The reason members of the British Commonwealth call you people "Yanks" has absolutely nothing to do with your Civil War (which is of no interest to anyone outside the USA).
In this case "Yank" denotes "Septic Tank", due to the way that most Americans (the ones we meet our countries that we get to talk to, instead of being shot or blown up by) come across as being full of shit.
I've sent letters to both sides of parliament on this issue, and oddly enough I havent got an answer back. In the past I've got back letters that say "Thanks for sending us your letter, we will try to ensure that all opinions are considered blah blah blah" type things.
I've worked with these types of cards (I assume that other/. readers have as well), and know too well the limitations of them. Just like any other electronic media, they're not that hard to copy. I've spelt out to Abbott and Costello (I kid you not people who arnt in Oz, these are the names of two members of our government, and are the two who have the most say in what goes on in this case) the risks and limitations of the M-card technology they are considering, and explained exactly how easy it will be for an underground industry to start making and "fixing" these cards.
Due to the resounding silence I've got back I have to assume that the purpose of the cards is NOT to simplify access to Government services and t combat fraud, but rather to work as an ID card.
Find the total bytes used in the current directory
The example is a 6 line script in ksh, or, a 3 step pipeline using awk to do the following:
du -b .
Hmmm...
Example 5
Find out when a process is no longer running.
The example shell script is 11 lines long, features two tests and two pipelines into variables to do the following:
while
ps -e | grep application ; do
sleep 10
done
echo "not running no more"
These are just two - I can see simple little pieces of shell that are trivial to make work on any modern posix system for all the examples provided, except for the laughable
Example 6
where they (Microsoft's rather amazing ksh coders) say there's no way in Unix to see what version of the code is running. Well yes, it's not the shell's job to keep track of that, but anything written using gnu getopts or written by anyone who actually keeps track of versions uses '-v' or '-V' to display that information.
The so-called examples page I linked to is really a page that is designed to convince Windows-only people that they can now have the power we have been used to for 20+ years. Anyone who actually has written any scripts bigger than "echo 'Hello World!'" would be laughing at their examples of "Unix Shell Scripts".
If it were, we could pretty much completely eliminate all driving fatalities by restricting cars to a top speed of 3 mph, forcing drivers to make only right-hand turns, and requiring a monthly driving test.
Somehow you seem to be implying that the above statement is false. I'm pretty sure it's true that if you did those things then road fatalities would be reduced to near zero.
Please also keep in mind that the majority of Christians arn't the "American Rabid Money Worshipping" kind. Most Christians outside the USA worship Christ, and not the $$ or televangilist.
I consider Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic etc to be "Eastern" (the "Middle East" thing I guess) but yes, I agree that there was a lot of stuff saved in Baghdad and Damascus.
Your tale reminds me of the bith of our 4th child. My wife had a spinal epidural block, and the surgeon started to cut (all 5 of our kids were ceasarians). Now due to the repeated cutting of the one spot, Jo can feel anything where the external incision is. Once the surgeon got inside she said "I can feel that!". The block hadn't worked at all!
She was given the option for a general anesthetic, but she decided she wanted to see the boy as soon as he was out. She lay there, starapped to the table, with surgeons cutting and mucking about inside here and she felt the whole bloody thing! She lay there, tears streaming from here eyes, and said "Trussed up like this I guess this is what Jesus went through".
As soon as Cooper was born she didnt care about the pain.
Now I don't know if that can be compared to electric shocks in the scrotum, but both cases show that people can stand a lot more pain than the ignorant masses would think.
A hell of a lot of Western knowledge was lost due to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, which happened early in the 1st millenium. Amongst other things lost were originals of Aristotle and Euclid, and Heron's plans for his steam car.
It's thought by some that we still haven't brought geometry to the state it was in before the Dark Ages.
We do have to keep in mind though that non-western civilisations kept most of their knowledge until the colonial powers trivialised and marginalised it. A great example is the Ancient Chinese proof of "Pythagoras' Theorem", which is simpler and clearer than Euclid's, to the extent that I use it when teaching, and have never had a student fail to understand it.
WTF?!? Why was this modded "Funny"? "True", "Very True" or "Why the hell don't we just beat the crap out of the bullies" would be better!
Also note that it doesnt always work though. There's this country that acts as an international bully, and despite a very small number of slaps from the oppressed, this bully nation still insists on invading other countries, trampling their sovreignity...
Oh, I understand now why it was modded funny, as after all, what country do most/. readers come from...
And where is the fossil evidence that the duckbill platypus evolved from another species?
There is a very complete collection of fossils of proto-monotremes. In fact the oldest mammal fossil ever found is a direct ancestor of the modern platypus. Monotremes have this habit of living in holes in the ground, with the entrances either under water or temporarily closed for protection. This tends to make it easier to end up as a fossil rather than as a meal.
I suggest you read almost any credible book on paleo-biology and you'll see how we know more about the extinct predecessors of the platypus than we do about most other creatures.
You could try the company linked to in the post I replied to, or else just get an old bike, an old generator from a car (or alternator if you like playing with AC) and a regulator (rectifier if you like AC - just a Diode is not enough by the way unless you like over-voltage in your laptop battery!) from an old car as well, and by cunning use of a multimeter, a screwdriver and by reading your lap-top's power supply label (i.e. output voltage, peak current and especially polarity) you should be able to make a home charger. Bonus points for one that gives you real mobile computing by making it run on a not-so-old bike so you can ride around, charging your laptop whilst you find all those unsecured WAP points [grin].
Note that as this is pre-IC technology we're talking here, you might want to track down an old auto-alectric manual (1960's vintage) to work out how to adjust a mechanical voltage regulator, or even talk to an aging car fan. I know you young folk have problems with electric devices that arnt packed in bakelite with 40 legs...
For about 60 years students across outback Australia studied via the "School of the Air" using 2-way radios which were pedal powered.
As well as educating those in remote locations, we also got a nation of excellent long-distance bicycle riders.
It is very cheap to create power - take one old bicycle frame, and one old car alternator or generator. Attach the back wheel of the bike to the generator via a bubber belt or rope. Pedal.
Regulator/rectifiers need only cost a few cents as well.
A real hacker builds this kind of low tech solution in an afternoon. The wannabees buy one from companies with shiny websites.
In the real world, back when I was young, these sorts of problems were solved using these incredible devices we had:
Paper
Pencil
Book of Logarithms (when accuracy could be let slide a bit)
Slide Rule (when accuracy didnt matter very much at all)
Human Brains.
The problem listed isnt that hard, and is a pretty simple problem to solve using the Dual Simplex method.
In particular, since you didnt really specify the numbers involved, the solution can be written as a single linear matrix relation.
In the old days we had to deal with matrices with hundreds of rows and columns, and we did it by pen and paper. How do you think such things as power networks, phone networks, factory producation lines etc were designed back before electronic computers became ubiquitous?
This is not that hard a problem, compared with things we used to do with pen and paper in the Good Old Days.
For example:
I wish to lay out power lines from a power plant to reach as many potential consumers as possible. I know:
How much a tower can hold.
How much one costs to build (this includes the costs of transport of materials, builders etc)
How likely any particular line segment is to suffer failure.
Where and by how much suburbs are likely to expand.
A map of places I can't ever build my towers.
So what network should I build to (a) minimise the chance of an extended power outage at any serviced location (b) to minimise building and maintenance costs (c) to allow for probable growth patterns?
This problem (which is awefully close to what you are describing) was a known problem in the 1920's, and was solved using NO electronic computers.
It's considered the top (or one of the very top) scientific journals.
Nature is the cream of the "newspaper style" journals. But it's not one of the top journals, that position is held by such publications as Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Proceedings of the Royal Society and other such things. It's probably one of the most accessible cross-discipline journals, and it much more rigorous than say Scientific American. Nature is a great place to find research notes on topics that are "hot" or high-profile. But if you want to read about what is really happening, or if you want some detail, there are any number of journals that rank higher, unless you are only considering the Grants Committee perspective, in which case Nature rates highly due to it's wide publication.
Perhaps the people surveyed included folks like me....
Back in the Olden Days, when I was young and played guitar in pubs, there was a bloke who had a Bose PA system. It ran to about 600W per side as I recall (we're talking mid 1980s here), and consisted of these wierd "little" (1100mm x 800mm x 800mm) bins, each with 2 "port" on the front with 8cm dia holes in them. On several occasions we ran these poor things till there was a red glow coming from those ports. Yet systems kept working, and kept sounding great.
There was no way Mark could of got a better PA for less, either in terms of quality, reliability or compactness. I would think that anyone who'd heard that PA and seen that would have a high degree of trust in the brand.
To further put things in perspective, Bose has car and home systems? I seem to vaguely recall someone telling me he'd bought a new stereo, and the speakers were Bose, and based on the PA speakers. This was in 1984 or 1985 I think. I remember them being quite nice - they had some kind of spectral analysis, and they auto adjusted EQ and cross-overs based on what was happening in the room. I had no idea that they had "consumer" products in general though.
Since I havent heard a modern Bose speaker set, if you'd have asked me to judge them I've have scored them high. Based on what people are saying I'd be shocked if I heard them.
I find if frightenign that everyoen is willing to turn a blind eye to the E.U.'s corrupt legal system simpyl because it's Microsoft at the receiving end of the raw deal here.
Is this anymore frightening than turning a blind eye to a corrupt legal system that allows people to buy what is arguably the most powerful political position in the world?
Or do you subscribe to the model seen so many times by 'The Rest Of The World (TM)', the American "Do As I Say, Don't Do As I Do" system? The same legal system that holds people in gaol for 4 years without trial, by holding them in a prison outside of the mainland USA.
Remove the log from your own eye before you complain about the splinter in someone else's.
2) Not recognizing MSFT's intellectual property would be a very, very stupid move. It would put in doubt all the other company's IP security.
And what legal basis is there anyway? MSFT has secured copyrights, you can't remove them unless there is a copyright infringement or some other IP-related issues. Dropping IP just because the company won't sell in your market, is stupid, stupid, stupid.
What's stupid is using the term "intellectual property". Do you mean "copyright"? If so say "copyright", for which there are ample laws. Or do you mean "patents", for which there are laws, even if not very good ones.
There is no such thing as "intellectual property". There are no laws about "intellectual property". There are no "IP-related issues", as you can have things existing that are all related to something that doesn't exist, unless the relation is non-existant - i.e. there is no such thing as "intellectual property".
Are these the chicks that jumped into the Boiling Mud Pools? Seriously, Kiwi chicks are interesting in that they don't seem to have any concpet of "un-natural act", which can be a lot of fun (and can also cause a lot of guilt - think very carefully before you try some of the things they suggest, it might just be a bit more than you can handle).
But due to the inbreeding, unless you like that particular look (2m high and wide), and the simplicity of communication (they only have 2 vowels - "ugh" and "eh"), or unless you want a live act for a novel pay-per-view website, I'd strongly suggest you try Aussie chicks.
Great point. I got an email from DoDo (my ISP) the other day, where they offered to add SPAM tags to my e-mails for a small monthly fee.
Now I can't see how routing ALL mail through spam-assasin so it gets tagged actually costs anything extra and above 4 or 5 people doing this. So I've come to the conclusion that DoDo sees this ruling as a great way to make money from spam, and and they have NO committment to cutting down spam going through the network.
DoDo charges a monthly fee plus data charges after a certain amount of usage. These fees are capped at different levels based on plan. So IF clients are getting spam to their machines, then DoDo earns more money.
If only I could find an ISP with a clue that charges a realistic fee I'd be away from DoDo so fast.
A recent report showed that spam (mass unwanted email) now accounts for three-quarters of all email traffic, up from 40% in 2003. In addition to the amount of spam, viruses are most commonly known to be transferred via email. They attach themselves to emails sent from other computers with viruses, and quickly spread out to thousands, even hundreds of thousands of users.
Because of the large increase in spam and viruses, Dodo has implemented 2 new systems, Spam Filters and Virus Filters. The new Spam Filter will mark any commonly known spam emails delivered to your individual mailbox with a [SPAM] tag at the front. The Virus Filter will tag any commonly known viruses with a [VIRUS] tag that are delivered to your individual mailbox.
If you are interested in having spam or virus filters setup on your mailbox, for just $1.90 per filter per month or $2.50 for both, please enter account management and select the Mail/Web tab then follow the steps displayed.
I find this rather immoral - I fail to see why every mail isn't scanned and tagged for virus.
We now have a set of Taxes everytime we step on an aeroplane
Checked the cost of phone line rental recently? It's gone from $11 to $25 per month over the lat 5 years. This means that (thanks to the GST) there's a 100% increase in tax revenue (20% per year) for that single item alone. And we were told that the GST would lower the cost of services.
Given the 100% or higher increases in land and homes over the last few years (for example, in 1997 you could buy a 4 bedroom house on half an acre in Naranderra for between 60 and 70 thousand dollars. You'll pay $300,000 now) there's a further increase in tax (thanks to the GST) that's quite huge.
I don't buy the "It's the States fault arguement myself". How come in the pre-GST years of Labor Goverened Queensland they still had the high quality free-as-in-beer hospitals, yet now you go to a public hospital in Queensland if you don't mind a dose of MRSA or some untrained drug-fucked quack removing the wrong organs ( Hi Dr Patel! Killed many more patients recently?).
The fact is that revenue from taxation has grown far faster than either the general economy OR the CPI. The % of each dollar traded that ends up back to Treasury is at record levels. Afdter all, if there has been little significant decrease in spending, how do you get surpluses in the order of 10 to 15 billion dollars per year unless taxation revenue has increased?
I appreciate your comment about "blind fanatical hatred". But I assure you, this is fanatical hatred with eyes wide open. I see where this country's going under the Bush/Howard government, and "I don't like it" (Hi Pauline!). I don't like what my kids will have to put up with unless the trend changes back to a caring, compassionate society.
Don't vote for the ALP if you don't want to, but please, please be careful that your vote actually counts against that heartless lying bastard Howard. Remember, there were NO children thrown overboard, there were NO WMDs found. Our health system has been gutted, our national highways are becoming goat-tracks.
We've got a record current account deficit, record high taxes and a record surplus (again and again, every year). We've also got record costs for home rental, a policy of ingnoring climate change, the progressive sale of all our national assets (why sell Telstra, when it's profitable? Who sells a profitable business for any reason other than blind adherence to ideology?), involvement in a war that history will show to have been a bigger mistake than Viet-nam ever was, blind worship of the Bush Dictatorship and the Washington Consensus.
Think of your children, and whether you want them to grow up in the Oz where people care for each other, or in the 52nd state of the US where only the mighty $ is right.
Slashdot Mirror
It's rhyming slang, other examples are "dinner plate" for "mate". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang
In this case "Yank" denotes "Septic Tank", due to the way that most Americans (the ones we meet our countries that we get to talk to, instead of being shot or blown up by) come across as being full of shit.
I've worked with these types of cards (I assume that other /. readers have as well), and know too well the limitations of them. Just like any other electronic media, they're not that hard to copy. I've spelt out to Abbott and Costello (I kid you not people who arnt in Oz, these are the names of two members of our government, and are the two who have the most say in what goes on in this case) the risks and limitations of the M-card technology they are considering, and explained exactly how easy it will be for an underground industry to start making and "fixing" these cards.
Due to the resounding silence I've got back I have to assume that the purpose of the cards is NOT to simplify access to Government services and t combat fraud, but rather to work as an ID card.
Papers Please.
On my system ls is as well. So your point is?
Examples 3
Find the total bytes used in the current directory
The example is a 6 line script in ksh, or, a 3 step pipeline using awk to do the following:
du -b .
Hmmm...
Example 5
Find out when a process is no longer running.
The example shell script is 11 lines long, features two tests and two pipelines into variables to do the following:
while
ps -e | grep application ; do
sleep 10
done
echo "not running no more"
These are just two - I can see simple little pieces of shell that are trivial to make work on any modern posix system for all the examples provided, except for the laughable
Example 6
where they (Microsoft's rather amazing ksh coders) say there's no way in Unix to see what version of the code is running. Well yes, it's not the shell's job to keep track of that, but anything written using gnu getopts or written by anyone who actually keeps track of versions uses '-v' or '-V' to display that information.
The so-called examples page I linked to is really a page that is designed to convince Windows-only people that they can now have the power we have been used to for 20+ years. Anyone who actually has written any scripts bigger than "echo 'Hello World!'" would be laughing at their examples of "Unix Shell Scripts".
Somehow you seem to be implying that the above statement is false. I'm pretty sure it's true that if you did those things then road fatalities would be reduced to near zero.
Please also keep in mind that the majority of Christians arn't the "American Rabid Money Worshipping" kind. Most Christians outside the USA worship Christ, and not the $$ or televangilist.
I consider Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic etc to be "Eastern" (the "Middle East" thing I guess) but yes, I agree that there was a lot of stuff saved in Baghdad and Damascus.
She was given the option for a general anesthetic, but she decided she wanted to see the boy as soon as he was out. She lay there, starapped to the table, with surgeons cutting and mucking about inside here and she felt the whole bloody thing! She lay there, tears streaming from here eyes, and said "Trussed up like this I guess this is what Jesus went through".
As soon as Cooper was born she didnt care about the pain.
Now I don't know if that can be compared to electric shocks in the scrotum, but both cases show that people can stand a lot more pain than the ignorant masses would think.
A hell of a lot of Western knowledge was lost due to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, which happened early in the 1st millenium. Amongst other things lost were originals of Aristotle and Euclid, and Heron's plans for his steam car.
It's thought by some that we still haven't brought geometry to the state it was in before the Dark Ages.
We do have to keep in mind though that non-western civilisations kept most of their knowledge until the colonial powers trivialised and marginalised it. A great example is the Ancient Chinese proof of "Pythagoras' Theorem", which is simpler and clearer than Euclid's, to the extent that I use it when teaching, and have never had a student fail to understand it.
I'm pretty sure that trephination (opening the skull to let the demons out) predates the Romans by at least 2000 years, possibly a lot more.
Also note that it doesnt always work though. There's this country that acts as an international bully, and despite a very small number of slaps from the oppressed, this bully nation still insists on invading other countries, trampling their sovreignity...
Oh, I understand now why it was modded funny, as after all, what country do most /. readers come from...
There is a very complete collection of fossils of proto-monotremes. In fact the oldest mammal fossil ever found is a direct ancestor of the modern platypus. Monotremes have this habit of living in holes in the ground, with the entrances either under water or temporarily closed for protection. This tends to make it easier to end up as a fossil rather than as a meal.
I suggest you read almost any credible book on paleo-biology and you'll see how we know more about the extinct predecessors of the platypus than we do about most other creatures.
And yes I know Smalltalk completely shoots this arguement in the foot...
Note that as this is pre-IC technology we're talking here, you might want to track down an old auto-alectric manual (1960's vintage) to work out how to adjust a mechanical voltage regulator, or even talk to an aging car fan. I know you young folk have problems with electric devices that arnt packed in bakelite with 40 legs...
For about 60 years students across outback Australia studied via the "School of the Air" using 2-way radios which were pedal powered.
As well as educating those in remote locations, we also got a nation of excellent long-distance bicycle riders.
It is very cheap to create power - take one old bicycle frame, and one old car alternator or generator. Attach the back wheel of the bike to the generator via a bubber belt or rope. Pedal.
Regulator/rectifiers need only cost a few cents as well.
A real hacker builds this kind of low tech solution in an afternoon. The wannabees buy one from companies with shiny websites.
Paper
Pencil
Book of Logarithms (when accuracy could be let slide a bit)
Slide Rule (when accuracy didnt matter very much at all)
Human Brains.
The problem listed isnt that hard, and is a pretty simple problem to solve using the Dual Simplex method.
In particular, since you didnt really specify the numbers involved, the solution can be written as a single linear matrix relation.
In the old days we had to deal with matrices with hundreds of rows and columns, and we did it by pen and paper. How do you think such things as power networks, phone networks, factory producation lines etc were designed back before electronic computers became ubiquitous?
For example:
I wish to lay out power lines from a power plant to reach as many potential consumers as possible. I know:
How much a tower can hold.
How much one costs to build (this includes the costs of transport of materials, builders etc)
How likely any particular line segment is to suffer failure.
Where and by how much suburbs are likely to expand.
A map of places I can't ever build my towers.
So what network should I build to (a) minimise the chance of an extended power outage at any serviced location (b) to minimise building and maintenance costs (c) to allow for probable growth patterns?
This problem (which is awefully close to what you are describing) was a known problem in the 1920's, and was solved using NO electronic computers.
Nature is the cream of the "newspaper style" journals. But it's not one of the top journals, that position is held by such publications as Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Proceedings of the Royal Society and other such things. It's probably one of the most accessible cross-discipline journals, and it much more rigorous than say Scientific American. Nature is a great place to find research notes on topics that are "hot" or high-profile. But if you want to read about what is really happening, or if you want some detail, there are any number of journals that rank higher, unless you are only considering the Grants Committee perspective, in which case Nature rates highly due to it's wide publication.
Back in the Olden Days, when I was young and played guitar in pubs, there was a bloke who had a Bose PA system. It ran to about 600W per side as I recall (we're talking mid 1980s here), and consisted of these wierd "little" (1100mm x 800mm x 800mm) bins, each with 2 "port" on the front with 8cm dia holes in them. On several occasions we ran these poor things till there was a red glow coming from those ports. Yet systems kept working, and kept sounding great.
There was no way Mark could of got a better PA for less, either in terms of quality, reliability or compactness. I would think that anyone who'd heard that PA and seen that would have a high degree of trust in the brand.
To further put things in perspective, Bose has car and home systems? I seem to vaguely recall someone telling me he'd bought a new stereo, and the speakers were Bose, and based on the PA speakers. This was in 1984 or 1985 I think. I remember them being quite nice - they had some kind of spectral analysis, and they auto adjusted EQ and cross-overs based on what was happening in the room. I had no idea that they had "consumer" products in general though.
Since I havent heard a modern Bose speaker set, if you'd have asked me to judge them I've have scored them high. Based on what people are saying I'd be shocked if I heard them.
Is this anymore frightening than turning a blind eye to a corrupt legal system that allows people to buy what is arguably the most powerful political position in the world?
Or do you subscribe to the model seen so many times by 'The Rest Of The World (TM)', the American "Do As I Say, Don't Do As I Do" system? The same legal system that holds people in gaol for 4 years without trial, by holding them in a prison outside of the mainland USA.
Remove the log from your own eye before you complain about the splinter in someone else's.
And what legal basis is there anyway? MSFT has secured copyrights, you can't remove them unless there is a copyright infringement or some other IP-related issues. Dropping IP just because the company won't sell in your market, is stupid, stupid, stupid.
What's stupid is using the term "intellectual property". Do you mean "copyright"? If so say "copyright", for which there are ample laws. Or do you mean "patents", for which there are laws, even if not very good ones.
There is no such thing as "intellectual property". There are no laws about "intellectual property". There are no "IP-related issues", as you can have things existing that are all related to something that doesn't exist, unless the relation is non-existant - i.e. there is no such thing as "intellectual property".
But due to the inbreeding, unless you like that particular look (2m high and wide), and the simplicity of communication (they only have 2 vowels - "ugh" and "eh"), or unless you want a live act for a novel pay-per-view website, I'd strongly suggest you try Aussie chicks.
Now I can't see how routing ALL mail through spam-assasin so it gets tagged actually costs anything extra and above 4 or 5 people doing this. So I've come to the conclusion that DoDo sees this ruling as a great way to make money from spam, and and they have NO committment to cutting down spam going through the network.
DoDo charges a monthly fee plus data charges after a certain amount of usage. These fees are capped at different levels based on plan. So IF clients are getting spam to their machines, then DoDo earns more money.
If only I could find an ISP with a clue that charges a realistic fee I'd be away from DoDo so fast.
A recent report showed that spam (mass unwanted email) now accounts for three-quarters of all email traffic, up from 40% in 2003. In addition to the amount of spam, viruses are most commonly known to be transferred via email. They attach themselves to emails sent from other computers with viruses, and quickly spread out to thousands, even hundreds of thousands of users.
Because of the large increase in spam and viruses, Dodo has implemented 2 new systems, Spam Filters and Virus Filters. The new Spam Filter will mark any commonly known spam emails delivered to your individual mailbox with a [SPAM] tag at the front. The Virus Filter will tag any commonly known viruses with a [VIRUS] tag that are delivered to your individual mailbox.
If you are interested in having spam or virus filters setup on your mailbox, for just $1.90 per filter per month or $2.50 for both, please enter account management and select the Mail/Web tab then follow the steps displayed.
I find this rather immoral - I fail to see why every mail isn't scanned and tagged for virus.
Company Tax hasn't changed.
We now have a set of Taxes everytime we step on an aeroplane
Checked the cost of phone line rental recently? It's gone from $11 to $25 per month over the lat 5 years. This means that (thanks to the GST) there's a 100% increase in tax revenue (20% per year) for that single item alone. And we were told that the GST would lower the cost of services.
Given the 100% or higher increases in land and homes over the last few years (for example, in 1997 you could buy a 4 bedroom house on half an acre in Naranderra for between 60 and 70 thousand dollars. You'll pay $300,000 now) there's a further increase in tax (thanks to the GST) that's quite huge.
I don't buy the "It's the States fault arguement myself". How come in the pre-GST years of Labor Goverened Queensland they still had the high quality free-as-in-beer hospitals, yet now you go to a public hospital in Queensland if you don't mind a dose of MRSA or some untrained drug-fucked quack removing the wrong organs ( Hi Dr Patel! Killed many more patients recently?).
The fact is that revenue from taxation has grown far faster than either the general economy OR the CPI. The % of each dollar traded that ends up back to Treasury is at record levels. Afdter all, if there has been little significant decrease in spending, how do you get surpluses in the order of 10 to 15 billion dollars per year unless taxation revenue has increased?
I appreciate your comment about "blind fanatical hatred". But I assure you, this is fanatical hatred with eyes wide open. I see where this country's going under the Bush/Howard government, and "I don't like it" (Hi Pauline!). I don't like what my kids will have to put up with unless the trend changes back to a caring, compassionate society.
We've got a record current account deficit, record high taxes and a record surplus (again and again, every year). We've also got record costs for home rental, a policy of ingnoring climate change, the progressive sale of all our national assets (why sell Telstra, when it's profitable? Who sells a profitable business for any reason other than blind adherence to ideology?), involvement in a war that history will show to have been a bigger mistake than Viet-nam ever was, blind worship of the Bush Dictatorship and the Washington Consensus.
Think of your children, and whether you want them to grow up in the Oz where people care for each other, or in the 52nd state of the US where only the mighty $ is right.