I do have a question for you, why do it? Why have towns in the middle of nowhere, over such a massive CONTINENT?
Towns in the middle of nowhere are either digging stuff up, growing stuff or shipping stuff and most of this cant be done in cities. There is very little that survives on it's own or via tourism in Australia. Most of our population is centred in our cities along the coast.
Although I disagree with what Mr Coward has stated, it's important to state never the less.
Yes, the whole Telstra separation could go pear-shaped but I doubt it, BT was privatised under Thatcher, Gillard is far from Thatcher level of, shall we say extreme capitalist philosophies. But we should be aware of potential issues and work to prevent them. The separation is to ensure that Telstra retail and Telstra wholesale become different companies in entirety.
* Julia Gillard is the current Australian Prime Minister which has a minority government (I.E. dependent on minor parties for power). She is leader of the Labor party.
In situations like that it sort of makes me wonder who owns all the land. In America you would be passing by people selling trinkets, roadside diners, etc. at least once every 1-2 hours.
What's to own? Road traffic is mainly road trains so why bother. Population density is 0.0001 in most of WA. As the poster above you pointed out, there are 2.3 million people in WA and 1.6 million live in a 80 KM radius of one place (land mass of Western Australia is 2,645,615 KM2).
Land that is away from Perth is essentially worthless unless you have it under good authority that there is something worth mining under it.
As an aside, you do know that 90%+ of Australia's debt is private?
Yes, most of our debt comes from people who can barely afford their first home buying a second house as an investment property.
Our national debt is less then 10% of our GDP, the US national debt is about 70-80% of it's GDP and Greece didn't get into real trouble until it was 110% of its GDP (being dependent on tourism, Greece's GDP isn't much either).
Not that it matters, as a taxpayer and net saver I'm going to be asked to bail the rest out in an emergency.
We are a big country, I mean big, you may think its a long way down to the chemist but thats peanuts on the distances in Australia. We are fucking huge.
I used to live in a mining town in North West Western Australia. If you wanted to get to the beach that's a 5 hour drive laddie at 120 KM/h. If you wanted to go to target, 7 hours drive to Karratha mate. If you wanted to get to Perth, the capital of Western Australia that was a solid 15 hours of driving in a land that is regularly above 35 Degrees C and very sparcely populated.
When I went up through South Thailand by road I was surprised as hell to see signs of civilisation everywhere, farms, houses, villages. You couldn't go a single kilometre without seeing something. In Australia it's not only possible but quite easy to drive for six hours at 100 KM/h and not see another soul. When I went to school, I travelled 85 KM both ways in the blistering heat, luxury I tell you, luxury.
Just so everyone on/. understands, The Australian is the equivalent of Fox News when it comes to the current government. Nothing in that paper can be considered accurate about the NBN.
lived in Sydney for 35 years before recently moving to London for contract work, and the last 6 years of that I had a 20 MB pipe
The average broadband speed in AU is 1.6 Mbit/s. It's terrible. If you want a guaranteed 10 Mbit/s pipe you are looking at A$1400 per month. I live a bit over 3 KM from my exchange and get a sync speed on my DSL of 4 Mbit/s. More people in AU have a slower sync speed than a higher sync speed in this country.
Also when you do these rants, differentiate between MB (megabytes) and Mb or Mbit (megabit) and specify that it is per second (Mbit/s).
Anyway guys, the NBN may come to your door, but in order to use it you'll have to shell out up to $450 and $750, and up to $3,000 to get a connection.
Hasn't been the case in Tassie, outright lies good sir. NBNco will connect to one point inside your house the same as if it were a Telstra telephone connection.
If you don't have an active (copper) telephone line to your house at the moment, Telstra charge $400 for connection. This is just to get it made active at the exchange, then you need to pay any fees your service provider asks. You don't want to know the costs if you don't already have copper to your door.
Now Wireless, there's a plan that needs to be replaced every few years. HSPA networks that were installed 5 years ago are already at the end of their life, Telstra and Optus are testing LTE and WiMax is already deployed by Vivid Wireless. Wireless may only be 6 Billion now, but it's another 6 billion every 5 years not to mention that it will never match the speed and latency of multi mode fibre. Fibre has a lifespan of at least 40 years, the expected lifespan on fibre is 60 years if it's been flexed so independent MP Tony Windsor put it best when he said "You do it once, you do it right, you do it fibre".
These public-private consortiums are ruining our country
Uninformed Luddites are ruining our country good sir. For the last 50 years we've been technological leaders with things like CSIRO and world class universities, why do you want to throw this away. Really, if you want to save some serious taxpayer $$$ dump the baby bonus scheme.
Hopefully the proposed privatisation of NBNco won't go ahead; I see too much value to Australia in keeping it as a government-owned corporation compared with selling it off a few years after the rollout is complete.
As much as I agree with you, as soon as the Liberal party gets into power they will sell it off regardless.
It doesn't make much sense to sell it off but these are politicians, since when do they do a sanity check on anything.
Telstra is not really a monopoly any more, they are a large telco but due to effective regulation cant force the market into following them despite owning most of the copper in OZ.
Telstra's wholesale arm no longer has any impetus to protect Telstra's retail arm. This will be good for the consumer as Telstra can no longer engage in (as much) anti competitive activities.
This is something that should have been done with the privatisation of Telecom Australia back in the 90's (Public utility Telecom Australia was sold off and became the private company Telstra)
They've got no choice. They fought it as long and hard as they could. The only options for them now are the easy way or the hard way - and they're welcoming the easy way.
The fact that this was not done years ago (heavy Kevvy was talking about it since he was elected) was the fact that Telstra fought it tooth and nail. But it's done now and there is nothing more Telstra can do about it.
Realistically this is something the Howard government should have done when Telstra was privatised in the 90's.
Really, why try to sensationalize a story by omitting its outcome?
Whatever happened to him in the mean time is OK so long as it reaches a satisfactory conclusion?
That's not how I understand the parent poster -- s/he doesn't say it's okay, s/he objects to the sensationalism.
Sigh, did you not read the part that said "by omitting its outcome"?
Omitting it's outcome did not change the story one iota, the story is about the abuses of your customs and inspection services. The fact that the person in question got their stuff back does not excuse what they had to go through for nothing.
Android is open source, that means Bing, Baidu, Google or anyone can use it.
Which means the best usage wins. If another company can utilise and spread (make appealing) their version of Android better then Google then they will win over Google. End of story.
However, due to the same open source that gave any competitors access to what google has created Google will have access to what advancements competitors make.
...didn't get them, gave him back his hardware and let him go.
Really, why try to sensationalize a story by omitting its outcome?
So...
Whatever happened to him in the mean time is OK so long as it reaches a satisfactory conclusion?
Most^H^H^H^H Some Slashdotters are smart enough to understand that the ends never justify the means, that this person was picked on, detained for 5 hours and subjected to an invasive search was _not_ all well and good because he got his laptop back.
In the end, I'd put good money on this person being picked up because he was coming in from the Dom Rep rather then because he was Moxie Marlinspike. The TSA likes to pick on single males coming in from potential sex tourism destinations, perhaps because it's the low hanging fruit. Bust a few guys coming back from the Philippines with some home made porn (a pic of a naked Pinay is not hard to get) and make it look like you're doing a great job, after all who would defend these dirty sex pests (they are probably all pedo's anyway). Incompetence rather then malice, but the end result is the same.
the team engineered to prevent the spread of this bacterium beyond the target environment, the underlying mechanism being that sucrose must be available in the environment to prevent the bacterium from producing a toxin which kills itself.
So, if the bacteria doesn't get sucrose from us they'll just slip into a coma and die right?
Foxconn has about half a million employees.
The USA has a suicide rate of about 10-14 per 100k
Pointless statistic made by overly defensive fanboys.
Let's break this down by demographic shall we. In the west, if we take away the unemployed and youth suicides you are left with about 2 or 3 per 100K. In Australia youth suicide makes up about 40-50% of all suicides (this is the sub 18 category). After that typically comes mental illness then old age. The suicide rate amongst healthy working adults is phenomenally low.
So when comparing the suicide rate of foxconn to the suicide rate of a western nation you are not comparing like for like because they are drastically different demographics. Now with Foxconn, I wouldn't go past putting a few suicides on drug or debt(gambling) problems (in fact, I'd bet a lot of the blame lies there), but these issues don't come from people who have good(happy) working lives either.
Chinese have already (successfully) copied fighter planes. Take a look at J-7 (Mig-21), J-8 (Su-15), J-10(Eurofighter), J-11 (Su-27, Su-33). So only thing that is actually new - is that they are making* a new, civilian airplane.
But copying passenger jets is very different to copying military jets. A completely different discipline with different goals. If a J11 crashes, 1 military pilot dies and his family may see a cheque from the Chinese government. If a Comac ARJ21 (717 copy) crashes and kills 60 people, there will be a serious problem to deal with. I just don't have the confidence in China to be able to honestly deal with that one, the issue of face may end up with serious mechanical failures being called "pilot error".
The Chinese people are, on the whole nice to deal with (not the best service in Asia but far better then the west) but their government does take never failing far too seriously.
It's the 717 clone coming out of China that does, as well as the notion that HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics LTD, India) might get the same idea.
Now quality in passenger aircraft is a major concern for me and any other frequent traveller. Airbus and Boeing have proven track records and are able to get to the bottom of problems in short order. I don't have that kind of confidence in China, especially as face comes into play. It may become, to the leader du jour that maintaining the Chinese aircraft industry is more important then lives. Never underestimate the kind of stupid things that will be done to maintain face.
Now I've heard that we had the same fears about Japan 40 odd years ago and despite several attempts Japan has not been able to build a domestic aircraft industry of note since WWII and they were a nation who produced very high quality planes in WWII. Even Russia struggles with modern airliners, the only thing that keeps that industry afloat is Aeroflot.
I am fairly certain that there are more than a few game companies that release DLC right away by taking content from the original game in order to make a few bucks
Only a few, like 2K and activision.
It takes time and effort to create new art assets, levels and scripting. Not to mention testing all of this. If you can release DLC within a week of release as 2K did with Mafia 2 then you made a conscious decision to remove content from release so it can be sold after the games release.
I highly doubt that content can be easily created between pressing and release, there just isn't enough time to go through QA.
Don't pay for the shit DLC, and Supply and Demand economics will take care of the problem.
Ummm...
The publishers have a legally enforced monopoly, what the heck makes you think that the rules of supply and demand apply here. After you satisfactorily explain that one you can explain how supply and demand works where supply is for all intents and purposes infinite because the product is infinitely replicable for negligible costs.
Australia has been trying to get game prices down to US/Euro levels for years, supply and demand hasn't done a damned thing, we are still paying US$90+ per game. Even making parallel importing legal hasn't affected it, they've just introduced region locking wherever possible.
DLC can be good for experimental game ideas. Most of the fallout 3 DLC took place in different settings than the main game
But Fallout 3 was sold at full price as a complete game. DLC came months after release.
Some games are being sold in half with DLC being made available 5 minutes after release.
Now I have no issue when a developer and publisher creates additional content, traditionally this was released as an expansion pack or more recently the phenomenon of "expand-alones" such as ARMA Operation Arrowhead or Fallout New Vegas but when a publisher only sells you half the game and then tries to charge you $10 to see the ending, that's what is wrong with DLC.
I hear this often about Arafat, do you have any proof of this?
It's called bad translation or deliberately mistranslating something to sell papers.
Of course Arafat lied, he lied in both English and Arabic equally. You don't think he stayed in power so long without telling people exactly what they wanted to hear?
American citizens have managed to enslave themselves to Wall Street thoroughly. Willing slaves with guns.
That's because having guns before a revolution is quite useless.
Unarmed societies (India) waged more successful revolutions then well armed societies (Ireland, the IRA) with the will to use them.
Giving an oppressive government an actual enemy to fight violently gives that government a cause to rally the people around. Which of these phrases makes you worried, "look at the terrorist blowing up the train stations" or "Look at the terrorists, starving themselves and meditating"? Start blowing up stuff, you become a threat in the average persons eyes, a semi competent government will use this to good effect (paging Mr Saddam and Mr Putin)
After a revolution starts (violently) then you need a source of weapons and munitions as stockpiles never last. This source is almost always the parts of the military that did not follow the governments orders.
Slashdot Mirror
Towns in the middle of nowhere are either digging stuff up, growing stuff or shipping stuff and most of this cant be done in cities. There is very little that survives on it's own or via tourism in Australia. Most of our population is centred in our cities along the coast.
Although I disagree with what Mr Coward has stated, it's important to state never the less.
Yes, the whole Telstra separation could go pear-shaped but I doubt it, BT was privatised under Thatcher, Gillard is far from Thatcher level of, shall we say extreme capitalist philosophies. But we should be aware of potential issues and work to prevent them. The separation is to ensure that Telstra retail and Telstra wholesale become different companies in entirety. * Julia Gillard is the current Australian Prime Minister which has a minority government (I.E. dependent on minor parties for power). She is leader of the Labor party.
What's to own? Road traffic is mainly road trains so why bother. Population density is 0.0001 in most of WA. As the poster above you pointed out, there are 2.3 million people in WA and 1.6 million live in a 80 KM radius of one place (land mass of Western Australia is 2,645,615 KM2).
Land that is away from Perth is essentially worthless unless you have it under good authority that there is something worth mining under it.
As an aside, you do know that 90%+ of Australia's debt is private?
Yes, most of our debt comes from people who can barely afford their first home buying a second house as an investment property.
Our national debt is less then 10% of our GDP, the US national debt is about 70-80% of it's GDP and Greece didn't get into real trouble until it was 110% of its GDP (being dependent on tourism, Greece's GDP isn't much either).
Not that it matters, as a taxpayer and net saver I'm going to be asked to bail the rest out in an emergency.
Luxury, we had to walk 3 hours to the pub and the only thing they had to drink there was watered down methylated spirits and it was bore water too.
AC has never lived in rural Australia.
We are a big country, I mean big, you may think its a long way down to the chemist but thats peanuts on the distances in Australia. We are fucking huge.
I used to live in a mining town in North West Western Australia. If you wanted to get to the beach that's a 5 hour drive laddie at 120 KM/h. If you wanted to go to target, 7 hours drive to Karratha mate. If you wanted to get to Perth, the capital of Western Australia that was a solid 15 hours of driving in a land that is regularly above 35 Degrees C and very sparcely populated.
When I went up through South Thailand by road I was surprised as hell to see signs of civilisation everywhere, farms, houses, villages. You couldn't go a single kilometre without seeing something. In Australia it's not only possible but quite easy to drive for six hours at 100 KM/h and not see another soul. When I went to school, I travelled 85 KM both ways in the blistering heat, luxury I tell you, luxury.
Just so everyone on /. understands, The Australian is the equivalent of Fox News when it comes to the current government. Nothing in that paper can be considered accurate about the NBN.
The average broadband speed in AU is 1.6 Mbit/s. It's terrible. If you want a guaranteed 10 Mbit/s pipe you are looking at A$1400 per month. I live a bit over 3 KM from my exchange and get a sync speed on my DSL of 4 Mbit/s. More people in AU have a slower sync speed than a higher sync speed in this country.
Also when you do these rants, differentiate between MB (megabytes) and Mb or Mbit (megabit) and specify that it is per second (Mbit/s).
Hasn't been the case in Tassie, outright lies good sir. NBNco will connect to one point inside your house the same as if it were a Telstra telephone connection.
If you don't have an active (copper) telephone line to your house at the moment, Telstra charge $400 for connection. This is just to get it made active at the exchange, then you need to pay any fees your service provider asks. You don't want to know the costs if you don't already have copper to your door.
Now Wireless, there's a plan that needs to be replaced every few years. HSPA networks that were installed 5 years ago are already at the end of their life, Telstra and Optus are testing LTE and WiMax is already deployed by Vivid Wireless. Wireless may only be 6 Billion now, but it's another 6 billion every 5 years not to mention that it will never match the speed and latency of multi mode fibre. Fibre has a lifespan of at least 40 years, the expected lifespan on fibre is 60 years if it's been flexed so independent MP Tony Windsor put it best when he said "You do it once, you do it right, you do it fibre".
Uninformed Luddites are ruining our country good sir. For the last 50 years we've been technological leaders with things like CSIRO and world class universities, why do you want to throw this away. Really, if you want to save some serious taxpayer $$$ dump the baby bonus scheme.
As much as I agree with you, as soon as the Liberal party gets into power they will sell it off regardless.
It doesn't make much sense to sell it off but these are politicians, since when do they do a sanity check on anything.
Telstra is not really a monopoly any more, they are a large telco but due to effective regulation cant force the market into following them despite owning most of the copper in OZ.
Telstra's wholesale arm no longer has any impetus to protect Telstra's retail arm. This will be good for the consumer as Telstra can no longer engage in (as much) anti competitive activities.
This is something that should have been done with the privatisation of Telecom Australia back in the 90's (Public utility Telecom Australia was sold off and became the private company Telstra)
The fact that this was not done years ago (heavy Kevvy was talking about it since he was elected) was the fact that Telstra fought it tooth and nail. But it's done now and there is nothing more Telstra can do about it.
Realistically this is something the Howard government should have done when Telstra was privatised in the 90's.
I hear a truckload of kleenex's just got delivered into Ellisons office when he heard this news.
Where can I find the Chip and Pin device?
Sigh, did you not read the part that said "by omitting its outcome"?
Omitting it's outcome did not change the story one iota, the story is about the abuses of your customs and inspection services. The fact that the person in question got their stuff back does not excuse what they had to go through for nothing.
Does it?
Android is open source, that means Bing, Baidu, Google or anyone can use it.
Which means the best usage wins. If another company can utilise and spread (make appealing) their version of Android better then Google then they will win over Google. End of story.
However, due to the same open source that gave any competitors access to what google has created Google will have access to what advancements competitors make.
So...
Whatever happened to him in the mean time is OK so long as it reaches a satisfactory conclusion?
Most^H^H^H^H Some Slashdotters are smart enough to understand that the ends never justify the means, that this person was picked on, detained for 5 hours and subjected to an invasive search was _not_ all well and good because he got his laptop back.
In the end, I'd put good money on this person being picked up because he was coming in from the Dom Rep rather then because he was Moxie Marlinspike. The TSA likes to pick on single males coming in from potential sex tourism destinations, perhaps because it's the low hanging fruit. Bust a few guys coming back from the Philippines with some home made porn (a pic of a naked Pinay is not hard to get) and make it look like you're doing a great job, after all who would defend these dirty sex pests (they are probably all pedo's anyway). Incompetence rather then malice, but the end result is the same.
the team engineered to prevent the spread of this bacterium beyond the target environment, the underlying mechanism being that sucrose must be available in the environment to prevent the bacterium from producing a toxin which kills itself.
So, if the bacteria doesn't get sucrose from us they'll just slip into a coma and die right?
Right?
Because this has never gone wrong.
Pointless statistic made by overly defensive fanboys.
Let's break this down by demographic shall we. In the west, if we take away the unemployed and youth suicides you are left with about 2 or 3 per 100K. In Australia youth suicide makes up about 40-50% of all suicides (this is the sub 18 category). After that typically comes mental illness then old age. The suicide rate amongst healthy working adults is phenomenally low.
So when comparing the suicide rate of foxconn to the suicide rate of a western nation you are not comparing like for like because they are drastically different demographics. Now with Foxconn, I wouldn't go past putting a few suicides on drug or debt(gambling) problems (in fact, I'd bet a lot of the blame lies there), but these issues don't come from people who have good(happy) working lives either.
But copying passenger jets is very different to copying military jets. A completely different discipline with different goals. If a J11 crashes, 1 military pilot dies and his family may see a cheque from the Chinese government. If a Comac ARJ21 (717 copy) crashes and kills 60 people, there will be a serious problem to deal with. I just don't have the confidence in China to be able to honestly deal with that one, the issue of face may end up with serious mechanical failures being called "pilot error".
The Chinese people are, on the whole nice to deal with (not the best service in Asia but far better then the west) but their government does take never failing far too seriously.
Not even the Brazilian Embraers,
It's the 717 clone coming out of China that does, as well as the notion that HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics LTD, India) might get the same idea.
Now quality in passenger aircraft is a major concern for me and any other frequent traveller. Airbus and Boeing have proven track records and are able to get to the bottom of problems in short order. I don't have that kind of confidence in China, especially as face comes into play. It may become, to the leader du jour that maintaining the Chinese aircraft industry is more important then lives. Never underestimate the kind of stupid things that will be done to maintain face.
Now I've heard that we had the same fears about Japan 40 odd years ago and despite several attempts Japan has not been able to build a domestic aircraft industry of note since WWII and they were a nation who produced very high quality planes in WWII. Even Russia struggles with modern airliners, the only thing that keeps that industry afloat is Aeroflot.
Only a few, like 2K and activision.
It takes time and effort to create new art assets, levels and scripting. Not to mention testing all of this. If you can release DLC within a week of release as 2K did with Mafia 2 then you made a conscious decision to remove content from release so it can be sold after the games release.
I highly doubt that content can be easily created between pressing and release, there just isn't enough time to go through QA.
Ummm...
The publishers have a legally enforced monopoly, what the heck makes you think that the rules of supply and demand apply here. After you satisfactorily explain that one you can explain how supply and demand works where supply is for all intents and purposes infinite because the product is infinitely replicable for negligible costs.
Australia has been trying to get game prices down to US/Euro levels for years, supply and demand hasn't done a damned thing, we are still paying US$90+ per game. Even making parallel importing legal hasn't affected it, they've just introduced region locking wherever possible.
But Fallout 3 was sold at full price as a complete game. DLC came months after release.
Some games are being sold in half with DLC being made available 5 minutes after release.
Now I have no issue when a developer and publisher creates additional content, traditionally this was released as an expansion pack or more recently the phenomenon of "expand-alones" such as ARMA Operation Arrowhead or Fallout New Vegas but when a publisher only sells you half the game and then tries to charge you $10 to see the ending, that's what is wrong with DLC.
He's optimised the process but it still takes forever to load.
It's called bad translation or deliberately mistranslating something to sell papers.
Of course Arafat lied, he lied in both English and Arabic equally. You don't think he stayed in power so long without telling people exactly what they wanted to hear?
That's because having guns before a revolution is quite useless.
Unarmed societies (India) waged more successful revolutions then well armed societies (Ireland, the IRA) with the will to use them.
Giving an oppressive government an actual enemy to fight violently gives that government a cause to rally the people around. Which of these phrases makes you worried, "look at the terrorist blowing up the train stations" or "Look at the terrorists, starving themselves and meditating"? Start blowing up stuff, you become a threat in the average persons eyes, a semi competent government will use this to good effect (paging Mr Saddam and Mr Putin)
After a revolution starts (violently) then you need a source of weapons and munitions as stockpiles never last. This source is almost always the parts of the military that did not follow the governments orders.