A remote Central Australian community will trial a technology that boosts supplies of drinking water using solar power and air, after battling water security issues for several years.

An Adelaide lawyer who authored the South Australian Law Society's trust account handbook "abused" his knowledge to steal $850,000 from two deceased estates and fabricate documents to cover his tracks, a court has heard.

NSW identity fraud victims want more done to stop imposters from using drivers licences to lodge bogus loan, credit and debit card applications.

A mothballedNSWHunterValley coal-firedpowerstationis to be re-commissioned and the new owners say it willbecleaner andgreenerthanitwas beforeitshutdownfive yearsago.

A West Australian man has captured on camera what may be one of the first documented cases of a redback spider capturing a mouse.

Tasmanian farmer Richard Headlam says he was reassured a proposed coal mine on his land would not go ahead. Two years later, the plan by Midland Energy has been revived.

About 500 locals turn out in Cummins, on SA's Eyre Peninsula, to farewell one of the final trains passing through the town as the region prepares for more trucks on the road.

A group of nine irrigators has lodged a class action in the NSW Supreme Court against the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, claiming its negligent water management has caused $750 million in losses.

The Social Services Minister has indicated a short-term lifeline may be thrown to a charity that provides 67 million meals for hungry Australians each year after Government moves to split food charity funding between three agencies.

The Prime Minister says the Government will maintain Foodbank's funding following community anger over plans to slash its budget in half.

Two regional Australian doctors are at the forefront of an international effort to eliminate a horrendous childbirth injury, and say they could succeed within a decade.

In 2009 we were promised a fast National Broadband Network with optical fibre cables direct to most homes and businesses. Instead, we've ended up with a mix of technologies including optical fibre, copper wires, Hybrid Fibre Coaxial, fixed wireless and satellite.

The duo's upcoming adaptation will mark their second adult-oriented animated project, following 2016's successful "Sausage Party."

#architektura #architekt #dom #design

(California Court of Appeal) - Held that a former company president did not have to arbitrate his claims that the CEO and others wrongfully diluted his interest in the high-tech company's stock. His employment contract's arbitration clause did not cover this situation. Affirmed the denial of a motion to compel arbitration.

Phishing scammers targeting Nedbank customers with malware.

Phishing scammers using UCount awards as bait to steal your Standard Bank Internet Banking login details.

[Ministerial statement by Minister Jamahl Simmons] Mr. Speaker, Today I would like to provide this Honourable House with an update on the very...

(California Court of Appeal) - Held that a former company president did not have to arbitrate his claims that the CEO and others wrongfully diluted his interest in the high-tech company's stock. His employment contract's arbitration clause did not cover this situation. Affirmed the denial of a motion to compel arbitration.

(US 3rd Circuit) - No. 19-2217

During the final minutes of her life, heartbeat fading, my mother was too weak to speak or open her eyes. But 1,500 miles away from where hospice had gently laid her down to die, I felt the strength of her spirit pushing me out the door. So I grabbed cross-country skis from the garage, clicked boots into my bindings and glided across a cold, empty meadow, where I surrendered Mom to the hand of God.

Trips to national parks are canceled. Popular hiking trails are avoided. Mountain towns are left unexplored.

In Sandwich, N.H., a town of 1,200 best known as a setting for the movie “On Golden Pond," broadband is scarce. Forget streaming Netflix, much less working or studying from home.

The L.A. community mourns the loss of beloved rapper.

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Research Report 199: Climate Resilience and Benefit–Cost Analysis: A Handbook for Airports provides information on how to apply benefit–cost analysis tools and techniques to improve decision making affecting resilience of airport infrastructure projects in response to potential long-term impacts of climate change and extreme weather events. The handbook is designed to improve the process by which infrastructure investment strategies are evaluated, with an...

I remember you were sick, And yet I had to go. I wasn't there to watch you die, That pain, I hope, I'll never know. So I never got to say goodbye, I

COVID-19 has shone a very bright light on the importance of widely available, affordable broadband. Nearly 42 million Americans lack access to any broadband whatsoever--double FCC estimates. And millions more can't afford service thanks to a lack of competition among very powerful, government pampered telecom monopolies.

As usual, with political pressure mounting to "do something," DC's solution is going to be to throw more money at the problem:

"The plan unveiled Thursday would inject $80 billion over five years into expansion of broadband infrastructure into neglected rural, suburban and urban areas, with an emphasis on communities with high levels of poverty. It includes measures to promote rapid building of internet systems, such as low-interest financing for infrastructure projects."

To be clear, subsidies often do help shore up broadband availability at coverage. The problem is that the United States government, largely captured by telecom giants with a vested interest in protecting regional monopolies, utterly sucks at it.

Despite ample pretense to the contrary, nobody in the US government actually knows where broadband is currently available. Data supplied by ISPs has never been rigorously fact-checked by a government fearful of upsetting deep-pocketed campaign contributors (and valued NSA partners). As a result, our very expensive ($350 million at last count) FCC broadband coverage map creates a picture of availability and speed that's complete fantasy. It's theater designed to disguise the fact that US broadband is mediocre on every broadband metric that matters. Especially cost.

While there has been some effort to fix the mapping problem via recent legislation, the FCC still needs several years (and more money) to do so. And while you'd think this would be more obvious, you can't fix a problem you can't even effectively measure. There's also not much indication that the $80 billion, while potentially well intentioned, would actually get where it needs to go. Especially right now, when federal oversight is effectively nonexistent.

You may or may not have noticed this, but US telecom is a corrupt, monopolized mess. Giants like AT&T and Comcast all but own state and federal legislatures and, in many instances, literally write the law. Feckless regulators bend over backward to avoid upsetting deep-pocketed campaign contributors. So when subsidies are doled out, they very often don't end up where regulators and lawmakers intended. There's an endless ocean of examples where these giants took billions in taxpayer subsidies to deploy fiber networks that are never fully delivered.

If you were to do meaningful audit (which we've never done because again we're not willing to adequately track the problem or stand up to dominant incumbent corporations) you'd very likely find that American taxpayers already paid for fiber to every home several times over.

That's not to say is that there aren't things Congress could do to help the disconnected during COVID-19. Libraries for example have been begging the FCC for the ability to offer expanded WiFi hotspot access (via mobile school buses) to disconnected communities without running afoul of FCC ERate rules. But while the FCC said libraries can leave existing WiFi on without penalty, it has been mute about whether they can extend coverage outside of library property. Why? As a captured agency, the FCC doesn't like anything that could potentially result in Comcast or AT&T making less money.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't subsidize broadband deployment once we get a handle on the mapping problem. But it's a fantasy to think we're going to immediately fix a 30 year old problem with an additional $80 billion in a mad dash during a pandemic. US broadband dysfunction was built up over decades. It's the product of corruption and rot that COVID-19 is exposing at every level of the US government. The only way to fix it is to stand up to industry, initiate meaningful reform, adopt policies that drive competition to market, and jettison feckless lawmakers and regulators whose dominant motivation is in protecting AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Spectrum revenues.

Maybe the pandemic finally provides the incentive to actually do that, but until the US does, these subsidization efforts are largely theater.

A few weeks ago, the US telecom industry began pushing a bullshit narrative through its usual allies. In short, the claim revolves around the argument that the only reason the US internet still works during a pandemic was because the Trump FCC ignored the public, ignored most objective experts, and gutted itself at the behest of telecom industry lobbyists. The argument first popped up over at AEI, then the Trump FCC, then the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and has since been seen in numerous op-eds nationwide. I'd wager that's not a coincidence, and I'd also wager we'll be seeing a lot more of them.

All of the pieces try to argue that the only reason the US internet works during a pandemic is because the FCC gutted its authority over telecom as part of its "restoring internet freedom" net neutrality repeal. This repeal, the story goes, drove significant investment in US broadband networks (not remotely true), resulting in telecom Utopia (also not true). The argument also posits that in Europe, where regulators have generally taken a more active role in policing things like industry consolidation and telecom monopolies, the internet all but fell apart (guess what: not true).

Usually, like in this op-ed, there's ample insistence that the US broadband sector is largely wonderful while the EU has gone to hell:

"Unlike here, European networks are more heavily regulated. This has led to less investment and worse performance for consumers for years. American consumers are being generally well served by the private sector."

Anybody who has spent five minutes talking to Comcast customer support -- or tried to get scandal-plagued ISP like Frontier Communications to upgrade rotten DSL lines -- knows this is bullshit. Still, we penned a lengthy post exploring just how full of shit this argument is, and how there's absolutely zero supporting evidence for the claims. The entire house of cards is built on fluff and nonsense, and it's just ethically grotesque to use a disaster to help justify regulatory capture and market failure.

While it's true that the US internet, in general, has held up relatively well during a pandemic, the same can't be said of the so called "last mile," or the link from your ISP's network to your home. Yes, the core internet and most primary transit routes, designed to handle massive capacity spikes during events like the Superbowl, has handled the load relatively well. The problem, as Sascha Meinrath correctly notes here, is sluggish speeds on consumer and business lines that, for many, haven't been upgraded in years:

"Right now, an international consortium of network scientists is collecting 750,000 U.S. broadband speed tests from internet service provider (ISP) customers each day, and we’ve been tracking a stunning loss of connectivity speeds to people’s homes. According to most ISPs, the core network is handling the extra load. But our data show that the last-mile network infrastructure appears to be falling down on the job."

Again, your 5 Mbps DSL line might be ok during normal times, but it's not going to serve you well during a pandemic when your entire family is streaming 4K videos, gaming, and Zooming. And your DSL line isn't upgraded because there's (1) very little competition forcing your ISP to do so, and (2) the US government is filled to the brim with sycophants who prioritize campaign contributions and ISP revenues over the health of the market and consumer welfare. And while there's a contingency of industry-linked folks who try very hard to pretend otherwise, this is a policy failure that's directly tied to mindless deregulation, a lack of competition, and, more importantly, corruption. In short, the complete opposite of the industry's latest talking point.

For years we've been noting how US telcos have refused to repair or upgrade aging DSL lines because it's not profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street's liking. Facing no competition and no regulatory oversight, there's zero incentive for a giant US broadband provider to try very hard. Similarly, because our lawmakers and regulators are largely of the captured, revolving door variety, they rubber stamp shitty mergers, turn a blind eye to very obvious industry problems, routinely throwing billions in taxpayer money at monopolies in exchange for fiber networks that are usually only partially deployed -- if they're deployed at all.

Meanwhile, US telcos that have all but given up on upgrading aging DSL lines have helped cement an even bigger Comcast monopoly across vast swaths of America. It's a problem that the telecom sector, Trump FCC, and various industry apologists will ignore to almost comical effect. Also ignored is the fact that this results in US broadband subscribers paying some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world:

"Numerous studies, including those conducted by the FCC itself, show that broadband pricing is the second-largest barrier to broadband adoption (availability is the first). It’s obvious that if people are being charged a lot for a service, they’re less likely to purchase it. And independent researchers have already documented that poor areas often pay more than rich communities for connectivity. Redlining of minority and rural areas appears to be widespread, and we need accurate pricing data from the FCC to meaningfully address these disparities."

Try to find any instance where Ajit Pai, or anybody in this chorus of telecom monopoly apologists, actually admits that the US broadband market isn't competitive and, as a result, is hugely expensive for businesses and consumers alike. You simply won't find it. What you will find are a lot of excuses and straw men arguments like this latest one, designed to distract the press, public, and policymakers from very obvious market failure. Market failure that was a major problem in normal times, and exponentially more so during a pandemic where broadband is an essential lifeline.

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