Posts by Thorne 1324 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2012
Ok I can see how it works checking spelling, gramma and punctuation but how does it work telling how well you actually answered the question?
Things like English and General Studies can have multiple correct answers depending on your point of view and how you argue your point.
It might make marking easier by picking up the little mistakes but not how well someone understands the course material.
Mining tax is a joke. When it's a Chinese owned mine selling to China, it's never going to be profitable (on the Australian tax returns anyway). Now they can bring in Chinese workers to run these mines, the country won't see a cent.
The government (and opposition) here are the biggest bunch of ass clowns in history.
"The fault lies entirely on Harvey-Fucking-Abnormals who have been screaming for years that they're losing business through tax-free online options, and who also claim every local business who isn't part of the Harvey-Fucking-Abnormal chain is also a grey importer who are also undercutting them."
Jerry was the first person to bring everything in from overseas destroying Australian manufacturing but is pissed now that he's being cut out of the loop.
Cry me a river.
How stupid. They didn't do it before because it costs more to collect than it makes. As for helping retailers here, it won't make the slightest difference. Adding 10% to overseas purchases makes no difference when local retailers can be anything up to 1000% dearer. Anyway what legal grounds does the Australian government have for forcing foreign companies to collect tax on it's behalf?
More work. More cost, No difference. A total waste of time and money.
Considered American tech companies sell globally, forcing them to install backdoors will force them to move outside the US or their customers will leave like rats from a sinking ship.
This is not even mentioning the effect should the NSA lose the key or even the precedence of a government forcing a company to install a backdoor for them. Just imagine America squealing if it was China demanding this?
"The real problem is that these people do not understand that, not only is "keep[ing] people safe" not the most important consideration in a free and democratic society"
Freedom is more important than human lives. Every day soldiers get sent into battle by Western countries in the name of freedom. Using a handful of deaths by terrorist to strip away the freedoms bought and paid for with the lives of soldiers is a farce.
Yes but it was the universal surveillance that made everybody want to hide things.
If the government didn't overreach and they still needed a warrant to tap someone's communications, people wouldn't bother with encryption for most things.
It's all the spying that created the encrypt everything society. What you sow, so shall you reap.
"No, it said good drivers don't need to *constantly* look at the speedo. 2-3 glances a minute should be enough to catch any casual/unnoticeable drift in speed"
I wish. There are areas in Australia where the speed limit changes three times within a kilometre. The speed can change on the time of day and change if there is a bus parked beside the road. The police use unmarked cars, mobile cameras and now have legalized wearing camo while hiding in bushes.
You are forever checking your speed and watching for speed sign instead of concentrating on the road. Each year they buy more and more cameras and bombard us with ads that speed cameras saves lives yet tragically each year the road toll increases.
You're quite correct. With the prevalence of roadside tax collectors dressed up as police officers, people need to watch their speedo constantly so which is safer? A HUD or a control panel?
We all know watching the road without distractions is the safest but it's not an option anymore when the government is addicted to the fine revenue.
"I assume you mean IP addresses"
No I mean MAC addresses. My router assigns IP addresses so I can't tell who was using the IP address at the time. I need to be given some unique identifier so the offending party can be identified.
Giving me the IP address of my router is not good enough.
Basically it boils down to them providing definitive proof of the offender which they cannot do. It's no different to getting a prank call down to a phone number but that still doesn't prove who made the call.
If it comes to court, all I need prove is reasonable doubt and I can claim my wireless access was hacked. Unless they can show the mac address, they cannot prove it was my computer and as such their case will fail. Plenty of precedence where they sued old people who didn't even know what a torrent was.
At the end of the day they will bluster a lot but they won't fight anyone that questions their methods because in court their methods might be shown to faulty which would stop them from scamming others. Short of someone admitting it, they really don't have a leg to stand on. They can only scare people with the cost of fighting them in court.
That you couldn't ask them for the mac address of the offending downloader as there is multiple people using the connection so you can forward the letter onto the correct party?
Of course if they cannot identify the offender clearly, I really don't know where that leaves their case....
There is no point to banning in the global marketplace.
The Australian government can ban whatever they like and anybody can bypass the ban in seconds flat thus makes the ban worthless.
Southpark had to remove the anal probing scene from their game to bypass the ban in Australia and replaced it with a picture of a crying koala. Now I can go straight onto the net via my VPN and download the banned US version.
Banning is a total waste of time.
There is a difference between privacy and anonymity. Google is an advertising company and simply can't function with total privacy. They make the best search engine and do a lot of other stuff. Yes they collect a lot of personal data but people don't look at that data, only robots.
Yes they might get your thermostat data and usage patterns but what will they do with it? Only logical things I can think of is to make the thermostat more efficient, perhaps generate load demands for energy companies.
Privacy went out the window as soon as the NSA slurped everyone's phone records and metadata. Anonymity is all we have left (short of living off the grid in a cave)
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