Re: That pie chart is well wrong
Trump is placing trade sanctions on China in part over IP theft (or recycling), expect about $600B to turn up on the door step any day now.
460 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2011
The place never stopped being a penal colony. Check out the security theatre for the games including airport style full body scanners (rapiscan have the contract are these the xray scanners or the terahertz ones) wonder what happens to the images. There will be back scatter xray vans on the gold coast - who cares about public health. And the never ending increase in police powers to keep us safe. Gold Coast, a good place to keep away from for the period of the games and possibly beyond.
To which Mr Franklin would reply that to have reached that point then you have already surrendered most of your liberties in exchange for fantasies that the state can or will offer you protection.
In any popular tabloid any criticism of the police is inevitably met with a response - when you need the police to protect you. The problem of course is that the police do not offer this service, at least not to Joe Public. The social contract between the government and the governed has long been broken and one sided. Further erosion of the rights of the governed will not make the government any more competent or any more interested in protecting you in your time of need.
the spend of £40 million at Porton Down to do something about it...
Grubyments don't work that way. The spend at Porton Down would have already been decided as would have been the eventual end game from all this Russian bashing - probably an excuse to re-enter Syria. We in the free West are now following the bouncing ball of increasingly shrill outrage from politicians and the press to 'do something' and hence arrive at the predetermined conclusion. The Iraq war, WMD's and babies thrown out of incubators was not that long ago. Lest we forget.
Just as there is a symbiotic link between police and criminals, so to between governments and terrorists. (If not symbiotic then directly funded). Terrorism is the gift that keeps on giving, influencing all sorts of power grabs like the one above. As there aren't enough real threats to justify the security and military apparatuses that have been built, we have to make some. This is similar to the situation before the great war, or the war to end all wars, whereby large standing armies were bankrupting the kingdoms of Europe and rational deescalation was abandoned in favour of Russian roulette. The only winners were the banks.
That depends on where the pressure to discriminate against $X comes from. A team is not an isolated entity, nor is a corporation. How internal and external influences are handled may suggest fairness, biases, discrimination, stupidity or something in between. With enough pressure a team will act against its own best interests even if that limits long term survival. We see this in the lifecycle of every major corporation.
That's easy, since 2008 a massive expansion of credit into the parasitical financial services sector to shuffle the cards without actually producing anything. How can you measure productivity growth when money has no value. Secondly the productive parts of the economy are now so wrapped in red tape and security theater that they have stopped expanding. Sovereign risk from armies of useless public servants who have forgotten that they offer no real value to an economy has killed most Western economies. Check out Australia's latest defense trade controls act and the criminalization of R&D to see the stupidity up close. Productivity has not improved because throughout most of the world the parasitical classes have been elevated - check CEO's salaries, ever expanding copyright terms or the rise of patent trolls - and the productive classes are now herded, tax surveilled, imprisoned and bound. Until people wake up and stand up Western culture, innovation and productivity is effectively at an end. We will be reduced to celebrating useless apps that allow us to share our underwear or our socks.
Or it may mean that as you employ more women you need more women to communicate and socialise with them. Either, because of bias against the men, the men speak a different interpersonal language, the men regard them poorly and so a grunt is seen as being more than sufficient or because the men will not engage with them due to concerns over their mental stability, maturity and the risk of false allegations. It may also mean that the economy is moving from making stuff to talking about stuff.
No Meadowlark, the super advanced androids will still take over mankind. The difference now is that they won't know what to do once the takeover is complete. Mankind will start referring to the androids as politicians and we will lament how nothing ever seems to change for the better. Expect the androids to one day start serving adverts and legislating for donors in the absence of any real AI.
Massive pharmaceutical industry that thrives on government mandates and paranoia - it definitely will be the US. If it is a resource rich country or strategically close to one then they can slip a few terrorists and guns in there as well. Provide jobs and make America great again Your tax dollars at work!
Probably not your fault unless your office is at the end of a long dark road with no public transport and surrounded by prisons, psychiatric hospitals, wolves and cannibals. There are obviously other drivers influencing women's career choices and expecting it all to be magically fixed at the corporate level is leaving things a bit late. As an exercise in trolling it would be interesting to chart women leaving technical industries with the increasing proportion of women in school teaching roles. Are young women not reaching for some industries because of a lack of accessible role models (male or female) to inspire and teach them technical skills.
This isn't about catching anyone. This is about fear of and control by an authoritarian state.
Look at how people are now willing to accept that the US govt can pass non-constitutional laws if they apply to non-citizens or outside of the borders. As a poster above pointed out probable cause becomes reasonable suspicion. Then it becomes a hunch followed by whatever the officer feels like stealing under local forfeiture conventions. All the while in the land of the over medicated anyone opposing this becomes a conspiracy theorist. A population already conditioned to live in its own faeces with the UK and Oz half a step behind. You have got to admire the social engineering that has gone into this.
Yup, one moment capitalism and the efficiency of a competitive free market is good but if it gets in the way of the bread and circuses it is bad. There is no difference between ticket scalping and futures trading. If it pushes up the cost of food and fuel and the bankers profit it is good. If it pushes up the cost of nothing consequential and the plebs profit it is bad. From a market point of view bulk buying tickets helps to support the entertainers by guaranteeing a level of market support and contributes to market efficiency by providing services to those who are prepared to pay, and as our economics teachers told us, can make the best use of the tickets.
The NBN's powered boxes by the side of the road look archaic now but we will stick with them because we are Stralians' and that is what we do! Soothed over by talk of off-budget, user pays, its all Labor's fault, terrorists hate us for our infrastructure, no one needs more than 640K, etc. Mobile broadband will be enough for the older low bandwidth (email and web) customers if the telco's get their pricing and marketing right. That will blow a big hole in the NBN both for finance and contention meaning no money for upgrades and no justifiable demand. NBN may even need to offer a CVC aggregation product across many POI's to keep things affordable (closer to the original plan).
Albanese, the man who gave us mandatory full body scanners at Australia's international airports. No opt out clauses, no limits on future technologies and no requirements that any of it be proven effective or safe. With the support of the Abbott government this was passed in the lower house at which point Labor and the LNP stood and applauded each other - suggesting there was considerable generosity at play. Our robust political democracy in action.
While a Labor win is likely, the major parties are struggling with record low primary votes (Barnaby excluded). With a series of S.44 by elections leading up to the 2019 poll it is likely that both parties will struggle to finance their national campaigns. Almost all parties will be relying on Australia's dumb as a box of rocks electorates to keep voting against their own interests.
My prediction for 2019 is an Internet startup - say Pubar (pronounced Pooh-Bah) - that will facilitate the delivery of bribes (or donations as they are called) between the common citizen and their party representatives so that ordinary people can enjoy the thrill of democracy. Need a politician for 20 minutes to attend your kids birthday party - Pubar it. Demand pricing would of course apply around popular events. The political parties would discover a new fund raising mechanism and we could throw away any pretense that the generous salaries enjoyed by politicians in any way contributes to their loyalties and obligations to the tax payer.
> averaged across all users, the average uncontested throughput of the NBN is a mere 1.3 Mbps.
But there's the rub. The end user experience is not benefiting from aggregate bandwidth across the whole of the NBN but only their little POI. 121 POI's didn't just make it more expensive to reach the customer but also limited the ability of the RSP's to aggregate CVC across a significant proportion of their user base.
Oz owned by foreigners isn't a problem, especially if they are fervent supporters of democracy and the process of donations that keep it alive. A government that offers no value to its voter base is a problem. People might start asking why is government so expensive and what does it really do, having sold off any legitimate activity? Lists and databases to the rescue. Busy work under the pretense of keeping us safe. This is also visible in our PM's latest brain f@rt. A list of foreign actors who might seek to influence government. ASIO already has a list and our politicians were so warned. Not good enough. We need to put them on another list, even better make them put themselves on a list for a fee. Not sure what happens to the list after that. Locked filing cabinet in the basement or circulated marked additional discretion required when accepting donations? As for Brandis's list, think back to gun registration. Once something is on list then additional rules can be formulated about its use or decommissioning. Like the Liddell power station whose owners are not prepared to play ball to flatter the LNP. As critical infrastructure we open the path to subsidies and arm twisting, carrots and sticks.
There are new SOLAS weight in motion standards for containerised cargo requiring verified weights. In modern ports the container weight is checked by the straddle and the crane. The ships know how heavy they are and their trim. If all else fails, water lapping over the gunnels may alert the stevedores or the crew that something is amiss.
Locusts, you can but dream. By the time the US food companies are done with them it will be 50% sawdust and GMO high starch filler, 40% GMO soy, corn syrup and artificial flavouring, 5% preservative and 5% undisclosed byproducts of the pharmaceutical industry. The big label on the front showing a cartoon image of a super locust will be as close as you will get to your fantasy protein source.
www.animemaru.com/japanese-navy-retroactively-renaming-ships-to-avoid-confusion-with-kancolle/
KINAWA – The Japanese Navy today announced a comprehensive plan to retroactively rename its vessels, including famous ships from history, to avoid confusing them with the popular online game Kantai Collection.
“This is all quite frustrating,” said Admiral Yamada, who is spearheading the renaming effort, during a press conference at the Okinawa Naval Headquarters. “It’s bad enough that most people think the Yamato is a space ship. ...
Even the LNP realise they have an election losing proposition with the NBN. Their standard mode of governance - it's all Labor's fault - is not working as well as it should so they need to reframe their inability to take responsibility for anything. Bill Morrow's moment of candid honesty is just the setup to allow the LNP to write off part of the problem. Watch for our Dear Leader to ride in as the guy who saved the Internet. Sadly it will still be a dogs breakfast but at least some of the cost will be hidden and the NBN will be able to offer cheaper CVC or a better network or more executive bonuses. With the LNP racking up debt at a huge rate and the submarine farce yet to hit, what's and extra 20 or 30 billion. It's not like it is their money. Maybe with the off the books finance they can gift the whole sorry mess to one of their mates for cents on the dollar.
If we could get the F35 canopy managed by North Korea, the undercarriage by China, the exhaust cowls by Iran and the control surfaces by Russia then we could have world peace! Maybe that's the key that we have been missing all these years. Take something completely useless but indispensable and give everyone a part share in the outcome.
The old hospital surgery straw man, well not for much longer. You can lie there happy knowing that diversity makes us stronger. Though some security was missed in the hospital electronics, a performance bias was included that considers your relative worth on the rainbow scale and your privilege level. While you might die, a cross dressing Latino man may live. See how warm and fuzzy that makes you feel. Similarly the AI in your self driving car will be capable of split second value judgments as to who should live and who should die in a collision, even if a circuitous route is needed to reach that outcome. Diversity is not just about gender, sexual orientation and colour but about value and intent.
No, the DTCA covers more than just cryptography. It covers a wide range of research and activities in manufacturing, medicine, telecommunications, and a bunch of others even if there is no relation to the military. There is no exception for fundamental research. This is typical head up rear end Canberra with no thought for the unintended consequences, for the R&D driven entirely offshore or for the closing down of future skills pipelines. Just when you call peak stupid in Australia the country surpasses itself. That the serfs should feel happy about crawling to some lick spittle public servant for a licence to do R&D under the pretence of keeping us safe while our own governments supports the US in its terrorist activities around the world is laughable.
Fortunately as we have learned, Australian law trumps the law of mathematics. Our worthless policy makers and their sycophants can simply legislate supremacy in this area. ROT-13 is secure by government fiat and that is all we need.
The rest of the world has pretty much given up any hope for Trump. His presidency has been an exercise in bicycling backwards thus far. He does not have enough political capital to take on the TLA's, he couldn't even get his party to agree on what to do about Obamacare. Best to just wait until the US sanctions itself into irrelevancy.