. In Australia we're happy to throw away freedoms left right and center,
Centre FFS, En_AU. It's a lot like En_UK but doesn't mark Dingo and wanker as misspellings.
I have no idea where you're getting that impression from, probably the same place as your English skills. I have no less freedom now then I did 10 years ago despite all this alarmist BS you people keep putting out.
What you're probably seeing is the result of lowering the speed limit to 40km/hr around school zones while cutting back on educating kids about the danger of cars
1. The 40 KM zone is enforced, rigorously.
2. The 40 KM zone around schools has actually reduced, significantly the amount of road accidents around school zones
3. Teaching kids about road safety is the responsibility of the parent, not the school system. The two are related like diving accidents and refrigerators (because everyone who's died in a diving accident has owned a refrigerator). As a product of the Howard era in education, even I can spot a bad non-sequitur.
That being said, a lot of people and most of them not young people with many being around 20-40 are walking around with their eyes glued to their damn Ipods and Iphones. Sometimes I make a conscious effort to walk into these people (a bit of hip and shoulder) in the hope I'll knock a bit of sense into them. Kids are the least of my problems on the road.
Am I the only one who doesn't like OLED and AMOLED displays? Sure they have vibrant colors but they are too saturated and not "real". Kinda like TVs at the hardware stores are setup to compete over color, without any regard for looking real.
Actually, Colour is one of the strengths of OLED, especially SOLED although AMOLED has more colour depth then LED. It's brightness where AMOLED suffers because unlike LED it's not backlit but this results in a massuve reduction in power consumption. Seeing as the LED screen on my Motorola Milestone consumes 40-50% of my battery on it's own and you cant see it in full daylight anyway (the sun is bright down here in Australia, no LED screen can be used in full daylight) I'll take the power savings... If I could find a decent phone with AMOLED.
You thought you should get paid for everything for forever and a day. But, you're like a parasite who thinks your host will continue to tolerate you forever. When the chickens come home to roost, you want to disavow blame. My finger is pointed squarely at you. This is your fault.
There, fixed that for you.
Remember who is really driving this, it's not about enforcing current copyrights at home, ACTA is about enforcing US copyright laws and indefinite copyright in other nations.
Gmail is on par with the better paid for email services I've used, nowhere near as good as having a fully qualified and competent sysadmin running your own private server but still, Gmail is free.
As a professional pilot/flight instructor/aircrew coordination trainer with 3500 hours, I think this is pretty much insane. I would not fly any airline that did this.
I already will not fly Ryanair, the same with their Austral-Asian equivalent Tiger airlines. There are better budget carriers such as Easyjet, Virgin Blue or Air Asia, they may be a few A$ more but worth it IMHO. Tiger/Ryan Air will nickel and dime you to death (Tiger just started charging an A$20 fee for checking in off-line).
They should get rid of all the passengers. Think about it....they wouldn't have to pay for meals, they could fire all the flight attendants and save that salary money, the seats on the planes wouldn't be needed anymore.
Dont laugh, the reason why budget airlines charge for baggage is because they can sell that same space to logistics companies (cargo). The meat airlines carry is the most expensive cargo per cubic metre, required to be fed, kept warm, breathing and so forth. Cargo is what keeps budget airlines afloat when they send half empty planes to places.
and a stewardess who's job to ensure the cabin is secure and safe for the duration of the journey and to aid in evacuation.
To be a flight attendant in Australia you have to have your First Aid level 3. I bet you're one of those passengers who yells "where's my beer, honey" whilst wiggling an empty cup in the air and the reason I hate other passengers. I'd like to remind you who you'll be relying on when you get hurt on an aircraft (wont be me, I have a first aid level 1 (workplace) and absolute contempt for most other travellers).
The blind faith many people seem to put in Assange confuses the hell out of me. He pissed off the United States, so any and all allegations against him are automatically baseless? By those standards, all anti-US terrorists in US history are automatically innocent.
I dont blindly believe Assange, but people _are_ out to get him so that does tend to slant occams razor towards the paranoid end of the spectrum.
The charges were raised, dropped and then raised again. That tells me that something fishy may be going on.
These hacks are fully detectable by PS3 and Sony. Those who have used them have already been banned from PSN and multiplayer games. What a great way to ruin your expensive console.
Nice way to turn this around.
The hackers didn't make Sony ban them from PSN, Sony pulled the trigger themselves. Regardless of weather they are legally within their rights to do so, it still was Sony's choice.
What a great way to ruin your expensive console.
But console gamers keep telling me consoles are cheap (despite console games costing A$20 more then PC games.)
First of all, this is just used for pirating purposes
Further more, it's not. I used to have a modded Xbox 1, I used it to run XBMC and used it as a cheap media centre. I didn't play games on it, not even pirated ones. A lot of people are looking for cheap hardware to run a simple function on (like playing video's from a hard drive). Unfortunately nothing like my old Xbox 1 exists anymore thanks to overzealous content controls so I ended up building a media centre PC out of parts of old PC's.
Small OSS projects. It replaces irc, todo lists, websites, messenger systems....... If you've ever taken part in a small oss project you'll know the spread out mess I'm talking about.
Actually I'd look at it more as a replacement for the sheer number of MS Exchange servers out there. So many organisations are running stupid exchange setups, not just small orgs but massive ones where Exchange is so spread out each user only gets a 20 MB mailbox due to the Exch database limit.
Not just Exchange but Sharepoint, Office Communications Server, if you've ever been a sysadmin for a die hard MS shop then you know each of these requires their own dedicated server and virtualisation is not easy for these servers.
What needs to be done in order for Wave in a Box to be successful:
1. Email needs to work as per normal.
2. VOIP integration. PSTN/POTS/ISDN optional but would be nice.
3. Someone needs to create a drop in replacement for Exchange (as in a bit of HW that can just be dropped in to the rack, even a VM will do)
4. A method of Exch/Sharepoint migration (probably already exists, but someone needs to write it).
Its not going to last forever, but it will probably last longer than we would expect.
You could say the same things about real life, but we've seen how that turns out. The Nigerian 419 scams are not new, not by a long shot. Con men have been using that one for almost 200 years, the scam is better known as "The Spanish Prisoner" where the con pretends to be in correspondence with a wealthy individual imprisoned in Spain and then promises to return a large sum of money in exchange for fronting up a smaller sum, sound familiar?
These types of scams have been going on for hundreds of years, spam is just the new digital variant. Theoretically everyone should know yet there seems to be no shortage of new naive people to fall for them.
I found South American immigration officials to be quite welcoming in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, it was only the folks manning the border post between Chile and Argentina in the Andes that were a bit uptight,
I suspect they are the same as Asian customs agents. Fine so long as you dont put a foot wrong (it is pretty hard to do something wrong at customs if you've got half a brain though) but if you do, they'll take you to a room, give you a glass of water, offer you a smoke and start talking about charges. Eventually you'll be offered a way out for a nominal sum of money.
The level of corruption would probably be on par with SE Asia in proportion to wealth. I have no problems getting into or out of SE Asian nations. The thing about this kind of corruption is that you dont notice it until you step into it.
Google have given us Chrome, whilst still funding Firefox.
Google have open sourced many internal developments, not the least of which is Android.
How do you explain that in your assertion that Google is trying to lock us in?
Google may make their money by selling adspace, but they are not locking people into an ecosystem. Google would rather have their ad's in every Ecosystem, try watching this keynote where Vic Gundotra explains why Google developed Android as opposed to foisting ad's onto Nokia, Apple et al. The bit you're interested in starts at about 1:18. So the last thing Google wants is a monoculture, a single ecosystem.
Actually I like 7". I think 5" is too big for a phone and too small for a tablet.
7" is the smallest I'd go for a tablet. For me anything between 7 an 13" is ideal. The Tab looks good for carrying around innocuously, using on the plane or train without interfering with other passengers and just being an alternative to the laptop in meetings or when I'm working at someone else's desk (Sysadmin, this happens quite a bit so I currently use my Milestone (3.7") for this purpose).
That being said, 10" would be better for general use and 600 Euro is a bit rich so I'll be looking to see what happens with the Archos 10i which has similar specs but a 10" screen and an announced price point of US$300 (also seen "under 300 Euro") which makes it quite a bargain for an Australian at the moment. There is no Android marketplace on the 10i so well have to see what Google or the Modding community do.
So is it better to have a sucky experience or none at all?
It's better that everyone gets the choice, rather then have Master Steve chose for you.
Flash on Froyo is not mandatory, a fact the article and fanboys tend to forget. It is in fact not installed by default and can be set to run on demand or not at all in the browser settings.
A couple of reviews of Flash running on Android 2.2 have come out.
You quote 1 blog from an obvious fanboy who spends more time bashing Android and quoting Steve Jobs then actually testing.
Laptopmag is an Apple mouthpiece as well. Apple fanboys seem to be spending more time trying to bash android into submission then attempting to make your own platform better. Next time, try to find some balanced sources rather then relying on propaganda.
I've run Flash on my Milestone and whilst some videos are bad, many are good. Once I've finished downloading them many tend to play flawlessly (same as HTML5, but doesn't require everyone to recode their website), not to mention being able to play flash games (either by the Milestones KB or direct touch input). Time will tell, right now we are at Flash version 1 (10.1, first version for mobile) and that's just come out of beta, wait until Flash version 3 and we'll see how right Steve was.
What the fsck, Samsung? Why couldn't you just have used the industry standard microUSB plug?
Because Samsung are Korean. Korea is trying to push a new USB plug which is featured on the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Cowon Iaudio 9. I was planning to buy a new Iaudio when I trod on my old one (it still works, I just cant change the song) but the Iaudio 9 uses this new plug whcih is incompatible with my USB mini and MicroUSB cables. So I settled for the cheaper and crapier Creative Zen Xi-Fi Style.
I believe it's PDMI, it may be a standard in a few years... the least they could have done is made it backwards compatible with MicroUSB or MiniUSB similar to what HTC did with ExtUSB.
up to you to believe it but the fact that after all the years they had to make a "light mobile friendly" flash version,
So, ARM v7 has been around for how many years. The reason Flash only runs on certain Android models is that it's built for ARM v7. Frankly this is a poor excuse. For the most part mobile phones have had slow processors and bad operating systems. Only in the last 2 years has ARMv7 and Android changed this. Adobe has tried for two years to get an Iphone version out there but after being stonewalled by Apple they gave up and focused on Android. If steve relented on allowing users to make their own decision on flash, it would be out for a year now.
but Steve Jobs has said time and time again that the reason there is no Flash on the iPhone is because Adobe has failed to deliver something that performs remotely acceptably.
He's also said time and time again that there can be no interpreted languages on the Iphone. I'm truly sorry that you actually believe what Steve said but it's quite obvious that this is more about maintaining control then about performance. Remember that they retroactively changed the developer T&C to prevent adobe releasing a program that converted flash code to Iphone code and allowing that to ported product to be sold on Itunes (the whole "originally developed in an approved language" thing).
There are a lot of Flash games out there but all require PC input and will never work on a touch device.
Never say never. As far as I can see, input is just a matter of interpretation. With flash it's two fold. 1. you need to take input from the OS, 2. you need to interpret input from the OS into the framework. This is how it works on PC and mobile, I think it's naive in the extreme to say that touch input will never work as the difference between a physical KB and on screen KB from the programs POV is nothing and all you need to do is make a connection between touch inputs and mouse inputs which is easy enough seeing as they are analogous pressing (touching and removing your finger) is a mouse click, dragging is a mouse move, long click (holding your finger down in one spot) is analogous to a right click in Android world.
Most people have not converted many media playback sites to HTML5
HTML5 is still not a standard, it's being implemented by everyone differently. I fear Apple is trying to do with HTML5 what MS did with web standards back in the 90's but I digress. Flash is used for a lot more then just media playback It also isn't dependent on the host having the right codec (which is becoming a complete minefield). HTML5 remains useless for any kind of presentation or program that requires input.
Again, customs in most the Western world seem to be staffed by egoistical power hungry twats with no concept of right to privacy
Not any different in the rest of the world. Only easier to bribe. If you get bailed up by Russian or Thai customs agents, they'll go straight for your wallet as there is no punishment for extorting out a bribe nor any recourse for you (especially as a foreigner).
But in answer to your question, these positions tend to attract the little Napoleons who cannot actually get into a position of authority.
and judging by that Australian border control documentary that's on TV here in the UK your customs folks would at least pull someone giving them the finger aside and harass them for a little while,
TV is not reality. (I'm sure you know this).
I've seen the Customs reality TV show a few times, they pick the worst cases Customs has to deal with for dramatic effect. If you flipped the bird in reality, they'd just tell you to sod off (or not to be a wanker). AQIS are actually one of the friendliest customs services I've dealt with, although maybe not the most efficient (I always get through Malaysia faster).
But I do not agree with your defence that searching for illegal porn is valid.
I think you've misinterpreted my post, I didn't say it was valid, I said it was legal. Like it or not we have to follow the law (exceptions may apply but those are extreme which this case it not). But blowing up at AQIS is no way to get the law changed (which IMHO, it should). AQIS still does a great service, keeping foreign pests and diseases out of Australia (we've got a bad history with introduced species) even if the law is not quite as good as it should be.
but I'm merely intrigued to know why a country that does have a reputation for being full of friendly laid back people seems politically to be trying to out compete even the US and UK on infringing freedoms and supporting big business to the detriment of citizens.
Like most YRO stories on/., this is overblown. The rantings of politicians are never representative of the average person in any nation. For the most part, you'll be fine bringing pornographic DVD's into Australia. They aren't illegal here, nor heavily taxed (10% GST, same as everything else) and I've never heard of AQIS asking to see your laptop (apart from X-Raying it).
Also Australia just had one of our... most interesting federal elections yet. No major party has enough seats to actually win and the balance of power in the house of reps lies in the hands of independents. I think we've expressed our displeasure.
That has got to be the most IDIOTIC and WEAK argument I have _EVER_ seen here. Do you realise the magnitude of that insult?
Explain....
Thought not. You're FOS, I'll explain
The Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service does an important job at keeping out foreign pests and diseases. Australia has a problem with several introduced animals such as rabbits, foxes (introduced to get rid of the rabbits) Camels and numerous insects and weeds that have upset the Australian ecosystem. AQIS's primary job is to keep these out, after that we have dangerous and controlled items like explosives, firearms, controlled drugs, illegal narcotics which can be quite dangerous if they get into the wrong hands. Unlike the US customs service, AQIS will be looking for plant and animal material first and foremost, I've received more questions about my guitar (because made out of wood) then any DVD I've bought into this country. BTW I do this about once every six months.
You are only required to declare things that would endanger this country.
Actually, you are required to declare anything that's on AQIS's list. If you dont like it, dont come to Australia. I've already decided not to visit the United States due to the trouble I'd get at the border (NOTE: Nothing against Americans, when I meet you abroad you are great people and I dont blame individual Americans for your bad laws, but I still have to deal with them).
So your post is devoid of content and ignorant of the law (and common sense). My assessment of you is correct, you are retarded.
Slashdot Mirror
We voted them out,
Pfft, wars are for the insecure, we just told them to leave.
Centre FFS, En_AU. It's a lot like En_UK but doesn't mark Dingo and wanker as misspellings.
I have no idea where you're getting that impression from, probably the same place as your English skills. I have no less freedom now then I did 10 years ago despite all this alarmist BS you people keep putting out.
1. The 40 KM zone is enforced, rigorously.
2. The 40 KM zone around schools has actually reduced, significantly the amount of road accidents around school zones
3. Teaching kids about road safety is the responsibility of the parent, not the school system. The two are related like diving accidents and refrigerators (because everyone who's died in a diving accident has owned a refrigerator). As a product of the Howard era in education, even I can spot a bad non-sequitur.
That being said, a lot of people and most of them not young people with many being around 20-40 are walking around with their eyes glued to their damn Ipods and Iphones. Sometimes I make a conscious effort to walk into these people (a bit of hip and shoulder) in the hope I'll knock a bit of sense into them. Kids are the least of my problems on the road.
Actually, Colour is one of the strengths of OLED, especially SOLED although AMOLED has more colour depth then LED. It's brightness where AMOLED suffers because unlike LED it's not backlit but this results in a massuve reduction in power consumption. Seeing as the LED screen on my Motorola Milestone consumes 40-50% of my battery on it's own and you cant see it in full daylight anyway (the sun is bright down here in Australia, no LED screen can be used in full daylight) I'll take the power savings... If I could find a decent phone with AMOLED.
There, fixed that for you.
Remember who is really driving this, it's not about enforcing current copyrights at home, ACTA is about enforcing US copyright laws and indefinite copyright in other nations.
Because Hotmail and Ymail are crap.
Gmail is on par with the better paid for email services I've used, nowhere near as good as having a fully qualified and competent sysadmin running your own private server but still, Gmail is free.
I already will not fly Ryanair, the same with their Austral-Asian equivalent Tiger airlines. There are better budget carriers such as Easyjet, Virgin Blue or Air Asia, they may be a few A$ more but worth it IMHO. Tiger/Ryan Air will nickel and dime you to death (Tiger just started charging an A$20 fee for checking in off-line).
Dont laugh, the reason why budget airlines charge for baggage is because they can sell that same space to logistics companies (cargo). The meat airlines carry is the most expensive cargo per cubic metre, required to be fed, kept warm, breathing and so forth. Cargo is what keeps budget airlines afloat when they send half empty planes to places.
To be a flight attendant in Australia you have to have your First Aid level 3. I bet you're one of those passengers who yells "where's my beer, honey" whilst wiggling an empty cup in the air and the reason I hate other passengers. I'd like to remind you who you'll be relying on when you get hurt on an aircraft (wont be me, I have a first aid level 1 (workplace) and absolute contempt for most other travellers).
Arm doors and cross check.
I dont blindly believe Assange, but people _are_ out to get him so that does tend to slant occams razor towards the paranoid end of the spectrum.
The charges were raised, dropped and then raised again. That tells me that something fishy may be going on.
Nice way to turn this around.
The hackers didn't make Sony ban them from PSN, Sony pulled the trigger themselves. Regardless of weather they are legally within their rights to do so, it still was Sony's choice.
But console gamers keep telling me consoles are cheap (despite console games costing A$20 more then PC games.)
Further more, it's not. I used to have a modded Xbox 1, I used it to run XBMC and used it as a cheap media centre. I didn't play games on it, not even pirated ones. A lot of people are looking for cheap hardware to run a simple function on (like playing video's from a hard drive). Unfortunately nothing like my old Xbox 1 exists anymore thanks to overzealous content controls so I ended up building a media centre PC out of parts of old PC's.
4th of January 2011?
Are you targeting the post-Christmas sales crowd? I think you're doing it wrong.
Actually I'd look at it more as a replacement for the sheer number of MS Exchange servers out there. So many organisations are running stupid exchange setups, not just small orgs but massive ones where Exchange is so spread out each user only gets a 20 MB mailbox due to the Exch database limit.
Not just Exchange but Sharepoint, Office Communications Server, if you've ever been a sysadmin for a die hard MS shop then you know each of these requires their own dedicated server and virtualisation is not easy for these servers.
What needs to be done in order for Wave in a Box to be successful:
1. Email needs to work as per normal.
2. VOIP integration. PSTN/POTS/ISDN optional but would be nice.
3. Someone needs to create a drop in replacement for Exchange (as in a bit of HW that can just be dropped in to the rack, even a VM will do)
4. A method of Exch/Sharepoint migration (probably already exists, but someone needs to write it).
You could say the same things about real life, but we've seen how that turns out. The Nigerian 419 scams are not new, not by a long shot. Con men have been using that one for almost 200 years, the scam is better known as "The Spanish Prisoner" where the con pretends to be in correspondence with a wealthy individual imprisoned in Spain and then promises to return a large sum of money in exchange for fronting up a smaller sum, sound familiar?
These types of scams have been going on for hundreds of years, spam is just the new digital variant. Theoretically everyone should know yet there seems to be no shortage of new naive people to fall for them.
I suspect they are the same as Asian customs agents. Fine so long as you dont put a foot wrong (it is pretty hard to do something wrong at customs if you've got half a brain though) but if you do, they'll take you to a room, give you a glass of water, offer you a smoke and start talking about charges. Eventually you'll be offered a way out for a nominal sum of money.
The level of corruption would probably be on par with SE Asia in proportion to wealth. I have no problems getting into or out of SE Asian nations. The thing about this kind of corruption is that you dont notice it until you step into it.
Also the first thing I thought.
This is why Slashdot is not like the rest of the world, most people dont imagine this kind of thing being used against them.
Your assertion flies in the face of the facts.
Google have given us Chrome, whilst still funding Firefox.
Google have open sourced many internal developments, not the least of which is Android.
How do you explain that in your assertion that Google is trying to lock us in?
Google may make their money by selling adspace, but they are not locking people into an ecosystem. Google would rather have their ad's in every Ecosystem, try watching this keynote where Vic Gundotra explains why Google developed Android as opposed to foisting ad's onto Nokia, Apple et al. The bit you're interested in starts at about 1:18. So the last thing Google wants is a monoculture, a single ecosystem.
So go back and try this one again.
Actually I like 7". I think 5" is too big for a phone and too small for a tablet. 7" is the smallest I'd go for a tablet. For me anything between 7 an 13" is ideal. The Tab looks good for carrying around innocuously, using on the plane or train without interfering with other passengers and just being an alternative to the laptop in meetings or when I'm working at someone else's desk (Sysadmin, this happens quite a bit so I currently use my Milestone (3.7") for this purpose).
That being said, 10" would be better for general use and 600 Euro is a bit rich so I'll be looking to see what happens with the Archos 10i which has similar specs but a 10" screen and an announced price point of US$300 (also seen "under 300 Euro") which makes it quite a bargain for an Australian at the moment. There is no Android marketplace on the 10i so well have to see what Google or the Modding community do.
It's better that everyone gets the choice, rather then have Master Steve chose for you.
Flash on Froyo is not mandatory, a fact the article and fanboys tend to forget. It is in fact not installed by default and can be set to run on demand or not at all in the browser settings.
You quote 1 blog from an obvious fanboy who spends more time bashing Android and quoting Steve Jobs then actually testing.
Laptopmag is an Apple mouthpiece as well. Apple fanboys seem to be spending more time trying to bash android into submission then attempting to make your own platform better. Next time, try to find some balanced sources rather then relying on propaganda.
I've run Flash on my Milestone and whilst some videos are bad, many are good. Once I've finished downloading them many tend to play flawlessly (same as HTML5, but doesn't require everyone to recode their website), not to mention being able to play flash games (either by the Milestones KB or direct touch input). Time will tell, right now we are at Flash version 1 (10.1, first version for mobile) and that's just come out of beta, wait until Flash version 3 and we'll see how right Steve was.
Because Samsung are Korean. Korea is trying to push a new USB plug which is featured on the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Cowon Iaudio 9. I was planning to buy a new Iaudio when I trod on my old one (it still works, I just cant change the song) but the Iaudio 9 uses this new plug whcih is incompatible with my USB mini and MicroUSB cables. So I settled for the cheaper and crapier Creative Zen Xi-Fi Style.
I believe it's PDMI, it may be a standard in a few years... the least they could have done is made it backwards compatible with MicroUSB or MiniUSB similar to what HTC did with ExtUSB.
If the safety systems are working this should have capped automatically.
The problem with the BP rig is not that the rig exploded but the safety systems at the well head (on the ocean floor) failed.
Apple wants to have complete control over all the devices you buy, locking you into their ecosystem.
Google wants to give you choice.
There, fixed that for you.
So, ARM v7 has been around for how many years. The reason Flash only runs on certain Android models is that it's built for ARM v7. Frankly this is a poor excuse. For the most part mobile phones have had slow processors and bad operating systems. Only in the last 2 years has ARMv7 and Android changed this. Adobe has tried for two years to get an Iphone version out there but after being stonewalled by Apple they gave up and focused on Android. If steve relented on allowing users to make their own decision on flash, it would be out for a year now.
He's also said time and time again that there can be no interpreted languages on the Iphone. I'm truly sorry that you actually believe what Steve said but it's quite obvious that this is more about maintaining control then about performance. Remember that they retroactively changed the developer T&C to prevent adobe releasing a program that converted flash code to Iphone code and allowing that to ported product to be sold on Itunes (the whole "originally developed in an approved language" thing).
Never say never. As far as I can see, input is just a matter of interpretation. With flash it's two fold. 1. you need to take input from the OS, 2. you need to interpret input from the OS into the framework. This is how it works on PC and mobile, I think it's naive in the extreme to say that touch input will never work as the difference between a physical KB and on screen KB from the programs POV is nothing and all you need to do is make a connection between touch inputs and mouse inputs which is easy enough seeing as they are analogous pressing (touching and removing your finger) is a mouse click, dragging is a mouse move, long click (holding your finger down in one spot) is analogous to a right click in Android world.
HTML5 is still not a standard, it's being implemented by everyone differently. I fear Apple is trying to do with HTML5 what MS did with web standards back in the 90's but I digress. Flash is used for a lot more then just media playback It also isn't dependent on the host having the right codec (which is becoming a complete minefield). HTML5 remains useless for any kind of presentation or program that requires input.
Not any different in the rest of the world. Only easier to bribe. If you get bailed up by Russian or Thai customs agents, they'll go straight for your wallet as there is no punishment for extorting out a bribe nor any recourse for you (especially as a foreigner).
But in answer to your question, these positions tend to attract the little Napoleons who cannot actually get into a position of authority.
TV is not reality. (I'm sure you know this). I've seen the Customs reality TV show a few times, they pick the worst cases Customs has to deal with for dramatic effect. If you flipped the bird in reality, they'd just tell you to sod off (or not to be a wanker). AQIS are actually one of the friendliest customs services I've dealt with, although maybe not the most efficient (I always get through Malaysia faster).
I think you've misinterpreted my post, I didn't say it was valid, I said it was legal. Like it or not we have to follow the law (exceptions may apply but those are extreme which this case it not). But blowing up at AQIS is no way to get the law changed (which IMHO, it should). AQIS still does a great service, keeping foreign pests and diseases out of Australia (we've got a bad history with introduced species) even if the law is not quite as good as it should be.
Like most YRO stories on /., this is overblown. The rantings of politicians are never representative of the average person in any nation. For the most part, you'll be fine bringing pornographic DVD's into Australia. They aren't illegal here, nor heavily taxed (10% GST, same as everything else) and I've never heard of AQIS asking to see your laptop (apart from X-Raying it).
Also Australia just had one of our... most interesting federal elections yet. No major party has enough seats to actually win and the balance of power in the house of reps lies in the hands of independents. I think we've expressed our displeasure.
Explain....
Thought not. You're FOS, I'll explain
The Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service does an important job at keeping out foreign pests and diseases. Australia has a problem with several introduced animals such as rabbits, foxes (introduced to get rid of the rabbits) Camels and numerous insects and weeds that have upset the Australian ecosystem. AQIS's primary job is to keep these out, after that we have dangerous and controlled items like explosives, firearms, controlled drugs, illegal narcotics which can be quite dangerous if they get into the wrong hands. Unlike the US customs service, AQIS will be looking for plant and animal material first and foremost, I've received more questions about my guitar (because made out of wood) then any DVD I've bought into this country. BTW I do this about once every six months.
Actually, you are required to declare anything that's on AQIS's list. If you dont like it, dont come to Australia. I've already decided not to visit the United States due to the trouble I'd get at the border (NOTE: Nothing against Americans, when I meet you abroad you are great people and I dont blame individual Americans for your bad laws, but I still have to deal with them).
So your post is devoid of content and ignorant of the law (and common sense). My assessment of you is correct, you are retarded.