No Universal Broadband For Australia
Martin Burns
Member info
User since: 26 Apr 1999
Articles written: 143
Having unsuccessfully tried to outlaw pretty much everything (forwarding email, gambling, stuff not suitable for kids (except McDonalds, of course)) online, Australia's Senator Richard Alston has decided that the Australian Labor Party's plan to ensure that every Australian home would have cable Internet access by 2006 is a costly waste of time
.
This wouldn't be a problem, except that Richie-boy runs the Oz
Department for Communications and Information Technology, which essentially means that it's not going to happen.
Which is a little bit odd as he was a key mover in
ensuring that all Australians had equal access to telecommunications in the first place.
Apparently the reason for stamping on the proposal is that Singapore's 98% cable coverage is only used by 2% of the population, and South Korea only uses so much bandwidth because of kids playing games. "There's no role for government in facilitating that roll-out," he said. "My kids don't need any help in that regard."
Nice to see elected officials thinking of the country first, eh?
Martin Burns has been doing this stuff since Netscape 1.0 days. Starting with the communication ends that online media support, he moved back through design, HTML and server-side code. Then he got into running the whole show. These days he's working for these people as a Project Manager, and still thinks (nearly 6 years on) it's a hell of a lot better than working for a dot-com. In his Copious Free Time™, he helps out running a Cloth Nappies online store.
Amongst his favourite things is Zope
He's been a member of evolt.org since the very early days, a board member, a president, a writer and even contributed a modest amount of template code for the current site. Above all, he likes evolt.org to do things because it knowingly chooses to do so, rather than randomly stumbling into them. He's also one of the boys and girls who beervolts in the UK, although the arrival of small children in his life have knocked the frequency for 6.
Most likely to ask: Why would a client pay you to do that?
Least likely to ask: Why isn't that navigation frame in Flash?
