Cheap by Australian standards. Telstra charge $25 for 1GB, with excess data at 10c/MB or $40 with no excess data charges. You can pay $95 for 15GB with same excess data 10c/MB excess data charge. The prepaid option is even worse $20 for 250MB up to $180 for 12GB.

amaysim's $9.90 for 1GB or $29.90 for 4GB is about as cheap as it gets in Australia.

Fetal alcohol syndrome could actually mean people are getting dumber. Secondly, looking at the current primary school kids in government schools from less socially well off areas, there is cause for concern that the education system is failing kids. Although having said that I'm not convinced that it is the education system, but more likely parents.

Newstart (Unemployment) benefits are $501 fortnight in Australia for a single, no children. On top of that is rent assitance and medicare which provides (almost) free healthcare.

There are a few places where the potential reward for investment make sense. Most high security environments (e.g. military, foreign embassies, etc) use separate networks to maintain security. Data is transferred from less classified networks to more classified networks via external media frequently, but not the other way. Standard practice is for two (or more) computers to exist on a person's desk with access to networks with a different level of classification. That person may be able to transfer files using a USB key. One of those is most likely a laptop that connects to external networks and which might be possible to compromise, particularly with a targetted attack. If the primary purpose is extraction of data, then a very sensitive listener could be sufficient.

I suspect that if this is at all possible, NSA (and other organisations) would be prepared to spend big on research because jumping an air gap could have huge rewards. It wouldn't surprise me that if this wasn't available now, there would be people from various organisations would have been researching since the story broke.

I think the easiest way to prove / disprove this would be to check the security policies of various organisations. If there are indications in the policies of measures to prevent this kind of attack (e.g. internal speakers removed, headphones only), then I think some credence should be given to the claims.

I've found WinXP running in a VM the sanest way to connect to the VPNs of various clients that I work with. Many VPN clients attempt to take over the entire network stack and direct all your traffic through their VPN which creates havoc with accessing company servers.

With WinXP I can clone a VM for different clients. I tried this with Windows7 and ran into activiation nightmares. Possibly not strictly legal, but I refuse to fork out cash just because different VPN clients won't play nicely with each other on the same instance.

The problem with this is that once a week, Grandma has a video conference with the grandkids for half an hour. The experience would be better if Grandma had a 100Mbps connection, but Grandma is unlikely to justify the extra expense just for that short call.

A 1Gbps connection is capable of 324TB a month. For a residential user that is a huge amount of data, yet because it is available some customers will download torrents to /dev/null simply because they can.

Quotas are a much more reasonable approach than speed tiers and likelier to lead to faster speeds because ISPs will want you to be able to download more data so they can charge you more. If you happen to blow through your quota in the first day, then you are capped to 128Kbps for the rest of the month and learn for next month or purchase additional quota. Excess usage charges should be banned because of potential bill shock.

This was tried in Australia by Internode and called the FlatRate plan. I've provided details in another post. In short it failed because Grandma opts for the low quota plan because it is cheaper, resulting in only heavy users being on the FlatRate plan. This made it unsustainable compared to fixed quota tiers because users preferred the certainty of having 100GB, 300GB, etc a month.

Many years ago in Australia, a well respected ISP Internode introduced flatrate plans, which prioritised traffic based on usage in the last 30 days. This Whirlpool interview with Simon Hackett about the new flatrate plans. The plans failed as explained in this End of flatrate announcement. The key point from Simon's post is that flatrate wasn't able to attract sufficient low and medium users to balance the leechers. There is a thread to discuss Are Flatrate plans viable under NBN?.

The difference between the Australian & USA market is that we've pretty much always had quotas. Customers choose the quota they want (30GB through to 1TB). Quotas are implemented as full speed until you reach your quota and the speed is capped to 256Kbps or 128Kbps for the rest of the month. Some RSPs allow you to buy additional data blocks. Some ISPs also offer extra downloads during off peak times (midnight to 8am) which are good for scheduling downloads.

The fact is that ISPs run networks with contention and in cheaper ISPs that leads to congestion in peak hours. There is not dedicated bandwidth between your PC and the server you want to connect with. Quotas are a reasonable way for ISPs to manage network traffic and make it cheaper to offer faster speeds. Bandwidth is a shared resource, which some people over exploit impacting on others. This is referred to as the Tragedy of the commons.

Would you prefer 8Mbps with no quota or 100Mbps with a 1TB quota?

I think this point would have more weight if you added some examples. Two weeks ago I purchased my first android phone. I haven't had time to play with it much, but I'd like to know answers to the following questions.

1. 1. How do I have photos taken on my Nexus 4 automatically copied to an nfs share when the phone connects to my home wireless network?
2. 2. How do I regularly copy certain files from my server to the Nexus 4?

Is there a recipies site?

As more companies move financial analysis to the cloud, I would expect that period of peak demand to occur. For example reporting run at the close of the month, quarter and financial year requires increased processing power. Another example is demand from ecommerce websites during peak times (e.g. black Friday). These occur at the same time for all companies.

The potential benefit for reasearchers is that cheaper cloud services could be available during off-peak times. The risk to investors is that availability of supply keeps increasing.

Many people are concerned about the range of an electric car. Currently the Tesla S has a range of 480km. If you can use solar panels to add 50% to that range, then it is 720km. That is some serious distance.

Our second car rarely travels more than 10km from home, so personally I'd be happy with a range of 100km and a price of under $30,000.

Let met tell you how it works in Australia. People don't worry about the cost of treatment when they are really sick

Before my son was 5 he managed to cut himself 4 times requiring 2-5 stitches each time and broke his finger. Each time we took him to the emergency department at the local public hospital waited less than an hour to be seen and were out of the hospital within 2 hours. That hospital provides the best healthcare for kids in the city. Total cost: $0. All I need to do was show my medicare card.

We also have private health insurance. Total cost is ~$4,000 year for top level cost (80% of most bills and no costs for hospital). My youngest daughter was born 8 weeks premature and we chose to be treated as a private patient in the public children's hospital. The total bill was around $15,000 of which we paid a few hundred. We could have opted to be admitted as a public patient and the only changes in treatment would have been that the duty registrar would have been the primary contact rather than the private specialist and my wife would have shared a room. If our daughter had been seriously ill, then the specialist would have looked after her anyway. There were babies next to us who were being treated as public patients who received much more expensive treatments at no cost.

The public hospital system falls down when you have a problem requiring "elective surgery" (e.g. hip or knee replacement) where the waiting times can be up to 18 months versus weeks as a private patient. The other deficiency is paying for equipment such as wheelchairs etc. may not be covered by the public system.

If I want to see my local GP, I have to pay a gap of around $20-$30, however if I have a concession card there is typically no gap. To fill a prescription costs either at most $30 or under $6 if you have a concession. Spend more than $1000 in a year and the government covers the rest.

We look at the USA and wonder with so much wealth, how can you be so uncaring?

Recently tried to have a database transferred from a client that we have who are supported by a leading global IT company with DBAs in India. They had issues transferring the file via sftp. I suggested compressing and splitting the file, and the response was "It is a database dump, which you cannot split." The really sad part is that in the email, I suggested using 7zip for the process.

After 4 weeks they gave up and the local office couriered the file to us on a hard disk!