Far freaking out - I've been assigned one too! My number seems to be some sort of cleverly encoded message, specially designed to implant particular thoughts into my mind...
While on the subject, is anybody still running old DOS programs in a DOS box on a Windows machine (e.g. a database) because your company is too poor/cheap to upgrade or doesn't want to bother with any free alternatives?
There's another excellent reason to run very old hardware or software that seems to get overlooked far too often. Sometimes, existing hardware or software does the job acceptably. The IT world is defined by constant change and progress, but 'latest' does not always mean 'greatest' when put into the context of tasks to be performed.
Change just for its own sake is a waste at best, and possibly quite a risk. How many reasonable in-house corporate applications have been re-written as web applications lately, with marginal benefits in ease of administration, and a loss of ease of use?
Of course, not all change is pointless. Much of it provides needed benefits, or is necessary for unrelated reasons (e.g. must have latest version of MS-office because others do). But the value of an existing solution sometimes seems to be overlooked when compared with the glamour of the latest, fastest, slickest new thing.
Yep - I was thinking of charging voltage but writing nominal for some reason. Good thing I don't use my brain for anything important.
I had a sealed pack opened up just recently, from an Ericsson phone. It had a thermistor based fuse built in to the wire (more like a strap) that ran from one end of the battery to the protection circuit at the other end. It was held firmly against the cell (I guess for good thermal transfer) by the design of the case. It was also the reason I had the battery open - the pack had failed because this thing had gone permanently open circuit. Needless to say I didn't try to repair it. A battery pack that doesn't work any more is much better than one that explodes.
Probably not so really battery acid: mobile phone batteries are typically Lithium Ion rather than lead acid like a car battery that can leak acid.
The Lithium Ion batteries in modern phones burn very well, and can even explode. They heat up when they are being charged, and they can also heat up under load, i.e. when the phone is transmitting. The battery pack that you attach to the back of the phone usually contains not only one or more Li-Ion cells (each cell produces a nominal 4.2V and most phones operate with that), but a temperature sensor and a small circuit board with a protection circuit on it.
The temperature sensor is used during charging to cut out charge if the battery overheats, to avoid it catching fire and/or exploding. I'm not sure if phones also monitor the battery temperature during normal use.
The protection circuit on the output of the cell stops the battery from discharging too deeply, because Li-Ion batteries are hard to recharge if they go too flat. It also usually limits the output current (i.e. the speed at which the battery can be discharged) to prevent sparks or overloading and presumably overheating.
Despite the disadvantages (limited lifespan of the cell is another), lithium ion batteries offer important advantages over other types of battery technology. They are small and light, and can be partially discharged then recharged repeatedly.
The article doesn't go into the detail of the cause of the incident. It could have been the temperature sensor failing, resulting in overcharge. It could have been something totally unrelated, but it seems most likely to have been the battery: its the most obvious explosive part in the phone.
They've got so much going for them that Australia mints notes for a number of other countries in the region. There is a down side to them, though. The plastic doesn't feel as nice as the paper money, and I still think they're a little harder to handle.
Much of the complaining was about publicity. For example, when the ACCC (under Alan Fels) investigated fuel price fixing, they made a big deal in the media about it and announced the raids they performed to find documentary evidence. Nothing came out of it. Big business complained that this amounted to a trial by media, and that they were entitled to some kind of privacy if there was no concrete proof of wrong-doing. I haven't heard quite as much complaining since Graeme Samuels took over. There are a few particular medium sized businesses that are particularly vocal in their complaints.
I think there are also plenty of examples to show where the ACCC doesn't seem to achieve their goals. If they were so powerful and effective, would we really have the outrageous banking costs that we have? Would Telstra get away with half the stuff it does?
The ACCC does have some teeth, but their history in enforcing compliance is patchy. In the past, they've made a lot of noise, but not necessarily achieved much. For example, their investigation into fuel pricing involved a lot of media publicity, but no other result. Even when they have been successful on their terms, they haven't necessarily had much impact. For example, they managed to force the record companies to allow parallel importing of CDs. Somehow, this hasn't worked out and prices didn't really drop. They have some quick successes though - e.g. they managed to force Telstra to stop some of their more misleading advertisements for ADSL.
The ACCC was recently appointed a new head: Graeme Samuel. He was initially criticized by some states as being too strongly oriented towards big business and therefore not appropriate for the job. He has rejected this fairly loudly. If we're lucky, maybe he'll see this investigation as an another opportunity to prove himself.
Your particular needs may not be served well by EJBs, in which case it makes sense not to use them. This technology (like most others that are fashionable) is not all bad, nor is the technology all good. There are problems for which it is a useful solution, and problems for which it is not. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others. A blanket anti-EJB position makes just as little sense as a blanket pro-EJB position.
This is my point, which seems to be getting both swamped by technical discussion and demonstrated all at the same time: it is the slavish adherance to fashion (or fear, politics, religion, ignorance, or other non rational factor) that is an interesting issue here, not the technology.
it's an ancillary feature of EJB and is included as an "add-in."
I think you could make that statement reasonably accurately about most of the services that are provided by an EJB container and EJBs. It's the framework that makes all sorts of valuable services (o/r mapping, transactional behaviour, security, re-useability, etc.) possible. That is, the EJB and container is the means to get a bunch of services cheaply rather than the end goal by itself.
Sure, I could use an o/r mapping library. And something else for transaction management. And I could get at remote objects using plain RMI, using something else for a naming service. But by the time you put all this type of stuff together yourself, you'd probably end up with something even more unweildy than EJB's at great cost. Not to mention the loss of portability/re-usability and the risks of the unknown. EJBs may look like an overblown solution, but you have to look at them in context - they're there to solve complex problems in a standardised and repeatable way. The complexity already exists in the problem space - it wasn't just added in the solution space.
To steer this at least slightly back on topic, let me use the f word again. Use EJBs just for the sake of fashion, and they look rediculous. Use them to solve the problems they were designed to solve and they are useful. Blindly following is the problem, not the particular technology or technique - be it EJB,.NET, XML, RUP, or whatever.
If you haven't already, may I recommend you take a look at Mastering EJB by Ed Roman, which you can download for free. It is an easy read, and it seems fairly well balanced. It even includes a section that addresses the very question you pose: when are EJBs genuinely called for (and when not).
Quite right of course. In fact, you could almost imagine the trend to treat a relational database as just dumb storage becoming another fashion. I could just see a less experienced developer taking this approach and misapplying it in an attempt to be 'just like the big J2EE applications'.
If you follow it just for the sake of fashion you could miss out on opportunities that an RDBMS provides. If you don't need O/R mapping (and therefore are not pushed to the lowest common denominator solution to solve the oo - relational mismatch) then it is a fashion that results in a poor outcome.
Having said all that: if we accept simple o/r mapping (despite the inherent ugliness in the whole situation) because our data is in a database and we have to get at it somehow from our OO environment, then EJBs are good at taking care of the mechanics.
Re:The very worst fashion...
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
EJBs complicate development.
Misuse of EJBs complicate development. When they're used just for the sake of fashion (as often seems to be the case), a perfectly good solution (for something) can be applied to entirely the wrong problem, resulting in a mess. The parent post makes two good points about the danger of fashion (another way of saying following blindly without thinking?); one of these points is perhaps made inadvertantly. Firstly, the results are bad. Secondly, it can make it look as if the subject of the fashion always produces bad results and has no merit.
Just because EJBs can be (and sometimes are) misapplied does not mean they have no value. Sometimes the situation is not 'EJBs complicate development', but rather problems get complicated all by themselves, and EJBs can provide a solution. For example, container managed entity beans can make object-relational mapping happen (along with transaction management) with hardly any code. It may seem complicated when you look at the multiple interfaces and deployment descriptors needed, but really this is a very simple solution relative to the complexity of the actual task to be performed. If I had to write my own code to handle these tasks so easily, it would take me forever.
Re:The one i hate most
on
Software Fashion
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Even Charles Simonyi, who started the whole Hungarian Notation thing, didn't propose that it should be used everywhere, for every variable name. This is, as the parent post suggests, a classic case of a valid idea being used in inappropriate contexts just for the sake of fashion. Unfortunately it (or worse still bastardised versions of it) has become so entrenched it is followed more like it is religion than fashion. Some developers can't be talked out of it with any reasoning - they just tell me it has to be that way, because it's programming. Like religion, logic seems to have no place.
In the days when you wrote complicated code in older forms of C that required casting all sorts of things to pointers (through char * before void existed), greater programmer care with the scope and type of variables was important. There were all sorts of things that a compiler wouldn't catch, so sometimes it was worth sacrificing code readability. Now, of course, it mostly just doesn't make sense to make the sacrifice. Compilers handle data types just fine, and you don't have to cast through some totally unrelated type in modern languages. OO languages keep a lid on scope: you don't have masses of global variables. OO languages also introduce polymorphism, in which H.N. or type based naming can be very misleading. Code clarity is very valuable, and more natural language is one tool to achieve this (see Knuth's Literate Programming for some interesting ideas). It frustrates me no end when people want me to read a series of codes (with no vowels!) as if I were a computer. Give me language instead: I've been handling that since before I could walk.
I think this particular fashion persists so strongly despite common sense for a number of reasons:
Momentum: there's so much of it about (e.g. Microsoft API docs) that programmers who don't think about why they should do things just copy the pattern blindly. Self perpetuating fashion.
Programmers not only undervalue code readability, they get some elitist kick out of making it undreadable. As if making it unreadable somehow makes code look more technical. I've seen programmers write code with vowels stripped out of every single variable name, even though they can touch type and have no absolutely no reason to abbreviate.
Maybe HN is useful in a training environment (so markers can see validity without using a compiler?) and it just carries into a professional career.
The availability of bottled water has failed to convinced me not to use water from the tap. I even use public drinking fountains. If the RIAA defines a successful distribution scheme as one in which they are always in control and always make a profit, then introducing P2P into the mix won't make them successful by their own measure.
Is that just the Swen worm, by any chance? It's all over the place, and sends mail claiming to be from MS Technical Support.
If it is, it's not quite the same as spam - the people sending it to you don't even know they're doing it, so anti-spamming laws aren't going to make them stop. I share your anger at what spam has done to email, but I think it is important to understand it and differentiate it from other annoyances such as worms and viruses if we are to deal with the situation.
Legislation seems unlikely to be a complete solution to spam, because it only takes one country without the same laws (or one failing to enforce laws) for the problem to continue. It's going to take technical solutions (e.g. filtering) and social solutions (e.g. better educated users) as well to really solve the problem.
New computer hardware and software is the last thing they need. What they've got is highly reliable, very thoroughly designed for safety, and a very well known quantity. Sure its old, but so what? When was the last time we heard of a computer problem in the shuttle endangering the astronaut's lives? The big dangers are the propulsion system and the complexity of a horizontal landing vehicle that was designed to be (but fails to be) re-useable.
A change to hardware or software is a very big deal because it's all so complicated: there are so many potential points of failure that maintaining quality is very difficult and expensive. I'd hate to think what we would get now if we changed software just for the sake of change. We'd probably end up with something that was built to a budget, not a quality standard.
Some of MS's TV and radio advertising already approaches things from this angle - they are working on building an image, not conveying real information about their product. No different from a large proportion of other advertising. They have advertisements that don't promote real features of the product they're trying to sell, or try talk about quality or price competitiveness. Either they think their target audience just isn't interested in these kinds of things, or they think that the only thing they've got going for them is hype.
Phony image building campaigns can turn me right off a product. I'd like to think that everyone else reacts like this too, but there's overwhelming evidence that this is not the case. We're getting the crap we deserve because we're so gullible.
If this is a defense strategy, the RIAA could turn it around into an attack strategy.
They could insist that now they need to confiscate all your computer equipment as evidence to confirm or deny the probable crime they detected, because the network 'evidence' is not longer trustworthy. This may sound unlikely from a legal perspective, but they've shown they have the power to make unlikely things happen (e.g. DMCA), and the arrogance to stomp on their potential customers. Instead of just getting a law suit delivered to you, you'd get a visit from enforcement officials to remove your equipment, along with a nice invitation to visit the courts in a year or two's time, at which point you may or may not get your gear back.
I'm 35. I was born in a country town, and back then, our oven was a wood burner. Our heating was by a kerosene heater - I still remember it. Utilities and services that we take for granted in the city take a while to get out to the bush because rural Australia is mostly quite sparsely populated. A large proportion of our population lives in a small number of cities, and the rest of the country could be categorised as 'mostly empty'.
Telecommunication capabilities in the more remote regions are still considered to be below standard. This issue is one of the major sticking points in the Australian government's attempts to fully privatise our (effective monopoly) major telecommunications carrier, Telstra. There is a fear that a privatised Telstra would not see value in providing service to remote regions, and would not install lines or would let maintenance go, further isolating people.
It's hard to imagine that he personally understands the issues involved. It seems more likely that he's been given advice, and not gotten involved or objected because it's all gone way over his head.
It's when he makes off the cuff comments that his general cluelessness about IT is revealed - he didn't earn the title of "Biggest Luddite in the World" for nothing. Aside from the comments on closing chatrooms that several other posters have mentioned, he's also recently been taken to task over comments he made in the Senate about Electronic Frontiers Australia. There was a story in the Register only a few days ago. EFA were permitted to publish a reply in the parliamentary records, objecting to his description of them as "spokespeople of the porn industry".
The same could be done by randomly flipping an arbitrary number of bits inside a mp3. Nothing usefull is being computed or done at all. So why is this important, or even relevant?
I'm sure it's very important to him - how else is he going to get government grants to buy beer for a 'research project'? I wish I'd thought of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, otherwise known as (thanks to The Register):
Judge Konsonant-Kollection
Far freaking out - I've been assigned one too! My number seems to be some sort of cleverly encoded message, specially designed to implant particular thoughts into my mind...
There's another excellent reason to run very old hardware or software that seems to get overlooked far too often. Sometimes, existing hardware or software does the job acceptably. The IT world is defined by constant change and progress, but 'latest' does not always mean 'greatest' when put into the context of tasks to be performed.
Change just for its own sake is a waste at best, and possibly quite a risk. How many reasonable in-house corporate applications have been re-written as web applications lately, with marginal benefits in ease of administration, and a loss of ease of use?
Of course, not all change is pointless. Much of it provides needed benefits, or is necessary for unrelated reasons (e.g. must have latest version of MS-office because others do). But the value of an existing solution sometimes seems to be overlooked when compared with the glamour of the latest, fastest, slickest new thing.
Yep - I was thinking of charging voltage but writing nominal for some reason. Good thing I don't use my brain for anything important.
I had a sealed pack opened up just recently, from an Ericsson phone. It had a thermistor based fuse built in to the wire (more like a strap) that ran from one end of the battery to the protection circuit at the other end. It was held firmly against the cell (I guess for good thermal transfer) by the design of the case. It was also the reason I had the battery open - the pack had failed because this thing had gone permanently open circuit. Needless to say I didn't try to repair it. A battery pack that doesn't work any more is much better than one that explodes.
Probably not so really battery acid: mobile phone batteries are typically Lithium Ion rather than lead acid like a car battery that can leak acid.
The Lithium Ion batteries in modern phones burn very well, and can even explode. They heat up when they are being charged, and they can also heat up under load, i.e. when the phone is transmitting. The battery pack that you attach to the back of the phone usually contains not only one or more Li-Ion cells (each cell produces a nominal 4.2V and most phones operate with that), but a temperature sensor and a small circuit board with a protection circuit on it.
The temperature sensor is used during charging to cut out charge if the battery overheats, to avoid it catching fire and/or exploding. I'm not sure if phones also monitor the battery temperature during normal use.
The protection circuit on the output of the cell stops the battery from discharging too deeply, because Li-Ion batteries are hard to recharge if they go too flat. It also usually limits the output current (i.e. the speed at which the battery can be discharged) to prevent sparks or overloading and presumably overheating.
Despite the disadvantages (limited lifespan of the cell is another), lithium ion batteries offer important advantages over other types of battery technology. They are small and light, and can be partially discharged then recharged repeatedly.
The article doesn't go into the detail of the cause of the incident. It could have been the temperature sensor failing, resulting in overcharge. It could have been something totally unrelated, but it seems most likely to have been the battery: its the most obvious explosive part in the phone.
Yep, I can see the pattern here too. Every second thing is bad for you.
They've got so much going for them that Australia mints notes for a number of other countries in the region. There is a down side to them, though. The plastic doesn't feel as nice as the paper money, and I still think they're a little harder to handle.
Much of the complaining was about publicity. For example, when the ACCC (under Alan Fels) investigated fuel price fixing, they made a big deal in the media about it and announced the raids they performed to find documentary evidence. Nothing came out of it. Big business complained that this amounted to a trial by media, and that they were entitled to some kind of privacy if there was no concrete proof of wrong-doing. I haven't heard quite as much complaining since Graeme Samuels took over. There are a few particular medium sized businesses that are particularly vocal in their complaints.
I think there are also plenty of examples to show where the ACCC doesn't seem to achieve their goals. If they were so powerful and effective, would we really have the outrageous banking costs that we have? Would Telstra get away with half the stuff it does?
The ACCC does have some teeth, but their history in enforcing compliance is patchy. In the past, they've made a lot of noise, but not necessarily achieved much. For example, their investigation into fuel pricing involved a lot of media publicity, but no other result. Even when they have been successful on their terms, they haven't necessarily had much impact. For example, they managed to force the record companies to allow parallel importing of CDs. Somehow, this hasn't worked out and prices didn't really drop. They have some quick successes though - e.g. they managed to force Telstra to stop some of their more misleading advertisements for ADSL.
The ACCC was recently appointed a new head: Graeme Samuel. He was initially criticized by some states as being too strongly oriented towards big business and therefore not appropriate for the job. He has rejected this fairly loudly. If we're lucky, maybe he'll see this investigation as an another opportunity to prove himself.
Your particular needs may not be served well by EJBs, in which case it makes sense not to use them. This technology (like most others that are fashionable) is not all bad, nor is the technology all good. There are problems for which it is a useful solution, and problems for which it is not. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others. A blanket anti-EJB position makes just as little sense as a blanket pro-EJB position.
This is my point, which seems to be getting both swamped by technical discussion and demonstrated all at the same time: it is the slavish adherance to fashion (or fear, politics, religion, ignorance, or other non rational factor) that is an interesting issue here, not the technology.
I think you could make that statement reasonably accurately about most of the services that are provided by an EJB container and EJBs. It's the framework that makes all sorts of valuable services (o/r mapping, transactional behaviour, security, re-useability, etc.) possible. That is, the EJB and container is the means to get a bunch of services cheaply rather than the end goal by itself.
Sure, I could use an o/r mapping library. And something else for transaction management. And I could get at remote objects using plain RMI, using something else for a naming service. But by the time you put all this type of stuff together yourself, you'd probably end up with something even more unweildy than EJB's at great cost. Not to mention the loss of portability/re-usability and the risks of the unknown. EJBs may look like an overblown solution, but you have to look at them in context - they're there to solve complex problems in a standardised and repeatable way. The complexity already exists in the problem space - it wasn't just added in the solution space.
To steer this at least slightly back on topic, let me use the f word again. Use EJBs just for the sake of fashion, and they look rediculous. Use them to solve the problems they were designed to solve and they are useful. Blindly following is the problem, not the particular technology or technique - be it EJB, .NET, XML, RUP, or whatever.
If you haven't already, may I recommend you take a look at Mastering EJB by Ed Roman, which you can download for free. It is an easy read, and it seems fairly well balanced. It even includes a section that addresses the very question you pose: when are EJBs genuinely called for (and when not).
Quite right of course. In fact, you could almost imagine the trend to treat a relational database as just dumb storage becoming another fashion. I could just see a less experienced developer taking this approach and misapplying it in an attempt to be 'just like the big J2EE applications'.
If you follow it just for the sake of fashion you could miss out on opportunities that an RDBMS provides. If you don't need O/R mapping (and therefore are not pushed to the lowest common denominator solution to solve the oo - relational mismatch) then it is a fashion that results in a poor outcome.
Having said all that: if we accept simple o/r mapping (despite the inherent ugliness in the whole situation) because our data is in a database and we have to get at it somehow from our OO environment, then EJBs are good at taking care of the mechanics.
Misuse of EJBs complicate development. When they're used just for the sake of fashion (as often seems to be the case), a perfectly good solution (for something) can be applied to entirely the wrong problem, resulting in a mess. The parent post makes two good points about the danger of fashion (another way of saying following blindly without thinking?); one of these points is perhaps made inadvertantly. Firstly, the results are bad. Secondly, it can make it look as if the subject of the fashion always produces bad results and has no merit.
Just because EJBs can be (and sometimes are) misapplied does not mean they have no value. Sometimes the situation is not 'EJBs complicate development', but rather problems get complicated all by themselves, and EJBs can provide a solution. For example, container managed entity beans can make object-relational mapping happen (along with transaction management) with hardly any code. It may seem complicated when you look at the multiple interfaces and deployment descriptors needed, but really this is a very simple solution relative to the complexity of the actual task to be performed. If I had to write my own code to handle these tasks so easily, it would take me forever.
Even Charles Simonyi, who started the whole Hungarian Notation thing, didn't propose that it should be used everywhere, for every variable name. This is, as the parent post suggests, a classic case of a valid idea being used in inappropriate contexts just for the sake of fashion. Unfortunately it (or worse still bastardised versions of it) has become so entrenched it is followed more like it is religion than fashion. Some developers can't be talked out of it with any reasoning - they just tell me it has to be that way, because it's programming. Like religion, logic seems to have no place.
In the days when you wrote complicated code in older forms of C that required casting all sorts of things to pointers (through char * before void existed), greater programmer care with the scope and type of variables was important. There were all sorts of things that a compiler wouldn't catch, so sometimes it was worth sacrificing code readability. Now, of course, it mostly just doesn't make sense to make the sacrifice. Compilers handle data types just fine, and you don't have to cast through some totally unrelated type in modern languages. OO languages keep a lid on scope: you don't have masses of global variables. OO languages also introduce polymorphism, in which H.N. or type based naming can be very misleading. Code clarity is very valuable, and more natural language is one tool to achieve this (see Knuth's Literate Programming for some interesting ideas). It frustrates me no end when people want me to read a series of codes (with no vowels!) as if I were a computer. Give me language instead: I've been handling that since before I could walk.
I think this particular fashion persists so strongly despite common sense for a number of reasons:
The availability of bottled water has failed to convinced me not to use water from the tap. I even use public drinking fountains. If the RIAA defines a successful distribution scheme as one in which they are always in control and always make a profit, then introducing P2P into the mix won't make them successful by their own measure.
Is that just the Swen worm, by any chance? It's all over the place, and sends mail claiming to be from MS Technical Support.
If it is, it's not quite the same as spam - the people sending it to you don't even know they're doing it, so anti-spamming laws aren't going to make them stop. I share your anger at what spam has done to email, but I think it is important to understand it and differentiate it from other annoyances such as worms and viruses if we are to deal with the situation.
Legislation seems unlikely to be a complete solution to spam, because it only takes one country without the same laws (or one failing to enforce laws) for the problem to continue. It's going to take technical solutions (e.g. filtering) and social solutions (e.g. better educated users) as well to really solve the problem.
New computer hardware and software is the last thing they need. What they've got is highly reliable, very thoroughly designed for safety, and a very well known quantity. Sure its old, but so what? When was the last time we heard of a computer problem in the shuttle endangering the astronaut's lives? The big dangers are the propulsion system and the complexity of a horizontal landing vehicle that was designed to be (but fails to be) re-useable.
A change to hardware or software is a very big deal because it's all so complicated: there are so many potential points of failure that maintaining quality is very difficult and expensive. I'd hate to think what we would get now if we changed software just for the sake of change. We'd probably end up with something that was built to a budget, not a quality standard.
Some of MS's TV and radio advertising already approaches things from this angle - they are working on building an image, not conveying real information about their product. No different from a large proportion of other advertising. They have advertisements that don't promote real features of the product they're trying to sell, or try talk about quality or price competitiveness. Either they think their target audience just isn't interested in these kinds of things, or they think that the only thing they've got going for them is hype.
Phony image building campaigns can turn me right off a product. I'd like to think that everyone else reacts like this too, but there's overwhelming evidence that this is not the case. We're getting the crap we deserve because we're so gullible.
If this is a defense strategy, the RIAA could turn it around into an attack strategy.
They could insist that now they need to confiscate all your computer equipment as evidence to confirm or deny the probable crime they detected, because the network 'evidence' is not longer trustworthy. This may sound unlikely from a legal perspective, but they've shown they have the power to make unlikely things happen (e.g. DMCA), and the arrogance to stomp on their potential customers. Instead of just getting a law suit delivered to you, you'd get a visit from enforcement officials to remove your equipment, along with a nice invitation to visit the courts in a year or two's time, at which point you may or may not get your gear back.
I'm 35. I was born in a country town, and back then, our oven was a wood burner. Our heating was by a kerosene heater - I still remember it. Utilities and services that we take for granted in the city take a while to get out to the bush because rural Australia is mostly quite sparsely populated. A large proportion of our population lives in a small number of cities, and the rest of the country could be categorised as 'mostly empty'.
Telecommunication capabilities in the more remote regions are still considered to be below standard. This issue is one of the major sticking points in the Australian government's attempts to fully privatise our (effective monopoly) major telecommunications carrier, Telstra. There is a fear that a privatised Telstra would not see value in providing service to remote regions, and would not install lines or would let maintenance go, further isolating people.
It's hard to imagine that he personally understands the issues involved. It seems more likely that he's been given advice, and not gotten involved or objected because it's all gone way over his head.
It's when he makes off the cuff comments that his general cluelessness about IT is revealed - he didn't earn the title of "Biggest Luddite in the World" for nothing. Aside from the comments on closing chatrooms that several other posters have mentioned, he's also recently been taken to task over comments he made in the Senate about Electronic Frontiers Australia. There was a story in the Register only a few days ago. EFA were permitted to publish a reply in the parliamentary records, objecting to his description of them as "spokespeople of the porn industry".