The pencil being your Weapon of Choice, eh Slim?

I'd be interested in whether you're able to get the 50 next month. We have a bunch of IT jobs outsourced here (some local and some offshore through the one company) and SLAs in place around scaling up numbers for projects. What we're seeing is people being pulled from one project to make up the numbers on another project instead of bringing them in from somewhere else in their organisation. Not always a huge issue but we've had two instances where the project that lost people was a dependency of the one that received them.

Bigger windows that can still be covered will be fine, thanks. All I thought of when I read this was Blaine the Mono

Funny isn't the right mod here. I live in Queensland and it's easy to see that we're headed the same places the US goes, just 10 or 15 years later. We even have white guys dressed up as black rappers with bad accents. On the plus side, this is only being considered as part of a history subject under the heading of controversies.

If their eyes are lighting up, it's more likely to be stargate radiation than cell tower radiation.

Remind me why China will be really pissed off? Google will be simply blocked and kicked out of China. Good luck with that idea.

Yeah, so tell us about some? They all allow you to download very little, unless you pay for it - if you don't you can download once an hour something like that. Knowing google, there won't be such limits.

Um, no, he didn't. That was the original joke, just using subtlety instead of the ice pick to the forehead.

Luxury! I wished I had a helmet many of the times I made an error whilst on my scooter.

Well, great white sharks do migrate (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2002/january9/sharks-19.html). But we hang nets off some of the beaches here in oz so that their favourite snack, the flabby gutted aussie floater doesn't have to worry too much about Bruce confusing us with Nemo.

I think classification is a big reason for the apparent increase in autism and Asperger's syndrome. Years ago a person could just be a little weird, now its always a medical condition. And even severely autistic people might not be classified as autistic, even if they were locked away and drugged because of it.

That said, I'm not questioning that it really is increasing also. Our environment has been changing rapidly. And childhood has changed a lot.

And this is why in australia all of our ADSL/Cable plans have "shaping" you get your allotment (usually in peak/offpeak GB per month) and once you go over it they "shape" your previously 24mbit** connection to 64 or 128kbit/s.
This means your monthly bill is a flat cost but if you accidentally stream too many movies off xbox live or something you will be back in dialup land till the end of your billing cycle or decide to upgrade to a more generous plan.

Our ISPs got slapped about 7 years ago for selling "unlimited" plans that had hidden smallprint limits in the acceptable useage policy (some of them defining abuse by being in the 98th percentile) as it was found to be illegal by the consumer watchdog.

** 24mbit is actually an average of 15mbit due to the nature of ADSL2+

It's woefully underused, probably at least partly due to the cost of printing in color for dailies. Maybe going digital will actually inspire them to do better, like the Boston Globe's wonderful Big Picture blog.

No but how about a balance between the two. Repos for what most people want. PGP signed debs for the 3rd parties. Straight deb for all those feeling frisky. It's not hard to warn people that, "Hey you're installing a unsigned package, chances are this will ruin your computer, sure you want to do that?" If a third party wants to distribute packages the least they can do is self-sign (bottom end), get a real cert (higher end).

The inherent problem with the iPhone is that you can only go to one store to buy apps (namely iTunes). With Repos you can pick and choose which stores you trust and which you don't. Much like how I choose if I want to buy software from BigBoxMart or BestStolen. The Internet in general could (since I am using a store analogy apparently) be seen as buying stuff off the street. Yeah, the stuff looks cool and at these bargain prices you can't beat. But I do need to exercise some caution when I flash my wallet to some guy hanging out the back of a van.

So yes, I agree, I'm not too hip on the one store to rule them all policy. But I do believe that the store concept actually has some utility to offer if given the ability to go to another store should I so choose later. I obviously don't want to exclude the random vendor on the street that is selling hand made crafts, or even the random kisok by the bus stop selling phones. I do however what to keep in mind the burly looking thug over there selling "Snoby" Radios. I think it is all a matter of getting people to get inside a way of thinking.

To me, and that only applies to me, Mac OSX screams "Hey buy more shiny Apple stuff" (Security by insulating ones self by coolness). Linux says to me "Hey subscribe to a Repo because we are always changing stuff and you want to have the latest build." (Security by trust of subscription [or maybe sheer geekness]). Windows just looks like, "Hey we're cool with everyone, you want herpes? No problem we're cool with that. Want to do really neat spreadsheets? We're cool with that too." (Insecurity by being a software whore. We're just trying to please everyone.)

You mean where many shops (mostly food related) don't support EFTPOS and I have to regress back to carrying cash everywhere? Where my power gets cut off for 3 weeks because when we requested the name be changed on the account they thought it meant "please disconnect me, I don't like electricity"? Where my ISP tells me to contact my modem provider and my modem provider tells me to contact my ISP because the two aren't compatible with each other (and most other ISPs don't service the exchange)? I'm not sure I like civilisation, give me grass skirts any day :(

Note: The tolerance seems to have expired ;)

I don't get the obsession with the sheep jokes. There are more sheep in Australia than in New Zealand.