People have been speculating that the proposed filter will die stillborn for a long time.
They are misguided on several counts:
(1) Unless a double-dissolution election is called (and I'm not at all sure whether that can happen at this late stage), Sen. Conroy's seat is safe for another term.
(2) This filter is a sacred cow of his, and his fellow nanny-stater MPs, including the Prime Minister.
(3) The so-called "Liberal" opposition has frequently mentioned that it is in favour of such a policy, but knows well enough that people object to it enough that they will have to implement it by stealth after the election. In the meantime, all they have to do is let the Government's newfound unpopularity work for them.
(4) The Greens, despite their many redeeming qualities, also have more than their fair share of nanny-staters who are happy to go along with such a filter.
(5) We can count on minority right-wingers like Family First and a lot of independents also going along with it, again thinking of the damned children.
I won't count this proposal disposed of until every last politician is burnt at the stake. We just can't depend on them to defend our interests.
My old Samsung ML-1710 B/W laser is still working well, and I now have a Samsung CLP-315 colour laser printer that is also good. Both are cheap, have a very small footprint for their type, and work fine with CUPS (i.e. with both Linux and Mac boxes). That's all I need.
if the cops have a good reason to believe someone has committed a crime, let them get a warrant.
They can already do this. And with the resources they currently have, they are already having what I would call a significant measure of success in prosecuting child pornographers.
So it's pretty obvious to me that the real reason behind these encroachments on civil liberties is to suppress dissent. Sure, we can (and maybe will) vote the existing government out of office, but the Liberals are highly likely to at least attempt to implement something similar, given the chance. At the moment, all they have to do is keep quiet and let the government's unpopularity work for them.
In some instances they are, but they are also a party that as a result of its "underdog" status is forced to listen to its electorate.
The major parties are too entrenched in their arrogance to bother. Labor probably has some redeeming qualities (though I can't offhand remember what they are), but in most respects they are indistinguishable from the so-called "Liberals". Except for the fact that Abbott is seriously scary...
Currently at 7% and scheduled to go up again RealSoonNow.
That is one thing I don't whine about, although I am fairly heavily in the red. I took out my first mortgage in 1990, when interest rates were over 17%, and giving every impression of staying that way. Compared to that, the current situation is fine.
Banks are not perfect, but if they freeze your funds you at least have the option of smashing your local manager's kneecaps. With Paypal you have to work hard to even find someone to complain to, and no guarantee that he'll listen.
It's not just the new HPs: I had one of their inkjets back in the '90s that did that. Cost me a fortune. Agree about Samsung, though. I've had one for 4 years and still going fine.
I don't think this is what you have in mind, but I am reminded of an occasion on a British Snail train in the early '80s, when a hung-over colleague vomited noisily and copiously into a stockbroker's briefcase. Way to make yourself popular...:-)
One of the main reasons I no longer use HP printers is their irritating tendency to spit out a test page every time you turn them on or look at them sideways. That can get through a lot of ink...
I don't use paypal, as it has always reeked as far as I am concerned, but as I understand it they will freeze accounts at the drop of a hat, for various reasons.
The latter has always bothered me, but still Paypal does offer a very useful service. My take on it is that a wise shopkeeper doesn't leave his day's takings sitting in the till, he puts them in the hands of someone he can trust (his bank, or in a safe). He doesn't leave them sitting there for some opportunist to come and snatch away.
I don't connect my paypal account to anything that will bankrupt (or even significantly inconvenience) me, so I figure I'm OK. There have been cases where organisations have run into cash-flow problems when dealing with paypal, but I have little sympathy for them.
Paypal never was intended to be more than a clearing-house for funds. Treating it as a bank is just foolish.
I mean even my 58 year old mother has heard of two or three of the common phishing types.
Since most of the modern mail clients have some reasonably successful way of flagging or ditching suspicious emails (given that most reputable ISPs filter the most egregious examples to/dev/null), she usually won't even need to think about it these days.
It might be unfashionable to say this, but there's a lot to be said for running a localhost-based email client (e.g. thunderfart or whatever works for you) rather than the web-based options offered by gmail, yahoo and all the rest. Not to mention that you have an archive of your emails if your internet connection breaks...
I suppose it would be stupid to have a law against being stupid, but some people just have to learn the hard way.
Like the morons who get sucked into banking phishing scams after being told repeatedly by their banks that they will NEVER email you. Or the greedy morons who get sucked in by Nigerian scams, knowing these have been exposed for over a decade, and knowing the deal has to be too good to be true...
Since the headline of TFA describes this as a once-in-a-generation "space storm", I'd say this is umlikely to be a problem. There were lots of electronic gadgets around a generation ago (or two, for that matter), and the world didn't come to an end.
Yeah, but if you want good coffee, you're better off staying at home and making it yourself. You would have to be in a bad way if you have to drink Starbuck's coffee just to get an internet connection.
This is not as inflammatory as some might suppose. Buying boxed DVD sets of the shows you like makes good sense. No ad-breaks, and no bullshit with TV schedules. And (if you care) the actors and media creators get paid royalties.
Currently my amazon history is 12 years long, you don't have to keep tax data that long, why should amazon keep that data that long?
Amazon does a pretty good job with me. I'm in my late 40s now, and my literary and musical tastes are as eclectic as they were when I was 16, so good luck to them. They have a hard job predicting what I'll like, but every now and then, they come up with surprises that work (yippee!). But I usually have to do the legwork by myself.
Where Amazon and the likes really score for me is with music: being able to listen to sound-bites of nearly everything is a huge improvement on bricks-and-mortar stores where I often feel an obligation to buy something simply because I don't want to put staff to the trouble of loading up yet another CD to try out.
But in general, if I have to see ads at all I'd prefer them to be relevant for me.
I'd rather they weren't. I'm not that keen on anyone tracking my search or browsing history. If they want to feed me adverts of any kind, that's just fine so long as they don't get in my way. Trouble is, marketroids are rarely content with that, and they feed us so much crap that we are forced to filter it either by wetware or software. I choose the latter.
I actually *would* love them. If they didn't suck.
I'm getting to a stage where ALL ads, whether targeted or not, have a tendency to occupy such a large proportion of my screen-space that I almost have no choice (for sanity's sake) to adopt a ruthless approach of filtering them all out.
Thanks to adblock, flashblock and an extensive hosts file, I now see very few ads at all, where I would have been happy to accept a limited amount to offset the costs of hosting the content in which I'm interested. The marketroids are sabotaging their own interests with their policy of saturation advertising, and they only have themselves to blame if people are physically tuning them out.
xsane, or at least its libraries, forms the core of every scanner program for Linux worth using.
Exactly. I no longer use my (currently Epson) scanner very often, so I have a tendency to take it for granted as something that "just works". But if the parent can point us in the direction of anything better, I will be very glad to hear of it. The only scanner I have had that is not supported by SANE/XSANE was an old UMAX parallel-port machine that had already been flagged as problematic.
dude, its Australia. The chance of anyone having a gun in a store is next to zero
We just headbutt people who give us the shits, then appologise later & buy them a beer
(+n Informative.) Except that headbutting people is fucking stupid, since it hurts the butter as much as the buttee. But we have no need for firearms. After all, you can do a lot of damage with a screwdriver, and you don't need a licence for that.
what they fail to see is that only Apple has this product...
We didn't have this product available before Apple brought it to the market, and now that we can see what it's like, we still don't have to buy it. Apple can kid itself that it is "redefining" the market, but (from my point of view) Apple is living in its own little feedback loop of responses from fanboys. What I want is a real computer in a tablet format, not an overgrown iPod Touch.
I'm not saying all Apple products suck (I have owned 2 iPods and this post is typed on a 2nd-hand MacBook), but a bit of perspective doesn't hurt.
Exactly. Twitter is not there for people to read something they are actually interested in. It is a soapbox for people to stand on while they yell "I JUST DROPPED AN ENORMOUS CRAP" (31 characters). Nobody actually reads this rubbish, twits are just twittering into a void. But if it keeps them away from sites that I do visit, then Twitter does at least have one useful purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
People have been speculating that the proposed filter will die stillborn for a long time.
They are misguided on several counts:
(1) Unless a double-dissolution election is called (and I'm not at all sure whether that can happen at this late stage), Sen. Conroy's seat is safe for another term.
(2) This filter is a sacred cow of his, and his fellow nanny-stater MPs, including the Prime Minister.
(3) The so-called "Liberal" opposition has frequently mentioned that it is in favour of such a policy, but knows well enough that people object to it enough that they will have to implement it by stealth after the election. In the meantime, all they have to do is let the Government's newfound unpopularity work for them.
(4) The Greens, despite their many redeeming qualities, also have more than their fair share of nanny-staters who are happy to go along with such a filter.
(5) We can count on minority right-wingers like Family First and a lot of independents also going along with it, again thinking of the damned children.
I won't count this proposal disposed of until every last politician is burnt at the stake. We just can't depend on them to defend our interests.
My old Samsung ML-1710 B/W laser is still working well, and I now have a Samsung CLP-315 colour laser printer that is also good. Both are cheap, have a very small footprint for their type, and work fine with CUPS (i.e. with both Linux and Mac boxes). That's all I need.
if the cops have a good reason to believe someone has committed a crime, let them get a warrant.
They can already do this. And with the resources they currently have, they are already having what I would call a significant measure of success in prosecuting child pornographers.
So it's pretty obvious to me that the real reason behind these encroachments on civil liberties is to suppress dissent. Sure, we can (and maybe will) vote the existing government out of office, but the Liberals are highly likely to at least attempt to implement something similar, given the chance. At the moment, all they have to do is keep quiet and let the government's unpopularity work for them.
In some instances they are, but they are also a party that as a result of its "underdog" status is forced to listen to its electorate.
The major parties are too entrenched in their arrogance to bother. Labor probably has some redeeming qualities (though I can't offhand remember what they are), but in most respects they are indistinguishable from the so-called "Liberals". Except for the fact that Abbott is seriously scary...
Currently at 7% and scheduled to go up again RealSoonNow.
That is one thing I don't whine about, although I am fairly heavily in the red. I took out my first mortgage in 1990, when interest rates were over 17%, and giving every impression of staying that way. Compared to that, the current situation is fine.
I can see a big market for offshore VPNs coming up... :-}
Banks are not perfect, but if they freeze your funds you at least have the option of smashing your local manager's kneecaps. With Paypal you have to work hard to even find someone to complain to, and no guarantee that he'll listen.
It's not just the new HPs: I had one of their inkjets back in the '90s that did that. Cost me a fortune. Agree about Samsung, though. I've had one for 4 years and still going fine.
Mysterious liquids?
:-)
I don't think this is what you have in mind, but I am reminded of an occasion on a British Snail train in the early '80s, when a hung-over colleague vomited noisily and copiously into a stockbroker's briefcase. Way to make yourself popular...
One of the main reasons I no longer use HP printers is their irritating tendency to spit out a test page every time you turn them on or look at them sideways. That can get through a lot of ink...
I don't use paypal, as it has always reeked as far as I am concerned, but as I understand it they will freeze accounts at the drop of a hat, for various reasons.
The latter has always bothered me, but still Paypal does offer a very useful service. My take on it is that a wise shopkeeper doesn't leave his day's takings sitting in the till, he puts them in the hands of someone he can trust (his bank, or in a safe). He doesn't leave them sitting there for some opportunist to come and snatch away.
I don't connect my paypal account to anything that will bankrupt (or even significantly inconvenience) me, so I figure I'm OK. There have been cases where organisations have run into cash-flow problems when dealing with paypal, but I have little sympathy for them.
Paypal never was intended to be more than a clearing-house for funds. Treating it as a bank is just foolish.
I mean even my 58 year old mother has heard of two or three of the common phishing types.
/dev/null), she usually won't even need to think about it these days.
Since most of the modern mail clients have some reasonably successful way of flagging or ditching suspicious emails (given that most reputable ISPs filter the most egregious examples to
It might be unfashionable to say this, but there's a lot to be said for running a localhost-based email client (e.g. thunderfart or whatever works for you) rather than the web-based options offered by gmail, yahoo and all the rest. Not to mention that you have an archive of your emails if your internet connection breaks...
I suppose it would be stupid to have a law against being stupid, but some people just have to learn the hard way.
Like the morons who get sucked into banking phishing scams after being told repeatedly by their banks that they will NEVER email you. Or the greedy morons who get sucked in by Nigerian scams, knowing these have been exposed for over a decade, and knowing the deal has to be too good to be true...
Since the headline of TFA describes this as a once-in-a-generation "space storm", I'd say this is umlikely to be a problem. There were lots of electronic gadgets around a generation ago (or two, for that matter), and the world didn't come to an end.
T = K9P
'nuff said.
La-dee-da! Aren't you Mr. Millionaire!
:D
We re-use our recycled loo paper.
Yeah, but if you want good coffee, you're better off staying at home and making it yourself. You would have to be in a bad way if you have to drink Starbuck's coffee just to get an internet connection.
...not completely useless. Get a dvd player.
This is not as inflammatory as some might suppose. Buying boxed DVD sets of the shows you like makes good sense. No ad-breaks, and no bullshit with TV schedules. And (if you care) the actors and media creators get paid royalties.
Currently my amazon history is 12 years long, you don't have to keep tax data that long, why should amazon keep that data that long?
Amazon does a pretty good job with me. I'm in my late 40s now, and my literary and musical tastes are as eclectic as they were when I was 16, so good luck to them. They have a hard job predicting what I'll like, but every now and then, they come up with surprises that work (yippee!). But I usually have to do the legwork by myself.
Where Amazon and the likes really score for me is with music: being able to listen to sound-bites of nearly everything is a huge improvement on bricks-and-mortar stores where I often feel an obligation to buy something simply because I don't want to put staff to the trouble of loading up yet another CD to try out.
But in general, if I have to see ads at all I'd prefer them to be relevant for me.
I'd rather they weren't. I'm not that keen on anyone tracking my search or browsing history. If they want to feed me adverts of any kind, that's just fine so long as they don't get in my way. Trouble is, marketroids are rarely content with that, and they feed us so much crap that we are forced to filter it either by wetware or software. I choose the latter.
I actually *would* love them. If they didn't suck.
I'm getting to a stage where ALL ads, whether targeted or not, have a tendency to occupy such a large proportion of my screen-space that I almost have no choice (for sanity's sake) to adopt a ruthless approach of filtering them all out.
Thanks to adblock, flashblock and an extensive hosts file, I now see very few ads at all, where I would have been happy to accept a limited amount to offset the costs of hosting the content in which I'm interested. The marketroids are sabotaging their own interests with their policy of saturation advertising, and they only have themselves to blame if people are physically tuning them out.
xsane, or at least its libraries, forms the core of every scanner program for Linux worth using.
Exactly. I no longer use my (currently Epson) scanner very often, so I have a tendency to take it for granted as something that "just works". But if the parent can point us in the direction of anything better, I will be very glad to hear of it. The only scanner I have had that is not supported by SANE/XSANE was an old UMAX parallel-port machine that had already been flagged as problematic.
dude, its Australia. The chance of anyone having a gun in a store is next to zero We just headbutt people who give us the shits, then appologise later & buy them a beer
(+n Informative.) Except that headbutting people is fucking stupid, since it hurts the butter as much as the buttee. But we have no need for firearms. After all, you can do a lot of damage with a screwdriver, and you don't need a licence for that.
what they fail to see is that only Apple has this product...
We didn't have this product available before Apple brought it to the market, and now that we can see what it's like, we still don't have to buy it. Apple can kid itself that it is "redefining" the market, but (from my point of view) Apple is living in its own little feedback loop of responses from fanboys. What I want is a real computer in a tablet format, not an overgrown iPod Touch.
I'm not saying all Apple products suck (I have owned 2 iPods and this post is typed on a 2nd-hand MacBook), but a bit of perspective doesn't hurt.
People are going to happily continue tweeting.
Exactly. Twitter is not there for people to read something they are actually interested in. It is a soapbox for people to stand on while they yell "I JUST DROPPED AN ENORMOUS CRAP" (31 characters). Nobody actually reads this rubbish, twits are just twittering into a void. But if it keeps them away from sites that I do visit, then Twitter does at least have one useful purpose.