To add some more context to this, in Australia I would prefer to receive month from a direct bank transfer than a cheque. Cheques still exist but the bank will charge me for depositing a cheque. An electronic deposit is free. The banks have realised that it costs them to process a cheque more than a direct bank transfer.
Now if you were charged for depositing a check but not for direct bank transfers that you can be done easily by the payer using their internet banking, which would you choose?
Seems that the Oz government has found a nice source of revenue. Not that they weren't entitled to the money before (all transactions should be taxed, even internet ones), but that it was easy to hide these transactions on the Web.
This is not about how much they buyer actually pays. Even if the price is advertised as including GST, if the product is sold to someone overseas they will pay the price excluding GST. What the article is saying is that as Australian buyer the price you see should be the amount you are going to hand over to the seller.
If you have Seller A who is registered for GST and seller B who is not, and they are both selling similar products, then the advertised price from Seller A should include the GST and the advertised price from Seller B should not. This means the Australian buyer can compare the prices. If Seller A did not include the GST and the buyer did not realise that, then the buyer might end up buying Seller A's product instead of Seller B's but end up paying more.
Normally GST is included in advertised prices when it is applicable, no matter where it is seen, in Australia.
Here in Australia Doctor Who 2005 will be broadcast on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). The ABC is owned by the government and there are no commercials on it, other than for the ABC, and they are only screened between programs. If I download the episodes and watch them before they are screened on the ABC who loses out? I have already paid my taxes that fund the ABC.
There seems to be a trend in Australia lately that some local programs will overrun their scheduled spot. What is scheduled to finish so another show can start at 8:30pm, for example, may actually go on for several more minutes. This makes it difficult to set the VCR timer to record. You end up with some of the show before the one you want to record and miss the end of it. I experienced this on Sunday. Bloody Big Brother!
I have also noticed the commercial networks may occasionally skip ads between programs. One program will flow into another. This may also make it difficult to set the timer.
What will be interesting to see with these PVRs is how good is the program guide they use. Will it be up-to-date? As said before, even the networks can't get their NOW/NEXT on-screen display accurate. How will a third-party do it? I can just imagine them having people watching each channel, pressing buttons which send signals to all the PVRs.
What is not mentioned is why the policy exists in the first place. How you can we advise on how to overturn the policy if we don't why it is there to start off with?
I have always worked in places where cell phones are an integral part of the business communications network, even if work is not paying for it. It is seen as a device that can more easily contact someone than a desk phone. I am not sitting at my desk from the time I arrive at work to when I leave at the end of the day.
Now, where I disagree with Red Hat is that you should _not_ use Windows. Use Mac OS X. It's way better than windows in design, and just works.
I agree, but why would someone whose product runs on Intel and similar architecture suggest someone use a different architecture? Changing to Red Hat would require a hardware platform change. Someone currently using Windows would be able to migrate to any future Red Hat product more easily than someone running Mac OS X. Besides, if you were running Mac OS X on the desktop why would you want to move to Red Hat?
Well, I saw your article and I immediately ran down to my local Mac place (McDonald's that is... I really wish you guys would not use the short name.). Anyway, I asked them if I could please have the new Panther Burger. They called security and threw me out! Can you believe that?
P.S. Don't bother asking them for any apples either.
If you go into a McDonalds in Australia and ask for an apple, they will give you one, the fruit, not the computer.
It sounds to me like they could only tax those who are claiming the lease payment or depreciation of computers and network equipment on their tax. They wouldn't be able to do it any other way. Another way of saying it would be that you can only claim 91% of the lease payments or depreciation of your computers and network equipment.
I have three BigPond email addresses which I don't use, but still check. The only mail I ever receive through them is from BigPond advising me of service details. The addresses are not simple words so aren't easily guessable. So far I don't think BigPond is selling email addresses.
I was working on the IT of one of the telcos in Australia when MNP was being introduced. It was quite a big job and involved many systems. No longer could you identify the carrier of the service by looking at the prefix of the phone number. You had to store all ported numbers and which carrier they used. Many systems were built around the prefix assumption.
In Australia the government authority stated that porting of a mobile number must happen within 2 hours. At the time I heard that the time for a port in the UK took days.
Since mobile numbers in many countries have their own prefix (area code) for identification, with the introduction of MNP, you effectively have a number for life, no matter where you live in the country. I believe in North America this is not the case, as mobile numbers are tied to the location you live. I would only need to change my number if I ever moved to another country.
I happen to be using a French keyboard as I type this, and it's not even properly set up, so the mappings from keys into the character set is a big mess, and I need to do some trial and error to find the right keys.
The best thing to do is learn one keyboard layout very well. When you need to use a computer whose keyboard has the keys in a different layout, just change the OS settings to the keyboard you know. Then you won't have any problems. I don't even look at the keyboard when I type. I watch what is typed on the screen.
As for keyboards of the future, there won't be any. People will simply "plug in" using a more direct neural interface
Plug in?? I would have thought we would all be Bluetooth enabled. All we would have to do is go near the computer in order to control it. Or maybe we would be computers ourselves, just nodes on a network, able to connect to different computers on the internet.
There are two things that make it easy for the stealing to happen. The first is that there is no restriction on the amount of data a customer can transfer. The second is that the bandwidth capping is done in the modem.
The first can be fixed by capping the amount of data a customer can transfer in a given period. This happens in places like Australia and New Zealand. If you go over your cap then you pay extra. The charges in the USA are based on the fact that most customers will only do so much data transfer in a month, however there is no control to make sure they do. You are not actually paying for the ability to saturate the connection non-stop.
I am not sure of the details of how cable modem access works. If bandwidth capping can't be control at the ISP's end, then maybe there should be a way the ISP can control the configuration of the modem from their network.
Both of these would make it hard for stealing to happen.
Jaguar is no good without Apple h/w to run it on, right? So, presumably, any teacher taking advantage of this would already have a Mac lying around. Other than preventing their current K-12 teacher customer base from eroding, I can't see what this will gain them.
What this gains them is that teachers, who already have a computer, are given the ability to use Mac OS X for themself. Once teachers are familiar with OS X they may start using it in the schools. For Apple, this means there will be less computers running OS 9.
I disagree with seeing your immediate world instead of the rest of the world. There is time to do that later in life.
People should go out and see the world if they can. I did it. Seeing the way others live makes you see your own country and city in a different way. Just staying in your local area is not going to help you with understanding these issues that are happening around the world either.
A friend of mine just moved to the US from Australia. Not a small country, Australia. Twice the size of Europe. He and his family are bewildered by the sheer amount of everything we have in this country. Took him to a grocery store the other day. Our city is nowhere near a coastline, but we get seafood by the ton flown in every morning. The produce available in our markets comes from every corner of the world, and it's all fresh and unbelievably cheap.
Actually, Australia is a small country when you look at population. It has less than 20 million for a country the size of continental USA. You may not be able to get seafood in a market in Alice Springs (central Australia), but the restaurants in central Australia will have it on the menu. Food is cheap in Australia. Most of it is produced in Australia.
As for television in Australia, there are only 5 broadcast channels. Pay-TV is having a hard time here. I wouldn't get it. Why would I when all the good American programs are on free-to-air. Our TV stations can show what American broadcast stations wouldn't dare (South Park, Sex In The City, Six Feet Under, Queer As Folk, to name a few). We also get good British programs. More channels doesn't always mean there's better programs to watch.
Not all televisions are tethered. With analog television it is quite difficult to get an adequate picture while mobile. Apparently the digital TV standard in Europe works well while mobile. It would be possible to have televisions in moving vehicles, trains, boats without loss of picture.
I find this a bit confusing. If a US company is charging VAT to a European customer, how does Europe then get the money from the US company? Wouldn't the company then have to file VAT in each of the European member states that it has received tax on their behalf? What is going to make them do that? Wouldn't this just stop companies from outside Europe selling to people living inside Europe?
You can see how bad introducing an organism can be. Just look at HIV. It is believed to have originated in western Africa, where it did not affect many people. People didn't move far back then. Europeans then starting colonising the area, and supposedly brought it back to Europe. Now it is a world-wide disease. We have no idea what the effects of bringing something from Mars would be.
Microsoft sells all of the e-mail addresses from hotmail.
This is not my experience with Hotmail. I have had my account for ages. I only every receive one SPAM message on a regular basis. I know where it came from. I used my Hotmail address on a certain web site. Maybe your Hotmail address is easy to make up (eg. your name with numbers). Mine is not that simple.
The purpose of region encoding is to ensure that a movie leaving US markets can be "staged" into foriegn markets, forcing DVD sales to be after film sales to avoid home viewing cutting into theater reciepts.
Different companies sometimes have the distribution rights in different markets. This is another use of region encoding.
Slashdot Mirror
To add some more context to this, in Australia I would prefer to receive month from a direct bank transfer than a cheque. Cheques still exist but the bank will charge me for depositing a cheque. An electronic deposit is free. The banks have realised that it costs them to process a cheque more than a direct bank transfer. Now if you were charged for depositing a check but not for direct bank transfers that you can be done easily by the payer using their internet banking, which would you choose?
Seems that the Oz government has found a nice source of revenue. Not that they weren't entitled to the money before (all transactions should be taxed, even internet ones), but that it was easy to hide these transactions on the Web.
This is not about how much they buyer actually pays. Even if the price is advertised as including GST, if the product is sold to someone overseas they will pay the price excluding GST. What the article is saying is that as Australian buyer the price you see should be the amount you are going to hand over to the seller.
If you have Seller A who is registered for GST and seller B who is not, and they are both selling similar products, then the advertised price from Seller A should include the GST and the advertised price from Seller B should not. This means the Australian buyer can compare the prices. If Seller A did not include the GST and the buyer did not realise that, then the buyer might end up buying Seller A's product instead of Seller B's but end up paying more.
Normally GST is included in advertised prices when it is applicable, no matter where it is seen, in Australia.
Here in Australia Doctor Who 2005 will be broadcast on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). The ABC is owned by the government and there are no commercials on it, other than for the ABC, and they are only screened between programs. If I download the episodes and watch them before they are screened on the ABC who loses out? I have already paid my taxes that fund the ABC.
They want it to work in the elevator; they want it to work in the basement.
I used to work at a company where we had coverage in the elevator and the basement. Oh wait, that was the phone company I was working for.
There seems to be a trend in Australia lately that some local programs will overrun their scheduled spot. What is scheduled to finish so another show can start at 8:30pm, for example, may actually go on for several more minutes. This makes it difficult to set the VCR timer to record. You end up with some of the show before the one you want to record and miss the end of it. I experienced this on Sunday. Bloody Big Brother!
I have also noticed the commercial networks may occasionally skip ads between programs. One program will flow into another. This may also make it difficult to set the timer.
What will be interesting to see with these PVRs is how good is the program guide they use. Will it be up-to-date? As said before, even the networks can't get their NOW/NEXT on-screen display accurate. How will a third-party do it? I can just imagine them having people watching each channel, pressing buttons which send signals to all the PVRs.
What is not mentioned is why the policy exists in the first place. How you can we advise on how to overturn the policy if we don't why it is there to start off with?
I have always worked in places where cell phones are an integral part of the business communications network, even if work is not paying for it. It is seen as a device that can more easily contact someone than a desk phone. I am not sitting at my desk from the time I arrive at work to when I leave at the end of the day.
Now, where I disagree with Red Hat is that you should _not_ use Windows. Use Mac OS X. It's way better than windows in design, and just works.
I agree, but why would someone whose product runs on Intel and similar architecture suggest someone use a different architecture? Changing to Red Hat would require a hardware platform change. Someone currently using Windows would be able to migrate to any future Red Hat product more easily than someone running Mac OS X. Besides, if you were running Mac OS X on the desktop why would you want to move to Red Hat?
Well, I saw your article and I immediately ran down to my local Mac place (McDonald's that is... I really wish you guys would not use the short name.). Anyway, I asked them if I could please have the new Panther Burger. They called security and threw me out! Can you believe that?
P.S. Don't bother asking them for any apples either.
If you go into a McDonalds in Australia and ask for an apple, they will give you one, the fruit, not the computer.
It sounds to me like they could only tax those who are claiming the lease payment or depreciation of computers and network equipment on their tax. They wouldn't be able to do it any other way. Another way of saying it would be that you can only claim 91% of the lease payments or depreciation of your computers and network equipment.
I have three BigPond email addresses which I don't use, but still check. The only mail I ever receive through them is from BigPond advising me of service details. The addresses are not simple words so aren't easily guessable. So far I don't think BigPond is selling email addresses.
The Vonage web site says its service does not work with a satellite connection to the internet.
Vonage Requirements
I was working on the IT of one of the telcos in Australia when MNP was being introduced. It was quite a big job and involved many systems. No longer could you identify the carrier of the service by looking at the prefix of the phone number. You had to store all ported numbers and which carrier they used. Many systems were built around the prefix assumption.
In Australia the government authority stated that porting of a mobile number must happen within 2 hours. At the time I heard that the time for a port in the UK took days.
Since mobile numbers in many countries have their own prefix (area code) for identification, with the introduction of MNP, you effectively have a number for life, no matter where you live in the country. I believe in North America this is not the case, as mobile numbers are tied to the location you live. I would only need to change my number if I ever moved to another country.
I happen to be using a French keyboard as I type this, and it's not even properly set up, so the mappings from keys into the character set is a big mess, and I need to do some trial and error to find the right keys. The best thing to do is learn one keyboard layout very well. When you need to use a computer whose keyboard has the keys in a different layout, just change the OS settings to the keyboard you know. Then you won't have any problems. I don't even look at the keyboard when I type. I watch what is typed on the screen.
As for keyboards of the future, there won't be any. People will simply "plug in" using a more direct neural interface
Plug in?? I would have thought we would all be Bluetooth enabled. All we would have to do is go near the computer in order to control it. Or maybe we would be computers ourselves, just nodes on a network, able to connect to different computers on the internet.
There are two things that make it easy for the stealing to happen. The first is that there is no restriction on the amount of data a customer can transfer. The second is that the bandwidth capping is done in the modem.
The first can be fixed by capping the amount of data a customer can transfer in a given period. This happens in places like Australia and New Zealand. If you go over your cap then you pay extra. The charges in the USA are based on the fact that most customers will only do so much data transfer in a month, however there is no control to make sure they do. You are not actually paying for the ability to saturate the connection non-stop.
I am not sure of the details of how cable modem access works. If bandwidth capping can't be control at the ISP's end, then maybe there should be a way the ISP can control the configuration of the modem from their network.
Both of these would make it hard for stealing to happen.
What this gains them is that teachers, who already have a computer, are given the ability to use Mac OS X for themself. Once teachers are familiar with OS X they may start using it in the schools. For Apple, this means there will be less computers running OS 9.
Oh well, she will have to switch again.
People should go out and see the world if they can. I did it. Seeing the way others live makes you see your own country and city in a different way. Just staying in your local area is not going to help you with understanding these issues that are happening around the world either.
From reading the posts here it seems there are a lot of battered women in the USA. How many phones do they need?
Actually, Australia is a small country when you look at population. It has less than 20 million for a country the size of continental USA. You may not be able to get seafood in a market in Alice Springs (central Australia), but the restaurants in central Australia will have it on the menu. Food is cheap in Australia. Most of it is produced in Australia.
As for television in Australia, there are only 5 broadcast channels. Pay-TV is having a hard time here. I wouldn't get it. Why would I when all the good American programs are on free-to-air. Our TV stations can show what American broadcast stations wouldn't dare (South Park, Sex In The City, Six Feet Under, Queer As Folk, to name a few). We also get good British programs. More channels doesn't always mean there's better programs to watch.
Not all televisions are tethered. With analog television it is quite difficult to get an adequate picture while mobile. Apparently the digital TV standard in Europe works well while mobile. It would be possible to have televisions in moving vehicles, trains, boats without loss of picture.
I find this a bit confusing. If a US company is charging VAT to a European customer, how does Europe then get the money from the US company? Wouldn't the company then have to file VAT in each of the European member states that it has received tax on their behalf? What is going to make them do that? Wouldn't this just stop companies from outside Europe selling to people living inside Europe?
You can see how bad introducing an organism can be. Just look at HIV. It is believed to have originated in western Africa, where it did not affect many people. People didn't move far back then. Europeans then starting colonising the area, and supposedly brought it back to Europe. Now it is a world-wide disease. We have no idea what the effects of bringing something from Mars would be.
This is not my experience with Hotmail. I have had my account for ages. I only every receive one SPAM message on a regular basis. I know where it came from. I used my Hotmail address on a certain web site. Maybe your Hotmail address is easy to make up (eg. your name with numbers). Mine is not that simple.
Different companies sometimes have the distribution rights in different markets. This is another use of region encoding.