I hate Australian telcos as much as the next guy, but about the *only* thing they have done right this century is to update the remaining old payphones to make it free to call anyone in Australia.

From memory, there's a government mandate to provide telecommunications to all citizens, and Telstra receives a pile of government money each year to maintain those payphones... these two links are the best I can find though: https://www.telstra.com.au/exc...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/20...

The article mentions "damage to another A380 at Sydney airport, when an aerobridge slammed into one of the engines."

I don't think this is the fault of the A380. Sydney airport is a terrible airport run by terrible people, it's probably not even entirely the fault of the guy who actually crashed the aerobridge.

Furthermore, as others have already pointed out above, it's far better to have maintenance issues fixed in a preventative fashion than ignored or put off until later.

This is good to know, thanks!

I will consider buying one of these. I am old enough to remember the original C64, but never used one enough to be a total purist about using totally original hardware. FPGA is good enough for me, but I definitely need real ports. That way I can finally finish my robot build from 30+ years ago, following the instructions in Usborne's "How To Build Computer Controller Robots" which was already pretty dated when I was reading it in the early 1990s. The book is totally free to download now though, as are some other 1980s classics: https://usborne.com/row/books/...

What ports does this new model have compared to the original? Joystick, serial, cartridge port, cassette, user port etc?

Yeah, all the Aussie banks suck. That's the nature of a cartel, and the recent royal commission seems to have had zero effect, despite that royal commission finding that yes, they are all pricks.

We're on Slashdot, so we are both probably aware of how easily SMS authentication can also be spoofed. I don't have this option, because even though I live in a 50 year old suburb in Australia's capital, I don't have a reliable mobile signal at my desk. Unfortunately, Telstra don't seem to be scared of the TIO, even though I have a lovely paper trail from Telstra admitting that their coverage map is incorrect, the phone doesn't work, and it has got worse since the shutdown of 3G.

The best solution I can think of for all of this is to simply mandate that a business must have a physical presence in order to do business.* If the bank wants your money, they must have a branch within some number of km of your residence. Ditto the phone company. I can hear the howls of anguish from our rural communities, but it's not like the status quo is any better for them. The obvious next step, of course, would be to nationalise a couple of banks and telcos.... just like the Commonwealth and Telstra used to be.

* I would love to see this applied to online busniesses as well. No more "selfie holding a government ID" sent to some insecure server overseas. If Facebook, Google, Coinbase etc want to do business in Australia, they should have a real office where customers can go and talk to a human to get their issues resolved. Locked out of your Facebook or GMail account? Go to their office and fix it. Hell, while I am dreaming of utopia, we should also make it a crime for the physical office to try and brush off customers by saying "why don't you use our app" instead of actually doing their job and helping. But now I'm just ranting, and I need to go and chase some kids off my lawn so I can yell at the clouds :-)

These days, so is a manual transmission.

+1. I'm interested in an EV but I want a real dashboard and controls. Tesla isn't even on my list.

I hope you're right. I received an email (a real one, not a phishing attempt) from CBA on Wed 25th of June saying that "Every time you log on to NetBank, you’ll be prompted to open your CommBank app to confirm the logon attempt." Maybe they are A/B testing it only on certain customers? Maybe you are a more valued customer than I am? The CBA already knows I despise them and are probably cranky that AFCA has sided with me in a couple of disputes that have cost the CBA some money :-)

Either way, it might be worth checking your email. I just logged into Netbank to see if there was a notification in there, but there wasn't. I find that it's pretty normal for CBA to be bad at messaging though, the sneaky buggers didn't give me any notification about my recent credit card fee increase either.

That sucks. But I'm not surprised, Australian businesses love forcing you to download an app. The Commonwealth bank is the latest. A few weeks from now, I won't be able to access my own money if my phone has a flat battery. Time to get a new bank, and time to go and troll some car salesmen about why I won't be buying one of their vehicles.

That's a good analogy.

Isn't it lucky that nobody has ever died in order for a nation to procure oil.

I'm pretty sure the cartoons aimed at toddlers are AI. Most of them are nursery rhymes, read by a computerised voice, with a tune that is like, but different from the original. The AI voice borks the cadence of the words enough that the audio won't be picked up for copyright violation. The animation is 1990s-level junk - I'm not an expert in AI prompts but it looks like what I'd expect if you used something "hickory dickory dock." If you let a few videos play in a row they get weirder, not traditional nursery rhymes at all.

And no, we don't leave a toddler watching youtube unattended. I hope other parents don't either

I'm not disagreeing with you, but this is why I no longer click on youtube links. It's just not worth the ads and loading time. If the person posting a youtube link is polite enough to include the title of the video and the runtime, I'll make an exception, but in my experience this is vanishingly rare.

Attention is a finite resource. We the consumers need to start treating it as such and stop letting advertisers steal it for free.

Why would I try to buy a sandwich from the closed shop ever again? I would go to the same shop that was open today, and sold me a sandwich without any hassle.