan to connect on fibre at 12Mbps
You, sir, have obviously never written a business plan. Conservatism is the name of the game. You plan for worst case. What we are seeing is that, as of Feb 2013, 41% have opted for the fastest available 100/40 plans and 11% have opted for the entry level 12/1
When preparing the 2012 revision of the Corporate Plan, NBNCo revised upwards the percentage of 100Mbps connections, but did not alter the percentage of 12Mbps connections. This suggests that NBNCo unsurprisingly expect that many of those yet to connect will choose the cheapest plan. NBNCo's latest prediction reinforces my opinion that speed tiers on the NBN will create digital divide.
I assume that you are referring to the same conservative corporate plan that is falling further behind every day in meeting the consistently revised down rollout targets?;-) The Stage 2 maps published prior the last Federal election show my house covered, which means I should have been able to order a connection at the latest by the end of 2011. The current NBNCo Rollout suggests I may be able to order a service in 2018.
Huge amounts of money are being wasted by NBNCo (Building a Fibre NBN on a Copper budget)
Our NBN is a project that has been planned, approved and star
Ideally, college students would be negatively affected by more student government stuff and would learn the price of apathy in democratic systems.
One could suggest that we shouldn't encourage student politicians. Instead they should be shipped off somewhere that they can no longer cause harm.
A big issue I see with politics is that the career path appears to be:
1. Law degree combined with student politics at Uni
2. Political staffer (or union leader in Labor party)
3. Nomination to a safe seat
Fortunately in Australia profit (corruption) doesn't figure, except in NSW Labor. However it does mean that many politicians have very little real world experience.
You missed the Labor Federal MP Craig Thomson HSU corruption scandal. The current Labor Government and in particular former prime minister Julia Gillard protected Thomson, to preserve her government, when he should have been brought to justice much more speedily. The worst part of this affair is that HSU members are mostly lowly paid cleaners and other associated support staff in hospitals. The people who unions are supposed to protect, not spend their union dues on expensive meals, prostitutes and holidays interstate.
We also have the NSW Labor corruption which has resulted in the expulsion of two former Labor Ministers Ian Macdonald and Eddie Obeid.
The advantage of preference voting systems is that it allows you to vote for your preferred candidate and know that your vote won't be wasted. For example, if two left leaning candidates and one right leaning candidate stand in an electorate where the vote is historically 60% left, 40% right then the right leaning candidate has a higher chance of being elected, but this doesn't truly reflect the will of the electorate.
In Australia, electors tend to prefer a centrist party (e.g Australian Democrats in the past) to hold the balance of power in the upper house (senate) to "keep the bastards honest". It is not clear that this has always resulted in the best policy outcomes (e.g. GST compromises) and has seen pork barreling when an independent holds the balance of power (e.g Brian Harradine from Tasmania, Independents in the current parliament).
1. The (incumbent) Labor party has a future-proofing, infrastructure-based Fibre-to-the-Premises broadband policy that is in build at the moment. The (opposition) Liberal/National coalition has a patchwork Fibre-to-the Node policy that they've been dragged kicking and screaming to because the FTTP policy has been so popular. The FTTN policy will cost almost as much to implement, cost more to maintain, and need replacing with FTTP before the FTTN build is complete.
I suggest you spend a bit more time studying the policies.
- Labor only promoted FTTP because Telstra refused to negotiate on FTTN.
- Labor only promised 1Gbps speed because just prior to the last election Google announced Google Fibre. Less than 5% are predicted to connect at 1Gbps in 2028
- 50% are predicted by Labor's NBN Corporate Plan to connect on fibre at 12Mbps
- Huge amounts of money are being wasted by NBNCo (Building a Fibre NBN on a Copper budget)
- Under Labor's plan wholesale Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) needs to rise from the current figure of just above $20 to over $100. Retail prices will need to rise even further when you add ISP costs and profits.
- ~$3000 to install fibre under the Coalition plan isn't that expensive when you consider that Labor charge $150/month ($1800/year) for 1Gbps
The current Labor Government are building a FTTP network which for half of the customers will be slower than HFC, 4G, FTTN and approaching half of ADSL2+ connections. Sadly it isn't that surprising coming from a government that brought us a mining tax that has delivered almost no revenue and cost to implement.
Slashdot Mirror
As more companies move financial analysis to the cloud, I would expect that period of peak demand to occur. For example reporting run at the close of the month, quarter and financial year requires increased processing power. Another example is demand from ecommerce websites during peak times (e.g. black Friday). These occur at the same time for all companies.
The potential benefit for reasearchers is that cheaper cloud services could be available during off-peak times. The risk to investors is that availability of supply keeps increasing.
Many people are concerned about the range of an electric car. Currently the Tesla S has a range of 480km. If you can use solar panels to add 50% to that range, then it is 720km. That is some serious distance.
Our second car rarely travels more than 10km from home, so personally I'd be happy with a range of 100km and a price of under $30,000.
The Stuart Highway is a reasonable stretch of road. The road has been fully sealed since the mid-1980s. It is predominately flat with few that require slowing down. The biggest danger is probably kangaroos or cattle.
Let met tell you how it works in Australia. People don't worry about the cost of treatment when they are really sick
Before my son was 5 he managed to cut himself 4 times requiring 2-5 stitches each time and broke his finger. Each time we took him to the emergency department at the local public hospital waited less than an hour to be seen and were out of the hospital within 2 hours. That hospital provides the best healthcare for kids in the city. Total cost: $0. All I need to do was show my medicare card.
We also have private health insurance. Total cost is ~$4,000 year for top level cost (80% of most bills and no costs for hospital). My youngest daughter was born 8 weeks premature and we chose to be treated as a private patient in the public children's hospital. The total bill was around $15,000 of which we paid a few hundred. We could have opted to be admitted as a public patient and the only changes in treatment would have been that the duty registrar would have been the primary contact rather than the private specialist and my wife would have shared a room. If our daughter had been seriously ill, then the specialist would have looked after her anyway. There were babies next to us who were being treated as public patients who received much more expensive treatments at no cost.
The public hospital system falls down when you have a problem requiring "elective surgery" (e.g. hip or knee replacement) where the waiting times can be up to 18 months versus weeks as a private patient. The other deficiency is paying for equipment such as wheelchairs etc. may not be covered by the public system.
If I want to see my local GP, I have to pay a gap of around $20-$30, however if I have a concession card there is typically no gap. To fill a prescription costs either at most $30 or under $6 if you have a concession. Spend more than $1000 in a year and the government covers the rest.
We look at the USA and wonder with so much wealth, how can you be so uncaring?
Recently tried to have a database transferred from a client that we have who are supported by a leading global IT company with DBAs in India. They had issues transferring the file via sftp. I suggested compressing and splitting the file, and the response was "It is a database dump, which you cannot split." The really sad part is that in the email, I suggested using 7zip for the process.
After 4 weeks they gave up and the local office couriered the file to us on a hard disk!
Have you considered that the more likely candidates for sponsors are video conferencing and communications companies?
It seems only fair to me that if Canonical wants to do their own thing, they'll have to put in the effort to maintain it. Because that is what this is about: Intel management decided that they're not going to pay their engineers to maintain code that benefits only Canonical.
This point of view I can appreciate and support, but the decision by Intel management means that they have removed functionality for purely political reasons. If they left the code in place and said 'unsupported', then Canonical could choose to continue development at their expense.
Dad recently purchased a Windows 8 laptop, but the FujiXerox DocuPrint 203A printer doesn't have a Windows 8 driver. Some posts suggest that it is a rebadged Brother HL-2040.
I was using Windows as an example of why closed sourced drivers are bad for hardware longevity. Should my parents throw out a perfectly useable printer simply becausse FujiXerox cannot be bothered to release a new driver?
This sounds like dumb management decision that hopefully community outrage will cause Intel to reverse.
I say this not because I support Canonical's decision to build XMir or even run Ubuntu, but because I don't think politics of this nature should see source code removed from kernel. I would encourage other kernel developers to re-apply the patches.
When will Linux finally use standard ABIs and APIs for drivers just like very other OS on the planet?
Ever had a perfectly useful piece of hardware (e.g. printer, scanner, etc.) and upgraded your computer with a new version of the Windows only to find that the latest operating system doesn't have drivers?
If you have, then you know the answer is hopefully never!
Binary incompatibility makes it more troublesome for companies to ship closed source drivers and makes it simpler to ship open source drivers. As a community we want to do everything we can to encourage open source.
While cost of flights was an issue, the other problem was the limited number of routes because of resident's objections to takeoff noise and sonic boom. It is plausible that if Boeing had developed a competitor that may have lessened political opposition in the USA to flights landing at airports.
IF Labor is outed, I really hope that the Tories have a minority government, so they'll force a double dissolution. That way the damage they can do to one of the strongest economies on the planet will at least be limited to what the Greens and minor parties approve of.
The Australian economy was strong because it entered the GFC with a surplus and cash in the bank. The Labor government the proceeded to spend that and drive the country in to $300 billion in debt. Between the last budget (May 2013) and July 2013, Labor mismanagement saw the deficit balloon from $5 billiion to over $30 billion. The Greens have been pushing Labor to spend even more. The good news is that everything points to the Greens having less influence in the next parliament.
Minor parties have a distinct advantage in a double dissolution because it halves the quota for a seat, so I'm not sure it will be seriously considered. I can only see the trigger being pulled if Labor infighting and back stabbing continues and they slip further in the polls after the election.
So we can vote for the Labor party which attempted to introduce the legislation to censor the internet in the last parliament or vote for the Coalition which voted against censorship and has come out and said there was a mistake in wording of the policy.
Let me tell you a personal story. When my daughter was six, she was playing a game on the computer. She had seen me search for her favourite characters, so she opened a web browser, typed "Charlie and Lola" and clicked search. I was in the room, but only half watching. I was very relieved when the links that turned up were for the kid's book.
I'm not in favour of censorship, but I can see the value for the government ensuring computer illiterate parents can make their kids jump through 3 hoops rather than stumble across content accidentally. Kids will soon learn at school how to work around any filters.
I'm looking for an web application I can use to do this, to make it easy for people who attend an event to share photos within a restricted group. Does MediaGoblin provide the ability for me to publish photos taken of family birthday parties, school events. etc. and restrict who views the photos to only family members / school members, etc.?
Yes, I'm fully aware that someone within the group can copy the photos and post them to facebook. That isn't really a concern because the assumption is that the person would also have been at the event and had an opportunity to take the photo (or a similar one). What I'm trying to facilitate is enabling Grandma to view the Christmas holiday photos, but not the school community.
Do you know what NBNCo charge for data (CVC)? $20Mbps / month. That means wholesale the cheapest plan would be 12/1Mbps @ $24 AVC + 12 * $20 CVC = $284/month to NBNCo, plus ISP's cost and profit margin. ISPs are left with three choices: expensive prices, congestion or quotas.
- Expensive prices don't work
- Congestion doesn't work well because people who only want a small amount of data leave, meaning the remaining customers are heavy downloaders, who might stay
- Quotas work because people causing the congestion pay for the upgrades to remove it
I realise this may not apply to the US because of monopoly providers, but it works well in Australia.
Internode attempted this in Australia with the "flatrate" plans, but they ended 2005, because enough low end users weren't attracted to the plans to balance out the top 10% of downloaders. It is well worth reading the detailed post by Simon Hackett (of Internet Toaster fame) explaining the reasons. You might be surprised that the CEO would write in such detail and openly the business.
The reality is that while it doesn't cost any more to provide 10Mbps or 1Gbps over the first piece of fibre from your home it does cost significantly more to route that data to it's end destination. People need to be prepared to pay for that, just like we pay for the amount of water and electricity consumed. Would people be complaining if the tap was left running all day?
Your great reference sounds like the Craig Thomson fan club from the comments. The linked article states that it is 173 charges relating to $28,000 of Health Services Union funds. The mere fact that it is called "Jacksonville" suggests a smear campaign against Kathy Jackson who first raised the allegations of corruption in HSU by Craig Thomson and colleague Michael Williamson.
What I see is evidence of Unions / Labor being more interested in internal politics than helping members / running the country.
I honestly did not expect a reply and you have proven that my assessment of you as a shill or Jones fan was in fact incorrect. Kudos.
Thanks. I'm no fan of Jones and thankfully don't live in the Sydney.
have skimmed through your response and see that I have some homework ahead of me. The shitty thing with politics is that despite having opposing views, we are both likely as right as each other.
I think you might find that once you look behind the media lines, that the reality is that a fibre connection doesn't automatically provide fast speeds and large quotas. I support FTTP, but not the pricing model that to quote Simon Hackett turns an abundant resource into a scarce resource.
The Craig Thomson case is far from over and it is more than likely that he will prevail in court. Craig Thomson was arrested in NSW by Victorian Police on credit card fraud charges. These charges total a little over $900 AUD and Craig was authorized for up to $50,000 per annum in work-related and incidentals.
The ABC reports that Police have Craig Thomson with 150 fraud charges. I'd be surprised if after a lengthy investigation by multiple parties. Mr McArdle (his lawyer) states that "That allegation [use of prostitutes] in the Fair Work matter is $7,000 - false as it is - out of a case that's $300,000." so I'm not sure where your figure of $900 comes from.
HSU's form national president Michael Williamson (a former colleague of Thomson) has been charged with misuse of $500,000 of union funds.
You would be surprised at how easy it is to vote in Australia.
- At a polling station it hasn't ever taken me longer than 30 minutes to vote
- All I need to provide is my Name & Address
- I can turn up at any of the polling stations in my electorate.
- If I happen to be outside my electorate and a reasonable distance, then I can vote at any polling station in the country.
- If I happen to be busy on polling day (almost any excuse will do), then I can submit an absentee vote via post.
The easy of the process probably helps to explain why voting is compulsory. Sometimes I even take the kids along for a bit of civics education.
On election night we have details for the almost all seats in lower house with a couple of hours. Only a few very close seats take longer if postal votes or a recount is required.
Frankly, most Australians (and New Zealanders) are surprised at how hard the rest of the world makes the process of voting.
I would like to apologize for previously calling you a paid shill. I now realize my error. Nobody would pay you for this shit.
Labor only promoted FTTP because Telstra refused to negotiate on FTTN.
Telstra was more than willing to negotiate as is evidenced by their submissions to the RFP 2007/09.
I guess you've forgotten that Telstra's bid was non-compliant? For a company of Telstra's size that was a deliberate action.
We are no longer dependent on Telstra.
Instead Labor is creating NBNCo which has an even tighter monopoly grip on infrastructure.
Labor only promised 1Gbps speed because just prior to the last election Google announced Google Fibre.
It took some time but Labor found a way to be able to offer it and keep the existing pricing. Most people don't (yet) care, but for Australia's forward-thinking technologists, this is a big win
Let me quote Quiqley for you: The reason we announced one gigabit was simply because when the government said you've got to provide at least 100Mbps, Google at the time made an announcement that they were providing 1 gigabit in the US. And suddenly we went from a situation facing [those] in the media saying 'what on earth does anyone need 100 megs for?' to saying 'this is already redundant, it is already out of date, you can't do one gig'," he told a Parliamentary inquiry into the benefits of the NBN in Sydney this morning.
I'm not sure that many people would call $150/month wholesale for 1Gbps, plus data charges a win, especially when so few peope will have access to those speeds.
Less than 5% are predicted to connect at 1Gbps in 2028
Predicted by who? You? NBNCo's own corprate plan shows in Exhibit 2.12 that downstream trends from 1985 - 2012 extrapolated to 2025 that demand for and reliance on gigabit services and beyond are more than likely. It is available and it cost us nothing ectra to have it made available.
I'm surprised that you've read the NBNCo Corporate Plan and missed Exhibit 8-4 Overall Fibre Subscriber Split by AVC Speed Tiers. You will find it that my numbers come from there. Have a read. Yes the hardware being installed will support 1Gbps, but not many will be able to afford the plans.
50% are predicted by Labor's NBN Corporate Plan to connect on fibre at 12Mbps
You, sir, have obviously never written a business plan. Conservatism is the name of the game. You plan for worst case. What we are seeing is that, as of Feb 2013, 41% have opted for the fastest available 100/40 plans and 11% have opted for the entry level 12/1
When preparing the 2012 revision of the Corporate Plan, NBNCo revised upwards the percentage of 100Mbps connections, but did not alter the percentage of 12Mbps connections. This suggests that NBNCo unsurprisingly expect that many of those yet to connect will choose the cheapest plan. NBNCo's latest prediction reinforces my opinion that speed tiers on the NBN will create digital divide.
I assume that you are referring to the same conservative corporate plan that is falling further behind every day in meeting the consistently revised down rollout targets? ;-) The Stage 2 maps published prior the last Federal election show my house covered, which means I should have been able to order a connection at the latest by the end of 2011. The current NBNCo Rollout suggests I may be able to order a service in 2018.
Huge amounts of money are being wasted by NBNCo (Building a Fibre NBN on a Copper budget)
Our NBN is a project that has been planned, approved and star
Ideally, college students would be negatively affected by more student government stuff and would learn the price of apathy in democratic systems.
One could suggest that we shouldn't encourage student politicians. Instead they should be shipped off somewhere that they can no longer cause harm.
A big issue I see with politics is that the career path appears to be:
1. Law degree combined with student politics at Uni
2. Political staffer (or union leader in Labor party)
3. Nomination to a safe seat
Fortunately in Australia profit (corruption) doesn't figure, except in NSW Labor. However it does mean that many politicians have very little real world experience.
You missed the Labor Federal MP Craig Thomson HSU corruption scandal. The current Labor Government and in particular former prime minister Julia Gillard protected Thomson, to preserve her government, when he should have been brought to justice much more speedily. The worst part of this affair is that HSU members are mostly lowly paid cleaners and other associated support staff in hospitals. The people who unions are supposed to protect, not spend their union dues on expensive meals, prostitutes and holidays interstate.
We also have the NSW Labor corruption which has resulted in the expulsion of two former Labor Ministers Ian Macdonald and Eddie Obeid.
The advantage of preference voting systems is that it allows you to vote for your preferred candidate and know that your vote won't be wasted. For example, if two left leaning candidates and one right leaning candidate stand in an electorate where the vote is historically 60% left, 40% right then the right leaning candidate has a higher chance of being elected, but this doesn't truly reflect the will of the electorate.
In Australia, electors tend to prefer a centrist party (e.g Australian Democrats in the past) to hold the balance of power in the upper house (senate) to "keep the bastards honest". It is not clear that this has always resulted in the best policy outcomes (e.g. GST compromises) and has seen pork barreling when an independent holds the balance of power (e.g Brian Harradine from Tasmania, Independents in the current parliament).
1. The (incumbent) Labor party has a future-proofing, infrastructure-based Fibre-to-the-Premises broadband policy that is in build at the moment. The (opposition) Liberal/National coalition has a patchwork Fibre-to-the Node policy that they've been dragged kicking and screaming to because the FTTP policy has been so popular. The FTTN policy will cost almost as much to implement, cost more to maintain, and need replacing with FTTP before the FTTN build is complete.
I suggest you spend a bit more time studying the policies.
- Labor only promoted FTTP because Telstra refused to negotiate on FTTN. - Labor only promised 1Gbps speed because just prior to the last election Google announced Google Fibre. Less than 5% are predicted to connect at 1Gbps in 2028
- 50% are predicted by Labor's NBN Corporate Plan to connect on fibre at 12Mbps
- Huge amounts of money are being wasted by NBNCo (Building a Fibre NBN on a Copper budget)
- Under Labor's plan wholesale Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) needs to rise from the current figure of just above $20 to over $100. Retail prices will need to rise even further when you add ISP costs and profits.
- ~$3000 to install fibre under the Coalition plan isn't that expensive when you consider that Labor charge $150/month ($1800/year) for 1Gbps
The current Labor Government are building a FTTP network which for half of the customers will be slower than HFC, 4G, FTTN and approaching half of ADSL2+ connections. Sadly it isn't that surprising coming from a government that brought us a mining tax that has delivered almost no revenue and cost to implement.