Comment Re:Yeah (Score 1) 80
I never had to pay for them either. And yes, we had to give them back, they belonged to the school.
Yes, but somebody had to pay for them. That somebody was the school, through the taxpayer.
Submission + - Australia: ACCC seeks injunction against Apple for iPad advertising (theage.com.au)
freddienumber13 writes: The Australian Competition and Consumer Comission (ACCC) has filed in an injunction against Apple for misleading advertising surrounding its latest iPad. In Australia, the latest iPad does not work on the 4G networks yet the advertising for the iPad continues to tout it as an available feature. Refunds for consumers and corrected advertising are being sought.
Submission + - Director James Cameron awestruck at ocean's deepest spot (reuters.com)
PolygamousRanchKid writes: Returning from humankind's first solo dive to the deepest spot in the ocean, filmmaker James Cameron said he saw no obvious signs of life that might inspire creatures in his next "Avatar" movie but was awestruck by the "complete isolation." The only free-swimming creatures he saw near the bottom were tiny shrimp-like arthropods, but little else in the way of life was immediately visible. Cameron said further exploration would be required to discern what other organisms might dwell there.
"When I got to the bottom ... it was completely featureless and uniform," he said. "My feeling was one of complete isolation from all of humanity. ... More than anything, (it's) realizing how tiny you are down in this big, vast, black, unknown and unexplored place."
The craft functioned flawlessly, he said, except for an unexplained failure of the hydraulic system that idled the vehicle's robot arm and prevented Cameron from collecting most of the biological and geologic samples he had hoped to retrieve.
"When I got to the bottom
The craft functioned flawlessly, he said, except for an unexplained failure of the hydraulic system that idled the vehicle's robot arm and prevented Cameron from collecting most of the biological and geologic samples he had hoped to retrieve.
Submission + - Murdoch faces allegations of sabotage (afr.com) 1
Presto Vivace writes: "Neil Chenoweth, of the Australian Financial Review, reports that the BBC program Panorama is making new allegations against News Corp of serious misconduct. This time it involves the NDS division of News Corp, which makes conditional access cards for pay TV. It seems that NDS also ran a sabotage operation, hiring pirates to crack the cards of rival companies and posting the code on The House of Ill Compute (thoic.com), a web site hosted by NDS.
ITV Digital collapsed in March 2002 with losses of more than £1 billion, overwhelmed by mass piracy, as well as technical restrictions and expensive sports contracts. Its collapse left Murdoch-controlled BSkyB the dominant pay TV provider in the UK.
Chenoweth reports that James Murdoch has been an advocate for tougher penalties for pirates, “These are property rights, these are basic property rights,” he said. “There is no difference from going into a store and stealing a packet of Pringles or a handbag, and stealing something online. Right?""
Comment Re:What? (Score 5, Interesting) 128
Selling used stuff as new aside for a second
Umm. No.
The media blowup is being fuelled by "I bought a hard disk and it had hard core porn on it!" sensationalism but seem to be ignoring this deeper issue -
Dick Smith Electronics, Harvey Norman, JB-HiFi and the rest have been getting away with it for years but the fact is selling used goods (no matter how good a condition it's in) as new is illegal.
They can ask the same price for it if the return is in great condition but they can't just seal it back up and pop it back on the shelf next to the new unopened boxes.
Comment This is Australia (Score 0) 210
Yes, and..?
Comment Key role in standardisation? (Score 2, Insightful) 64
From TFA, "Since World War II, the United States has played a key role in international standardization"
Umm. Played a key role in international standardisation? This is a country - the only major industrialised nation in the entire world - that so far refuses to embrace the metric system. Key role, indeed.
Submission + - Researchers test WiFi access from moving vehicles (networkworld.com)
Julie188 writes: Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Massachusetts have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle. The technology is dubbed Wiffler and earlier this year its creators took it for a test drive with some interesting results. Although the researchers determined that a reliable public WiFi hotspot would be available to their test vehicles only 11% of the time, the Wiffler protocol was able to offload almost 50% of the data from 3G to WiFi.
Submission + - Verizon Wireless to issue $90 Million in refunds (tekgoblin.com)
tekgoblin writes: Verizon Wireless had somehow been charging customers extra money on their bills for data that they actually hadn't been using. Approximately 15 million customers were affected by the erroneous billing error. According to BGR the FCC had been pressuring Verizon to resp0nd to the hundreds of complaints that had been piling up. So Verizon's answer was to refund all of the overcharged money as soon as possible.
Comment No polticial free speech... (Score 3, Informative) 160
Australia may rank 16th on the Press Freedom Index, But unfortunately Australia doesn't have US 1st Amendment-like protection for political free speech. (The High Court has ruled that it's heavily implied in the constitution, but it's not absolutely stated). There's no "You can't block that, it's political free speech!" kind of laws.
Comment Re:Interesting... (Score 3, Interesting) 584
This is pretty much what happens right now in Australia.
All income taxpayers pay the Medicare levy. A large payment base means there's enough in the nation-wide pool to cover pensioners, unemployed, etc who can't afford to pay-in.
Private health insurers then come in and make a killing on gap insurance and covering things Australian Medicare doesn't - like dental.
Comment New incoming message! (Score 0, Redundant) 136
1995 called. They want their instant messaging back.
Comment Re:But does it work? (Score 1) 707
This is why one should always refuse a breathalyzer test even if you haven't been drinking
"Refused to give a sample of breath for analysis." Instant fail. Off to gaol for you. Thanks for coming.
Submission + - Pirated XP superior to the real thing (apcmag.com)
KrispyXP writes: "One of the annoyances with installing a fresh copy of Windows XP these days is that the driver set is six years out of date, and there's been a LOT of new hardware emerge since then. It's one thing to install the latest graphics driver, but it's another to have to set up everything from the chipset to the storage drivers. Now, a pirated distribution of XP has done what Microsoft hasn't: it has brought XP's driver base completely up-to-date, as well as cutting out all the crap Microsoft ships with XP that nobody wants."
Software Company Sues Popular Australian Forum 121
Pugzly writes "In a recent announcement on the Whirlpool front page, it appears that accounting software maker 2clix is suing the founder of the forums as the founder "allowed statements 'relating to the Plaintiff and its software product that are both false and malicious' to be published on the Whirlpool forums."
