With respect. You are a numb-but, otherwise known as a "muppet".

If you haven't realised or woken up to the fact that the NBN is really a smoke-screen thrown up the the Grubber-mint as a back-door way to totally control Internet access within our country, I suggest that you scour the fine pages on Slashdot and just take a quick look at what has occured recently in other counties where the Grubbermint has had absolutely no control over the pipe leading into their fine land to inform the general population.

In case you are to think to understand, the NBN is Labors back-door mechanisim to control the flow of information in and out of this place because they didn't get it past the general population when they used the old American trick of Motherhood and Apple-Pie when wrapped into the blanket of kiddie-porn and terrorism the way the Yanks seem to continually do.

Make no bones about it. The NBN has nothing to do with access. It is about "control" at any and all costs. With a Grubbermint as the Naitional ISP and ultimately controlling the pipes, what more or less would.could you expect?

It is east to always justify things like this in the name of protection and safety. It is the motherhood and apple-pie argument which Americans use to defend all of their actions.

Sadly, it is not a substitute for taking care of your children. Explain things to them, teach and guide by example. Make them aware of what they can stumble into and how to get out. Handled correctly and with educated children, you don't need nanny filters, porn filters, or key-loggers. With 3 children connected to the internet since their early to mid teens, two of whom are now in their early 20's, I have actually practiced this method and it works. Show some respect and guidance, you might be surprised to discover that you get the same in return. Children are a reflection on their parents, so kids who grow up with nanny filters and snooping software, think it is normal and won't have any issue in seeing it used elsewhere for any reason whatsoever.

A rather interesting choice of words in TFA: "The virus crept into"
Eek ! In all my years, I've never known a virus to "creep" anywhere. Once in a computer they usually jump about and whack the system senseless in a few microseconds. This must be one of those new super-viri we've been hearing about because the mental giants responsible for this system still have no idea as to the cause or source, according to TFA. Glad to know that calls to the 000 emergency number weren't affected, although for the unknown virus to lung out and infect a totally physically isolated network (Telstra) would have been pretty impressive.

The most depressing part of the entire article is that it was supposedly written by someone at "TechWorld.com.au". How on earth do these idiots get jobs, let alone keep them? If this really is the state of our technical media and specialists, then the country really has gone to hell in a hand-basket.

The fact that the numb-sculls responsible for this system still have jobs and the gaul to report, "we know nothing", is simply scandalous and an outrage. Still, that's what you get when you farm essential services out to private enterprise and only pay 6 times what it should cost to run.

The whole thing is a disgrace.

> But enough of this. Nothing more need be said

However, you felt it pertinent to add > 70 words in 5 sentences using about 10 punctuation marks and 2 apostrophes.

Thank goodness, you closed this one out so succinctly.

> The protocol could be tested via a website

'coz we all know that the "Aliens" have high-speed web access.

Before you start laughing ...At least this explains a few things.

Excuse me. I [b]must[/b] be missing something here!

They set-aside $50 Million to "cover this". This implies they [b]knew[/b] they were doing something wrong!
They were fines $47.5 Million.

If I'm not mistaken, they just made a @2.5 Million [i]profit[/i] from the deal!

Whoops. Me thinks you hav e no understanding of how our GST works. At the end of the day, the final consumer or purchaser of the goods *always* pays the 10% GST.
When a retailer or any wholesalers purchase any item, they pay 10% GST on that item.
When they on-sell the item (be it wholesale or retail), they charge the next person in the chain 10% GST. They then claim the 10% they paid back and pass on the difference to the Grubbermint.

For anyone involved in manufacture, wholesale, or retail, GST is so much easier and simpler than what we had before (wholesale sales-tax which climed to 22.5%). It is also harder for people to cheat. As a manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, you never need to worry about GST. You pay it and get it back when you on-sell the item, so you don't need to factor GST into anything, because the end user pay it. It is really quite clean and simple.

If people import stuff directly, then Customs will charge them the 10% GST on the declared value. The Customs and Taxation departments have worked out that it is not worth their while to try to get the GST on items which are less than A$1,000- in value. Persumably because someone worked out tha tit costs them more than $100 to collect it. How they did that is beyond me, but it doesn't matter. The Australian Grubbermint does not need to charge the overseas retailer anything, they simply charge the person importing the goods. It really is plain and simple. So plain and simple, that even a moron like Gerrry should be able to understand it.

Gerry, his mate Solomon and the rest of the cronies trying to beat this up are just having a sulk because Australians aren't spending much money at the moment.

Their days of sucking people in with loss-leaders and high-interest interest-free deals are over. They've scammed all of those they can scam, and people are now taking a little longer and looking around. This might involve on-line stores, it might involve catalouges, it might even involve visting other shops. In some instances, people might choose to look overseas, but that would really be the minority.

Their huge markups (typically over 35%) for doing nothing other than employing morons who don't know shit from clay and lie to customers is starting to wear a little thin, but the number of people buying from overseas would be infintesimal. The savings aren't that great and it is a real pain with a high chance of getting ripped-off.

GST has absolutely nothing to do with it.

> OS vs OS. Server vs Server.
> But Microsoft had an unending money supply through its monopoly in the MS-Office franchise.
> Microsoft could simply wait it out in a slugfest.

Wrong. MicroShaft won the API wars.

They embarked on a propaganda war and ran seminars convincing CEO's and other non-tehco's that "the API was are over" - Win 3.1 has won over OS/2; the perfomance race is over, "NT 3.1 is as fast as Netware". The application was is over, "WinWord is better than Wordperfect and Excel smashes Lotus". Then they stole OS/2 (win 3.1) and gave away packaged as Win 3.11W, 3-Com's Lan-Manager became the giveaway known as WfW 3.11 and they did similar things with NT 3.51, WinWord 2.11, and a plethora of neat programs for anyone who wanted then under the guide of "helping" the developers. Cripes, they were doing this before the Mac was even a stolten glint it Steve Job's eyes. They hosed som any companies and effectively stole their packages that it wasn't funny. If you had a decent package in the early 80's and entered into a sales and marketing agreement with M$, you deserved everyting you got it you didn't cash in your shares the next day. Do you really thing M$ wore their now only C compiler - No, they stole it "legally", the same way that Borland did except theirs cost them less. They didn''t develop PC based networking, they entered into "strategic marketng exercises and joint partnerships" with companies who were the best in field and re-packaged their software under the Micro$haft brand for a few years. To ensure success, they sent some Mickey$oft programmers to "help" the company develop and evolve the package that M$ were flogging. Strange how as ever agreement reached it's termination period M$ no longer needed the other company and had developed thier own in-house alternative, which saw the origionator vanish within 6-12 months.

The really sad thing is that the droids who conducted thiscampaign were were really nice people who I like to think did not realise what they were doing at the time or where it was headed. The few I had contact with were really proud of what htey were doing for society and of their small contribution in fixing a bug here and there. The ones I was the closest to are not sadly no longer with us, but I like to think they would not really be all that happy about how things turned out, then again, a few made some very seroius money and like the vast majority of other M$ employees at the time, probably do'nt give a rats arse.

Sun and many/most other technical organisations were fighting a loosing battle. Whlle Microsoft were advertising in Airline magazines and Accounting Journals etc, they were trying to sell to the "techs" and like the techs themselves, didn't realise that the "tech's" were ultimately told what to do by the finance guys. Sun had the tech guys who were super-smart like Bill. Their sales and marketing guys like Scott were just not at the same level, yet still tried to run the show. Sometimes I wonder how or if things would have turned out different if the real techs ran the companies instead of the pseodo puppets like Scott. Would the real techs like Bill J (Steve W, and the plethora of others) have got through, and if so, where would have be now?

> We were a wonderful acquisition — we got stolen for a song at the bottom of the Dow

Translation (spin removal) - I screwed up - and would now like to thank the Gods for my "golden parachute". Since I think a suitable time period has passed (hey, it's 2010 and people have an attention span of 2 minutes or less, besides nobody who will live much longer than another 2-3 years even knows who Bill Joy, or a SPARC let alone a 360 was), it is okay for me to now attempt to twist and distort history so the world doesn't remember me as "the bloke who fsked up, big time and killed off one of the last bastilions of real technical people who "got it"."

- Yeah, I fsked up BIG TIME, but you can' t prove it and my name isn't Julian Assange, so after tomorrow you won't remember anyway.

When I'm lucky enough to get a bonus.

From Rover to Spot?