The unions involved are: Ground staff union (baggage handlers and food preparers etc.) The airplane engineers union (fix and maintain the planes) And the airplane pilots union (fly the planes) It is not all qantas staff. Staff not part of the unions are still going to work. (I imagine they are all on the phones organizing alternative travel arrangements for everyone that is flying with them that has been grounedd) I agree, it is possibly not that relevant, but I am glad to hear it being reported outside of Australia. (we get so little quality journalism from outside I forget that news agencies around the world can actually report interesting things)

MIT weren't fighting it. JSTOR was. I believe JSTOR is a seperate entitiy that MIT have a connection to. Sounds more like MIT weren't paying attention to the squeals coming from JSTOR

err mastercard/visa not hard to deploy infrastructure????

What planet are you living on?

here's a thought experiment for you:
Go to South Africa. Use your non-mastercard non-visacard payment method to buy a loaf of bread.
Then go to Australia, use your non-mastercard non-visacard payment method to pay for a taxi ride.
Then go to america, use your non-mastercard non-visacard payment method to buy a plane ticket.
Then, after they all deny your payments because they don't support google checkout, because they haven't received the Credit-Card processing machine that supports "Western Union" tell me there is no already deployed infrastructure that is required to process your payment.

Fact is, they deploy hardware. Those little mag-stripe readers are designed to work with them. If you killed mastercard, and visa, all those banks that process those cards would stop being interoperable. You could still use BankX card at BankX machines, but unless BankX talked directly to BankY, you now can't use your card there. You'd need 2 cards.

You see, what mastercard and visa do, is they have deployed a world-wide system, that gets banks to sign up to, to then allow credit cards issued by BankX to work at BankY machines, and vice versa. While it may not be all "Hardware" infrastructure, it is "Software" infrastructure. Legal infrastructure even if you will. BankX agrees that when MasterCard says "Charge it" BankX pays the merchant the money. even if it is a BankY card!!.

Your example of Mastercard or visa denying a card to someone? Actually a false example.

BankX is well within their rights to deny you a card.
BankY is well within their rights to deny you a card.
Neither of them can deny you a card: "For being smelly". Often you'll find they need to provide an actual reason for denying you the card. And if they do, you take them to court and a judge will agree. Double the payout when it turns out both BankX and BankY spoke to each other and said: "I'll block him if you block him" and it turned out the whole reason they decided to deny service was "because we don't like his beliefs about how the world should work".

(as opposed to: "we thought he would be a bad debtor". You can deny bad debtors loans, thats a stupid counter-example).

So you agree, corporations eventually go evil when they get too big?

Perhaps ALL shareholders should become legally liable for the actions of the company they hold shares in. Maybe that would fix the system.

I realise it was a mispost.

but how is 1068 dollars cheaper than 750 dollars?

Hi,

I (my company) forked out 650 dollars for my iPhone here in Australia.

Why would I do this instead of paying 300 dollars? My plan was cheaper because I wasn't paying off my phone, I upgraded out of my 2 year contract sooner, I got a better phone. I can travel overseas and save hundreds of dollars on roaming phone charges. I like this game, can you think of any other reasons? Oh heres one! I can use the "personal hotspot" feature without paying extra. Ooh I have been able to use the old-style tethering for the last 3 years without paying extra too! (thats 120 dollars per year value right there!)

One day; one of your carriers will go: "heey... we could get more people if we didn't *force* them to buy a phone and charged them less!!!" (just like it is everywhere else where you can buy unlocked phones, or more importantly have consumer protection laws that REQUIRE your phone providers to unlock phones when you are out of contract)

Just because you can't see beyond your current market doesn't mean there isn't a slightly better model just around the corner. When telecoms are forced to treat you like a customer, you might see actual benefits. Phone unlocking should be mandatory after contracts (or for a fee) in the US. I really don't understand why it isn't.

17% of hits to the website I developed/work on for work (lawyer focus) is Mac users.

Without office these mac users wouldn't be able to work with other lawyers. (they are barristers, they are sole entities that work with other lawyers).

Without MS these barristers would not own macs, and THEY are the ones with more money than sense and they are the ones buying 2 macs (work macbook air for laptop, work desktop), an iPhone every 12 months an iPad every 12 months and deprecating their old hardware to the rest of the family every 12 months. Without them, you have less people handing down hardware, and less people getting in on the MacOS ecosystem. Dangerous to get rid of them.

With an iPhone, your only option is to reinstall. Because when stuff breaks, you haven't got enough control to figure out what is wrong.

My wifes iPhone stopped taking calls properly. reinstall iOS fixed it. But ofourse now its a 3g with 4.0 iOS, and guess what. It runs like arse. yay.

Microsoft Exchange 2003 webmail has "good" mode and "bad" mode.
"good" mode must be using some magic sauce invented purely for IE by the Exchange team.
even after forcing "good" mode on firefox / chrome the website just breaks.

It is actually invented to not work on other browsers.

Opera mini on iOS just doesn't fucking work. And, I actually found it slower than safari native. go figure.

what came first, the computer with firefox on it to copy to the USB drive, or the USB drive with firefox on it.

it renders them, but most of these "apps" are ActiveX controls that do something in addition to the rendering engine of ie6.

I work in the legal sector in a state of Australia, and our justice system was running on ie6 (last I heard; 24 months ago) and their public website for Barristers (fancy lawyers) to access a system they had invented for easy access to state criminal law, relied exclusively on an Active X control that only ran in ie6.

Thankfully, they have since updated the ActiveX control to work properly in ie7. It wasn't the rendering engine (which I believe that "compatibility button" switches to) that was the issue.

My biggest problem was once a year they would come and make a presentation to our barristers, as I was the IT guy, I'd have to re-install windows XP on a laptop somewhere for use as the presentation machine. I tried a Virtual machine one year, but unfortunately the hardware in the presentation laptop at the time completely choked. In the end, I started saying if they want to present it they need to supply their own laptop.

Sadly, they were presenting it so people being presented to could learn about it for their own criminal trial work. Ironically, one year they basically had to say: "but .. it won't work for you because no computer you have access to will have ie6 on it. And chances are if you own your own computer it won't have ie6 either."

*shrug*.

Even more burn might be to schedule the israel trip on israel funds, and convince the israelis to *allow* him to speak in palestinian territories, all the way saying: "thanks israel for being so awesome". THAT would be the true burn.

My backyard is literally full of redbacks, even found a mouse spider in my hammock stand the other day!

And I am in suburban Melbourne.
Honestly though, first time I ever saw them was this house when I bought it 2 years ago.

Went spraying with the bug killer last year and must have killed at least 10 females, and countless males. (females are the "red back" part of redbacks)

200 dollars an hour?

You do realise how much experienced network technicians cost from a large firm don't you?

If you *have* to break into (sake of the argument) Cisco network yesterday because your admin buggered off with the passwords, you would get Cisco in.
Cisco doesn't send you a complete moron, they send you one of their well paid engineers that spend 90% of their time doing nothing. And Cisco doesn't charge you the cost of his time (maybe he's paid $40 an hour?) they charge you 10 times the cost of his time.

$400 per hour per expert is not unreasonable.

After my dad retired, he did part time work for one of the very large accounting firms here (possibly international accounting firm, never checked). He was paid $70 an hour as an IT security consultant. He was charged out at $700 an hour for the hours he worked on the firms clients.

My work had a single specialist in to look at our equipment during a failure. $250 dollars an hour. And this guy wasn't even very good. I shudder to think what they would charge if we wanted an actually useful specialist.