Posts by Darryl Smith

It's time to suck the marrow from the NBN debate

Another thing about the NBN costs is that many of the costs must be expended anyway.

For instance, the current broadband over satellite for the bush service is currently getting close to End Of Line. It will require about $7b from memory to replace it. These costs have been moved into the NBN, but will have to happen even if the NBN does not go ahead.

Another of those costs is the cost of Fibre to regional centres. Once again, this has been moved to the NBN, and is needed anyway. Lets put a price of $1b on it. So we have about $8b of government costs, even if the NBN does not go ahead.

Then Telstra would need to spend at least $10b upgrading it's copper network over the next 10 years, because it if falling apart. This puts the total to about $18b that needs to be spent regardless.

On the other side, from the FIOS experience in the USA, I predict that there will be about four house fires during install caused by installers hitting gas or electric lines. I hope I am wrong, but this is a prediction.

Darryl

IOC asks Olympic spectators to cut back TXTs and tweets

Re: The IOC can piss right off

I used APRS in the 2000 Olympics to track motorcycles for the TV coverage, and this worked without incident. Any competent broadcast rf engineer would know that trying to rely on the phone system during a major event is dumb

Darry

Half of computer users are Wi-Fi thieves

I am not a thief

I am not a thief. I occasionally use an unsecured WiFi access point, but this is not misuse or theft. In the real world if someone puts up a sign saying people can take as much fruit as they want from a shop for free, then it is not possible to charge anyone with theft, provided the sign was put up by the owner.

WiFi is no different. At a protocol level, every access point transmits an invitation for other devices to connect to it. If I accept the invitation then I am doing no wrong.

Aussie bin Laden penetrates APEC security

It might not have been illegal!

The APEC ACT is an interesting read.

Paragraph 19 is entitled 'Offence: Entering restricted area without special jurisdiction'

It states that 'A person must not, without special justification, enter a restricted area or any part of a restricted area.'. This is really simple. There is only one issue. They defined Special Justification.

Paragraph 37 is entitled 'Special Justification'.

It states that 'A person has a special justification to be in an area if:

(c)the person is required to be in (or pass through) the area for the purposes of the person's employment, occupation, profession, calling, trade or business or for any other work-related purpose'.

Therefore regardless of wether the person had a security pass or not, they were permitted to be in the area because they had a reason to be there because their employer wanted them there. All they need to do is to be able to prove this as part of paragraph 38.

Patientline backs down on price rises

Better in Australia

In Australia hospitals have their own suppliers. My mother has been in one hospital much of this year with Cancer. They charge her 50c to dial out, and we pay 25c (or the normal local call rate) to dial in. These are un-timed. These are about 20p and 10p respectively. They do need to register for the phone service which is about $2-3 per day for short stays (or 1 pound) from memory. But if you are a pensioner then the phone service has no per-day charges.

And they are not banning mobile phones either in the hospital, apart from a few minor areas. Even with these charges it is amazing to see how many oncology paitients have mobiles. Just makes things easier for them

Cash machines get a voice

Old News

In Australia talking ATM's were introduced about 1988 at the State Bank of NSW. In a country with about the highest literacy level in the world I think they decided in the next few years that the extra expense of adding the voice to the machine was not really worth it.