Aussie banks (Commonwealth Bank, at least) seem to rely on SMS messages. You're redirected to their website and click a button. They send a 'NetCode SMS' (one-time code specific to that transaction) to your phone with a number you enter into their website, then the payment is processed. Not too bad; something you know (cc number) and something you have (phone).

Games funded by microtransactions, like F2P games, tend to activate a defensive mode for me; I'm constantly on the look-out for mechanics that try to make me spend money, to avoid them, which distracts me from focusing my full attention on the fun portion of the game. The money mechanics are going to be presented in a way which is tempting, so it's not easy to let my guard down. I'd take a game that costs money up-front and doesn't require me to guard myself over one with a microtransaction system any day.

Smart phone theft doesn't seem to be much of a thing in Australia (at least where I live), possibly because any phone reported stolen has its IMEI blocked from accessing any of our telecommunications providers until the owner reports it as returned (if this page is to be believed, it reduced theft by 25% over the past seven years, which is impressive given the explosive growth of mobile phones in that time). Sure, it's not perfect, because some phones do allow you to change the IMEI, it doesn't brick the device, and the device can still be disassembled for parts (though I assume it's a little more challenging to sell the parts without identifying their origins here), but it seems to be a sufficient deterrent to prevent casual theft.

It's actually super interesting to see the responses other people have posted, presumably Americans, which assume either that this type of law is fundamentally unacceptable or that their government will use it to silence dissent in the event of an uprising (which seems highly improbable, and if it did occur your cell networks would likely be shut down anyway so the phone is irrelevant). That doesn't seem to be something that people consider likely to occur with the cell blocking here - I assume, but cannot verify, that most people here find the law useful - so it's an interesting division of attitude.

That or it's more about being able to create a level 90 character to play immediately with your friend who just signed up to WoW and got a free 90. WoW, and I assume other MMOs, aren't full of terribly engaging gameplay, but being able to play with friends makes up for that somehow; not many people would play a WoW-like game in permanently-offline single-player mode.

Seems odd that neither the summary didn't link to the demonstration video player on Condition One (it's kinda slow to load, and the first couple of scenes aren't '3D'). As you can see in the 2D version, it's just playing a 2D video on a virtual curved screen that extends half way around the user's viewpoint; that's enough to look pretty damned cool in the later scenes with crowds and on an escalator though.

Worth noting all the scenes there involved the viewpoint remaining either static or very predictably and slowly moving in a single direction, so perhaps this movie won't have quite so many barf moments as some of the demo games out there (doing a barrel roll in a spaceship game demo did me in, so I don't think being shaky-cam '3D' videos are going to work for me).

So when you send a product they may collect the address to send it to? Or if you invite someone to join a forum it may collect the email address with which to contact them? Absurd.

So when you purchase something using a credit card, or add a credit card to an account, they might collect other information which credit card companies require in order to prove your identity (and make charge-backs less likely)? Inconceivable.

Clearly this information collection is not for the same reasons or in the same league as Google or Facebook's data trawling.

And if you do transfer them to the WiiU, there's no way to get them off the WiiU or return them to the original Wii; they're stuck there permanently, or until you erase the device. The console manufacturers really need to take a page out of Steam's book and tie the purchases to an account, not a console; I'm guessing the only reason they haven't is because any solution for multiple accounts on the same console could potentially allow sharing games with friends, which would potentially reduce sales. And we can't have that.

It's not so much Minority Report as it is them trying to find a viable interaction method for augmented reality. The AR versions has some significant benefits over the Minority Report interface, in that it can theoretically overlay data on real-world objects and make things ranging from internal surgery to constructing aircraft a simpler undertaking by allowing you to see inside or where things should go. This method of interacting is severely limited (it's essentially a 1.5inch thick virtual touch screen held 11inches in front of you at all times) but it's more or less the best we have until voice or neural interfaces become practical.

That said, the consumer uses are extremely limited and wearing bulky glasses is probably more likely to get in the way of a surgeon than help them. Interactive AR is still not there yet.

It's hackable, so you could probably implement the mouse like a trackball; a flicking action could simulate the ball rolling/moving the cursor and touching the pad again would stop the cursor.

There are a lot of possibilities for modifying the control scheme in each game to increase accuracy whilst reducing fatigue - there's no reason you must implement it as 1:1 movement for all games.

That's a pretty poor analogy, those celebrities are constantly harrassed by photographers at all hours of the day and in every location they visit. Could you imagine how irritating it would be to go to the supermarket and have 5 photographers waiting outside for you every time, trying to catch a shot of you so they can publish something negative in a tabloid? That most celebrities are able to control their frustration is impressive.

It's nothing like what a CEO of something as relatively unimportant as AOL has to deal with - someone photographing a meeting (presumably a slide on a presentation).

As noted by MrNemesis, the Ars Technica piece was, as so much journalism unfortunately is these days, written to push a specific "us vs them" mentality; this ultimately resulted in the author compromising their integrity to try and hammer a dubious point home in a concrete manner. A look at the Wikipedia article about the CSIRO patent notes the author had a follow-up article with more dubious attempts to validate their point; he quotes an unrelated and apparently uninformed politican saying Australia invented WiFi - it did not - as evidence of CSIRO claiming it did, and making the unusual assertation that because CSIRO itself wasn't directly involved in the creation of the WiFi standard its patent claim is invalid, even though a company that was licensing CSIRO's patent actively used it as part of their participation in the creation of the WiFi standard. The Register also covers the interesting points.

I'm an Australian and I think CSIRO is an awesome organisation that's earned considerable respect, and I'm not overly fond of the US media's attempts to smear it in order to improve their bottom line (in Ars' case, ad impressions from indignant people on both sides of the fence).

It's easy to jump on a bandwagon, but you should figure out where it came from and where it's going before you do.

First-person is where the story unfolds through the eyes of the main character - you are them, inside and looking out through their vision. Third-person is where you're given a view outside of the character you're controlling. You may be confusing the idea of first person with controlling a single character, but they're unrelated.

The article is pretty vague, only stating that communications routed through undersea cables that carry information to the United States of America must pass through a US government-owned facility; Telstra itself isn't doing anything, it's all occurring on the other end of the cable on US soil. I'm a little surprised that the US government is trying to vet all communications entering their country, but I don't see what Telstra has to do with it other than owning a link to the US (and I'm not a fan of Telstra). Seems like a red herring.

You are not in control of the security of your unencrypted data once it leaves your country (or, more accurately, your home), as anyone on the route it takes could copy it.

It's weird, but I've actually found myself liking Bing's image search feature. The interface allows me to quickly skip through enlarged views of the thumbnails without the jarring expand/collapse animation that Google image search uses. It also allows you to disable the safe searching feature, which Google doesn't seem to permit without an explicit search anymore (sometimes filters aren't perfect). It doesn't do reverse image searches (that I've discovered thus far), but I can still use Google image search for that if it's ever necessary to find an image's source. It seems to rank images differently to Google also, so searching for the same thing using both should provide a better range of results.

The rest, of course, is quite bad. Bing's web search isn't spectacular, and Windows 8 is only tolerable with Start8 and DisplayFusion, but there are a couple of good products still remaining.