Greg Smith in Western Australia

In another " You WILL be healthy " push from our medical " I'm better than you " medical people, a sugar tax is being pushed. I propose a 12% price hike twice a year. Let's see how that plays out.

Australia to way too timid in a modern world.  The media is doing it's very best to demonise data centers which have a potential to centre Australia as in dispensible engine room for future world economies. And the government is taking note of the fear and suspicions by introducing draconion rules that risk making it "too hard" for investors. Sure data centres, like any industry, needs to follow reasonable rules regarding location, resource usage and environmental impact but the positive impact they have on GDP and security should not be ignored. All levels of government should stand ready to help, not hinder.  Manufacturing followed the same path. Dealing with increasing regulation, uncapped labour cost rises, and government laziness, manufacturering in Australia collapsed. Yes, we ship iron ore overseas and get it back as washing meachines.  Australia must be less timid, not be afraid to fail, and be prepared to adventure.

 It used to be easy to setup and run your own private email server.  I used postfix. If you wanted to send an email to someone@somewhere .com your server would look up s omewhere.com 's mail server address from it's DNS record, connect to it's port 25, somewhere.com would say "Hello", you said I have a message for someone , and somewhere.com would say great - send it over. Now it's all encryption, domain authentication keys, permitted sender policies, spam checks, scam checks, etc, etc, etc. I gave up and went back to my native gmail address.  Let the experts try and keep up.

 The Australian referendum to recognise Australian Indigenous peoples in the constitution through the establishment of a Voice To Parliament body was quickly defeated. Current counting stands at 60% No. I voted No. But not against Aboriginal peoples or against recognition. I voted against the Voice To Parliament which was to be given constitutional powers to consult with all levels of Government. While not having any veto power, it's influence would be significant. My No stance developed over time.  After announcement of the referendum, big business, sporting interests, unions and associations fell over each other to announce support and provide campaign funding. To my mind this could only be the result of a lot of background lobbying of company boards and various management teams. Then when the legal implications were questioned, the Solicitor General released a carefully crafted and clearly forced statement stating the proposed amendments were legally "safe" in his opin...

It's May 2013.  Apple is becoming a follower rather than leader in the innovation stakes.  Microsoft is still puzzled and wandering where past glories have gone.  Unless either can change the game - change the rules - they will go the way of countless other tech companies. Where is there hope?  Well, it's in the ability for someone to make 1 + 1 = 7.  Steve Jobs had it.  He saw a mouse driven computer and could see the possibilities.  He was the most enthusiastic guy in the room.  Others saw problems - he saw possibilities. I'm not a game console type of guy - but have a look at Microsoft's Kinect technology in this Youtube video.   The technology is great, and brings us closer to HAL9001 computer interactions.  It's really wasted on a game console. So what's the best way to really use Microsoft's Kinect - to build the technology into everyday devices and lifestyle?  I don't know.  But Steve Jobs would have. If ...

You may remember that 2004 and 2005 were the years of the email virus. 2007 and 2008 are definitely the years of SPAM email. I run a small home server with Postfix. It just does email for my self and immediate family members - about 12 or so accounts. It gets about 400 SPAM emails a day. This takes some filtering. What's interesting is how SPAM is changing. Initially we had direct SPAM - a server would send out thousands (or millions of emails. These were easily blocked by IP address. Then we had open relay SPAM - an internet search would see what mail servers were mis-configured for relaying and emails would be directed through that server. Again reasonably easy to block, even so some legitimate emails might have been blocked. Now we have zombie SPAM - virus infected computers are transformed into mail senders. You will see today that an IP will just send SPAM once and then you'll never see it again (presumably the owner sees his PC melting down and gets it fixed). S...