Not to mention that the Government itself is a big user of Google. Various Google services are integrated into the systems of a number of Government departments. Also, Google is actually an invaluable tool for policy research (or political research, e.g. googling for embarrassing press releases put out by your opponents in years gone by). The Government's censorship plans might be stupid, but they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot *that* much.
Well, the iPhone isn't exclusive to one company in Australia. All the major (and some of the minor) telcos here sell it and support it on their networks.
3) Telstra submitted a non-conforming tender and the Government had no choice but to reject it.
Being a Government employee myself, when it comes to tendering you have to apply the same rules to everyone. If the Government had accepted Telstra's tender, even though it did not comply with the requirements in the RFT (and this was well publicised, they would have left themselves open for all sorts of problems, e.g. being sued by other applicants.
Optus was right to say that Telstra's submission was a joke: a 12 page letter to the Minister in lieu of a serious tender for a $4.7bn project is brinkmanship of the worst sort and the Government was right to call their bluff.
What would be the purpose of the 'buying the whole thing" suggestion?
Why not Just make it that the value you claim your IP is worth is the only value you can claim it is worth in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Makes more sense to me anyway.
Actually, there is no automatic assumption that a model needs to be paid if their image will be used commercially*. The purpose of a model release is not about the model's right to compensation, but about ensuring that they don't dispute the purpose of the photo, i.e. that they consent that their photo be used in a commercial application. There's also the trade practices laws concept of 'passing off' - basically, if you use a particular person's photo in an advertisement for a product, it is implied in law that they support that product. If done without their consent, you are 'passing off' their support. In a model release, you would typically ask a model to agree that their photo might be used in commercial purposes.
Separately, you can generally take someone's photo and sell it or publish it without their permission (think of how many millions of photos of politicians, celebrities, criminals, etc are published in newspapers and magazines every day). You don't need to get a model release for every one of those people. There are some limitations to do with people's privacy, but that's the general rule.
* Though presumably there is a general need for a model to receive consideration for their model release to have force as a contract
I find this very odd - I didn't think that HK had such a strong stance on moral issues, particularly compared with the rest of China (which is very strict.
When I was in HK a couple of years ago, free weeekly magazines (which you could pick up in coffee shops, etc) carried columns with advice on personal issues, sex, how to get better oral sex from your partner, etc - it was quite explicit. I'm really surprised that posting a link to porn was such a major offence.
I think that people are offended at the thought of some corporate mob getting free advertising: but the site mentioned in this 'article' doesn't seem to have a business model - it's just a fun thing and informative.
Also, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's equivalent to the NY Times) said about these people:
"Dressed in their wedding outfits, the couple were promoting a spoof dating website - darwindating.com - and a hobby travel mashup site, swiftcity.com."
If you go to swiftcity.com, it looks interesting, but not a corporate venture - I didn't even see any advertising (also, the site is a Google maps mashup, which makes the situation all the more appropriate).
Re:Nothing inconvenient about the results
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I live in Australia, so have no idea what $15/gallon translates to in our terms, but...
Petrol is quite expensive here at the moment (the price per litre has gone up by more than 50% in the last couple of years) - it's been a big issue in the media/public consciousness. Petrol is also taxed fairly heavily here, but that was also true before the price sky rocketed.
Since petrol has become so expensive the price of food doesn't appear to have dramatically increased (in fact, the general inflation rate is more or less unchanged) - but people are tending to buy smaller cars. The most popular cars in Australia used to be 6 cylinder family sedans with 3.8 to 4 litre engines. There seems to be a trend at the moment towards smaller cars with lower fuel consumption.
Now, I don't have hard data on this - I'm talking on the basis of various conversations I've had and what I can observe of the public mindset - but I believe there is a trend in this direction. In short, it's too simplistic to say that a major increase in petrol prices wil lead to massive inflation - it's not actually that simple.
Re:Unverifiable? Let's give it a go...
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Also, the one piece of positive feedback showing on Amir6626's eBay profile is from nicktofang, who seems to share a name quite similar to Amir Tofangsazan. nicktofang also has mediocre feedback, is no longer a member, and started with one piece of good feedback from amir6626.
All of MP3 may be "somewhat" legal in Russia but it is fully-non legal for Americans (or Canadians, Australians, and anybody else who is lives in a country that's signed on with international copyright laws) to buy music from them, as it says outright in their terms of service.
Actually, it doesn't say that at all in their terms of service. What it says is that:
"you should not download audio files from AllOFMP3.com if the Terms are in conflict with the laws of your country of residence."
Their FAQ also states that the use of music you download from them is dependent on the law of your own country, vis:
"The user bears sole responsibility for any use and distribution of all materials received from AllOFMP3.com. This responsibility is dependent on the national legislation in each user's country of residence. The Administration of AllOFMP3.com does not possess information on the laws of each particular country and is not responsible for the actions of foreign users."
In Australia, at the moment, that presumably means I couldn't copy it to an iPod because we're not allowed under our Copyright Act to copy copyrighted songs at all without explicit permission - but that also means that we're not yet allowed to copy CDs to our computer and then to the iPod. It's a law that is more honoured in the breach than the observance.
Perhaps you could quote the section of the Terms of Service that you thought outright stated that it was illegal for people in the countries you mentioned?
That's actually a bit misleading - the Queensland Government is of the opposite political persuasion to our Federal Government, and so put a different political spin on it (Queensland has a Labor Government while the Federal Government is mainly formed by our Liberal/Conservative party - somewhat analagous to Democrats vs Republicans in the USA).
Anyway, that comment pulled from the Queensland website is mostly spin - notice the common use of the words 'can' and 'may'. Nobody really knows yet exactly what practical impact these new laws are going to have.
Now, I'm not a real supporter of these new laws, but some of those comments quoted are FUD. It's true that these laws will give more power to employers, but it won't mean that employyees can't bargain at all for better conditions - and in a highly competitive industry like IT, it shouldn't be too bad. Also, most of the comments imply that workers on an industrial award might lose conditions, but there are only a couple of States in which IT workers are actually covered by awards.
In summary: yes, these new laws are a bit dodgy from an employee/union perspective - but beware FUD.
Actually, I ran some benchmarks on this on my Powerbook G4 some time ago. The internal 7200rpm 2.5in drive performed faster in every way than an external 7200rpm 3.5in drive, connected via FW800.
So in the new Mac Mini, a 7200rpm 2.5in drive connected via SATA should absolutely outperform an external drive - it just can't have the same capacity.
That said, the idea of connectign some sort of NAS via gigabit ethernet sounds interesting.
I was waiting for someone to say this. Basically, that argument just shows that with the Open Source model you can't please everyone.
If a company doesn't open source, plenty of open source advocates say they should and will complain about closed environment, etc etc If they do open source, then you get arguments like this - either that they are taking advantage of free labour, or using cheap labour.
If you accept the open source model, then things like this are the outcome. In this case, it is very nice of Apple that they rewarded some of the top contributors, which they were certainly not obliged to do.
A lot of people in Australia are quite interested in the political process, really. We have election night parties as well - sometimes big piss-ups, like "Don's Party" (a classic play/movie). Do you get them as well in the States, or is that another Australian-ism?
So, if the two theories are being taught side by side, i.e. evolution a well of critiques of the theory, are being taught, where exactly is the problem? What I'm getting at is if you teach in scvhools not just the dominantn theory itself, but alternate viewpoints - aren't you explicitly promoting skills in analaysis and comparison? From my reading, the decision wasn't that only ID could be taught, or that evolution couldn't be taught, but that it was ok to present multiple viewpoints and critiques.
I think using religion as an excuse is a cop-out - everyone in just about every country other than American knows that Americans are stupid. We've just been humoring you.
And I said this like a joke but, in case you didn't know, it really is what people think about Americans.
Of course they're interested in the dollars, but they're also giving good service and expanding in areas that larger ISPs aren't. To me, this syas that they are taking risks and providing services and settling for less profit, as compared (say) to some of the largest telcos that only offer services where they can be assured of the maximum profit, and skimp on customer service in order to boost the bottom line.
I've already moderated in this thread, but what they hey...
This is based on ADSL2+, same as the service offered by Internode, iiNet or Adam in Australia. Internode really led the way and were the first to roll out DSLAMs that would offer up to 24 Mbps download speeds and about 1 Mbps upload. iiNet, although they offer ADSL2+, limit it to 12 Mbps download.
Now, I suspect the reason for this is that while 24Mbps is the theoretical maximum download speed over ADSL2+, you're only going to get that speed if you have a perfect line and live really close to the exchange. If you're even 2km away, then you're speed is going to drop a fair bit: granted, you'll still get about 15Mbps, but not the 24Mbps advertised. My guess is that iiNet just finds it easier to guarantee 12Mbps rather than trying to explain that, "well, you might get 24Mpbs, but there's all these other factors and we can't guarantee it, and no, we don't know exactly what speed you'll end up with."
There was a really good graph on this here, which shows deteriorating performance as you move further from the exchange.
The other thing about this that really interests me is that Australia was derided and we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up - maybe in large part as we have good companies like Internode who are very tech-minded, still small enough to focus on service rather than just the almighty buck, and who actually want to provide good services to people.
People are always saying that there has been very little innovation in Office (or like) suites over the last 8 years or so. What I would like to see as a big step forward is the ability to collaborate on word processor documents (in particular) ala SubEthaEdit (the app formerly known as Hydra).
I think that would be a really neat feature that would make some tasks in the office where we have several people working on a document much easier.
I lived most off my life in Sydney (in Australia, but not the capital city, for those of you who don't know).
Sydney is one of the most wonderful ocean-fronted cities in the world and has a wonderful harbour, great beaches, decent weather, etc etc.
In 22 years I never saw a hurricane, cyclone, or anything approaching a natural disaster of that kind. We had bushfires which were deemed natural disasters, but they didn't quite get into the area where I was living (I did have friends who lost houses though).
My point is: you can live near an ocean without experiencing hurricanes.
And it works, but it doesn't have all the features of MSN on Windows (e.g. no support for video, but many other issues as well).
If you have Tiger, it's probably preferable to find a Jabber server with an MSN conduit and use iChat. Some of the benefits are that you can archive and search for conversations, including through Spotlight, you can use the one client for most IM systems, and it integrates nicely with the address book. What more could anybody want? (well, support for iChat-MSN video chat, and a Skype conduit maybe - ok, so there are a few things more we might want, but it's still pretty good).
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that the Government itself is a big user of Google. Various Google services are integrated into the systems of a number of Government departments. Also, Google is actually an invaluable tool for policy research (or political research, e.g. googling for embarrassing press releases put out by your opponents in years gone by). The Government's censorship plans might be stupid, but they're not going to shoot themselves in the foot *that* much.
Well, the iPhone isn't exclusive to one company in Australia. All the major (and some of the minor) telcos here sell it and support it on their networks.
Or rather:
3) Telstra submitted a non-conforming tender and the Government had no choice but to reject it.
Being a Government employee myself, when it comes to tendering you have to apply the same rules to everyone. If the Government had accepted Telstra's tender, even though it did not comply with the requirements in the RFT (and this was well publicised, they would have left themselves open for all sorts of problems, e.g. being sued by other applicants.
Optus was right to say that Telstra's submission was a joke: a 12 page letter to the Minister in lieu of a serious tender for a $4.7bn project is brinkmanship of the worst sort and the Government was right to call their bluff.
What would be the purpose of the 'buying the whole thing" suggestion?
Why not Just make it that the value you claim your IP is worth is the only value you can claim it is worth in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Makes more sense to me anyway.
Actually, there is no automatic assumption that a model needs to be paid if their image will be used commercially*. The purpose of a model release is not about the model's right to compensation, but about ensuring that they don't dispute the purpose of the photo, i.e. that they consent that their photo be used in a commercial application. There's also the trade practices laws concept of 'passing off' - basically, if you use a particular person's photo in an advertisement for a product, it is implied in law that they support that product. If done without their consent, you are 'passing off' their support. In a model release, you would typically ask a model to agree that their photo might be used in commercial purposes.
Separately, you can generally take someone's photo and sell it or publish it without their permission (think of how many millions of photos of politicians, celebrities, criminals, etc are published in newspapers and magazines every day). You don't need to get a model release for every one of those people. There are some limitations to do with people's privacy, but that's the general rule.
* Though presumably there is a general need for a model to receive consideration for their model release to have force as a contract
I find this very odd - I didn't think that HK had such a strong stance on moral issues, particularly compared with the rest of China (which is very strict.
When I was in HK a couple of years ago, free weeekly magazines (which you could pick up in coffee shops, etc) carried columns with advice on personal issues, sex, how to get better oral sex from your partner, etc - it was quite explicit. I'm really surprised that posting a link to porn was such a major offence.
I think that people are offended at the thought of some corporate mob getting free advertising: but the site mentioned in this 'article' doesn't seem to have a business model - it's just a fun thing and informative.
Also, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's equivalent to the NY Times) said about these people:
"Dressed in their wedding outfits, the couple were promoting a spoof dating website - darwindating.com - and a hobby travel mashup site, swiftcity.com."
If you go to swiftcity.com, it looks interesting, but not a corporate venture - I didn't even see any advertising (also, the site is a Google maps mashup, which makes the situation all the more appropriate).
I live in Australia, so have no idea what $15/gallon translates to in our terms, but...
Petrol is quite expensive here at the moment (the price per litre has gone up by more than 50% in the last couple of years) - it's been a big issue in the media/public consciousness. Petrol is also taxed fairly heavily here, but that was also true before the price sky rocketed.
Since petrol has become so expensive the price of food doesn't appear to have dramatically increased (in fact, the general inflation rate is more or less unchanged) - but people are tending to buy smaller cars. The most popular cars in Australia used to be 6 cylinder family sedans with 3.8 to 4 litre engines. There seems to be a trend at the moment towards smaller cars with lower fuel consumption.
Now, I don't have hard data on this - I'm talking on the basis of various conversations I've had and what I can observe of the public mindset - but I believe there is a trend in this direction. In short, it's too simplistic to say that a major increase in petrol prices wil lead to massive inflation - it's not actually that simple.
Also, the one piece of positive feedback showing on Amir6626's eBay profile is from nicktofang, who seems to share a name quite similar to Amir Tofangsazan. nicktofang also has mediocre feedback, is no longer a member, and started with one piece of good feedback from amir6626.
Certainly looks fishy to me.
All of MP3 may be "somewhat" legal in Russia but it is fully-non legal for Americans (or Canadians, Australians, and anybody else who is lives in a country that's signed on with international copyright laws) to buy music from them, as it says outright in their terms of service.
Actually, it doesn't say that at all in their terms of service. What it says is that:
"you should not download audio files from AllOFMP3.com if the Terms are in conflict with the laws of your country of residence."
Their FAQ also states that the use of music you download from them is dependent on the law of your own country, vis:
"The user bears sole responsibility for any use and distribution of all materials received from AllOFMP3.com. This responsibility is dependent on the national legislation in each user's country of residence. The Administration of AllOFMP3.com does not possess information on the laws of each particular country and is not responsible for the actions of foreign users."
In Australia, at the moment, that presumably means I couldn't copy it to an iPod because we're not allowed under our Copyright Act to copy copyrighted songs at all without explicit permission - but that also means that we're not yet allowed to copy CDs to our computer and then to the iPod. It's a law that is more honoured in the breach than the observance.
Perhaps you could quote the section of the Terms of Service that you thought outright stated that it was illegal for people in the countries you mentioned?
I'm sorry, I'm sorry - we're embarrassed by him as well.
Then maybe you could just train your memory. I too have several thousand books, and have no troubles remembering which books I've already got.
Maybe it's just a matter of having my shelves organised in such a way that I can easily maintain a mental map of it.
That's actually a bit misleading - the Queensland Government is of the opposite political persuasion to our Federal Government, and so put a different political spin on it (Queensland has a Labor Government while the Federal Government is mainly formed by our Liberal/Conservative party - somewhat analagous to Democrats vs Republicans in the USA).
Anyway, that comment pulled from the Queensland website is mostly spin - notice the common use of the words 'can' and 'may'. Nobody really knows yet exactly what practical impact these new laws are going to have.
Now, I'm not a real supporter of these new laws, but some of those comments quoted are FUD. It's true that these laws will give more power to employers, but it won't mean that employyees can't bargain at all for better conditions - and in a highly competitive industry like IT, it shouldn't be too bad. Also, most of the comments imply that workers on an industrial award might lose conditions, but there are only a couple of States in which IT workers are actually covered by awards.
In summary: yes, these new laws are a bit dodgy from an employee/union perspective - but beware FUD.
Actually, I ran some benchmarks on this on my Powerbook G4 some time ago. The internal 7200rpm 2.5in drive performed faster in every way than an external 7200rpm 3.5in drive, connected via FW800.
So in the new Mac Mini, a 7200rpm 2.5in drive connected via SATA should absolutely outperform an external drive - it just can't have the same capacity.
That said, the idea of connectign some sort of NAS via gigabit ethernet sounds interesting.
I was waiting for someone to say this. Basically, that argument just shows that with the Open Source model you can't please everyone.
If a company doesn't open source, plenty of open source advocates say they should and will complain about closed environment, etc etc
If they do open source, then you get arguments like this - either that they are taking advantage of free labour, or using cheap labour.
If you accept the open source model, then things like this are the outcome. In this case, it is very nice of Apple that they rewarded some of the top contributors, which they were certainly not obliged to do.
A lot of people in Australia are quite interested in the political process, really. We have election night parties as well - sometimes big piss-ups, like "Don's Party" (a classic play/movie). Do you get them as well in the States, or is that another Australian-ism?
What class do you want to cover this in again?
In "History and Philosophy of Science" classes of course. Isn't that obvious?
So, if the two theories are being taught side by side, i.e. evolution a well of critiques of the theory, are being taught, where exactly is the problem? What I'm getting at is if you teach in scvhools not just the dominantn theory itself, but alternate viewpoints - aren't you explicitly promoting skills in analaysis and comparison? From my reading, the decision wasn't that only ID could be taught, or that evolution couldn't be taught, but that it was ok to present multiple viewpoints and critiques.
What if they found dinosaurs trapped and preserved in ice, like woolly mammoths have been?
I think using religion as an excuse is a cop-out - everyone in just about every country other than American knows that Americans are stupid. We've just been humoring you.
And I said this like a joke but, in case you didn't know, it really is what people think about Americans.
Of course they're interested in the dollars, but they're also giving good service and expanding in areas that larger ISPs aren't. To me, this syas that they are taking risks and providing services and settling for less profit, as compared (say) to some of the largest telcos that only offer services where they can be assured of the maximum profit, and skimp on customer service in order to boost the bottom line.
I've already moderated in this thread, but what they hey...
This is based on ADSL2+, same as the service offered by Internode, iiNet or Adam in Australia. Internode really led the way and were the first to roll out DSLAMs that would offer up to 24 Mbps download speeds and about 1 Mbps upload. iiNet, although they offer ADSL2+, limit it to 12 Mbps download.
Now, I suspect the reason for this is that while 24Mbps is the theoretical maximum download speed over ADSL2+, you're only going to get that speed if you have a perfect line and live really close to the exchange. If you're even 2km away, then you're speed is going to drop a fair bit: granted, you'll still get about 15Mbps, but not the 24Mbps advertised. My guess is that iiNet just finds it easier to guarantee 12Mbps rather than trying to explain that, "well, you might get 24Mpbs, but there's all these other factors and we can't guarantee it, and no, we don't know exactly what speed you'll end up with."
There was a really good graph on this here, which shows deteriorating performance as you move further from the exchange.
The other thing about this that really interests me is that Australia was derided and we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up - maybe in large part as we have good companies like Internode who are very tech-minded, still small enough to focus on service rather than just the almighty buck, and who actually want to provide good services to people.
People are always saying that there has been very little innovation in Office (or like) suites over the last 8 years or so. What I would like to see as a big step forward is the ability to collaborate on word processor documents (in particular) ala SubEthaEdit (the app formerly known as Hydra).
I think that would be a really neat feature that would make some tasks in the office where we have several people working on a document much easier.
I lived most off my life in Sydney (in Australia, but not the capital city, for those of you who don't know).
Sydney is one of the most wonderful ocean-fronted cities in the world and has a wonderful harbour, great beaches, decent weather, etc etc.
In 22 years I never saw a hurricane, cyclone, or anything approaching a natural disaster of that kind. We had bushfires which were deemed natural disasters, but they didn't quite get into the area where I was living (I did have friends who lost houses though).
My point is: you can live near an ocean without experiencing hurricanes.
And it works, but it doesn't have all the features of MSN on Windows (e.g. no support for video, but many other issues as well).
If you have Tiger, it's probably preferable to find a Jabber server with an MSN conduit and use iChat. Some of the benefits are that you can archive and search for conversations, including through Spotlight, you can use the one client for most IM systems, and it integrates nicely with the address book.
What more could anybody want?
(well, support for iChat-MSN video chat, and a Skype conduit maybe - ok, so there are a few things more we might want, but it's still pretty good).