Is any part of this effort to censor the Internet driven by the will of a majority of citizens?
Nope, but this is par for the course with the Liberal government (note big L, they're actually our conservatives, well our bigger conservatives, much like the US we dont have any real left wing parties to speak of).
Since taking office on the slimmest of majorities that was only granted due to a series of dodgy preference deals, the Abbott government has been acting like they've been crowned kings and pursuing their own agenda regardless of what people want. They've started conducting a military operation with a complete media blackout, began all out attacks on our public broadcaster, almost completely destroyed the NBN and all of this against the wishes of the people.
I know three people who voted Liberal, two now regret it deeply, they said they wanted to punish the Labor party, but now they realise the only people they've punished are Australia.
The only thing Australia can hope for, is that next year we have a hostile senate as the Liberals don't have a majority there and will be depending on minor parties and independents to push their agenda through.
Murdoch is nothing like our Tea Party. The TP has no economic sense whatsoever and are willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. Murdoch is a businessman. Possibly crooked, but at least you can figure out his motives by watching the money.
Murdoch's businesses are losing money hand over fist in Australia at the moment. He might have more in common with the Tea Party than you think.
Oh ya, I get the Australia pattern. I'm sure the Cisco logo "inspired" them.
Under Oz law, the logo is unique enough. We apply a very simple test, if a 7 year old can tell them apart, they aren't the same.
CSIRO was founded in 1928 compared to Cisco's 1984. I'm not sure when the current logo was created (same with Cisco's current logo).
Here are a few of CSIRO's older logo's, it could easily be argued that it's just an evolution of their older logo's: Logo 1 Logo 2
Besides this, companies usually sue over trade dress, logo's, et al. when there is a risk of brand dilution or harm to the brand (except if you're Apple, then you sue because you're bonkers). With the quality of Cisco's latest kit, being accidentally confused for CSIRO would do more good than harm.
Because there is still wifi and satalite phones that they cant as simply lock down by flipping a breaker at the nearest cell tower.
Erm, WiFi isn't a WAN technology and satellite, just control the downlink station.
Again, why try to find out who's using their phone (which takes time and money, then depends on people that have trouble finding their own arse to wipe it) and just control the source.
Essentially I lost my phone, called the carrier they bricked it and sent me a new phone as I am on contract and had insurance and they knew the phone would not be used in Australia on the main carriers
Your phone wasn't bricked, it still works fine. What happened is that your phone's IMEI was added to a blacklist and the carriers refused connection.
You can still sell the phone, it still turns on and acts like a normal phone would with no SIM card and if you sold it overseas, it would work the same as it did for you. This is why it does not discourage theft one tiny iota.
Your theif sold your phone, he hasn't been discouraged at all. It took him no extra effort to completely bypass this system.
Off topic: if this system is flawed what other system do you think will lead to a reduction in phone muggings?
People being smarter.
Almost all thefts occur because the owner is careless. They wander around with their phones out paying no attention to what happens around them. A crime is 10% motivation and 90% opportunity. People give thieves opportunities all the time.
In fact because it's so easy to bypass any carrier based system by simply turning off the phone, this is the only way to reduce phone theft.
The US is pushing for a more permanent bricking that cannot be gotten around by simply replacing the SIM card or sending the phone overseas. This is the only method that will actually discourage robberies and theft.
While the Australian method is good intentioned, it doesn't discourage theft.
Neither will the US method.
Because if it is implemented, the first thing that a thief will do at this turn off the phone and remove the SIM card. There is no way in hell you can report a stolen phone faster than a thief can do that.
Beyond this, bricking a phone wont stop a thief from selling it. If they're dishonest enough to steal, what makes you think they aren't dishonest enough to sell broken merchandise?
Socialism means that there's no private ownership of the factors of production
Nope, here you demonstrate you dont know what socialism is. Socialism is covers a very broad range of ideologies from co-operative enterprise to state ownership.
Nordic countries don't follow either of these, by the way.
Nordic countries, much like the rest of the western world use a mixed economy, neither capitalist nor communist and they do tend to have a lot more co-operative enterprise than most nations. Whether this is good or bad depends on your own philosophy but it works for the Swedes, Finns and Norwegians so I wish them luck.
You cant change the meaning of words to suit your narrow view.
My sister, who is fairly well off, bought a Lexus. My old Chrysler has more comfortable seats, better HVAC (kicks in faster), a better sounding radio, but when it was new (I bought it used) it cost half of what that Lexus cost.
I agree that a Lexus is an overpriced Toyota... But it's still a Toyota and Toyota air-conditioners are built with two settings, off and Igloo.
It's the fatal flaw in dear old Julian's argument: He's worried about the Americans getting hold of him, so he'd rather stay in the UK where extradition to the US is easy, rather than go to Sweden where extradition to the US is much harder. Or maybe there's another reason....
Because he's not in the UK, he's in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which is Ecuadorian soil according to treaties not even the US is mad enough to break. As soon as he leaves the embassy and enters the UK again, they'll have him bailed into a van and sent to the US for a show trial.
It would be easier for the US to get him extradited from the UK than from Sweden. Our extradition treaty with the US has far fewer safeguards than does Sweden's. And Sweden wouldn't be able extradite him to the US anyway without him going back to the UK first. I don't see why he can't go to Sweden to face questioning. He seems to have a case to answer, as well he would if the allegations against him were made in the UK (not that this matters legally for a European Arrest Warrant to be valid, but it makes a difference morally).
Because to go to Sweden he needs to leave the Ecuadorian embassy and the UK police can arrest and extradite him to the US.
You've obviously never been bullied. Hitting a bully back doesn't work. The two times I did, one got me suspended and disciplined (no "charges" for the bully) and the other time, the bully came back with 5 others and cornered me. Fighting back doesn't work, and those that suggest it were annoyed with people but the people annoying them weren't bullies.
This.
People keep pretending that bullies have some kind of code of honour, that if you stand up to them they'll just give up and accept you are the boss.
This is bullshit from people who've never lived in the real world, of course a bully is going to come back with 5 of his mates once you've bloodied his nose. In fact they will almost never start bullying unless they have a serious numerical advantage (well they are cowards, but cowards in numbers are still dangerous). You've embarrassed them, they need to make an example of you.
There are really only two ways to deal with bullies.
1. Just ignore them. This works better with adult bullies in the workplace, on the road, in shops, etc... They end up looking like the douchebag and the harder they try the worse they look.
2. Get more friends than they have. I was bullied in highscool... but one day it all stopped. I didn't figure out what had happened until years later but it turned out I'd developed a sense of humour (well I always had it, I just didn't show it) and people started to like me. Enough people so that bullies were afraid of becoming persona non grata themselves if they did anything beyond simple name calling (in which case I'd just call them something back, I was usually the better smart arse). The worst idiots still tried to start fights, but would never actually touch me because then they'd earn the ire of our peers.
Friends are really the biggest defence against bullying because bullies are inherently cowards.
I'd like to see a real candy company sue King for using the word "candy".
Hell, even funnier would be a real King suing him for misuse of the title "King" by a non-royalty.
What would be even better is the estate of Elvis Presley suing King for using the name "King".
Almost as funny as the representative of the office of Caesar suing everyone who ever used the word King, Tzar, Kaiser or any of the other derivatives.
Tell me, if the exact same thing is true of capitalism, then why is it that all of the self identified capitalist societies have the highest education rates, highest literacy rates, and highest standards of living for everybody overall?
Actually it is.
There aren't any pure capitalist societies, unlike communism which started and failed, pure capitalist societies never ever got off the ground.
Western economies are mixed economies, neither pure capitalist or socialist, rather a mix of the two and this is why they are so successful. Capitalism and Communism are limited ideologies incapable of change or accommodating anything out of their limited ideologies. This is why communism failed and pure capitalism (libertarianism) has never even started.
Also, you've failed to explain why the "evil socialist" Nordic states have some of the highest living standards in the world (including amongst western nations).
Firstly because it's IMEI blocking on participating carriers. So all you need to do is sell the stolen phone overseas where the carriers don't give a fat rats clacker about the IMEI's Australia blocks. Secondly, you end up with unsuspecting people buying stolen phones with blocked IMEI's.
1. Theif sells phone
2. Purchaser doesn't know phone on Ebay (or Gumtree) is stolen
3. Purchaser gets useless phone
There's no shortage of idiots to fill the role in step 2.
Carrier based phone bricking also doesn't work because you can disable it by removing the SIM card and then selling it on Ebay. Also selling it overseas ensures that you never connect to another Australian carrier ever again.
Also there are people who never report their phone stolen. I know someone who loses phones on a regular basis (every 3 or 4 months). He wouldn't even think of reporting one as stolen.
The NSA could use it to kill communications when the uprising begins.
Why would they need to target individual handsets?
If an uprising gets to the point where you need to censor communications en mass they'll just switch off the towers.
Identifying all the people in an uprising is extremely difficult and getting disposable burn phones is extremely easy... and when the govt can simply take over the underlying infrastructure both are entirely pointless.
There are still signs around the all of the pumps here banning use of a cell phone in a filling station. The current reasons is because they could cause a spark. Is there any evidence of this, or is it another feeling that's become true by repetition?
That reason is gone (mostly) there's still a small risk that you can drop your phone and somehow it will spark and a smaller risk that will ignite the some fuel (I see people drop a few centilitres onto petrol station floors all the time when they take the nozzle out after filling).
The main reason those signs are still around is because when pumping an extremely flammable substance they want people to pay attention to what they're doing. Unfortunately when told this, people think the rule does not apply to them (and the Dunning-Kruger effect means that these people are almost always the most incompetent that ignore it) so it's easier to hang onto a disproved scientific reason then tell people the real reason.
and yet you are one of those people. i often see comments about swimming on full stomach here (i'd say from people who either don't swim or eat). if you want to know why it's stupid, eat and drink until you're full, go to bed, lie down on your belly and wait for a burp to come. if you don't barf, you're not human. to better simulate swimming, you should have somebody shake you at the same time.
Amazingly enough, I don't have that issue.
I've done weights after eating a large meal before, sure it wasn't all that comfortable but I didn't barf doing squats or deads.
Maybe I'm not human (you never know, I could be a dog on the internet for all you know) or maybe you've just got a very weak stomach.
That aside, the old myth about swimming and eating used to be that if you didn't wait 30/60/120 minutes after eating before swimming you'd get a huge stomach cramp and drown. That's the bit that's been proven to be a myth.
(In OZ and NZ there used to be a drink (non-alcoholic) called Clayton's . It was advertised as "The drink I have when I am not having a drink"
Although the product eventually disappeared, the adjective Clayton's still remained in the popular usage)
For people under 40, its kind of fallen out of popular usage.
A bit off topic, but the British were best at this, they had a drink (alcoholic) called Dickins Cider.
Slashdot Mirror
Is any part of this effort to censor the Internet driven by the will of a majority of citizens?
Nope, but this is par for the course with the Liberal government (note big L, they're actually our conservatives, well our bigger conservatives, much like the US we dont have any real left wing parties to speak of).
Since taking office on the slimmest of majorities that was only granted due to a series of dodgy preference deals, the Abbott government has been acting like they've been crowned kings and pursuing their own agenda regardless of what people want. They've started conducting a military operation with a complete media blackout, began all out attacks on our public broadcaster, almost completely destroyed the NBN and all of this against the wishes of the people.
I know three people who voted Liberal, two now regret it deeply, they said they wanted to punish the Labor party, but now they realise the only people they've punished are Australia.
The only thing Australia can hope for, is that next year we have a hostile senate as the Liberals don't have a majority there and will be depending on minor parties and independents to push their agenda through.
Murdoch is nothing like our Tea Party. The TP has no economic sense whatsoever and are willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. Murdoch is a businessman. Possibly crooked, but at least you can figure out his motives by watching the money.
Murdoch's businesses are losing money hand over fist in Australia at the moment. He might have more in common with the Tea Party than you think.
What have we done! We've created a monster (aka Tony Abbott). I voted the Pirate Party, myself. /Stolzy
Yeah, they told me that if I voted for the Greens Australia would be screwed. Well I voted for the greens and look what happened.
Oh ya, I get the Australia pattern. I'm sure the Cisco logo "inspired" them.
Under Oz law, the logo is unique enough. We apply a very simple test, if a 7 year old can tell them apart, they aren't the same.
CSIRO was founded in 1928 compared to Cisco's 1984. I'm not sure when the current logo was created (same with Cisco's current logo).
Here are a few of CSIRO's older logo's, it could easily be argued that it's just an evolution of their older logo's:
Logo 1
Logo 2
Besides this, companies usually sue over trade dress, logo's, et al. when there is a risk of brand dilution or harm to the brand (except if you're Apple, then you sue because you're bonkers). With the quality of Cisco's latest kit, being accidentally confused for CSIRO would do more good than harm.
Because there is still wifi and satalite phones that they cant as simply lock down by flipping a breaker at the nearest cell tower.
Erm, WiFi isn't a WAN technology and satellite, just control the downlink station.
Again, why try to find out who's using their phone (which takes time and money, then depends on people that have trouble finding their own arse to wipe it) and just control the source.
Essentially I lost my phone, called the carrier they bricked it and sent me a new phone as I am on contract and had insurance and they knew the phone would not be used in Australia on the main carriers
Your phone wasn't bricked, it still works fine. What happened is that your phone's IMEI was added to a blacklist and the carriers refused connection.
You can still sell the phone, it still turns on and acts like a normal phone would with no SIM card and if you sold it overseas, it would work the same as it did for you. This is why it does not discourage theft one tiny iota.
Your theif sold your phone, he hasn't been discouraged at all. It took him no extra effort to completely bypass this system.
Off topic: if this system is flawed what other system do you think will lead to a reduction in phone muggings?
People being smarter.
Almost all thefts occur because the owner is careless. They wander around with their phones out paying no attention to what happens around them. A crime is 10% motivation and 90% opportunity. People give thieves opportunities all the time.
In fact because it's so easy to bypass any carrier based system by simply turning off the phone, this is the only way to reduce phone theft.
The US is pushing for a more permanent bricking that cannot be gotten around by simply replacing the SIM card or sending the phone overseas. This is the only method that will actually discourage robberies and theft.
While the Australian method is good intentioned, it doesn't discourage theft.
Neither will the US method.
Because if it is implemented, the first thing that a thief will do at this turn off the phone and remove the SIM card. There is no way in hell you can report a stolen phone faster than a thief can do that.
Beyond this, bricking a phone wont stop a thief from selling it. If they're dishonest enough to steal, what makes you think they aren't dishonest enough to sell broken merchandise?
You don't even know what socialism is
You seem to have me confused with yourself.
Socialism means that there's no private ownership of the factors of production
Nope, here you demonstrate you dont know what socialism is. Socialism is covers a very broad range of ideologies from co-operative enterprise to state ownership.
Nordic countries, much like the rest of the western world use a mixed economy, neither capitalist nor communist and they do tend to have a lot more co-operative enterprise than most nations. Whether this is good or bad depends on your own philosophy but it works for the Swedes, Finns and Norwegians so I wish them luck.
You cant change the meaning of words to suit your narrow view.
I agree that a Lexus is an overpriced Toyota... But it's still a Toyota and Toyota air-conditioners are built with two settings, off and Igloo.
It's the fatal flaw in dear old Julian's argument: He's worried about the Americans getting hold of him, so he'd rather stay in the UK where extradition to the US is easy, rather than go to Sweden where extradition to the US is much harder. Or maybe there's another reason....
Because he's not in the UK, he's in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which is Ecuadorian soil according to treaties not even the US is mad enough to break. As soon as he leaves the embassy and enters the UK again, they'll have him bailed into a van and sent to the US for a show trial.
It would be easier for the US to get him extradited from the UK than from Sweden. Our extradition treaty with the US has far fewer safeguards than does Sweden's. And Sweden wouldn't be able extradite him to the US anyway without him going back to the UK first. I don't see why he can't go to Sweden to face questioning. He seems to have a case to answer, as well he would if the allegations against him were made in the UK (not that this matters legally for a European Arrest Warrant to be valid, but it makes a difference morally).
Because to go to Sweden he needs to leave the Ecuadorian embassy and the UK police can arrest and extradite him to the US.
Just one warning: when the food supplies collapse due to global warming, we will eat the deniers like you first.
With the last of the fava beans and a nice Chianti
+1C, all snow soon melted away.
Australia, +35C.
What is this snow thing you're talking about?
your forefathers who blazed the trails to the west and through the mountains must be spinning like tops in their graves
I've always admired the way our forefathers dealt with this sort of thing - like the Donner party.
I always wondered what was in a Donner Kebab.
Because my, um....
It matches the spinning rims we're putting on the new cop cars (well Aussie cops are getting WRX's these day, rexy's need spinners).
You've obviously never been bullied. Hitting a bully back doesn't work. The two times I did, one got me suspended and disciplined (no "charges" for the bully) and the other time, the bully came back with 5 others and cornered me. Fighting back doesn't work, and those that suggest it were annoyed with people but the people annoying them weren't bullies.
This.
People keep pretending that bullies have some kind of code of honour, that if you stand up to them they'll just give up and accept you are the boss.
This is bullshit from people who've never lived in the real world, of course a bully is going to come back with 5 of his mates once you've bloodied his nose. In fact they will almost never start bullying unless they have a serious numerical advantage (well they are cowards, but cowards in numbers are still dangerous). You've embarrassed them, they need to make an example of you.
There are really only two ways to deal with bullies.
1. Just ignore them. This works better with adult bullies in the workplace, on the road, in shops, etc... They end up looking like the douchebag and the harder they try the worse they look.
2. Get more friends than they have. I was bullied in highscool... but one day it all stopped. I didn't figure out what had happened until years later but it turned out I'd developed a sense of humour (well I always had it, I just didn't show it) and people started to like me. Enough people so that bullies were afraid of becoming persona non grata themselves if they did anything beyond simple name calling (in which case I'd just call them something back, I was usually the better smart arse). The worst idiots still tried to start fights, but would never actually touch me because then they'd earn the ire of our peers.
Friends are really the biggest defence against bullying because bullies are inherently cowards.
I'd like to see a real candy company sue King for using the word "candy".
Hell, even funnier would be a real King suing him for misuse of the title "King" by a non-royalty.
What would be even better is the estate of Elvis Presley suing King for using the name "King".
Almost as funny as the representative of the office of Caesar suing everyone who ever used the word King, Tzar, Kaiser or any of the other derivatives.
Except its not.
Tell me, if the exact same thing is true of capitalism, then why is it that all of the self identified capitalist societies have the highest education rates, highest literacy rates, and highest standards of living for everybody overall?
Actually it is.
There aren't any pure capitalist societies, unlike communism which started and failed, pure capitalist societies never ever got off the ground.
Western economies are mixed economies, neither pure capitalist or socialist, rather a mix of the two and this is why they are so successful. Capitalism and Communism are limited ideologies incapable of change or accommodating anything out of their limited ideologies. This is why communism failed and pure capitalism (libertarianism) has never even started.
Also, you've failed to explain why the "evil socialist" Nordic states have some of the highest living standards in the world (including amongst western nations).
The exact same is true of Capitalism.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around.
As seems to be the case in Australia where they are already doing this.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/An-easy-way-to-curb-smart-phone-thieves-2344797.php
Australian here, this doesn't work.
Firstly because it's IMEI blocking on participating carriers. So all you need to do is sell the stolen phone overseas where the carriers don't give a fat rats clacker about the IMEI's Australia blocks. Secondly, you end up with unsuspecting people buying stolen phones with blocked IMEI's.
1. Theif sells phone
2. Purchaser doesn't know phone on Ebay (or Gumtree) is stolen
3. Purchaser gets useless phone
There's no shortage of idiots to fill the role in step 2.
Carrier based phone bricking also doesn't work because you can disable it by removing the SIM card and then selling it on Ebay. Also selling it overseas ensures that you never connect to another Australian carrier ever again.
Also there are people who never report their phone stolen. I know someone who loses phones on a regular basis (every 3 or 4 months). He wouldn't even think of reporting one as stolen.
The NSA could use it to kill communications when the uprising begins.
Why would they need to target individual handsets?
If an uprising gets to the point where you need to censor communications en mass they'll just switch off the towers.
Identifying all the people in an uprising is extremely difficult and getting disposable burn phones is extremely easy... and when the govt can simply take over the underlying infrastructure both are entirely pointless.
There are still signs around the all of the pumps here banning use of a cell phone in a filling station. The current reasons is because they could cause a spark. Is there any evidence of this, or is it another feeling that's become true by repetition?
That reason is gone (mostly) there's still a small risk that you can drop your phone and somehow it will spark and a smaller risk that will ignite the some fuel (I see people drop a few centilitres onto petrol station floors all the time when they take the nozzle out after filling).
The main reason those signs are still around is because when pumping an extremely flammable substance they want people to pay attention to what they're doing. Unfortunately when told this, people think the rule does not apply to them (and the Dunning-Kruger effect means that these people are almost always the most incompetent that ignore it) so it's easier to hang onto a disproved scientific reason then tell people the real reason.
and yet you are one of those people. i often see comments about swimming on full stomach here (i'd say from people who either don't swim or eat). if you want to know why it's stupid, eat and drink until you're full, go to bed, lie down on your belly and wait for a burp to come. if you don't barf, you're not human. to better simulate swimming, you should have somebody shake you at the same time.
Amazingly enough, I don't have that issue.
I've done weights after eating a large meal before, sure it wasn't all that comfortable but I didn't barf doing squats or deads.
Maybe I'm not human (you never know, I could be a dog on the internet for all you know) or maybe you've just got a very weak stomach.
That aside, the old myth about swimming and eating used to be that if you didn't wait 30/60/120 minutes after eating before swimming you'd get a huge stomach cramp and drown. That's the bit that's been proven to be a myth.
Erm... woof.
Am I the only one who thinks Csiro's logo is extremely similar to Cisco's?!
Apart from the logo clearly being a map of Australia?
I'd love to see Cisco try to sue them. That didn't work out too well for Apple when they tried to sue Woolworths in Australia.
(In OZ and NZ there used to be a drink (non-alcoholic) called Clayton's . It was advertised as "The drink I have when I am not having a drink"
Although the product eventually disappeared, the adjective Clayton's still remained in the popular usage)
For people under 40, its kind of fallen out of popular usage.
A bit off topic, but the British were best at this, they had a drink (alcoholic) called Dickins Cider.