I suspect that they are overcalling beyond actual capacity to put their people on the incoming calls. It would be cheaper to have dead calls than to leave their agents idle.

If you have 30 agents and place 50 calls in the autodialer. Say that 15 of the calls don't get answered, the first 30 get a telemarketer leaving 5 with silence. Less idle time then if they made the calls only after the last one finished and having to wait for grandma to make it down the stairs. You may notice that sometimes you get an answer after a couple of seconds because someone has been freed.

Having never reached the remote desktop stage I have always wanted to mess around with them in a virtual machine and contort the desktop resolution to some insanely short resolution and claim I have an ultra wide screen. There should be barely enough space to see the content of the window between toolbars.

Their scripts probably can't handle the victim using a Mac, let alone FreeBSD.

This looks interesting but I can't find any information on whether it can run an SSH server or HTTPS on their site or through google. Does anyone know if it would be possible to port something Dropbear SSH to NuttX (assuming the CPU can handle it)?
They claim they have a POSIX-like system, which Dropbear needs so it should be possible, but has anyone done it yet?

TabMixPlus and the built in tab groups make it possible for me to just leave things open to read later. Close and open Firefox and the tabs are back as they were as I left them. Bookmarks are ok for long term keeping of pages I may want to view again, but leaving tabs open makes me more likely to actually view it again during the upcoming Great Tab Purge of 2014.

I just wish that middle click wasn't stuck on the harder to click scroll wheel.

Good point. I notice that the charging pins are indented to avoid direct contact with the skin, though whether that is enough to reduce corrosion I can not say. Arm hairs can still deposit corrosive oils.

This would be great if it could use inductive charging instead. Coils in the wrist strap maybe?

You have to include the $30 line rental or compare the Naked ADSL prices in your comparison.

The whole point of NBN other than fast speeds, is that gets rid of the broadband lottery. So that 25/5Mbps plan gives you 25/5Mbps, not 1.8Mbps. The opposition's FTTN will not with download speeds varying depending on how far you live from the node.

Quite honestly most people who oppose the NBN oppose it because it's a Labor project and would just as readily oppose FTTN it if the parties' chosen technologies were reversed and Abbot/Turnbull were going to switch to FTTP.

In a the magical free market the profits are meant to be squeezed down by healthy competition. In this case the only competition is importing from the USA, losing all consumer protections granted under Australian laws.

As everyone here knows, there is no such thing as a free market. When there is a distribution network filled with exclusivity contracts that prevents parallel imports and DRM that makes your licensed software deactivate itself when they discover your an Aussie you can't call that a success of capitalism.

And for "willing to pay more". It's not like deciding between a $5 HDMI cable and a $120 one where the consumer made a choice to pay more. There is only one company that makes this particular movie, game or software.
How can one be willing to pay more for a necessity in the case of MS Windows/Office. This makes as much sense as people willing to pay $5 per litre for petrol if the oil companies so wished.

Interesting point. With the NES however, I'm sure it's all down to the CIC chip that Nintendo used to act as gatekeeper (like Apple's app store) to prevent the problems that led to the video game market crash back in the 80s (didn't prevent shitty games though).

Which brings up another point I should have touched on in my earlier post. You can't make a console game without the blessing of Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony, then or now. This usually does keep most of the terrible indie games off the market but does nothing to shitty big budget ones and it completely locks out those rare great ideas like Minecraft from ever starting off on a console.

The NES and SNES aren't so innocent since they still had the form of DRM known as region locking. The PAL/NTSC limitation is complete bullshit when the digital game ROM has no analog video signalling components.

At least my old games still work on those old consoles. The future is pretty bleak as to the longevity of current games with activation servers going offline after they become an expense. Cracking teams are our only hope of preserving our gaming history.

Sony's stock jumps 9% during Xbox One announcement.

Ah ... you've been to TV Tropes too.

Floppy drives? I'm sure you will be hard pressed trying to find a Core2duo era motherboard with a floppy controller. New Ivy Bridge boards don't even have IDE controllers any more.

My favourite example of #2 is when my brother preordered Skyrim from Playasia. Playasia sent him a notice that the game may not be playable from Australia as Bethesda used geo-IP region locking to enforce regional pricing (and Valve are guilty for implementing the code for it). We are talking $55 (including shipping) vs $89 full retail. Playasia offered a refund and we went to EBgames to pay full retail.

I hope the government restricts the use of geo-IP price discrimination when it comes to online licence validation.

And yet if I was to go overseas and buy as many copies of Photoshop as I can fit in my bag, jet back to Oz and resell them it is illegal.

This is how I think things would probably happen in real life.

When an attacker cracks passwords in the hash table from some insecure forum they don't instantly get your bank account since (if it works like my bank) you aren't logging in with your usual online username or email address to the internet banking sites.
The forum has your username, hashed password (now assumed to be cracked) and the email you registered with.
The email account has to be sharing the same password (working out if users are prefixing "psn_" isn't worth the hackers time when there are thousands of other suckers who don't). With the email account now compromised the hacker has access to all your archived emails and knows of all the sites that you have registered for and can even reset your passwords if they wish to. Steam, WOW, ect. with access to the email account they can change the email account associated with it and sell if off.

Now if the victim happens to receive transaction statements in that same email account then now the hacker does have the bank and customer/account numbers needed to log on. Provided that the user has done all the wrong things (top500 password, reusing password on all sites) they are screwed. Sadly, as TFA argues, enough users do all the wrong things to make this highly profitable for the bad guys.