It's not nitpicking as the actual infringement case is yet to be heard. This judgement only had to do with the injunction against Samsung.
The case to decide if Samsung has infringed on anything is going to be heard next year. In the mean time, Samsung can sell their tablet on the open market.
This does restore some confidence in the Aussie legal system though. I think Justice Bennett needs to keep her head down as her ruling was overruled by both three Federal Court judges then a High Court judge. Also, seeing as the High Court is the highest court in Australia, Apple has no avenue left for appeal.
What about the potential of lost sales during those 2 months?
Not until the actual infringement case is over. That case hasn't been heard yet and will be heard early next year.
If Apple loses the infringement case, they are not only liable for Samsung's legal costs but also can be sued for the estimated loss of revenue whilst there was an injunction. Both the legal costs and loss of revenue will be hotly debated by Samsung, Apple and the judges. It will get messy.
Anyone who thinks that any tablet, Android or otherwise is a replacement for a laptop is retarded and deluding themselves.
But they do have their place for some people, My Iconia tab will never replace my laptop, heck it's not even turned on right now but seeing as I'm on call one week out of every three or four it's great for telling Nagios to shut up at 3 in the morning. Seeing as Nagios is entirely web based I can flick on the tablet (instant on from sleeping) and silence the alert. By the same token, if the fix cannot wait until morning I'll fire up my laptop, the 40 seconds it takes W7 to boot on my Asus U30SD is easily adsorbed by the time I would have wasted typing on my Iconia.
Also with flights, trying to use my 13" lappy on a crowded Air Asia flight is an exercise in frustration. My tablet which has a much smaller form factor is great. Given that budget airlines like Air Asia cram six or seven more rows into the same space as premium airlines that extra room means comfort.
Tablets excel at a few things (media consumption, web browsing), but suck at almost everything else.
And Google for Android too. They've used it before to kill malware apps. It's a good feature to have, exactly for that reason.
The difference is,
1) you are not 100% reliant and bound to Google for Applications, if you find their "controls" (mocking voice and air-quote) too restrictive, you can simply select "allow unkown sources".
2) Google are yet to use it to pull an application for offending their sensibilities or competes with them, unlike Apple.
The Germans also had a shortage of strategic materials near the end of WWII. They could no longer make decent high temperature alloys, dense armor, or penetrator rounds. Their tank armor and munitions were basically a POS made from regular steel by that time. As for jets, they could have made a fighter much sooner had Heinkel's prototype He 280 been put to production instead of waffling around.
Quite true, this is especially where cheaper tanks would have helped them out in the same way that cheaper tanks helped the allies and the soviets. Not that it would have changed the outcome, by 1945 the German people were too war weary to keep fighting for too much longer.
Also, time and resources spent on Hitler's V weapons could have been put to better use on conventional programs.
And theres precedence for your argument. In world war II Germany made a few outstanding tanks (panthers? I can't remember) that took so much work and money to build that they could only make a few, and hence were overrun by cheap british tanks in massive numbers. Like they really got owned.
Specifically, the Tiger Tank was in many ways the Rolls Royce of tanks, but it was engineered like a fine sports car instead of a tank for a dirty, grimy battlefield, and so wasn't terribly reliable. And it was so expensive and complicated to build that during the entire war, under 1400 were made. And for the King Tiger, the follow on, less than 500 were made. The Soviets churned out over 84 thousand T-34's. We built nearly 50K M4 Shermans.
An old military saying goes "quantity has a quality all its own", and there's an influential school of thought among WWII historians that we didn't beat the Axis with superior weapons, but with superior production lines.
Nazi Germany's problem was Hitler. There were cheaper, less terrifying medium tanks that could be produced similar to the Sherman and T34 (the original T34 was a gutless wonder. Barely effective against the German PzKW IV's, designed to fight the more numerous Pz II and Pz III tanks. It wasn't until the T34 was equipped with a 85mm cannon (T34-85) that it became effective against other medium tanks).
The issue was that Hitler had a hard on for big tanks. Even when they were proved cost ineffective. One needs to look at the experimental designs of tanks by the end of WWII, the E75, E100, Maus, Lowe and and the LandKrusier super heavy tank. This was after both allied forces (US/UK and Soviet) were cleaning up their heavies with inferior medium tanks, not many Shermans were equipped with 90mm or 17 pdr QF (Sherman Firefly) guns but were still somewhat effective with their 75mm due to numbers and well trained US and British tank commanders.
It was the same with the Luftwaffe, Hitler had a hard on for bombers. He ordered that the Me262 had to be built as a bomber, eliminating much of their advantage of speed against allied escorts and bombers. Although it was not easy for US Mustang's to intercept Me262 it was possible, it also gave gun crews on the bombers themselves a chance. Me262 pilots still approached US bombers from the front or top like earlier German fighters as it was still too dangerous for them to approach from the sides or rear.
BTW "quantity has a quality of its own" I beleive came from a high ranking Soviet general in WWII.
"without a gps signal then there's no way you are going to make it 50+ miles back to a safe landing zone without a significant amount of inaccuracy in your position. "
hahaha, no.
We have vehicle with terrain based location systems (TERCOM). I'm not saying this vehicle has one, just that it's possible.
Not to mention this strange navigation device called a compass.
The drone has it's last known position, knows the position of the base, can use the compass to find the base. It does not need to be 100% accurate, just accurate enough to get it out of the jamming field and get a fix on it's current position.
Beyond that, there are other positioning systems like GLONASS (Russian) and Galileo (European). Having multiple systems means that you cant jam all of them, without jamming the one you (the enemy) is also using.
Roughly the same cost as an F-15. Cheaper than an F-22 (around 200 million a pop depending on how you count things) and about what a hit movie brings in on midnight showings. (Just for some perspective).
of that $30 million the movie bought in, not a cent will be paid in tax. (just to keep things in perspective)
Ducklin said that the likelihood of the USB sticks being left on trains on purpose by hackers or penetration testers so they are picked up by corporate users and plugged into their work computers, is very low.
"We didn't find any evidence to support the theory that the USB sticks had been deliberately planted," said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at the company.
[TFA]
Trains are not logically a good place to leave sticks lying around for an attack. People treat things found on trains as suspicious, worse yet will hand them over to security. In order to attack via this angle you need to get people where they feel safer, such as in a workplace where they'll see a USB stick in the work dunny and thing "Free USB stick".
Also, never ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity. Steve the Salesman with his Blackpad and iBerry is paying zero attention to what he is doing could easily lose a USB stick out of his pocket, Given it will cost his companies IT dept $10 to replace, he just doesn't care.
I'll probably get modded down for saying this - but over the years, I've worked as a developer/tech arch in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Milwaukee and Portsmouth, and my experience is that the vast majority of US programmers also suck.
The vast majority of any programing body sucks. Sturgeons law apples to developers, 90% are crap.
However the differences between Indian and American programmers is that if the Indian programmer is good at his job, he goes to work in the west.
Well, this isn't so much of an difference any more, much like the Irish, Americans are now flooding to Australian shores looking for work.
What religion do you feel bears hardship in Iran?
Baha'i yes. Sufi muslims, yes.
I can't think of many others. Iran is home to tens of thousands of prosperous Jews and Christians
This,
Americans understand so little about Iran despite the largest Iranian population outside of Iran living in California (They're Persians, so they look and sound like like (white) Europeans).
Persian Christian and Jews who were always passive minority religions in Iran were pretty much untouched. The Islamic Revolution targeted the popular religions such as Baha'i and Zoroastrians. I've met few Iranian Muslims, but I know a few Baha'i and Zoroastrians.
Worse than that, Iranian hackers stormed the Virtual Embassy and took 52 user accounts hostage.
Obama is rumoured to have ordered a strike team assembled from the top elite US Battlefield 2 soldiers, to stage a daring rescue in high-polygon-count Virtual Blackhawk helicopters.
Operation Shitcock was launched on October 22 2013.
It was doomed to failure from the start as 3 of the team members went off in their own direction calling the rest of the team "nubs", the rear most member shot the next two in the back and was kicked. The team commander sat in the helicopter motionless and not saying anything before the final member wandering into machine gun fire and claiming the Iranians were Haxxxor Noobs.
Within 36 minutes of launch, the entire squad was dead and complaining.
Not sure if there is a name for: "we all buy the book from the same publisher and they charge all of us the same price, so we happen to sell it at the same price to the consumer. Why? Because we happen to have the same percentage commission rate."... Maybe there is a german word for that.
I have NEVER, during 15 years in the field, EVER encountered a competent IT professional who dreamed of being in a union. Union culture is pretty much the antithesis of what makes a good engineer tick.
About both unions and engineers. The idea of labour unionism is the ability to negotiate as a whole, I cant see who a proper engineer sees that as counter productive. Most of the hate of unions is based on political scaremongering, not actual fact. Germany survives quite well on collective bargaining, the ability for workers to act as one whole gives them power equal to the company ensuring that neither side can effectively abuse a stronger position.
Now the problem with getting IT workers to organise is the same as getting IT workers to decide what to have for lunch. Every one has a separate want and agenda, being engineers means they'll argue for what they want and not necessarily negotiate very well. I often use the joke "the last time IT tried to unionise, we met for 3 days and in that time we couldn't decide whether we should be a Union, Guild or Clan."
A bubble in Developers! Developers! Developers!
That means we will get a bunch of snot noes guys jumping into Computer Science who are in it just for the money. It will create the.COM boom all over again... Then it will crash and half of the idiots will stay and they will lay off half of the skilled workers.
Been saying this for a while. This is the part of the bubble just before it bursts.
I call this.bomb 2.0 or iBust in homage the most ridiculously overvalued company.
Inevitably the overpriced companies will lose a lot of their share price, Apple, Zynga, Twitter, Facebook (if they are smart enough to get their IPO sorted before the crash), even Google's going to lose a fair chunk although not the 60-80% I'm predicting for APPL, Zynga and Facebook.
The rush in hiring developers means we've moved into the late adopters stage. Everyone and their dog is saying "look at Facebook" and "Me too". They are creating web services and portals (in the Cloud) not realising that the ship has sailed. Look at FB, they already losing value before their IPO, if Zuckerberg is smart he'll sell out before the crash is imminent and FB loses most of its value. Much in the same way MySpace's creators sold out to News Corp (MySpace is now worth what fraction of what News Corp paid for it). Once this happens, developers become useless and overpaid. I think this is going to come as a big surprise to many developers. When push comes to shove, Devs will be the first to go in most tech companies. During the GFC, my company of 95 ish staff sacked 12, 9 were developers and Australia weathered the GFC _a lot_ better then most western nations.
It's also a great insurance policy, in case the Australian government gets fed up and starts sinking their whaling fleet. It's much harder to sink a Mammoth hunting lodge.
Which brings up a good idea, why aren't we cloning whales or other animals on the brink of extinction thanks to human activities?
Better yet, animals we've cause to go extinct recently such as the Tasmanian Devil or the Lithgow Tiger.
As for the whaling fleet. Dear RAN, use the big missile, you might get the hippies at the same time.
Considering my mobile number was previously registered with Vodafone in my mums name (at the time I signed up, I didn't have enough credit history to get a postpaid plain in my own name) and I was recently able to switch it from Vodafone to TPG Mobile without either entity seeing any kind of actual ID (and I dont remember providing ID when I first signed up to TPG for ADSL either) I doubt that there are as many requirements on getting a SIM card as there should be.
Which is why I said in theory.
Just about every Australian knows, if one store knocks you back, just keep going until you get one that's hungry enough for the commission that they'll fudge the paperwork. Doesnt normally take long.
In theory, they are meant to ask for ID, I was in a Telstra store where they wouldn't sell a SIM to Norwegian tourists without seeing their passports. On my way out of the store (15 minutes without being served) I suggested to the Noggies that they try the Optus shop across the road.
I hate banks in general as much as the next man in the times of this crisis induced by some of them but lets at least blame them for the evil things that they really have done. This is not one of them.
Only because they are forced by the law to do what they did.
Banks can make things incredibly painful for people if they get hurt by fraud if they want to. One of my former bosses with a $20K AUD platinum card from an unnamed 3 letter Aussie bank had almost 19K swiped from it by card copiers a few years back. A lot of crap sent to Thailand, Russia, China and other places we couldn't prosecute. Basically he reported that he didn't make any of these transactions but the bank said they had to investigate. After a few days of being jerked around by the bank he called the Banking and Financial Services Ombudsman (BFSO) who could do little else but force the bank to give him a deadline for the investigation, they did, no more then six weeks.
So for six weeks, my former boss was $19K in debt with a 17% interest rate on that. 5 weeks and 6 days after the BFSO got involved the bank said they will refund the $19K, however they still sent him a bill for the interest as they had passed the 30 day interest free period on that card. Of course my boss fought this, and the bank dragged it out to over 2 months before finally reversing the debt.
So banks will help you if you're a victim of fraud, they'll even do it quickly if you're lucky or the case generates a lot of PR. But dont pretend banks are doing it out of the kindness of their heart. They _have_ to give your money back by law, but they dont have to do it kindly.
Slashdot Mirror
How so? It's a fairly accurate description O_o.
You're kind of nitpicking here, in my opinion.
It's not nitpicking as the actual infringement case is yet to be heard. This judgement only had to do with the injunction against Samsung.
The case to decide if Samsung has infringed on anything is going to be heard next year. In the mean time, Samsung can sell their tablet on the open market.
This does restore some confidence in the Aussie legal system though. I think Justice Bennett needs to keep her head down as her ruling was overruled by both three Federal Court judges then a High Court judge. Also, seeing as the High Court is the highest court in Australia, Apple has no avenue left for appeal.
What about the potential of lost sales during those 2 months?
Not until the actual infringement case is over. That case hasn't been heard yet and will be heard early next year.
If Apple loses the infringement case, they are not only liable for Samsung's legal costs but also can be sued for the estimated loss of revenue whilst there was an injunction. Both the legal costs and loss of revenue will be hotly debated by Samsung, Apple and the judges. It will get messy.
What about the potential of lost sales during those 2 months?
Not until the actual infringement case is over. That case hasn't been heard yet and will be heard early next year.
If Apple loses the infringement case, they are not only liable for Samsung's legal costs but also
Anyone who thinks that any tablet, Android or otherwise is a replacement for a laptop is retarded and deluding themselves.
But they do have their place for some people, My Iconia tab will never replace my laptop, heck it's not even turned on right now but seeing as I'm on call one week out of every three or four it's great for telling Nagios to shut up at 3 in the morning. Seeing as Nagios is entirely web based I can flick on the tablet (instant on from sleeping) and silence the alert. By the same token, if the fix cannot wait until morning I'll fire up my laptop, the 40 seconds it takes W7 to boot on my Asus U30SD is easily adsorbed by the time I would have wasted typing on my Iconia.
Also with flights, trying to use my 13" lappy on a crowded Air Asia flight is an exercise in frustration. My tablet which has a much smaller form factor is great. Given that budget airlines like Air Asia cram six or seven more rows into the same space as premium airlines that extra room means comfort.
Tablets excel at a few things (media consumption, web browsing), but suck at almost everything else.
2) Apple has yet to remote pull anything.
This is wrong.
Apple first used it in 2009..
here's another from 2010
I aslo dont see why I should pay a ransom to be able to do what I want with my property, that is exactly what Microsoft is asking me to do.
So how is that an Android problem?
You admit yourself that ONE carrier does it and they stopped doing it a year and a half ago.
As of the beginning of this year, no carrier locked out this feature.
Wrong again,
You could side-load applications onto AT&T phones without rooting or a custom ROM. But it's been over a year and a half since that was needed.
Apple first used it in 2009. for nudity (to us Australians who aren't afraid of the human body, this seem pants on head retarded).
here's another from 2010
So it seems your information is a bit out of date... and completely fabricated.
Gingerbread was last years OS, give me an Ice Cream Sandwich geodesic house template.
And Google for Android too. They've used it before to kill malware apps. It's a good feature to have, exactly for that reason.
The difference is,
1) you are not 100% reliant and bound to Google for Applications, if you find their "controls" (mocking voice and air-quote) too restrictive, you can simply select "allow unkown sources".
2) Google are yet to use it to pull an application for offending their sensibilities or competes with them, unlike Apple.
The Germans also had a shortage of strategic materials near the end of WWII. They could no longer make decent high temperature alloys, dense armor, or penetrator rounds. Their tank armor and munitions were basically a POS made from regular steel by that time. As for jets, they could have made a fighter much sooner had Heinkel's prototype He 280 been put to production instead of waffling around.
Quite true, this is especially where cheaper tanks would have helped them out in the same way that cheaper tanks helped the allies and the soviets. Not that it would have changed the outcome, by 1945 the German people were too war weary to keep fighting for too much longer.
Also, time and resources spent on Hitler's V weapons could have been put to better use on conventional programs.
And theres precedence for your argument. In world war II Germany made a few outstanding tanks (panthers? I can't remember) that took so much work and money to build that they could only make a few, and hence were overrun by cheap british tanks in massive numbers. Like they really got owned.
Specifically, the Tiger Tank was in many ways the Rolls Royce of tanks, but it was engineered like a fine sports car instead of a tank for a dirty, grimy battlefield, and so wasn't terribly reliable. And it was so expensive and complicated to build that during the entire war, under 1400 were made. And for the King Tiger, the follow on, less than 500 were made. The Soviets churned out over 84 thousand T-34's. We built nearly 50K M4 Shermans.
An old military saying goes "quantity has a quality all its own", and there's an influential school of thought among WWII historians that we didn't beat the Axis with superior weapons, but with superior production lines.
Nazi Germany's problem was Hitler. There were cheaper, less terrifying medium tanks that could be produced similar to the Sherman and T34 (the original T34 was a gutless wonder. Barely effective against the German PzKW IV's, designed to fight the more numerous Pz II and Pz III tanks. It wasn't until the T34 was equipped with a 85mm cannon (T34-85) that it became effective against other medium tanks).
The issue was that Hitler had a hard on for big tanks. Even when they were proved cost ineffective. One needs to look at the experimental designs of tanks by the end of WWII, the E75, E100, Maus, Lowe and and the LandKrusier super heavy tank. This was after both allied forces (US/UK and Soviet) were cleaning up their heavies with inferior medium tanks, not many Shermans were equipped with 90mm or 17 pdr QF (Sherman Firefly) guns but were still somewhat effective with their 75mm due to numbers and well trained US and British tank commanders.
It was the same with the Luftwaffe, Hitler had a hard on for bombers. He ordered that the Me262 had to be built as a bomber, eliminating much of their advantage of speed against allied escorts and bombers. Although it was not easy for US Mustang's to intercept Me262 it was possible, it also gave gun crews on the bombers themselves a chance. Me262 pilots still approached US bombers from the front or top like earlier German fighters as it was still too dangerous for them to approach from the sides or rear.
BTW "quantity has a quality of its own" I beleive came from a high ranking Soviet general in WWII.
And they'll still get that tech anyway
Eventually, but remember that to get Stealth you need to have researched Combustion and Lasers. You don't get it automatically any more.
If you've got the Internet, you get it automatically as soon as two other nations have researched it.
"without a gps signal then there's no way you are going to make it 50+ miles back to a safe landing zone without a significant amount of inaccuracy in your position. "
hahaha, no.
We have vehicle with terrain based location systems (TERCOM). I'm not saying this vehicle has one, just that it's possible.
Not to mention this strange navigation device called a compass.
The drone has it's last known position, knows the position of the base, can use the compass to find the base. It does not need to be 100% accurate, just accurate enough to get it out of the jamming field and get a fix on it's current position.
Beyond that, there are other positioning systems like GLONASS (Russian) and Galileo (European). Having multiple systems means that you cant jam all of them, without jamming the one you (the enemy) is also using.
Roughly the same cost as an F-15. Cheaper than an F-22 (around 200 million a pop depending on how you count things) and about what a hit movie brings in on midnight showings. (Just for some perspective).
of that $30 million the movie bought in, not a cent will be paid in tax. (just to keep things in perspective)
They considered that angle. But then
Ducklin said that the likelihood of the USB sticks being left on trains on purpose by hackers or penetration testers so they are picked up by corporate users and plugged into their work computers, is very low.
"We didn't find any evidence to support the theory that the USB sticks had been deliberately planted," said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at the company.
[TFA]
Trains are not logically a good place to leave sticks lying around for an attack. People treat things found on trains as suspicious, worse yet will hand them over to security. In order to attack via this angle you need to get people where they feel safer, such as in a workplace where they'll see a USB stick in the work dunny and thing "Free USB stick".
Also, never ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by stupidity. Steve the Salesman with his Blackpad and iBerry is paying zero attention to what he is doing could easily lose a USB stick out of his pocket, Given it will cost his companies IT dept $10 to replace, he just doesn't care.
The vast majority of any programing body sucks. Sturgeons law apples to developers, 90% are crap.
However the differences between Indian and American programmers is that if the Indian programmer is good at his job, he goes to work in the west.
Well, this isn't so much of an difference any more, much like the Irish, Americans are now flooding to Australian shores looking for work.
What religion do you feel bears hardship in Iran?
Baha'i yes. Sufi muslims, yes.
I can't think of many others. Iran is home to tens of thousands of prosperous Jews and Christians
This,
Americans understand so little about Iran despite the largest Iranian population outside of Iran living in California (They're Persians, so they look and sound like like (white) Europeans).
Persian Christian and Jews who were always passive minority religions in Iran were pretty much untouched. The Islamic Revolution targeted the popular religions such as Baha'i and Zoroastrians. I've met few Iranian Muslims, but I know a few Baha'i and Zoroastrians.
Worse than that, Iranian hackers stormed the Virtual Embassy and took 52 user accounts hostage.
Obama is rumoured to have ordered a strike team assembled from the top elite US Battlefield 2 soldiers, to stage a daring rescue in high-polygon-count Virtual Blackhawk helicopters.
Operation Shitcock was launched on October 22 2013.
It was doomed to failure from the start as 3 of the team members went off in their own direction calling the rest of the team "nubs", the rear most member shot the next two in the back and was kicked. The team commander sat in the helicopter motionless and not saying anything before the final member wandering into machine gun fire and claiming the Iranians were Haxxxor Noobs.
Within 36 minutes of launch, the entire squad was dead and complaining.
Not sure if there is a name for: "we all buy the book from the same publisher and they charge all of us the same price, so we happen to sell it at the same price to the consumer. Why? Because we happen to have the same percentage commission rate." ... Maybe there is a german word for that.
Kollusion?
I have NEVER , during 15 years in the field, EVER encountered a competent IT professional who dreamed of being in a union. Union culture is pretty much the antithesis of what makes a good engineer tick.
About both unions and engineers. The idea of labour unionism is the ability to negotiate as a whole, I cant see who a proper engineer sees that as counter productive. Most of the hate of unions is based on political scaremongering, not actual fact. Germany survives quite well on collective bargaining, the ability for workers to act as one whole gives them power equal to the company ensuring that neither side can effectively abuse a stronger position.
Now the problem with getting IT workers to organise is the same as getting IT workers to decide what to have for lunch. Every one has a separate want and agenda, being engineers means they'll argue for what they want and not necessarily negotiate very well. I often use the joke "the last time IT tried to unionise, we met for 3 days and in that time we couldn't decide whether we should be a Union, Guild or Clan."
A bubble in Developers! Developers! Developers! .COM boom all over again... Then it will crash and half of the idiots will stay and they will lay off half of the skilled workers.
That means we will get a bunch of snot noes guys jumping into Computer Science who are in it just for the money. It will create the
Been saying this for a while. This is the part of the bubble just before it bursts.
.bomb 2.0 or iBust in homage the most ridiculously overvalued company.
I call this
Inevitably the overpriced companies will lose a lot of their share price, Apple, Zynga, Twitter, Facebook (if they are smart enough to get their IPO sorted before the crash), even Google's going to lose a fair chunk although not the 60-80% I'm predicting for APPL, Zynga and Facebook.
The rush in hiring developers means we've moved into the late adopters stage. Everyone and their dog is saying "look at Facebook" and "Me too". They are creating web services and portals (in the Cloud) not realising that the ship has sailed. Look at FB, they already losing value before their IPO, if Zuckerberg is smart he'll sell out before the crash is imminent and FB loses most of its value. Much in the same way MySpace's creators sold out to News Corp (MySpace is now worth what fraction of what News Corp paid for it). Once this happens, developers become useless and overpaid. I think this is going to come as a big surprise to many developers. When push comes to shove, Devs will be the first to go in most tech companies. During the GFC, my company of 95 ish staff sacked 12, 9 were developers and Australia weathered the GFC _a lot_ better then most western nations.
It's also a great insurance policy, in case the Australian government gets fed up and starts sinking their whaling fleet. It's much harder to sink a Mammoth hunting lodge.
Which brings up a good idea, why aren't we cloning whales or other animals on the brink of extinction thanks to human activities?
Better yet, animals we've cause to go extinct recently such as the Tasmanian Devil or the Lithgow Tiger.
As for the whaling fleet. Dear RAN, use the big missile, you might get the hippies at the same time.
In Soviet Russia, president assassinates you.
Considering my mobile number was previously registered with Vodafone in my mums name (at the time I signed up, I didn't have enough credit history to get a postpaid plain in my own name) and I was recently able to switch it from Vodafone to TPG Mobile without either entity seeing any kind of actual ID (and I dont remember providing ID when I first signed up to TPG for ADSL either) I doubt that there are as many requirements on getting a SIM card as there should be.
Which is why I said in theory.
Just about every Australian knows, if one store knocks you back, just keep going until you get one that's hungry enough for the commission that they'll fudge the paperwork. Doesnt normally take long.
In theory, they are meant to ask for ID, I was in a Telstra store where they wouldn't sell a SIM to Norwegian tourists without seeing their passports. On my way out of the store (15 minutes without being served) I suggested to the Noggies that they try the Optus shop across the road.
Only because they are forced by the law to do what they did.
Banks can make things incredibly painful for people if they get hurt by fraud if they want to. One of my former bosses with a $20K AUD platinum card from an unnamed 3 letter Aussie bank had almost 19K swiped from it by card copiers a few years back. A lot of crap sent to Thailand, Russia, China and other places we couldn't prosecute. Basically he reported that he didn't make any of these transactions but the bank said they had to investigate. After a few days of being jerked around by the bank he called the Banking and Financial Services Ombudsman (BFSO) who could do little else but force the bank to give him a deadline for the investigation, they did, no more then six weeks.
So for six weeks, my former boss was $19K in debt with a 17% interest rate on that. 5 weeks and 6 days after the BFSO got involved the bank said they will refund the $19K, however they still sent him a bill for the interest as they had passed the 30 day interest free period on that card. Of course my boss fought this, and the bank dragged it out to over 2 months before finally reversing the debt.
So banks will help you if you're a victim of fraud, they'll even do it quickly if you're lucky or the case generates a lot of PR. But dont pretend banks are doing it out of the kindness of their heart. They _have_ to give your money back by law, but they dont have to do it kindly.