I was referring specifically to the late paying customers, not their other dodgy business practices (which are very dodgy).
So you have a contract where you have no coverage or if you do have coverage making more than a 2 minute phone call will generate excess fee's and even if you want to cancel they charge you for that too.
Which is a separate issue, also caught by the ACCC.
The flame baiting, lame summery tries to make it looks like some evil diplomat tries to censor some facebook pages. But as the TFA says, this is about an imposter who has assumed a diplomats name on a fake facebook account and now post fake posts.
Brendan is a common Australian first name.
Nelson is a common Australian last name.
I'd be surprised if there weren't a few Brendan Nelson's in Australia. Now if you called yourself Minister Brendan Nelson or Ambassador Brendan Nelson then we have an issue.
So it seems that the real Ambassador Nelson was trying to get an impostor Ambassador Nelson shut down.
Fake Brendan Nelson is also not a problem. We had a Fake Stephen Conroy (Stephen Conroy is the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (and the ministry of excessively, needlessly and obnoxiously long ministry names) who had no problems, even when it was revealed that the person behind Fake Stephen Conroy worked for our largest Telco.
Excite Mobile are an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) who dont own any infrastructure themselves. Their business model depends on being cheaper than the big 3 (Telstra, Vodafone and Optus) which often leads to having to use questionable business practices to stay in the black... Which is what happened here.
What isn't wrong, is that they sent letters of demand to late paying customers. They had every right to do this, even to use a debt collection agency (after a reasonable time) to recoup the loss. This is fine.
What they did wrong was to set up a fake debt collection agency (deceive customers) and send out threats to confiscate property that did not legally belong to them. Only a court order can order a debtor to hand over their own property to pay a debt and the court does not do this readily.
The second thing they did wrong was to set up another fake company, this time a complaint handling service that had an official sounding name, "Telecommunications Industry Complaints" that was internal to Excite Mobile which again deceived customers. What makes this particularly bad is that "Telecommunications Industry Complaints" sounds very similar to the official government body for regulating the telecommunications industry, the "Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman" who deals with high level complaints about telco's and has real power to hand out fines. So it was a deliberate attempt to mislead customers that an authoritative body was dealing with their complaints when it was not and an attempt to prevent customers from contacting the ombudsman (by confusing them between "complaints" and "ombudsman").
What is good here, is that Excite Mobile was caught and is being punished.
Good post. I would mod you up. We DO have plenty of high prices. Sadly, our fossil fuel is subsidized, so that is cheap, but that only serves to hurt us. Hopefully, we will stop that.
The US has low prices compared to OZ.
Our fuel is cheap compared to Europe (US pays about $1.10/L, Australia pays 1.45/L Europe pays $2.00/L) but everything here is expensive, cars, CD/DVD's, clothing.
When Aussies go to the US, we tend to load up on things like clothing, shoes, media because it's so much cheaper for you than us. I buy a lot of things from the US (tyres and aftermarket car parts of late) because paying A$100 to get 4 tyres flown from the US is cheaper because we pay twice as much for them here.
First off, IRS penalty and interest are NOT taxes. That is for lazy or corrupt individuals.
Secondly, perhaps you can push for one large tax of say 50% and be done with it.
Thirdly,
He can realise that most of those are optional and consumption taxes. So he cant treat them as income taxes.
I get these idiots on Australian forums all the time trying to prove that we pay 50, 60 and sometimes even 80% tax by dragging up some obscure 3 cent sugar free chocolate cent tax that only applies in the western half of Wagga Wagga that 99.9998% people wont ever pay.
If you pay 7% sales tax, you pay 7% on what you buy (not what you save or invest) so it doesn't amount to 7% of your income.
But logic and reason doesn't stop the loons from trying to pretend you pay 1.21 gigadollars in tax. Much like Australia the US is one of the lowest taxed western nations, unlike Oz you dont have the high prices.
Most reasonably sharp thieves will quickly wipe your HD and install a "fresh" OS on your laptop after they take it from you. Your monitoring software will be gone quickly; though fortunately your data will go with it.
The thing is, thieves usually aren't that bright.
Personally if my laptop was stolen I'd be more worried about people getting access to my data. This is why I keep as little personal data as possible on my laptop.
Is anyone else slightly concerned that a thief without the wisdom to re-install the OS could also get into the laptop? Occams Razor would indicate that he had no password on his user account. This tool isn't a hero, he's an idiot for letting his laptop get stolen and a fool for having no password.
This is crap. Where I come from, possession of (i.e. buying) stolen goods is a crime.
Well than in your nation, the laws suck.
What about the overwhelming majority of cases when people were unknowingly sold stolen goods. It's not as if Dodgy Dan, the pawn shop owner has a sticker differentiating stolen goods from legitimately acquired goods. What actual crime did these people commit, why should these people be punished when they were under the impression that the goods they were buying were legitimate.
Thieves dont advertise that their goods are stolen precisely because no-one would buy them. So they intentionally device those who receive stolen goods... So again I ask, what crime did these people commit?
Owner contacts you? RETURN THE ITEM!
Actually, you contact the police, surrender the goods to the police and let the police handle the transfer (and determine that the alleged owner is the actual owner, not some con). In my country, you wont be charged for turning in stolen goods because you didn't steal anything.
Truth is not always a defence against libel in the UK. Publishing the truth with intent to damage or for malicious purpose can also be libel.
Here the opposing party has to prove that the comment was made with malicious intent.
If the company did not indeed pay her promptly, they will have a very hard time proving that.
There is something similar here in Australia. If you hit someone in a rear end collision, it is almost always the fault of the driver behind unless the driver behind can prove the person in front braked maliciously. To the best of my knowledge, this has never been done.
The truth is a defence against libel, but not against trying to cause damage to a company.
There may be inventive public servants, but I highly doubt they are inventive enough to make a stupid obfuscated download system just so that some guy would bittorrrent it, and thereby save the government a small amount of money on bandwidth. I mean really.
You've never worked in the APS have you.
The fewer people you have to serve, the better your balance sheet looks. If someone else can do it, why not.
I have seen company after company where they have an MSDN certified IT head and that is it, Microsoft everything. Can't afford another SQL license then develop it in Access.
Whoever did this needs to be shot. Who ever believes this is retarded.
MS developer programs provide you with near unlimited server licenses for development purposes. MSDN packs give you some licenses for production too.
License restrictions is not an excuse for not having another development server if you've got the hardware. Now maintenance is an issue, 95% of developers couldn't look after a SQL server to save their lives. The number of times a dev has whinged until I gave him his own box is only exceeded by the number of times a dev has come into my office, tail between legs because he lost data on the box I gave him and magically expects me to get it back (and they never did any backups).
2012 - Microsoft introduces Metro to much wailing and gnashing of teeth
2013 - Microsoft retracts Metro
2014 - Google produce a new desktop/laptop interface that is/nearly/ functionally identical to Metro, but better in every single aspect, and preserves a lot of old idioms and computer access schemes in the new format, to the delight of everyone who uses it
2014 - Apple introduces a new user interface identical as Metro and fanboys declare it the best thing ever and no-one ever invented this before.
2015 - Microsoft re-introduces Metro, is told they are copying, and doing so poorly.
Since the data is available for free (obfuscated or not) and was released under a CC license, technically this should all be considered legal, right? Not that it should be necessary of course.
The obfuscation is probably because hosting and bandwidth are not cheap in Oz and some inventive public servant (stop snickering, they do exist, there aren't many of them but they do exist) came up with a way to reduce the bandwidth bill. With the current emphasis on public service spending and impending election, this wouldn't surprise me.
Either that or some hopeless public servant coder has no idea what they've done.
OK, I'm travelling to the US later this year, I'm going to have to take some internal flights... Is there any airline there that I can reasonably count on not to screw up?
I agree, but I think the solution could be a lot easier. Most airports have stairs they can drive to the airplane door. Sure, that wouldn't help a disabled person, but there is no reason 200 people have to sit in a plane for hours when only 1 or 2 people can't walk down a flight of stairs.
In addition to the stairs, they also have elevators on trucks (this is how they get large items in and out of the cabin).
This is total lack of human compassion that someone can't get in one of those tractors, push the plane at the gate out of the way to a spot off to the side and let the plane with the people unload. What kind of heartless ass is running American's operations at that airport? Oh, gee, that might inconvenience the airline personel because the first plane would then have to be trundled back over since it needs to leave first when things resume.
Not quite that simple as you'll need an excavator to move all the support infrastructure (fuel, sewerage inlets and so forth).
What the airport should have is an over-flow area on the tarmac where passengers can be unloaded via those portable stairs you may have seen about and bused to the terminal. I've seen this setup in almost all SE Asian airports except for NAIA in Manila (and I'm not sure if that is because NAIA was designed by Americans or run by Filipinos).
This of course wont help with flights departing late.
Of course, I would say that the cities that you give as examples do not actually have governments
???
Have you taken you medication today. Are you trying to say Australia has no government?
They merely have mobs who extort protection money from the populace and call it taxes
And here you demonstrate how little you know about Asian governments.
I once asked a hotelier in the Philippines how much he pays in taxes.
He laughed and said "what taxes".
He pays next to nothing to the Filipino government, he pays a bit to city hall, the police, et al. to get them to leave him alone. This is not taxation, this is bribery (two very different concepts) and the governments of SE Asia are very unashamed about doing it.
The lawyer told him that the vast majority of bankruptcies are just as easy as his was (although that is just an anecdotal claim by his lawyer).
No offense but you're entire post was anecdotal. I've dealt with dozens of people looking to do the same thing and its never worked out for them. Perhaps your state is more prone to this type of abuse, mine however is not.
An anecdotal prediction to the GP's anecdote.
After 7 years you are allowed to borrow again, but you dont have a clean slate. That bankruptcy would be on their records for life, any semi-responsible lender would be very reluctant to lend to them again. Getting a car loan from all but the shonkyest of the shonky would be difficult and even after declaring bankruptcy, if you get any money you can still be sued for it. As another poster has said, the scope of a bankruptcy is very narrow.
Most governments justify limiting taxi services by claiming it is to control safety, when in fact it is to control transportation (and to reward those taxi companies that support the correct government officials and initiatives).
You mean few governments.
I'll admit that there are a few governments that control taxi licenses/medalions.
In most places with taxi prices out of control it's due to a cabal of private companies that prevent competition. In many places its mainly due to the fact that few companies hold virtual monopolies on taxi companies, despite anyone being able to get a license to operate a "private car". These companies wont think twice about using standover tactics to force some people out of business. Certainly in my city, if you want to take a taxi they have you bent over a barrel. In fact, they'll charge you an extra A$9 if you want them to turn up within 20 minutes of when you booked them. They do this because they have a virtual monopoly and in my city, anyone can get a license to operate a private car service.
The absolute worst I've seen is Phuket, Thailand where the local taxi/tuk tuk drivers will literally kill other taxi operators in order to protect their monopoly and charge prices way out of line with other cities in Thailand. The local government is as powerless as it is corrupt, the last time they tried to implement a public transport system the drivers were dragged out and beaten in broad daylight. In Phuket, if you want to go 700m down the road expect to pay 200 Baht minimum, (they'll start asking at 500), compare this to Bangkok (which IMHO, has some of the cheapest taxi's in the world) you can go from the airport to the city centre (A trip of 30 KM) for 400 Baht, that includes a 50 B in tolls and a tip rounding it up to 400 B (normally between 20-40 Baht).
For reference purposes, 100 Baht is around US$3.50.
Driverless technology becomes workable when it is better than the average human driver. That's a pretty low bar to clear. I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.
And here in lies the problem.
Driverless cars will have to live side by side with human driven cars for years, if not decades and as you pointed out, there are a lot of bad drivers out there. A self driving car will need to be able to be proactive in protecting it's passengers from drivers that are pretty damn unpredictable. Right now we cant even get everyone doing the same speed or indicating, a driverless car has no hope dealing with that at our current level of technology.
Right now, you cant even get an automatic transmission that can predict what gear you need to be in before you need it, let alone an entire car that can spot potential hazards or the signs bad behaviours in other drivers.
Seen all those ads on TV from Labor about how the Liberals were denying the GFC?
No, because they dont exist.
Stop getting your info from Murdoch.
We are not in a recession'
That's because we weren't in recession.
We experienced knock on effects from the GFC when it hit the US and Eurozone. We recovered within months whilst the US and Eurozone have been in actual recessions for the last 4 years.
The GFC never really hit Australia. Our economy has been growing since mid 2009 although a lot of idiots keep saying that it's going to hit us any minute now... Any minute now... We've dodged 20 of these recessions in the last year. Mostly because idiots dont actually know anything about the economy.
was Liberals hard saved cash
LoL, I guess you'd be an expert on revisionism.
The Liberals "hard saved" cash came from selling off public assets. Without selling off Telco assets and the airports, Howard would have left in debt. What Labor is spending is to build new public assets and fix systems that have been horribly broken under the previous Liberal government (notably Education and Health).
You guys need to get your government under control.
The problem with this that the government has continually shrunk funding for CSIRO and as a result CSIRO has been forced to rely on other sources of funding. This means they spend more time and resources on securing revenue than doing actual science. To lack of government funding is directly behind this.
and the stupid voters will stay focused on stupid shit like gay marriage
Gay Marriage is actually an important issue. 50 years ago your country discriminated people based on skin colour, these days you do the same thing based on sexual preference. Taking a stand against this kind of idiocy should be a top priority for any free society (liberty, fraternity, equality and all that bollocks).
In Australia the stupid voters are caught on backburner issues like Asylum seekers, MRRT and the Carbon Tax. The opposition leader spends more time banging the hate drum against the current prime minister than actually promoting what he stands for. Few Australians are concerned about science and technology, creating new industry or ensuring that our education system remains amongst the best in the world (all three of which have long term economic benefits, but seeing as its not "stopping the boats" the average mouth breather doesn't care).
As far as I can tell, the only policy that Tony Abbott has is to hate Julia Gillard, but because it's popular to hate Julia Gillard it's paying off for him (much to the detriment of Australia, I'm not Gillard's biggest fan but Tony Abbott is going to be far worse).
Slashdot Mirror
I was referring specifically to the late paying customers, not their other dodgy business practices (which are very dodgy).
Which is a separate issue, also caught by the ACCC.
The flame baiting, lame summery tries to make it looks like some evil diplomat tries to censor some facebook pages. But as the TFA says, this is about an imposter who has assumed a diplomats name on a fake facebook account and now post fake posts.
Brendan is a common Australian first name.
Nelson is a common Australian last name.
I'd be surprised if there weren't a few Brendan Nelson's in Australia. Now if you called yourself Minister Brendan Nelson or Ambassador Brendan Nelson then we have an issue.
So it seems that the real Ambassador Nelson was trying to get an impostor Ambassador Nelson shut down.
Fake Brendan Nelson is also not a problem. We had a Fake Stephen Conroy (Stephen Conroy is the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (and the ministry of excessively, needlessly and obnoxiously long ministry names) who had no problems, even when it was revealed that the person behind Fake Stephen Conroy worked for our largest Telco.
And you thought Verizon was bad...
Generally our telco's aren't this bad.
Excite Mobile are an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) who dont own any infrastructure themselves. Their business model depends on being cheaper than the big 3 (Telstra, Vodafone and Optus) which often leads to having to use questionable business practices to stay in the black... Which is what happened here.
What isn't wrong, is that they sent letters of demand to late paying customers. They had every right to do this, even to use a debt collection agency (after a reasonable time) to recoup the loss. This is fine.
What they did wrong was to set up a fake debt collection agency (deceive customers) and send out threats to confiscate property that did not legally belong to them. Only a court order can order a debtor to hand over their own property to pay a debt and the court does not do this readily.
The second thing they did wrong was to set up another fake company, this time a complaint handling service that had an official sounding name, "Telecommunications Industry Complaints" that was internal to Excite Mobile which again deceived customers. What makes this particularly bad is that "Telecommunications Industry Complaints" sounds very similar to the official government body for regulating the telecommunications industry, the "Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman" who deals with high level complaints about telco's and has real power to hand out fines. So it was a deliberate attempt to mislead customers that an authoritative body was dealing with their complaints when it was not and an attempt to prevent customers from contacting the ombudsman (by confusing them between "complaints" and "ombudsman").
What is good here, is that Excite Mobile was caught and is being punished.
Good post. I would mod you up. We DO have plenty of high prices. Sadly, our fossil fuel is subsidized, so that is cheap, but that only serves to hurt us. Hopefully, we will stop that.
The US has low prices compared to OZ.
Our fuel is cheap compared to Europe (US pays about $1.10/L, Australia pays 1.45/L Europe pays $2.00/L) but everything here is expensive, cars, CD/DVD's, clothing.
When Aussies go to the US, we tend to load up on things like clothing, shoes, media because it's so much cheaper for you than us. I buy a lot of things from the US (tyres and aftermarket car parts of late) because paying A$100 to get 4 tyres flown from the US is cheaper because we pay twice as much for them here.
First off, IRS penalty and interest are NOT taxes. That is for lazy or corrupt individuals.
Secondly, perhaps you can push for one large tax of say 50% and be done with it.
Thirdly, He can realise that most of those are optional and consumption taxes. So he cant treat them as income taxes.
I get these idiots on Australian forums all the time trying to prove that we pay 50, 60 and sometimes even 80% tax by dragging up some obscure 3 cent sugar free chocolate cent tax that only applies in the western half of Wagga Wagga that 99.9998% people wont ever pay.
If you pay 7% sales tax, you pay 7% on what you buy (not what you save or invest) so it doesn't amount to 7% of your income.
But logic and reason doesn't stop the loons from trying to pretend you pay 1.21 gigadollars in tax. Much like Australia the US is one of the lowest taxed western nations, unlike Oz you dont have the high prices.
Most reasonably sharp thieves will quickly wipe your HD and install a "fresh" OS on your laptop after they take it from you. Your monitoring software will be gone quickly; though fortunately your data will go with it.
The thing is, thieves usually aren't that bright.
Personally if my laptop was stolen I'd be more worried about people getting access to my data. This is why I keep as little personal data as possible on my laptop.
Is anyone else slightly concerned that a thief without the wisdom to re-install the OS could also get into the laptop? Occams Razor would indicate that he had no password on his user account. This tool isn't a hero, he's an idiot for letting his laptop get stolen and a fool for having no password.
Well than in your nation, the laws suck.
What about the overwhelming majority of cases when people were unknowingly sold stolen goods. It's not as if Dodgy Dan, the pawn shop owner has a sticker differentiating stolen goods from legitimately acquired goods. What actual crime did these people commit, why should these people be punished when they were under the impression that the goods they were buying were legitimate.
Thieves dont advertise that their goods are stolen precisely because no-one would buy them. So they intentionally device those who receive stolen goods... So again I ask, what crime did these people commit?
Actually, you contact the police, surrender the goods to the police and let the police handle the transfer (and determine that the alleged owner is the actual owner, not some con). In my country, you wont be charged for turning in stolen goods because you didn't steal anything.
Truth is not always a defence against libel in the UK. Publishing the truth with intent to damage or for malicious purpose can also be libel.
Here the opposing party has to prove that the comment was made with malicious intent.
If the company did not indeed pay her promptly, they will have a very hard time proving that.
There is something similar here in Australia. If you hit someone in a rear end collision, it is almost always the fault of the driver behind unless the driver behind can prove the person in front braked maliciously. To the best of my knowledge, this has never been done.
The truth is a defence against libel, but not against trying to cause damage to a company.
There may be inventive public servants, but I highly doubt they are inventive enough to make a stupid obfuscated download system just so that some guy would bittorrrent it, and thereby save the government a small amount of money on bandwidth. I mean really.
You've never worked in the APS have you. The fewer people you have to serve, the better your balance sheet looks. If someone else can do it, why not.
I have seen company after company where they have an MSDN certified IT head and that is it, Microsoft everything. Can't afford another SQL license then develop it in Access.
Whoever did this needs to be shot. Who ever believes this is retarded.
MS developer programs provide you with near unlimited server licenses for development purposes. MSDN packs give you some licenses for production too.
License restrictions is not an excuse for not having another development server if you've got the hardware. Now maintenance is an issue, 95% of developers couldn't look after a SQL server to save their lives. The number of times a dev has whinged until I gave him his own box is only exceeded by the number of times a dev has come into my office, tail between legs because he lost data on the box I gave him and magically expects me to get it back (and they never did any backups).
2012 - Microsoft introduces Metro to much wailing and gnashing of teeth /nearly/ functionally identical to Metro, but better in every single aspect, and preserves a lot of old idioms and computer access schemes in the new format, to the delight of everyone who uses it
2013 - Microsoft retracts Metro
2014 - Google produce a new desktop/laptop interface that is
2014 - Apple introduces a new user interface identical as Metro and fanboys declare it the best thing ever and no-one ever invented this before.
2015 - Microsoft re-introduces Metro, is told they are copying, and doing so poorly.
FTFY.
Fixed your FTFY.
You can give +1's to AC's. The purpose of modpoints is to promote constructive posts, not to reward registered users.
This.
I'd mod you up but I've already commented on this thread. So I found a previous comment of yours I thought was constructive and modded that up.
And what about cars in Australia that drive upside down?
Pedals are on the same orientation, we've just mounted them on the roof.
Convertables suck here.
The pedal orientation is not switched in RHD cars.
Also, most of Europe is LHD, only the UK is RHD.
But what about all those European cars with the gas on the left and brake on the right so they can drive on the other side of the road?
Does anyone else think it's sad that this post has no mention of the Clutch position.
Link to the torrent of the census data from the article:
http://blog.angrygoats.net/2013/04/12/2011-australian-census-release-3/
Since the data is available for free (obfuscated or not) and was released under a CC license, technically this should all be considered legal, right? Not that it should be necessary of course.
The obfuscation is probably because hosting and bandwidth are not cheap in Oz and some inventive public servant (stop snickering, they do exist, there aren't many of them but they do exist) came up with a way to reduce the bandwidth bill. With the current emphasis on public service spending and impending election, this wouldn't surprise me.
Either that or some hopeless public servant coder has no idea what they've done.
Could be either case really, I've seen both.
From various airlines: 2004 #1, 2004 #2, 2011 #1, 2011 #2, and probably others I missed.
OK, I'm travelling to the US later this year, I'm going to have to take some internal flights... Is there any airline there that I can reasonably count on not to screw up?
I agree, but I think the solution could be a lot easier. Most airports have stairs they can drive to the airplane door. Sure, that wouldn't help a disabled person, but there is no reason 200 people have to sit in a plane for hours when only 1 or 2 people can't walk down a flight of stairs.
In addition to the stairs, they also have elevators on trucks (this is how they get large items in and out of the cabin).
This is total lack of human compassion that someone can't get in one of those tractors, push the plane at the gate out of the way to a spot off to the side and let the plane with the people unload. What kind of heartless ass is running American's operations at that airport? Oh, gee, that might inconvenience the airline personel because the first plane would then have to be trundled back over since it needs to leave first when things resume.
Not quite that simple as you'll need an excavator to move all the support infrastructure (fuel, sewerage inlets and so forth).
What the airport should have is an over-flow area on the tarmac where passengers can be unloaded via those portable stairs you may have seen about and bused to the terminal. I've seen this setup in almost all SE Asian airports except for NAIA in Manila (and I'm not sure if that is because NAIA was designed by Americans or run by Filipinos).
This of course wont help with flights departing late.
???
Have you taken you medication today. Are you trying to say Australia has no government?
And here you demonstrate how little you know about Asian governments.
I once asked a hotelier in the Philippines how much he pays in taxes.
He laughed and said "what taxes".
He pays next to nothing to the Filipino government, he pays a bit to city hall, the police, et al. to get them to leave him alone. This is not taxation, this is bribery (two very different concepts) and the governments of SE Asia are very unashamed about doing it.
The lawyer told him that the vast majority of bankruptcies are just as easy as his was (although that is just an anecdotal claim by his lawyer).
No offense but you're entire post was anecdotal. I've dealt with dozens of people looking to do the same thing and its never worked out for them. Perhaps your state is more prone to this type of abuse, mine however is not.
An anecdotal prediction to the GP's anecdote.
After 7 years you are allowed to borrow again, but you dont have a clean slate. That bankruptcy would be on their records for life, any semi-responsible lender would be very reluctant to lend to them again. Getting a car loan from all but the shonkyest of the shonky would be difficult and even after declaring bankruptcy, if you get any money you can still be sued for it. As another poster has said, the scope of a bankruptcy is very narrow.
Most governments justify limiting taxi services by claiming it is to control safety, when in fact it is to control transportation (and to reward those taxi companies that support the correct government officials and initiatives).
You mean few governments.
I'll admit that there are a few governments that control taxi licenses/medalions.
In most places with taxi prices out of control it's due to a cabal of private companies that prevent competition. In many places its mainly due to the fact that few companies hold virtual monopolies on taxi companies, despite anyone being able to get a license to operate a "private car". These companies wont think twice about using standover tactics to force some people out of business. Certainly in my city, if you want to take a taxi they have you bent over a barrel. In fact, they'll charge you an extra A$9 if you want them to turn up within 20 minutes of when you booked them. They do this because they have a virtual monopoly and in my city, anyone can get a license to operate a private car service.
The absolute worst I've seen is Phuket, Thailand where the local taxi/tuk tuk drivers will literally kill other taxi operators in order to protect their monopoly and charge prices way out of line with other cities in Thailand. The local government is as powerless as it is corrupt, the last time they tried to implement a public transport system the drivers were dragged out and beaten in broad daylight. In Phuket, if you want to go 700m down the road expect to pay 200 Baht minimum, (they'll start asking at 500), compare this to Bangkok (which IMHO, has some of the cheapest taxi's in the world) you can go from the airport to the city centre (A trip of 30 KM) for 400 Baht, that includes a 50 B in tolls and a tip rounding it up to 400 B (normally between 20-40 Baht).
For reference purposes, 100 Baht is around US$3.50.
Driverless technology becomes workable when it is better than the average human driver. That's a pretty low bar to clear. I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.
And here in lies the problem.
Driverless cars will have to live side by side with human driven cars for years, if not decades and as you pointed out, there are a lot of bad drivers out there. A self driving car will need to be able to be proactive in protecting it's passengers from drivers that are pretty damn unpredictable. Right now we cant even get everyone doing the same speed or indicating, a driverless car has no hope dealing with that at our current level of technology.
Right now, you cant even get an automatic transmission that can predict what gear you need to be in before you need it, let alone an entire car that can spot potential hazards or the signs bad behaviours in other drivers.
revisionist?
the only revisionism here is your post.
Seen all those ads on TV from Labor about how the Liberals were denying the GFC?
No, because they dont exist.
Stop getting your info from Murdoch.
We are not in a recession'
That's because we weren't in recession.
We experienced knock on effects from the GFC when it hit the US and Eurozone. We recovered within months whilst the US and Eurozone have been in actual recessions for the last 4 years.
The GFC never really hit Australia. Our economy has been growing since mid 2009 although a lot of idiots keep saying that it's going to hit us any minute now... Any minute now... We've dodged 20 of these recessions in the last year. Mostly because idiots dont actually know anything about the economy.
was Liberals hard saved cash
LoL, I guess you'd be an expert on revisionism.
The Liberals "hard saved" cash came from selling off public assets. Without selling off Telco assets and the airports, Howard would have left in debt. What Labor is spending is to build new public assets and fix systems that have been horribly broken under the previous Liberal government (notably Education and Health).
You guys need to get your government under control.
The problem with this that the government has continually shrunk funding for CSIRO and as a result CSIRO has been forced to rely on other sources of funding. This means they spend more time and resources on securing revenue than doing actual science. To lack of government funding is directly behind this.
and the stupid voters will stay focused on stupid shit like gay marriage
Gay Marriage is actually an important issue. 50 years ago your country discriminated people based on skin colour, these days you do the same thing based on sexual preference. Taking a stand against this kind of idiocy should be a top priority for any free society (liberty, fraternity, equality and all that bollocks).
In Australia the stupid voters are caught on backburner issues like Asylum seekers, MRRT and the Carbon Tax. The opposition leader spends more time banging the hate drum against the current prime minister than actually promoting what he stands for. Few Australians are concerned about science and technology, creating new industry or ensuring that our education system remains amongst the best in the world (all three of which have long term economic benefits, but seeing as its not "stopping the boats" the average mouth breather doesn't care).
As far as I can tell, the only policy that Tony Abbott has is to hate Julia Gillard, but because it's popular to hate Julia Gillard it's paying off for him (much to the detriment of Australia, I'm not Gillard's biggest fan but Tony Abbott is going to be far worse).