I don't see them removing existing bills, though. This is the standard operating procedure: an unpopular law goes in, then after the election everyone mysteriously "forgets" about it.
Except the law never went though,
In the last 4 years, it's failed in the house twice (never even made it to the senate).
Telstra and Optus are voluntarily filtering, no mandatory filtering here. Telstra and Optus are Australia's oldest and worst ISP's. Because they are so old, they have a large customer base.
And TFS is wrong, Australia's 2nd largest ISP is iinet (Optus is only larger when you include voice customers) which have been staunch in opposing mandatory filtering and have not implemented a voluntary filter.
Because this is voluntary, you are free to switch to ISP's that are voluntarily not filtering, I can suggest iinet and Internode. So I'm going to be enjoying unfiltered internet.
Yah. Five anxious years with an increasingly demented parent made this sound attractive at first. Then I remembered how her regular "safe return" bracelet bruised and scratched her increasingly fragile skin (despite being properly fitted) until we had to stop using it. I think their hearts are in the right place, but a bracelet just won't do it.
Indeed, we need sub-cutaneous transmitters to keep those old people well and truly tracked (hey, they voted to track the cars of young people (didn't pass fortunately) I say turn about is fair play)
so as long as they say "from zero up to the maximum we have advertised" then it's sufficient? seems pretty pointless.
Uh, no.
That's pretty stupid as they dont give you an idea of minimum typical speeds. What Helstra (mentioned above in my GP post) does say is that if it's working, you will likely get between 1.1 and 8 Mb/s.
I dont quite get your logic here, you're saying off should be listed as a working speed? Something about that seems wrong.
What user cares about that? You've got to think about it from the end users perspective, they want to know is what speeds to expect when they are using it.
Minimum data speeds? Surely it depends on the device you are using and the area you are in...The bill obviously has good intentions but it'll be hard to maintain the info.
Hmmm, other nations seem to have no problem with this.
the backup system was probably in one of the _racks_ the FBI seized.
That's OK, I'll just grab the latest backup we shipped off site.
More like the insurance wont cover FBI seizure. Bloody heavy handed of the FBI though, this is the sort of thing expect of a third world police force looking for bribe money, not a respected first world law enforcement agency.
Couldn't the FBI have worked with the DC's owners? Wouldn't that be more effective in rooting out LulzSec members/leaders? Oh but that wouldn't show the world that Something(TM) was being done, damn media circus.
And a cheque is something one uses to pay the bill at a restaurant?
Fixed.
Seeing as no one in Australia uses "check" or "check bin" (as it is in Thailand), to refer to the an open account at a restaurant, if one were backward enough to use a cheque (correct spelling) one would "pay the bill with a cheque".
This however is a moot point as no business would accept a personal cheque anyway. We have credit/debit cards, it's not the middle ages any more.
I can tell you from experience that dollar bills and vending machines seldom get along well. I usually sort the $1 bills in my wallet by grade, in case I should find myself needing one for a vending machine,
Australia tends to have few vending machines that take notes*, those that do seem to have an easier time as polymer notes dont fade and are difficult to tear or crease.
as wrinkled/torn/wet/ugly bills often don't go through the machines well.
Another advantage of polymer notes, they come out of the wash in the same condition they go into the wash (well, maybe a bit cleaner).
* We call them (bank) notes, not bills as a bill is a notice that you owe someone else some money and yes Americans, I'll be happy to send you all the bills I have... If you promise to pay them on time.
Given Apple's cash reserves couldn't it just buy every major carrier in the country? I'm sure it could buy ATT, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, et al, with the loose change in the couches at the Apple campus.:) Given Internet access is pretty much already a local monopoly with no competition what would it matter? At least with Apple in charge they would have an incentive to get rid of the caps.
Asuming that Apple actually has the money, they might be able to negotiate Comcast down to that but chances are Comcast will go for a higher price as they have no need to sell, forcing Apple into debt.
This is just Comcast, AT&T (~ US$160 B) and Verizon (~ US$100 B) are bigger.
That's a patently false "answer": Australia and Canada are two countries with major providers that have caps.
That being said, in Oz I can get 150 GB/m for A$60 (US$63.5) which is fairly standard entry level pricing for ADSL. That's 4.5 ish GB per day which is not easy to go over for the average person. 1 TB plans are A$160 from the same provider, not to mention that data peered between two members of the same ISP is not metered (A few ISP's dont do this) which accounts for about 20% of my traffic when doing P2P.
Caps wont kill on-line services, caps in Oz have been increasing over the years, in 2004 the cap for A$50 ADSL was around 5 GB and I had to pay an additional $20 for line rental. Now A$60 gets naked ADSL (no line rental).
Caps aren't bad, I think they are good as the people who use more take up more of the financial burden of providing the service.
You can get unmetered internet but for most people, that starts at A$450 for 2 Mb fibre.
Once you get out of South Africa and Egypt there is no infrastructure for manufacturing in Africa. Even with 15-25 years of solid investment and construction, there won't be infrastructure for manufacturing in Africa outside of Egypt and South Africa.
China isn't investing in the Republic of South Africa or Egypt, they are investing in places they can strip bare of mineral wealth.
That isn't particularly true,
Plenty of mining companies such as Rio Tinto and BHP have set up in places like Tanzania. Granted for areas that are or were recently war torn this is true but that isn't that much of Africa. The problem is mainly infrastructure (ports and roads) but these can easily be built with enough investment.
BTW, China is not investing in Egypt or South Africa because these nations are not third world, South Africa in particular has a well established manufacturing industry akin to Japan (cars in particular, a few Toyota models are manufactured in SA), making them a bit more advanced then China. Egypt is also quite rich.
China will simply move the cheap manufacturing to Africa.
You don't think china's been buddying up with East African nations for nothing do you? They've had a military medial ship there for six months late last year spreading China's good will.
China is not dumb, not in the slightest, they've been preparing for the growth of their economy for at least a decade and manufacturing will not start to move for at least another decade, China intends to branch into the more advanced side of manufacturing such as aircraft and high tech. Much the same as Japan and Taiwan did, when I was a lad, "made in Taiwan" was not a symbol of quality, now days Taiwan makes some of the highest quality electronics in Asia (along with Korea and Japan) so why can't China do the same thing? Unlike the other poor Asian nations such as Thailand or the Philipines, China does not have a incompetent leadership mired in corruption.
So chances are, in 15 years we'll still be buying Huawei modems, except they will have "made in Tanzania" written on the side.
Before you know it you won't be Buying your next iPhone at all. You'll be Licensing it to use only under an ever increasingly long list of Terms & Conditions.
What makes you think that is sarcasm?
Have you read Apple's EULA, they do this with the OS and software already. Not to mention giving application developers express permission to data mine devices.
- immigration is great, but we need more engineers & scientists
Wow, thats what a skilled migration program is.
Malaysian dentist comes to Oz, goes to Oz university, gets Oz qualification under Oz standards. Amazing isn't it
It's a bit faster then doing it from recombinant DNA.
As others have pointed out, it's pretty damn hard to migrate here, even as a skilled American or Canadian. BTW, most of the illegal immigrants in Australia are Visa over-stayers from first world nations.
We won't know until it is done. If you know what happened in Afghanistan many years ago we helped the locals there push out the Russians and then deserted them leaving a power vacuum that was filled up by the Taliban.
To be 100% fair,
The US's abandonment of Afghanistan wasn't as bad as the US trusting the Pakistanis to move the weapons. There were many faction fighting the Russians in a very loose coalition, the Pakistanis wanted to make sure, when the Soviets left that a Pakistan friendly state would arise. So Pakistan arranged for the best weapons and the largest shipments to go to the groups that would serve their interests best, in their estimation that was an Islamic fundamentalist state.
Never hear of the National Guard? They got a shitload of really nice big guns in nearly every little town in the south.
You may as well have posted "I dont know how war actually works".
Because you don't need a few weapons, you need a constant stream of weapons, munitions and trained personnel to use them.
Taking over a national guard base will do no good in the long term. The army would just besiege you and starve you out. No need for the army to risk an assault.
If you want to be an actual resistance force, you need a manufacturing or procurement program for weapons, you need a logistics chain that is reliable and effective (THIS is what won the battle for France, the fact that the Red Ball Express could keep up with the front lines), you need competent commanders and lines of communication and more importantly, you need personnel trained to a point where they are able to match the enemy forces.
So I heartedly LOL at your post. A few weekend warriors would retreat at the first sign of trouble, much like the Libyan resistance did back in the early days. You cant just capture a few Bradleys and expect to win a war, you need to be able to replace losses, resupply troops and be certain your forces will not lose their nerve.
With all the pickups we'd have so many technicals we'd have our very own "Toyota war" like Libya VS Chad.
Technicals vs M1 tanks, F18 fighter bombers and Javelin missiles?
Good luck with that. Remember that Gadaffi's newest planes are from the 80's and before NATO enforced a no fly zone, they were massacring the resistance. How do you expect WWII tech to defeat modern forces? Look how far Hamas got against Israel, 30 years of fighting and Israel is still not back to the 67 borders (let alone destroying the Zionist state) and Hamas gets a shitload of funding and weapons from anyone who hates Israel.
But if there is a civil insurrection, those involved would be quickly annihilated with superior firepower.
True. The civilian firepower cannot compete with the US military. It is, however, also dependent on the military brass agreeing with attacking the citizens of the nation they are sworn to protect.
Actually, in an all volunteer army your biggest concern is the person pulling the trigger. Generals are easy to order around, it's not so easy to get a grunt to actually shoot his own neighbour.
Think about the lengths the Soviets had to go to in order to "motivate" their troops in WWII, and remember that was fighting a foreign enemy. I don't think the US army manage to become so brutal?
This is, of course assuming a civil war where lines of right and wrong are obvious, that almost never happens. Considering the polarisation of American politics, it's likely the army would be split based on who each soldier/general wants to follow.
In the business market they were. But they were never popular in the consumer market, and still aren't.
So what you're saying is that Blackberries were popular, in the larger market (yes, business was and is still the more significant market for phones, especially smart phones).
I really don't understand the price structure here - for this unlocked iPhone in particular, but even for the high-end Android phones. It can't be costing them that much to make the bloody devices.
I bought the HTC Desire Z for A$550 (US$600) delivered 4 months after release, why is the Iphone still US$650 (A$999 for some strange reason)?
Occams razor suggests because Apple are making a crap-load of profit and don't want to lower prices.
Who profits from the 10% service tax in Malaysia. Look up who owns Malaysia Airports and tell me who profits from every visitor. The government of Malaysia would be earning more in tax from this then it spends.
That's actually 6% tax, 10% service charge. But my point stands.
As for Malaysia specifically, they have a 10% government tax and 7.5% service charge.
Where do you get this info from? Hotels and restaurants employing more than a certain number of staff are subject to a 6% government service tax (raised from 5% at the beginning of this year), and most also add a 10% service charge to the bill).
I got the 10% and 6% transposed.
Thanks for not being a douche when pointing out this simple mistake (HINT: This is sarcasm).
This is probably because I'm used to thinking in terms of the Oz GST which is 10% and service charges are not customary here.
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I don't see them removing existing bills, though. This is the standard operating procedure: an unpopular law goes in, then after the election everyone mysteriously "forgets" about it.
Except the law never went though,
In the last 4 years, it's failed in the house twice (never even made it to the senate).
Telstra and Optus are voluntarily filtering, no mandatory filtering here. Telstra and Optus are Australia's oldest and worst ISP's. Because they are so old, they have a large customer base.
And TFS is wrong, Australia's 2nd largest ISP is iinet (Optus is only larger when you include voice customers) which have been staunch in opposing mandatory filtering and have not implemented a voluntary filter.
Because this is voluntary, you are free to switch to ISP's that are voluntarily not filtering, I can suggest iinet and Internode. So I'm going to be enjoying unfiltered internet.
Yah. Five anxious years with an increasingly demented parent made this sound attractive at first. Then I remembered how her regular "safe return" bracelet bruised and scratched her increasingly fragile skin (despite being properly fitted) until we had to stop using it. I think their hearts are in the right place, but a bracelet just won't do it.
Indeed, we need sub-cutaneous transmitters to keep those old people well and truly tracked (hey, they voted to track the cars of young people (didn't pass fortunately) I say turn about is fair play)
so as long as they say "from zero up to the maximum we have advertised" then it's sufficient? seems pretty pointless.
Uh, no.
That's pretty stupid as they dont give you an idea of minimum typical speeds. What Helstra (mentioned above in my GP post) does say is that if it's working, you will likely get between 1.1 and 8 Mb/s.
I dont quite get your logic here, you're saying off should be listed as a working speed? Something about that seems wrong.
What user cares about that? You've got to think about it from the end users perspective, they want to know is what speeds to expect when they are using it.
Minimum data speeds? Surely it depends on the device you are using and the area you are in...The bill obviously has good intentions but it'll be hard to maintain the info.
Hmmm, other nations seem to have no problem with this.
From Big Pong, Australia's worst telco,
Speed: Typical download speeds are from 1.1Mbps to 20Mbps in all capital city
Honesty in advertising is really hard and it sucks for consumers. We would all be better off if they kept lying to us.
I thought a bill was something on a duck's face. I'm SO confused!
Nah, Bill's over there franking shares next to frank who's billing clients.
not with half the datacentre gone, they can't.
the backup system was probably in one of the _racks_ the FBI seized.
That's OK, I'll just grab the latest backup we shipped off site.
More like the insurance wont cover FBI seizure. Bloody heavy handed of the FBI though, this is the sort of thing expect of a third world police force looking for bribe money, not a respected first world law enforcement agency.
Couldn't the FBI have worked with the DC's owners? Wouldn't that be more effective in rooting out LulzSec members/leaders? Oh but that wouldn't show the world that Something(TM) was being done, damn media circus.
And a cheque is something one uses to pay the bill at a restaurant?
Fixed.
Seeing as no one in Australia uses "check" or "check bin" (as it is in Thailand), to refer to the an open account at a restaurant, if one were backward enough to use a cheque (correct spelling) one would "pay the bill with a cheque".
This however is a moot point as no business would accept a personal cheque anyway. We have credit/debit cards, it's not the middle ages any more.
I always thought that was so they would charge less tax.
10% tax is still 10%.
Sales tax is not graduated by price in most nations.
They advertise $29.95 because simpletons associate this with $20, not the $30 it really is.
I can tell you from experience that dollar bills and vending machines seldom get along well. I usually sort the $1 bills in my wallet by grade, in case I should find myself needing one for a vending machine,
Australia tends to have few vending machines that take notes*, those that do seem to have an easier time as polymer notes dont fade and are difficult to tear or crease.
as wrinkled/torn/wet/ugly bills often don't go through the machines well.
Another advantage of polymer notes, they come out of the wash in the same condition they go into the wash (well, maybe a bit cleaner).
* We call them (bank) notes, not bills as a bill is a notice that you owe someone else some money and yes Americans, I'll be happy to send you all the bills I have... If you promise to pay them on time.
...cue litigation in ...1...2...3...
Countdown fail!
The countdown might be in plus time, that means the litigation started 3 seconds ago/
Given Apple's cash reserves couldn't it just buy every major carrier in the country? I'm sure it could buy ATT, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, et al, with the loose change in the couches at the Apple campus. :) Given Internet access is pretty much already a local monopoly with no competition what would it matter? At least with Apple in charge they would have an incentive to get rid of the caps.
Apple alegedly has US$50 billion in cash,
Comcast's market cap is US$65 billion.
Asuming that Apple actually has the money, they might be able to negotiate Comcast down to that but chances are Comcast will go for a higher price as they have no need to sell, forcing Apple into debt.
This is just Comcast, AT&T (~ US$160 B) and Verizon (~ US$100 B) are bigger.
That's a patently false "answer": Australia and Canada are two countries with major providers that have caps.
That being said, in Oz I can get 150 GB /m for A$60 (US$63.5) which is fairly standard entry level pricing for ADSL. That's 4.5 ish GB per day which is not easy to go over for the average person. 1 TB plans are A$160 from the same provider, not to mention that data peered between two members of the same ISP is not metered (A few ISP's dont do this) which accounts for about 20% of my traffic when doing P2P.
Caps wont kill on-line services, caps in Oz have been increasing over the years, in 2004 the cap for A$50 ADSL was around 5 GB and I had to pay an additional $20 for line rental. Now A$60 gets naked ADSL (no line rental).
Caps aren't bad, I think they are good as the people who use more take up more of the financial burden of providing the service.
You can get unmetered internet but for most people, that starts at A$450 for 2 Mb fibre.
Once you get out of South Africa and Egypt there is no infrastructure for manufacturing in Africa. Even with 15-25 years of solid investment and construction, there won't be infrastructure for manufacturing in Africa outside of Egypt and South Africa.
China isn't investing in the Republic of South Africa or Egypt, they are investing in places they can strip bare of mineral wealth.
That isn't particularly true,
Plenty of mining companies such as Rio Tinto and BHP have set up in places like Tanzania. Granted for areas that are or were recently war torn this is true but that isn't that much of Africa. The problem is mainly infrastructure (ports and roads) but these can easily be built with enough investment.
BTW, China is not investing in Egypt or South Africa because these nations are not third world, South Africa in particular has a well established manufacturing industry akin to Japan (cars in particular, a few Toyota models are manufactured in SA), making them a bit more advanced then China. Egypt is also quite rich.
'nuff said.
China will simply move the cheap manufacturing to Africa.
You don't think china's been buddying up with East African nations for nothing do you? They've had a military medial ship there for six months late last year spreading China's good will.
China is not dumb, not in the slightest, they've been preparing for the growth of their economy for at least a decade and manufacturing will not start to move for at least another decade, China intends to branch into the more advanced side of manufacturing such as aircraft and high tech. Much the same as Japan and Taiwan did, when I was a lad, "made in Taiwan" was not a symbol of quality, now days Taiwan makes some of the highest quality electronics in Asia (along with Korea and Japan) so why can't China do the same thing? Unlike the other poor Asian nations such as Thailand or the Philipines, China does not have a incompetent leadership mired in corruption.
So chances are, in 15 years we'll still be buying Huawei modems, except they will have "made in Tanzania" written on the side.
Before you know it you won't be Buying your next iPhone at all. You'll be Licensing it to use only under an ever increasingly long list of Terms & Conditions.
What makes you think that is sarcasm?
Have you read Apple's EULA, they do this with the OS and software already. Not to mention giving application developers express permission to data mine devices.
We have the same problem that Australia does
A glut of uninformed casual racists?
- immigration is great, but we need more engineers & scientists
Wow, thats what a skilled migration program is.
Malaysian dentist comes to Oz, goes to Oz university, gets Oz qualification under Oz standards. Amazing isn't it
It's a bit faster then doing it from recombinant DNA.
As others have pointed out, it's pretty damn hard to migrate here, even as a skilled American or Canadian. BTW, most of the illegal immigrants in Australia are Visa over-stayers from first world nations.
We won't know until it is done. If you know what happened in Afghanistan many years ago we helped the locals there push out the Russians and then deserted them leaving a power vacuum that was filled up by the Taliban.
To be 100% fair,
The US's abandonment of Afghanistan wasn't as bad as the US trusting the Pakistanis to move the weapons. There were many faction fighting the Russians in a very loose coalition, the Pakistanis wanted to make sure, when the Soviets left that a Pakistan friendly state would arise. So Pakistan arranged for the best weapons and the largest shipments to go to the groups that would serve their interests best, in their estimation that was an Islamic fundamentalist state.
You may as well have posted "I dont know how war actually works".
Because you don't need a few weapons, you need a constant stream of weapons, munitions and trained personnel to use them.
Taking over a national guard base will do no good in the long term. The army would just besiege you and starve you out. No need for the army to risk an assault.
If you want to be an actual resistance force, you need a manufacturing or procurement program for weapons, you need a logistics chain that is reliable and effective (THIS is what won the battle for France, the fact that the Red Ball Express could keep up with the front lines), you need competent commanders and lines of communication and more importantly, you need personnel trained to a point where they are able to match the enemy forces.
So I heartedly LOL at your post. A few weekend warriors would retreat at the first sign of trouble, much like the Libyan resistance did back in the early days. You cant just capture a few Bradleys and expect to win a war, you need to be able to replace losses, resupply troops and be certain your forces will not lose their nerve.
Technicals vs M1 tanks, F18 fighter bombers and Javelin missiles?
Good luck with that. Remember that Gadaffi's newest planes are from the 80's and before NATO enforced a no fly zone, they were massacring the resistance. How do you expect WWII tech to defeat modern forces? Look how far Hamas got against Israel, 30 years of fighting and Israel is still not back to the 67 borders (let alone destroying the Zionist state) and Hamas gets a shitload of funding and weapons from anyone who hates Israel.
But if there is a civil insurrection, those involved would be quickly annihilated with superior firepower.
True. The civilian firepower cannot compete with the US military. It is, however, also dependent on the military brass agreeing with attacking the citizens of the nation they are sworn to protect.
Actually, in an all volunteer army your biggest concern is the person pulling the trigger. Generals are easy to order around, it's not so easy to get a grunt to actually shoot his own neighbour.
Think about the lengths the Soviets had to go to in order to "motivate" their troops in WWII, and remember that was fighting a foreign enemy. I don't think the US army manage to become so brutal?
This is, of course assuming a civil war where lines of right and wrong are obvious, that almost never happens. Considering the polarisation of American politics, it's likely the army would be split based on who each soldier/general wants to follow.
In the business market they were. But they were never popular in the consumer market, and still aren't.
So what you're saying is that Blackberries were popular, in the larger market (yes, business was and is still the more significant market for phones, especially smart phones).
The combination of "social media" and "experts" just sounds like the combination of "homeopathic" and "doctor".
How about:
Robert Homoeopathic, Medical Doctor?
I bought the HTC Desire Z for A$550 (US$600) delivered 4 months after release, why is the Iphone still US$650 (A$999 for some strange reason)?
Occams razor suggests because Apple are making a crap-load of profit and don't want to lower prices.
Every hotel in Malaysia charges 10% government tax as well as 7.5% service charge so that's quite a little money spinner for the government.
A wee bit of errata here, the tax is 6%, the service charge is 10%.
Who profits from the 10% service tax in Malaysia. Look up who owns Malaysia Airports and tell me who profits from every visitor. The government of Malaysia would be earning more in tax from this then it spends.
That's actually 6% tax, 10% service charge. But my point stands.
Where do you get this info from? Hotels and restaurants employing more than a certain number of staff are subject to a 6% government service tax (raised from 5% at the beginning of this year), and most also add a 10% service charge to the bill).
I got the 10% and 6% transposed.
Thanks for not being a douche when pointing out this simple mistake (HINT: This is sarcasm).
This is probably because I'm used to thinking in terms of the Oz GST which is 10% and service charges are not customary here.