In the case of Australia plenty was done to provide real competition, and we now have tons of ISPs strongly competing against each other. The problem was that the underlying physical network was owned by the privatised formerly-government monopoly and there was no realistic way for someone else to run their own cables to every home and business in the country, thus we have the NBN. A public monopoly providing fibre is better than a private monopoly providing shitty copper cable, slow speeds and stingy bandwidth limits.
For experimental/observational science 'the universe' and 'the observable universe' are the same thing, as by definition that's all we can know actually exists. If you think there's a distinction between the 2 terms you're the one making an assumption.*
* This is not necessarily a bad thing, there are many cosmological theories that feature the idea that there are vast areas of the universe beyond our current abilities to detect them. However all such theories are only at the hypothesis stage - currently without observational or experimental evidence.
Why would you have to go through airport-style security to get on a train? All the high-speed trains in Europe you just walk onto the platform and get on. The hugely expensive hassle of trying to security scan a train load of people is just not worth it compared to the statistically minuscule chance of a terrorist attack.
Exactly. Where I'm (temporarily) living in Germany they take a zero-tolerance attitude to fights in nightclubs and bars. A friend of mine was involved in a one-punch fight - the other guy was unharmed and there was no blood. However the bouncers still called the cops, who arrived and took everyone's details etc. In a minor case like that it ended up with just a letter being sent out a few months later saying 'no further action'.
But it's why you can go out at night in Germany very safely - the cops investigate and take seriously every little assault. We need to do that in Australia, and to avoid clogging the courts with minor assaults introduce an exclusion-from-licensed-premises scheme, where the excluded person still has the right to challenge it in court if they wish.
I've even heard of people in Sydney being given suspended sentences over glassings. That needs to stop too, if you glass somebody and cause permanent scarring or even loss of an eye you should expect to spend some years in gaol, it's GBH. It needs to be punished severely for people to get the message that it's not just part of the average nightly brawl that you pick up a glass and go all in.
Anyone who's lived in Australia recently will now about the increasingly restrictive and puritanical direction our alcohol and pub/club licensing laws are going in. The usual reason brought up is the violence, which anecdotally and in my own experience is much worse than in similar places in Europe. However alcohol is seen as the cause of it all so law-abiding people get stung with sky-high alcohol prices (highest in the world outside the Nordic countries) and really restrictive door entry policies and closing hours.
If they setup some proper exclusion scheme to exclude violent people, with proper judicial oversight and judicial right of appeal - perhaps with tribunals similar to the industrial relations ones, we could stop the majority of the violence and do away with the puritanism.
I don't understand this, how can you not be able to create subnets out of a whole 64-bit address space? Is this some fault or oversight in the IPv6 standard?
My parents did the same thing, and I think even the word 'gullible' is a bit harsh. For people who don't know much about computers they thought they were doing the right thing, after all McAfee and Symantec are big companies with what should be polished commercial products advertised in the media and available in many stores. How were they to know that really these products are bloated and overkill for what they do and that better products are available for free?
Last time I was at home I solved the problem by installing Windows Security Essentials on both their computers.
"1) Why would a *biology* journal publish physics work?"
'Biology' is a mistranslation. The word Naturwissenschaft literally means 'natural sciences' and means any science dealing with the natural world - eg. biology, physics and chemistry, as opposed to social science (Sozialwissenschaft), the arts/humanities (Geisteswissenschaft) and other branches of science.
If Firefox did that too, then you'd end up with the situation where Firefox users running on Windows would be able to view H.264 and Firefox users on a Free operating system would not.
My Linux OS plays H.264 videos, DVDs, wmv, wma and a host of other formats that are patent-encumbered or otherwise not 'free'. While I'd rather see the patent-free WebM win this battle Firefox should still support whatever the system has codecs installed for - almost every Linux system used as a desktop is going to have the x264 codec, among others, installed.
The number of purists who actually have a pure Free software Linux desktop system is very low as such a system wouldn't be able to do many of the most common desktop tasks such as use Wifi, play Flash videos, play DVDs or indeed play any videos.
It's true that the Australian government doesn't need to ask for donations to shore itself up during this crisis, unlike perhaps Haiti's or Pakistan's governments. Australia is a very rich country with relatively low debt, the amount of money the government can raise on the open market is many orders of magnitude greater than what any donation appeal can raise.
However it's not that simple, even if the Aussie federal and Qld state governments are very generous there are always limits to what you can pay for with the public purse. They can't and won't just rebuild everyone's house and business for them, nor compensate businesses for lost trade nor cover dozens of other big and little losses and expenses that people affected by this crisis have.
So yes there are probably people in very poor countries who have worse things to worry about than many of the people affected by this flood, but equally money you donate to this will really help out someone at the worst time of their life.
Make your own decision about which is best and then please keep it to yourself, getting into the 'do they deserve charity' discussion is simply unnecessary.
Funnily enough I never said Internet Censorship had been defeated for ever and ever. I simply pointed out that Australia does not currently censor the internet and won't under the current political situation.
No we're not, the necessary legislation was never even introduced to parliament. Even if it was, and somehow managed to get voted through, it would be killed in the senate due to the changes brought about during the recent election - the government got its arse kicked over issues like this.
On the face of it you'd be right, but the issue isn't that simple. A previous government set the GST thresholds to increasingly higher levels in the first few years after the GST introduction because they realised it was costing more to enforce the tax on these small imports than they were taking in.
The retailers are effectively asking for the government to put up artificial roadblocks for online shoppers. Since overseas retailers aren't going to collect taxes for the Aussie government the only way to work it would mean that everyone has to line up in a massive queue outside the post office on saturday morning to go in and pay some stupid little fee to retrieve their online shopping packages. Harvey and co. are hoping this artificial inconvenience will reduce the competition from online shopping - instead of them actually having to compete.
Some friends of mine did a tour through there - to within ~200 metres of the reactor 'sarcophagus' a few months ago. These tours have been running for years now form several different operators. Look up any travel website or just google 'chernobyl tours' and you'll find plenty about this.
I read the article but still can't understand WTF it's about when you consider these tours have been going on for years.
Yeah tariff was probably the wrong word there. Better said it's the phone companies exploiting the fact the eu is halfway between a trade agreement and a proper federal state to try and collude across national boundaries. This does require government to solve, the eu govt specifically.
Right, and roaming charges have never even existed within most of the individual member states.
However the EU is still not a single federal nation state like the US, Australia or Germany are, for eg. Eliminating what is effectively an import tariff on a service provided from one member state being 'imported' into another is the job of government, and does create a free market in the end (2015 in this case).
Re:Oracle is pure evil.
on
RIP, SunSolve
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· Score: 1
Nowadays not only do you need a web browser with a modern version of Flash and an account, but you can't get patches at all without an expensive support contract.
I realise you're being sarcastic but it's still worth pointing out that this isn't socialism, it's the use of the same anti-collusion (anti-trust) laws that you guys have over in the US. Basically the EU Commission worked out that phone companies were colluding (illegal in the free market) to fix phone charges for roaming.
They then had the choice of going through a normal collusion investigation, spending huge amounts of tax-payers money in court and investigation fees and at the end probably coming up with fines of a few hundred million Euros - a small write-off for these companies. They chose the smart way - since the EU is one market companies shouldn't be allowed to charge higher prices for services that are 'imported' from another country in the EU.
It's a rare example of governments just doing their job properly, although it's not all perfect. 2015 is a long time, especially since they started this in 2007 or 2008 and since then have been slowly lowering prices - it's gone from extreme rip-off towards the current more moderate rip-off. They really should have brought this law in for 2011 - 3 or 4 years is more than enough time for phone companies to adjust, esp. since most mobile contracts are less than 2 years.
Be careful there! An insurance company may request information, implying that it is required, that they are not, by law, entitled to. This happened to me.
Ok but at a minimum they're going to be able to demand the same information as is on the Krankenkasse cards aren't they? I mean demand as in say if you dont give us the info we don't pay you.
If I had a doctor visit that I don't want the insurance company to know about, I just don't submit it, and sit on the costs myself.
You could do the exact same thing as a publicly insured patient - just book the doctor's appointment or whatever and pay for it yourself.
In 20+ years of living in Germany, only once have the police requested an ID from me.
Same with me - in over 2 years I've never been asked for ID, doesn't change the fact that the law applies to foreigners like us as well.
It's not ideological, rather empirical. My girlfriend (state insured) had an allergy problem, and had to first go to her General Praticioner (Hausartz) to get a referral to an allergy specialist, who did a set of allergy tests. Since they all came up negative, the doctor needed to do another set of tests. Oh, but the state insurance only allows one set of tests per calender quarter. "Sorry, come back in two months." As a private insured patient, the doctor can do whatever is necessary, whenever it is necessary. Recently there was something in the news about how dentists had used up all their allotment for treatments, so they were telling people to come back in January. No, thanks.
Private insurance has all sorts of exceptions and limitations such as 'will only pay X number of these treatments per year', 'will only pay X% of the cost of this' too. It's better for some people's circumstances (me included) but not automatically better than the public system.
The bills get sent directly to me. I pay the bills myself directly. It is my responsibility to do the paperwork, and submit that to the insurance company. They reimburse me then directly. So to reiterate, no 'tracking data' is sent from my doctor to the health insurance company; they only get what I choose to send them.
There's no secret 'tracking data'. Plus with private insurance you have no choice what you can send or not - you have to send exactly what the insurance company requires of you.
German citizens are required to carry their ID card at all times. The police can request to see your ID card at any time for no reason, and can fine you if you do not have it with you. But the police usually only do this to people who are causing trouble. "Papers, please!"
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweisgesetz Funnily enough this law applies to foreigners in Germany as well, meaning you have to carry around your passport or some other identification, eg. drivers licence.
Private insurance is a lot cheaper than the state affiliated insurance companies, it has better service, it's more flexible, etc. Gee, something in the private sector is better than what is offered by the government? Go figure.
It's only better depending on your personal circumstances, eg. for young single people it's clearly better. But choosing insurance purely based on some ideological 'private must be better' basis in Germany would probably just end up getting you a bad deal - the system is very complex.
At any rate, the publicly insured folks' cards get read with every visit to the doctor. Who knows where all this tracking data is stored, and what it is used for? Again, something I don't want.
The same 'tracking data', and possibly more, is stored and sent off for a private patient - if it wasn't your private insurance would have nothing to evaluate the claim on and simply wouldn't pay you or the doctor/hospital.
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In the case of Australia plenty was done to provide real competition, and we now have tons of ISPs strongly competing against each other. The problem was that the underlying physical network was owned by the privatised formerly-government monopoly and there was no realistic way for someone else to run their own cables to every home and business in the country, thus we have the NBN. A public monopoly providing fibre is better than a private monopoly providing shitty copper cable, slow speeds and stingy bandwidth limits.
For experimental/observational science 'the universe' and 'the observable universe' are the same thing, as by definition that's all we can know actually exists. If you think there's a distinction between the 2 terms you're the one making an assumption.*
* This is not necessarily a bad thing, there are many cosmological theories that feature the idea that there are vast areas of the universe beyond our current abilities to detect them. However all such theories are only at the hypothesis stage - currently without observational or experimental evidence.
Why would you have to go through airport-style security to get on a train? All the high-speed trains in Europe you just walk onto the platform and get on. The hugely expensive hassle of trying to security scan a train load of people is just not worth it compared to the statistically minuscule chance of a terrorist attack.
Exactly. Where I'm (temporarily) living in Germany they take a zero-tolerance attitude to fights in nightclubs and bars. A friend of mine was involved in a one-punch fight - the other guy was unharmed and there was no blood. However the bouncers still called the cops, who arrived and took everyone's details etc. In a minor case like that it ended up with just a letter being sent out a few months later saying 'no further action'.
But it's why you can go out at night in Germany very safely - the cops investigate and take seriously every little assault. We need to do that in Australia, and to avoid clogging the courts with minor assaults introduce an exclusion-from-licensed-premises scheme, where the excluded person still has the right to challenge it in court if they wish.
I've even heard of people in Sydney being given suspended sentences over glassings. That needs to stop too, if you glass somebody and cause permanent scarring or even loss of an eye you should expect to spend some years in gaol, it's GBH. It needs to be punished severely for people to get the message that it's not just part of the average nightly brawl that you pick up a glass and go all in.
Anyone who's lived in Australia recently will now about the increasingly restrictive and puritanical direction our alcohol and pub/club licensing laws are going in. The usual reason brought up is the violence, which anecdotally and in my own experience is much worse than in similar places in Europe. However alcohol is seen as the cause of it all so law-abiding people get stung with sky-high alcohol prices (highest in the world outside the Nordic countries) and really restrictive door entry policies and closing hours.
If they setup some proper exclusion scheme to exclude violent people, with proper judicial oversight and judicial right of appeal - perhaps with tribunals similar to the industrial relations ones, we could stop the majority of the violence and do away with the puritanism.
I don't understand this, how can you not be able to create subnets out of a whole 64-bit address space? Is this some fault or oversight in the IPv6 standard?
My parents did the same thing, and I think even the word 'gullible' is a bit harsh. For people who don't know much about computers they thought they were doing the right thing, after all McAfee and Symantec are big companies with what should be polished commercial products advertised in the media and available in many stores. How were they to know that really these products are bloated and overkill for what they do and that better products are available for free?
Last time I was at home I solved the problem by installing Windows Security Essentials on both their computers.
"1) Why would a *biology* journal publish physics work?"
'Biology' is a mistranslation. The word Naturwissenschaft literally means 'natural sciences' and means any science dealing with the natural world - eg. biology, physics and chemistry, as opposed to social science (Sozialwissenschaft), the arts/humanities (Geisteswissenschaft) and other branches of science.
http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/journal/114 makes it clear that this journal deals with physics too.
Still open-minded scepticism is the way to go until there are independently verified results.
Or is it endemic to the fact that the US government does things on a scale no other operation in the world does?
No, it doesn't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_German_Border
(Not that I'm saying setting up an Inner-German border style system would be a good idea, just that a fence on this scale has been done before)
If Firefox did that too, then you'd end up with the situation where Firefox users running on Windows would be able to view H.264 and Firefox users on a Free operating system would not.
My Linux OS plays H.264 videos, DVDs, wmv, wma and a host of other formats that are patent-encumbered or otherwise not 'free'. While I'd rather see the patent-free WebM win this battle Firefox should still support whatever the system has codecs installed for - almost every Linux system used as a desktop is going to have the x264 codec, among others, installed.
The number of purists who actually have a pure Free software Linux desktop system is very low as such a system wouldn't be able to do many of the most common desktop tasks such as use Wifi, play Flash videos, play DVDs or indeed play any videos.
It's true that the Australian government doesn't need to ask for donations to shore itself up during this crisis, unlike perhaps Haiti's or Pakistan's governments. Australia is a very rich country with relatively low debt, the amount of money the government can raise on the open market is many orders of magnitude greater than what any donation appeal can raise.
However it's not that simple, even if the Aussie federal and Qld state governments are very generous there are always limits to what you can pay for with the public purse. They can't and won't just rebuild everyone's house and business for them, nor compensate businesses for lost trade nor cover dozens of other big and little losses and expenses that people affected by this crisis have.
So yes there are probably people in very poor countries who have worse things to worry about than many of the people affected by this flood, but equally money you donate to this will really help out someone at the worst time of their life.
Make your own decision about which is best and then please keep it to yourself, getting into the 'do they deserve charity' discussion is simply unnecessary.
Funnily enough I never said Internet Censorship had been defeated for ever and ever. I simply pointed out that Australia does not currently censor the internet and won't under the current political situation.
Australia is filtering the net
No we're not, the necessary legislation was never even introduced to parliament. Even if it was, and somehow managed to get voted through, it would be killed in the senate due to the changes brought about during the recent election - the government got its arse kicked over issues like this.
On the face of it you'd be right, but the issue isn't that simple. A previous government set the GST thresholds to increasingly higher levels in the first few years after the GST introduction because they realised it was costing more to enforce the tax on these small imports than they were taking in.
The retailers are effectively asking for the government to put up artificial roadblocks for online shoppers. Since overseas retailers aren't going to collect taxes for the Aussie government the only way to work it would mean that everyone has to line up in a massive queue outside the post office on saturday morning to go in and pay some stupid little fee to retrieve their online shopping packages. Harvey and co. are hoping this artificial inconvenience will reduce the competition from online shopping - instead of them actually having to compete.
Some friends of mine did a tour through there - to within ~200 metres of the reactor 'sarcophagus' a few months ago. These tours have been running for years now form several different operators. Look up any travel website or just google 'chernobyl tours' and you'll find plenty about this.
I read the article but still can't understand WTF it's about when you consider these tours have been going on for years.
Yeah tariff was probably the wrong word there. Better said it's the phone companies exploiting the fact the eu is halfway between a trade agreement and a proper federal state to try and collude across national boundaries. This does require government to solve, the eu govt specifically.
Right, and roaming charges have never even existed within most of the individual member states.
However the EU is still not a single federal nation state like the US, Australia or Germany are, for eg. Eliminating what is effectively an import tariff on a service provided from one member state being 'imported' into another is the job of government, and does create a free market in the end (2015 in this case).
Nowadays not only do you need a web browser with a modern version of Flash and an account, but you can't get patches at all without an expensive support contract.
FTFY
That's what they're doing, but they're doing it (too) slowly. There will be no more notion of 'abroad' between EU countries phone contracts by 2015.
No, that's socialism, and you go to hell for that
I realise you're being sarcastic but it's still worth pointing out that this isn't socialism, it's the use of the same anti-collusion (anti-trust) laws that you guys have over in the US. Basically the EU Commission worked out that phone companies were colluding (illegal in the free market) to fix phone charges for roaming.
They then had the choice of going through a normal collusion investigation, spending huge amounts of tax-payers money in court and investigation fees and at the end probably coming up with fines of a few hundred million Euros - a small write-off for these companies. They chose the smart way - since the EU is one market companies shouldn't be allowed to charge higher prices for services that are 'imported' from another country in the EU.
It's a rare example of governments just doing their job properly, although it's not all perfect. 2015 is a long time, especially since they started this in 2007 or 2008 and since then have been slowly lowering prices - it's gone from extreme rip-off towards the current more moderate rip-off. They really should have brought this law in for 2011 - 3 or 4 years is more than enough time for phone companies to adjust, esp. since most mobile contracts are less than 2 years.
No, Paypal is a subsidiary of ebay, a US company based in California.
Paypal's European office is in Luxembourg.
Mod parent up. Unless the GP can provide the link of the bug report where it's not been acknowledged or fixed I'd say this has been called out.
Be careful there! An insurance company may request information, implying that it is required, that they are not, by law, entitled to. This happened to me.
Ok but at a minimum they're going to be able to demand the same information as is on the Krankenkasse cards aren't they? I mean demand as in say if you dont give us the info we don't pay you.
If I had a doctor visit that I don't want the insurance company to know about, I just don't submit it, and sit on the costs myself.
You could do the exact same thing as a publicly insured patient - just book the doctor's appointment or whatever and pay for it yourself.
In 20+ years of living in Germany, only once have the police requested an ID from me.
Same with me - in over 2 years I've never been asked for ID, doesn't change the fact that the law applies to foreigners like us as well.
It's not ideological, rather empirical. My girlfriend (state insured) had an allergy problem, and had to first go to her General Praticioner (Hausartz) to get a referral to an allergy specialist, who did a set of allergy tests. Since they all came up negative, the doctor needed to do another set of tests. Oh, but the state insurance only allows one set of tests per calender quarter. "Sorry, come back in two months." As a private insured patient, the doctor can do whatever is necessary, whenever it is necessary. Recently there was something in the news about how dentists had used up all their allotment for treatments, so they were telling people to come back in January. No, thanks.
Private insurance has all sorts of exceptions and limitations such as 'will only pay X number of these treatments per year', 'will only pay X% of the cost of this' too. It's better for some people's circumstances (me included) but not automatically better than the public system.
The bills get sent directly to me. I pay the bills myself directly. It is my responsibility to do the paperwork, and submit that to the insurance company. They reimburse me then directly. So to reiterate, no 'tracking data' is sent from my doctor to the health insurance company; they only get what I choose to send them.
The types information that can be stored on a health insurance card are set down by Germany's data protection laws:
http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/sgb_5/__291a.html
There's no secret 'tracking data'. Plus with private insurance you have no choice what you can send or not - you have to send exactly what the insurance company requires of you.
German citizens are required to carry their ID card at all times. The police can request to see your ID card at any time for no reason, and can fine you if you do not have it with you. But the police usually only do this to people who are causing trouble. "Papers, please!"
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personalausweisgesetz
Funnily enough this law applies to foreigners in Germany as well, meaning you have to carry around your passport or some other identification, eg. drivers licence.
Private insurance is a lot cheaper than the state affiliated insurance companies, it has better service, it's more flexible, etc. Gee, something in the private sector is better than what is offered by the government? Go figure.
It's only better depending on your personal circumstances, eg. for young single people it's clearly better. But choosing insurance purely based on some ideological 'private must be better' basis in Germany would probably just end up getting you a bad deal - the system is very complex.
At any rate, the publicly insured folks' cards get read with every visit to the doctor. Who knows where all this tracking data is stored, and what it is used for? Again, something I don't want.
The same 'tracking data', and possibly more, is stored and sent off for a private patient - if it wasn't your private insurance would have nothing to evaluate the claim on and simply wouldn't pay you or the doctor/hospital.