pdemporg

The absurdity of this debate is highlighted in the comments section of any newspaper article on Facebook. In them, you'll find real people using their real names, happily displaying to their local community what dreadful people they really are.

Real name policies do not stop abuse. But many voters will be swayed by their basest and most authoritarian instincts, and bring themselves to support yet another example of internet salami slicing by tech-illiterate governments who know all too well themselves that this has nothing to do with ending online abuse.

And why wouldn't they? The horror stories of online abuse are very real! But the consequences of trying to bubblewrap the internet have led to a place now where here in Australia a single un-elected bureaucrat is about to be given the power to scrub whatever she pleases from the internet with no recourse to users whatsoever.

I understand of course that this is just a petition that must be given lip service, but the tech community has got to realise that this sort of nonsense is not just going to go away. "Just use Matrix/Tor/I2P/IPFS/crypto-soup-du-jour" is really not a good enough response, unless we want an internet for crypto nerds (quickly banned in Australia, under penalty of secret trial and imprisonment, of course) and a separate normie-net for Netflix and state-approved cat pictures. What to do about it (above whinging about it on HN), I have no idea.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234020

'Clipless' pedals are so called because the system that preceded them was composed of toe clips and straps. Remove the clips and replace with ski bindings, and voila - clipless pedals!

That was the way I was taught to think about print vs digital in the bio box --- print degrades gracefully, slowly, while digital fails catastrophically, abruptly.

I'm sure this is true of a wider scope of things than just cinema projection.

NR is the only 5G protocol (aside from Verizon's abortive proprietary 5G TF), but it couldn't hurt to at least specify if the spectrum being used is sub-6 or mmWave. This factor (700--3500 Mhz vs 26, 28, 39 GHz) is going to have the largest impact by far on the experience in terms of the bandwidth/coverage tradeoff.

When it comes to discussing these two distinct clusters of spectrum, the difference is so stark that we might as well be talking about different protocols.

5G and 5G pro?...

As sibling commented, Voda is distant third in Australia. The incumbent is Telstra, with ~50% mobile share and was the dominant fixed provider pre-NBN.

Telstra's mobile footprint is vastly superior to the other two MNOs in terms of geographic coverage.

I may have missed something, but why specifically when paying for petrol? Surely the advice here should be to stop using debit entirely?

(Alternatively, choose to use cash now - or you won't have the choice in the future.)

The fact that most MAC addresses are not visible to the ISP behind NAT anyway is not the point, given the Department is not renowned for doing its homework.

The real concern here is the insight provided by this submission into the sort of thinking that is clearly going on at the most powerful ministerial department in the country. These people don't understand the technology, and fundamentally do not care.

It's worth nothing that Australia has never had the net neutrality debate that occurred in the US. This might well be the spark, if anyone in this country cares.

This move would be NBN way overstepping its remit as a last-mile layer-2-only service, as it is described in legislation. The ACCC has already taken them to task over mission creep regarding backhaul (and remade the model from 14 POIs to 121) - deep packet inspection would surely grab their attention.

Whilst the recent events are absolutely appealing, and Doctorow's central thesis is correct, there are a few things I feel the need to correct as an Australian:

Firstly, 'Australia is a politically unstable state whose governments routinely fail' is either a gross exaggeration or a misunderstanding.

No government has 'failed' in such a sense since 1975 --- a change of Prime Minister is not the same as an impeached President or a Parliament that falls apart. It is true we've had five PMs since 2013, but the government has only changed once. That is, Labor lost the election in 2013 to a legitimate alternative in the Coalition. Everything else is internal shenanigans --- neither policy nor implementation change measurably.

Secondly, 'The country's elites rely on voter suppression and other antimajoritarian tactics' is also a misreading of the political climate. 'voter suppression' doesn't really work in a nation with compulsory voting and a turnout of 92%.

I'm usually the first to point out that we have an issue with media concentration, particularly in regional areas with only one daily masthead, but the reality is much less stark than the one Doctorow paints here. Murdoch is Murdoch, not the China People's Daily. Tellingly, one of the journalists raided was a News Corp editor, and The Australian Newspaper is in as much of a flurry about these raids as anyone else.

EDIT: Sorry, I don't want to sound like a parochial whinger with a patriotic glass jaw, but this is a seriously important topic, and context is king.

Unfortunately, probably not. 70mm on a Vic8 already can be prone to tearing if not handled correctly, I wouldn't trust tape splices any faster than 24fps. IMAX already has zig-zag shaped splices to survive the faster film speed of 8 perf 70mm.

That is interesting - I guess by using scrypt for passwords you're encouraging crackers not to bother brute forcing (it isn't worth your time), wheras in a cryptocurrency you're actively encouraging that behaviour? Well spotted.

Thank you for actually engaging! Let me preface this by saying I'm usually the first to deride Bitcoin as a payments platform. However, using energy to mine Bitcoin does provide value to the user - profits over and above what the power bill and ASICs/GPUs cost. And you're right - for a payments platform, it is a regression in terms of energy consumption.

That, however, does not change the fundamental issue - the severe underpricing of emissions-heavy power generation. The externalities that the author is so worried about (in the form of climate change) are not priced into the going rate for electricity. Blaming bitcoin miners is silly - if I pay for my power, I should be able to use it however I see fit. The alternative leads to absurdity, such as a law that states your aircon may be set no lower than 22C in summer, as anything more would be "a waste". I pay for it, I use it, bugger off.

The external social cost of electricity generation needs to be internalised into the private end-cost - a carbon tax or an ETS. Pick one, follow through, and stop blaming rational agents for acting rationally.

EDIT: Spelling

What a ridiculous article. Household air-conditioning wastes energy. Running your television wastes energy. Serving up webpages for The Guardian is apparently a waste of energy. If the problem is that the price of energy does not encompass the negative externalities it creates, then we need a Pigouvian tax on it. The price rises, and miners reassess whether or not they are profitable in a carbon-neutral world. The author seems to think that market participants using energy in a profitable manner are at fault here, rather than the policymakers who are not interested in tackling the Greatest Moral Challenge of Our Time (TM). But sure, jump on the bandwagon and write op-eds while Bitcoin is in the news.