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Aussies LXI- Summer is coming!


sh_wulff

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GO YOU DOCKERS!!!

There was an election on? Must have missed that.

ETA: Woah GS :cheers:

Wait, the Dockers won? Over here in the US, the mail was that the Catters got in by ten goals easily...

Actually I nearly blew a gasket watching the game after midnight with a rum and coke too many in my system, but oh well, at least we're still in it...

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Adam! :)

The real footy news of note is that WCE missed the finals.

I am only mildly bummed that the mighty Lions missed as well, but when WCE misses the finals the whinging of the fans over here is pure schadenfreude glory.

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Haha suffer in your jocks Adam!! Time to start sharing those premierships around...you guys are greedy.

I suffered in my jocks quite enough for one night thank you very much.

All I have to hold on to is the Kennett Curse (if we get that far), and then that the coaches have learned to play a bloody ruck division against your mob...

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Have you guys seen this? I doubt it will do anything but it's only been up for a few days and already has had a ton of support/coverage so you never know.

Warg Arry beat you to it yesterday :P :

...

There is a petition going around. It has received 110 thousand signatures in 5 days

It's to the Liberal party concerning the NBN < Hopefully that link works.

Just thought I'd share it in case anyone is interested.

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To be fair, I don't think the majority of the population (including regular Internet users and including young people) recognise the difference between megabits and megabytes. Every time I've explained it to one of my 20-something year-old friends, they've been amazed at what it means, and when I've mentioned it in class, my students have been completely clueless about it. Companies continue to advertise their connection speeds in mbps, so tricking your average customer into believing you're going to get awesome speeds must be working.

As for 60 year-olds deciding long-term future directions of the country, that's always been a major problem of any political process. Superannuation was probably one of the biggest achievements of Keating's Labor government simply because of its foresight. As it is, a country like the US that hasn't introduced compulsory superannuation is robbing all the future generations to pay for the current retired lot.

I think it was Tony Blair who remarked that progressive governments only have short bursts of power, while conservatives generally reign much longer. The gross generalisation (but with a grain of truth) is that the progressives spend the money on good things very quickly (usually overspending), and the conservatives then take a while to pay the bills and fix up the finances afterwards (while hopefully not undoing too much of the worthwhile parts of the progressive agenda). Before anyone picks apart that line, I know of course it's an oversimplification and there are a myriad of factors involved, so I'm not referring to this most recent Labor government and the incoming Coalition. Just making a broad observation.

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Actually I'd agree with that Jeor, it's the dual natures of our system. Left wing build the infrastructure, the social safety net etc and then the right wing pays off the debt, neglects the infrastructure etc until things degrade to the point people want the left wing to come back and spend money again :P It only works as long as the two sides play their part, which has clearly stopped happening in the US.

I really just wish the conservatives would take a long term view of investment instead of looking at the short term. In the long term Fibre to the Home is cheaper, and delivers better - we will save money just by getting it all done now as it lets us retire the copper network, save on powered exchanges etc. Instead we'll get the shitty, slightly cheaper in the short term solution and pay for it in the long run. And it's for pretty much purely political reasons, not because it's good policy.

If the Coalition privatises the NBN Co that will be really fucking stupid. The Howard government ended up regretting what they did with Telstra, yet there seems a decent chance one of Howards ministers will turn around and do it all over again and fuck us all.

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To be fair, I don't think the majority of the population (including regular Internet users and including young people) recognise the difference between megabits and megabytes. Every time I've explained it to one of my 20-something year-old friends, they've been amazed at what it means, and when I've mentioned it in class, my students have been completely clueless about it. Companies continue to advertise their connection speeds in mbps, so tricking your average customer into believing you're going to get awesome speeds must be working.

I'm quite aware of that, it's a bit different when you're a politician actually making decisions in the area though. I brought it up because I noticed in a Labor ad even they didn't seem to know the difference (or were just being intentionally misleading).

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Sounds like himself, if it wasn't an idealogical issue he'd listen to the people and the experts in the field instead of putting a political solution ahead of a technical one.

He could do that, but he has a +3 Mandate of Impervious Majesty, which makes him immune to experts, economics, and Moore's law (which I know is about processing, but seems to apply pretty readily to data storage and transfer rates as well).

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He could do that, but he has a +3 Mandate of Impervious Majesty, which makes him immune to experts, economics, and Moore's law (which I know is about processing, but seems to apply pretty readily to data storage and transfer rates as well).

Well it does apply to transfer rates in the sense that Moore's Law has an exponential growth in processing power, leading to more computing intensive applications being developed which require more bandwidth and results in us being bandwidth capped. Which we are already.

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Well it does apply to transfer rates in the sense that Moore's Law has an exponential growth in processing power, leading to more computing intensive applications being developed which require more bandwidth and results in us being bandwidth capped. Which we are already.

That's true. I've just been reading responses to the ABC story on Turnbull's comments. A number of people suggested that 25mb/s is more than adequate for a home connection. If 25mb/s is adequate now, and if Moore's law applies then it will be at least 10 years before we need the full 1000mb/s that the NBN potentially offers. So, that's an investment in our future . . .

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