Posts by tkioz 448 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jul 2009
Reminds me of Telco here in Australia that sent me a threatening letter over 70 cents. Yes, I under paid my final bill on a mobile account by 70 blood cents. I couldn't believe it, I honestly thought it was a prank, but none of my friends would admit to it, it wasn't until I got the second letter threatening to send it to a debt collection agency that I rang them and asked "are you bloody serious?". I paid them and made a note to never purchase from that company ever again, people that stupid don't need my money.
So law abiding citizens are being punished because of the actions of criminals? Yeah that's right... NOT.
I'm all for mobile signal blocking (god only knows why they didn't do it before hand) in prisons, but banning tiny phones because of one segment of the population is just nuts.
Honestly there are a lot of places I would accept blank mobile phone jamming, it needs to be made easier to legally do.
Maybe leave open one channel for 'approve' phones for people with demonstrable need (doctors on call for example), but they need to prove it to get their phone working in jamming zones.
I think the US needs to focus on fixing our own house and leave the others to do the same. We do not/should not want to be the worlds babysitter and the world should not want us to wipe their noses.
Err.. Most of us DO have our 'houses' in order, we don't spy on tens of millions of private citizens of other nations, our governments need... ya know WARRANTS to spy on our own citizens.
How about you freaking yanks get your noses OUT of our private affairs huh? How about you deal with your shitty third world hellhole, you gun crime, homelessness, shitty healthcare, and other bollocks first.
Where the HELL do you get off looking into the private information of Australians, British, French, Germans, etc.
And you wonder why the rest of the world hates you...
I honestly don't get the big deal, I own a copy of it, it's something everyone with an interest in history and politics should read, alongside The Prince, 1984, A Brave New World, Farenheit 451, etc.
Oh and if you want a good laugh consider this: All those Neo-Nazis who buy the book? The German state of Bavaria owns the rights to the book (until 2015, when it goes into the public domain) and all the royalties collected go to charity, including Jewish groups.
It depends on the information but I can definitely understand withholding information from services not hosted in Australia. Things like Google Docs were I store notes, half finished story ideas, and stuff like that I really don't care who whose law it's subject too, but stuff like medical records, financial records, etc. I definitely want to be subject to Australian law and regulation only.
I don't think it's unreasonable either. Leaving aside all the NSA stuff, I really don't want private companies having the ability to share my information amongst themselves.
Exceptionally well written!
It's a crying shame when a nation that once a guiding light of freedom and liberty has lost it's way. When I was in school we were taught about the influence of the American constitution on our very own Australian constitution, and it was held up as one of the land mark documents of history... to see such a nation behaving in ways more reminiscent of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany is just sad.
I saw it last night and while there was a lot of hype, it was still an interesting watch. There was some American dude on there saying we 'need to hit back!', of course he works for a private company selling 'offensive cyber weapons' so I'll take that with a grain of salt... but what do we steal? Most everything China has is stuff they've got from western companies!
It's always interesting to see the law trying to catch up with technology. Sure the current gen printed guns are pretty pathetic, but just give it a while for 3D printing to become more and more mainstream and the technology to mature.
I'm thinking they'll try and put 'report home' software on them, so the government can be sure you're not 'hurting yourself'.
Social protocol is a minefield mate, even if he was taking lessons it's likely they only covered the 'big' stuff, not how one holds themselves while talking, or where you place your other hand during a handshake.
Honestly the whole thing reads like a slow news day beat up.
Out to ruin the states? Hell they should be out to abolish and utterly destroy the damn useless things. Other than the occasional sporting match they serve zero purpose in this country any more.
They made sense a century ago when communication over such vast distances could take time, but today? No, get rid of them, we've got three levels of government (local, state, federal) and could get along just fine with only two levels and say a hell of a lot of money.
I think the problem is that they wouldn't return the favour. I lived next door to a auto-repair tech once, I fixed up his computer a time or two, but when my car broke down on a weekend he refused to even look at it 'I do that at work, not at home'.
See the problem with fixing computers is people expect us to be all Sherlock excited at a new mystery to ply our trade upon... yeah... no... that was me 15 years ago when I fresh, before I had the joy burnt out of me by many evenings of unpaid virus removing.
I lie my ass off about what I do/did now, have done since I moved to a new town. I can actually eat my dinner in peace. It's a shocking experience.
I was an excited geeky teenager when I first started working in IT, and happy to share my experience with all and sundry, but after a few years of getting calls from people I only tangentially knew who never spoke to me when there wasn't a 'computer crisis' I simply stopped bothering.
Oddly I think it was family that broke me, I was working retail IT, the closest thing this side of hell I can think of, at the time, and I had knocked off from a terrible week, and my mother rung me on the way home, telling me to get out to my aunts house to fix her computer... I was hungry, I was tired, and still in my work clothes, so I drag my ass half away across creation (my Aunt lived about 30kms away), and I get there as they are sitting down to tea, and I'm shoved into the back room to fix a freaking printer. No offer of coffee, no offer of food, nothing, hell she didn't even have the decency to ask me herself, she called my mother to ask me, a woman half a freaking state away, because she knew I wouldn't say no to her.
After all was said and done it wasn't even a bloody emergency, just a broken printer that could have waited.
I think that was the point I started telling people "come into the shop" and "sorry, no, I don't moonlight".
I know it's silly isn't it... I often wonder around a shopping area, just looking after I've made the purchases that I went there for, I'll nip into a shop I've never been in before, maybe I'll buy something, maybe I wont... but if I saw a sign saying they want to charge me just for looking I'll keep on walking.
The male pill has been in the pipeline since forever. Even if it was only, say, 90% effective, combine it with the female pill, and you've got a damn near perfect contraception.
Unfortunately, the male pill wont really solve the major problems better condoms help with, STD transmission in Africa, and it wont make it out into the developing world due to patents and prices.
Odd that they didn't have a category for reusable condoms. Wait before you throw something at me, they use to exist before the latex condoms came into vogue, but they were terrible things.
A condom that is reusable, reliable, and enhances pleasure could go a long way to help with the STD epidemics in Africa. Of course so could religious leaders getting off their moral high horse and endorsing them...
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