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Apparently they do.

Australia is the driest *inhabited* continent.

That said, even South Australia has 185 potential pumped hydro sites that may be able to store 500GWh of energy:

http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all...

I suspect if Australia can do it (in theory) then other, more uppy/downy-ground nations could do it also?

So it's not all bad news, Australia could, in theory, become 100% renewable in a very short time. It's not like there is a lack of space for PV panels, solar thermal, geothermal, wave, wind or alt-nuclear generation. As a very geologically stable continent it could even charge (up front...) to store other nations nuclear waste, enabling it to fund renewable power construction.

This must worry those heavily invested in traditional power generation.

Is this actually new? My understanding was that 'hidden variables' were ruled out, so randomness is required, as any theory that predicted outcomes would be tantamount to hidden variables. So we already have quantum randomness generators:
https://qrng.anu.edu.au/

IMO, the main practical advantage is that checking for MP is fast, so they're easier to search for. Working with MP number fields is fast too (owing to close-to-pow2 property). so they find use whenever any large prime would do, it's just a nice to have MP in there.

A typical practical usage is PRNGs of girgantual periods (the period is typically the MP itself, or multiple of thereof) for HPC number crunching. The perfect number property indeed is a nice bonus in there, as it often leads to better k-distribution of the permutation.

http://maths-people.anu.edu.au...

So I guess all those scientists searching for the cause and the IPPC are just wasting their time eh?

Hard to make judgement call on the International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) and whether they are wasting their time, but I'd say it seems like a worthy cause - unless you meant the International Plasma Protein Congress (IPPC)? Or perhaps the International Probabilistic Planning Competition? or the The International Pastors' and Partners' Conference (IPPC)?

Granted I'm not a plow engineer so I really don't know everything that goes into one, but how complicated can one plow really be...

Complicated enough...

Following an initial trial, Richard, then in business with Clarence at Kalkabury (Arthurton) on Yorke Peninsula, exhibited two prize-winning versions of a stone- and stump-jumping plough at the agricultural show at Moonta in November 1876. The Farmers' Weekly Messenger accurately forecast that Smith's invention had the potential to 'cause a complete revolution in tilling uncleared land'. The mechanism allowed the shares to glide over stumps which otherwise required grubbing, a laborious and costly process. He failed, however, adequately to secure his rights under the Patents Act of 1877 and prosperity eluded him.

http://adb.anu.edu.au/biograph...

Of course, if he invented it today, he and his descendants would have prosperity guaranteed for as long as they could buy lawmakers...

That name, Siding Spring, comes from the name of Siding Spring Observatory, the most significant optical observatory in Australia, operated by the Australian National University. The mountain is part of the Warrumbungle Range, in the state of New South Wales, near the town Coonabarabran. It is the site of the Anglo-Australian Telescope, among others. Also see Google maps at 31.273038S 149.066804E.

I think ultimately someone made a page demonstrating how to find Shakespeare using the same technique. Or maybe finding the same messages in the works of Shakespeare.

Well, the classic debunking occurred by finding similar patterns in Moby Dick, but there were also things found in War and Peace (particularly the Hebrew translation!), as you can read about here.

This has always been my answer to the "Strong Anthropic Principle" which claims that some agency must have tuned the universe to be able to support conscious life. Since no one knows how many repetitions exist, the SAP has no legs to stand on.

While I think SAP is a bogus argument, your rebuttal also makes little sense.

(1) It doesn't matter "how many repetitions exist" -- it only matters what the odds are, and whether that seems a reasonable way to evaluate the nature of the universe. I can draw a 1 in 1,000,000 poker hand the first time I ever play cards and never play again. The fact that I only played one hand of cards and that one hand happened to have unique statistical properties doesn't mean that someone designed it to happen. It just meant that some weird thing occurred. If I play 1000s of hands of cards, it might seem less weird, but the fact that a bunch of coincidences happen the first time I try something isn't necessarily significant either -- it just means, well, that it happened, and that the chances of its occurrence were non-zero.

(2) Any probabilistic arguments are hugely speculative, since we really have no idea what determines how/why/whether any arbitrary universe has any "constraints" on how it is "tuned." Without a sample of random universes, we can't know how likely it is for one to appear with our characteristics -- perhaps there is something fundamental about the way the universe appeared (and the way that random universes tend to go "Big Bang") that results in the "tuning" we think we see... so perhaps most universes will actually end up "tuned" automatically by some natural process. On the other hand, perhaps it is really a ridiculously unlikely event.

Regardless, the argument can't validate OR invalidate SAP. The only way to do that would be to have actual knowledge about whether some force/entity/creator/whatever was involved in the formation of the universe. We can make an Occam's razor argument that we have little evidence of such a thing existing, so why assume one -- but arguing about apparent probabilities in things like fundamental constants with only a sample size of ONE to draw conclusions from is just a ridiculous position, on either side of the argument.

called HECS.

http://studyassist.gov.au/site...

It began in the 1990's and was developed by the economist Bruce Chapman.

https://crawford.anu.edu.au/pe...

It is a great success in Australia. I graduated under the system. It was perfect for me, because I had no money to study but made some after and payed the loans through my taxes.

Sounds like you had a teacher like one of mine: Mark Ellison. I was fortunate to have him as a lecturer back while he was still at Murdoch University in Western Australia. Although much younger than I am, he was an inspiration.

I, too, hope for minor damage only. After first-hand experience of the bushfire that destroyed Mount Stromlo 18 Jan 2003 (and the ensuing shit fight with insurers) I would not wish a similar loss on the ANU and others again.

The Register had a link to this:

http://news.anu.edu.au/2013/01/08/fire-risk-information-for-anu-staff-and-students/

The Observatory has survived with some damage and some loss of buildings.

An initial assessment indicates that five buildings have been severely affected or damaged, including the Lodge used to accommodate visiting researchers and a number of cottages and sheds. A fire has been extinguished at the Visitors Centre this morning . We expect the Visitor Centre has been severely damaged.

An initial visual assessment indicated that no telescopes appear to have received major damage, but the impact of the fire on the instruments will not be known until later today.

Actually, I may have gotten that wrong. At any rate, if you want to follow the research on the biology side, I believe that this guy is the PI. Check out his publications.

GRACE can resolve nearly uncorrelated mascons that are blocks 400km on each side with a noise floor of ~1cm equivalent water height. (This is latitude dependent because GRACE's denser ground tracks near the poles allow for better resolution.) Each mascon has a mass of ~1.6 gigatons, and a fully-loaded coal train is ~10 kilotons, so GRACE falls short by about five orders of magnitude.

The improved laser ranging on the GRACE follow-on will increase sensitivity, and David Wiese analyzes improvements due to lowering the satellites' altitude and/or adding more satellites to the GRACE system.

You're right to suspect that detecting a tiny change in local gravity is limited by uncertainties in models such as atmosphere dynamics. I've discussed how GPS occultation data (among many other data sources) can be used to reduce these uncertainties.

Other anthropogenic effects such as groundwater depletion can already be detected with GRACE. Rodell et al. 2009 (PDF) and Tiwari et al. 2009 (PDF) observed this in northern India, and Famiglietti et al. 2011 (PDF) recently observed similar groundwater depletion in California.

GRACE is dying. Its batteries aren't reliable enough to keep the satellites' microwave ranging system running continuously now. The JPL engineering team has worked miracles to give us 10 years of GRACE data, especially since the mission was only supposed to last 5 years. The GRACE follow-on mission is scheduled to launch in 2017, and has nifty features like a laser ranging system which is ~1000 times more precise than the current microwave ranging system. Because GRACE almost certainly won't last until 2017 (and because climate science requires long-term measurements), the GRACE team has decided to repeatedly turn GRACE off to avoid stressing the battery chemistry. This strategy should stretch out its remaining lifespan at the cost of introducing gaps in the data.

Try it for yourself: Moodgym is a website offering CBT for depression. It helped me better than my shiftless therapist managed to.

Go on. Try it. It beats sitting around in this place bitching about Apple and Microsoft.

Actually, profiling has been seriously challenged, there's a nice New Yorker article about it, and several scholarly papers, Alison L and Rainbow L. eds (2011) 'Professionalizing Offender Profiling: Forensic and Investigative Psychology in Practice'. Routledge, London. The charge is that profiling is similar to astrology, make vague claims that could match a variety of scenarios, and pay attention when it fits, not when it doesn't.

Like a lot of forensic techniques, it seems to have jumped from the theoretically plausible to practice, without going through the intermediate step of check that it works. "Junk science" may be a fair characterisation.

The paper can be found here.

The slant they're putting on it is slightly different. They've noted that in a large proportion of areas on Earth where there is liquid water there isn't necessarily life, so simply searching for liquid water in space isn't necessarily the best way to go about looking for other life or places which would be habitable: you need to bear in mind other factors as well if you want to narrow it down.

Terrestrial life is known to require liquid water, but not all terrestrial water is inhabited. Thus, liquid water is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for life...If the known limits of terrestrial life do not change significantly, these limits represent important constraints on our biosphere and, potentially, on others, since ~4 billion years of evolution have not allowed life to adapt to a large fraction of the volume of Earth where liquid water exists

That's an old 2010 paper.

This paper is called An Extensive Phase Space for the Potential Martian Biosphere (Paywalled, can't find an open copy. It still seems to be in press rather than completely published).

Abstract: We present a comprehensive model of martian pressure-temperature (P-T) phase space and compare it with that of Earth. Martian P-T conditions compatible with liquid water extend to a depth of 310km. We use our phase space model of Mars and of terrestrial life to estimate the depths and extent of the water on Mars that is habitable for terrestrial life. We find an extensive overlap between inhabited terrestrial phase space and martian phase space. The lower martian surface temperatures and shallower martian geotherm suggest that, if there is a hot deep biosphere on Mars, it could extend 7 times deeper than the 5km depth of the hot deep terrestrial biosphere in the crust inhabited by hyperthermophilic chemolithotrophs. This corresponds to 3.2% of the volume of present-day Mars being potentially habitable for terrestrial-like life. Key Words: Biosphere—Mars—Limits of life—Extremophiles—Water. Astrobiology 11, xxx–xxx.,

The paper can be found here.

The slant they're putting on it is slightly different. They've noted that in a large proportion of areas on Earth where there is liquid water there isn't necessarily life, so simply searching for liquid water in space isn't necessarily the best way to go about looking for other life or places which would be habitable: you need to bear in mind other factors as well if you want to narrow it down.

Terrestrial life is known to require liquid water, but not all terrestrial water is inhabited. Thus, liquid water is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for life...If the known limits of terrestrial life do not change significantly, these limits represent important constraints on our biosphere and, potentially, on others, since ~4 billion years of evolution have not allowed life to adapt to a large fraction of the volume of Earth where liquid water exists

I did not find much on Thai monsoons in the paper, but the predictions seem to be (from the abstract) that:

1. there is increased runoff and risk of flooding in early spring, but increased risk of drought in summer, especially over continental areas

2. with more precipitation per unit of upward motion in the atmosphere, i.e. ‘more bang for the buck’, atmospheric circulation weakens, causing monsoons to falter

On a first read that sounds like the opposite of what's happening in Thailand right now -- if I am not mistaken the rainfall was caused by the monsoon. Also, it seems that while the heavy rainfall this year is, indeed, exceptionally high, it is not unheard of. Similar amounts of rain have fallen 4 or 5 times during the 20th century, according to the rain data (the data source is quoted as thai govt weather service).

So, while there is probably some contribution, it is quite hard to blame the flood on the global warming yet.

China’s rapid emissions growth and global climate change policy table 8.1 lists China's emissions growth 2000-05 as 10.6% p.a. If continued, this rate means a doubling of emissions in approximately 7 years. If you take figures published in China of 33.6% between 2006-10, equating to a 7.5% p.a. growth, or a doubling period of approximately 10 years (6.0% and ~12 years if you treat that as a 5 yr period). Contrast that with figures for Australia which are essentially flat this year (-0.4%).

What you say is true. What you say also does not contradict anything that Psychotria said. People like John Green and Anne Bon were outnumbered, but they did exist.

Would these ultra cool brown dwarves serve in putting more fruit to dark matter theories?

Almost certainly not. Dark matter made up of brown dwarfs was searched for in the gravitational microlensing experiments like the MACHO project. They didn't find nearly enough to account for the dark matter.

Thunderbolt was the name of an infamous bushranger (highwayman/outlaw) here in Australia.

Well, there is clear geological evidence that global sea level was lower by ~180m or so during the last Ice Age, and that sea level rose relatively rapidly between ~10000 and 8000 years ago to close to present-day levels as the continental ice sheets melted. The modern-day Persian Gulf is everywhere less than that, and most of it much less (~half of it is <50m, and I'm not sure any of it is >100m). Although a tectonically active area, the terrain hasn't shifted that much over such a geologically short period, so you can very confidently predict that during the last Ice Age it was exposed land, and that it drowned as global sea level rose. I found this paper by Stoffers and Ross (1979), which is about the Gulf of Oman and inferring what is happening "upstream" in the Persian Gulf from the sedimentation there, but you need access. This paper by Lambeck (1996) [pdf] is accessible. It lays out the geological case pretty well. But what's really needed is to go from archaeological speculation to actually finding sites on the sea floor. What they should do is swath bathymetry across the area, although it would probably be a bit of a mess to sort through all the modern ships, pipelines, and other structures produced from more recent activity.

Anyway, from a geological perspective, no, it isn't a crazy idea. But as far as I know archaeologists have done little to actually LOOK on the sea floor of the Persian Gulf.

I have said once before, the main spam problem can only be rectified one way...by charging per email, .01 cent! with a cap of about 50$.

I doubt very much if that would work. If one machine was sending out the mail then yes, it would throttle it, but with a botnet which will have more than enough machines the spam would still be sent out, but the spam sent from each individual machine would be below the threshold and so no dent whatsoever

That's it, your ISP provider will send you off a bill at the end of the month, of which if you hit 50$, you know you are infected seeing as you have not sent any mail...

If the user of a machine also sent out enough emails, then the spam extras may not be noticed.

...you will disconnect yourself...

It's more likely that you'd complain to the ISP that they've got the traffic wrong.

...and bring your pc to a tech who will clean it for you, or install legit windows for you

[emphasis added] You've just shown the problem: Windows. I don't use Windows, so why should I have to pay for for my emails because Microsoft can't write a secure OS, despite the virus problems harking back to the good old DOS days - they've had plenty of experience of how viruses could enter their systems since BEFORE Windows and yet they've still got gaping holes; they obviously do NOT learn from their mistakes...or perhaps they do, just the learning is how to extract more money from their victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers.

also make it impossible for spammers to spam legitimately....it would be too expensive...

Not for them: they wouldn't be paying for their emails in the first place - the cost would be born by the customer (sic) of Microsoft who bought a licence to use Windows (as it already is in terms of anti-virus software, re-installing OS, etc)

...and the reason most malware exist, is to send spam, so if you block the spam, then there is not much profit to be had if you can not send your emails...

Except that the spam isn't blocked. It just costs the machine's owner not the spammer, so any spam sent by a spammer costs him/her very little - they just steal the bandwidth and electricity (and, if implemented, the e-stamps).

...or are disconnected from the botnet...

Losing a machine from a botnet won't worry a spammer very much as new infections will add to the botnet.

...and then you will be back on the internet.

Back in December 2003 Microsoft admitted that Windows was not fit for purpose and gave the advice that before doing anything customers (sic) needed to download anti-virus software to protect the system from the deluge of viruses and worms that target the flaws in Microsoft's software as soon as you take it online. Even if the machine is cleaned, it is very likely to be re-infected and the botnet expanded again, as well as with the "new" machines that aren't protected that become part of a botnet, even if unused for the moment..

Link to Australian National University Tractor Beam News

Fortelling assassinations! (This originally being a refutal of Drosnin's "Bible Code" nonsense)

Seriously, in any given cirumstance I'd be extremely skeptical of this stuff. But in this case we don't really know whether all of "Plato's" writings were actually written by Plato, and certainly not if they're verbatim.
Given that ancient Greek had five grammatical cases, it didn't have very strict word order (much like Latin). So it's even less of a coincidence if someone manages to string the words together into comprehensible sentences.

I doubt this will be the revolution Dr Kennedy thinks it will be. It'd be interesting to hear what others have to say. But of course, this is a press release, not a real article.

Dr. Kennedy wants publicity, but nowhere in his paper does he even begin to describe a code. All he does is point out that Plato, like most of his contemporaries, mixed rhythm and narrative structure. There's no hidden message, there's simply a supposed emphasis put on certain already well studied sections. No, magical-thinker Plato didn't invent science.

Fortelling assassinations! (This originally being a refutal of Drosnin's "Bible Code" nonsense)

Seriously, in any given cirumstance I'd be extremely skeptical of this stuff. But in this case we don't really know whether all of "Plato's" writings were actually written by Plato, and certainly not if they're verbatim. Given that ancient Greek had five grammatical cases, it didn't have very strict word order (much like Latin). So it's even less of a coincidence if someone manages to string the words together into comprehensible sentences.

I doubt this will be the revolution Dr Kennedy thinks it will be. It'd be interesting to hear what others have to say. But of course, this is a press release, not a real article.

Or maybe you should simply have switches on the actual power outlets like in most places in the world. I was actually fairly disbelieving when people told me that North American outlets didn't have switches, until I visited the US for the first time and found out that it was actually true. You guys just literally plug things in and pull things out from the wall while the current is running - no switch.

For comparison, this is a picture of a standard outlet in my country (Australia FWIW). Other countries I've visited, such as the UK, also have similar switches.

They genuinely are quite useful, as it means you can leave things plugged in but easily turn them off (as in, completely off) when required. I do this for my TV and PS3 and various other things that I've noticed have quite a large vampiric power draw when on standby.

I'm curious if anyone knows why the US/Canada don't commonly have these switches? Maybe the lower voltage (110V instead of 240V in Australia) means that safety wasn't as great a factor in their design?

The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 1817:

                "'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

It's a funny saying, but it's not quite true.

There was a famous case in Australia often cited by economists. The government was changing their tax regime, and if you died after a certain date, then you paid less tax. Death rates dropped significantly before the deadline:

http://people.anu.edu.au/andrew.leigh/pdf/DeathAndTaxes_BEP.pdf

Looking up some of the author's actual publications on this issue shows some very interesting details that greatly modify this picture. See: http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/Jones&LineweaverProceedingsv7color.pdf.

Most remarkably he calculates that 99% of the Earth's ACTUAL liquid water contains life!!

This 12% business is the volume of the Earth where liquid water can physically exist due to its pressure-temperature phase diagram - whether or not there is actually much (or any water) there.

There are yet more limitations on this claim: it is based on the presumption that there is no life below 5 km in the Earth's crust. This is a region very slightly explored, so it can hardly be said that this claim is based on extensive direct observation. The assumption is really that the temperatures below this depth are too high life to exist (the assumed limit is 150 C). But organisms known to survive this temperature dormantly (tardigrades) are actually complex organisms (not simple extremophiles), and it was only recently that organisms were discovered that actually thrive above 121 C (the temperature of an autoclave), so the assumption that this is really the upper limit seems weak.

And the claims get even weaker. Why have we only recently discovered thermophiles above 121 C? Because there are very few accessible locations where liquid water can exist above this temp in which to observe it! Concentrated salts can raise boiling points only so far, beyond which only considerable pressure will keep it liquid. Probably the only environments we can access currently to investigate the >150 C regime are the black smoker vents on the sea floor, where emerging water hits 400 C (before rapidly cooling due to mixing).

And by this same token, the high pressure high temperature liquid water regime will be impossible for astronomers to directly observe anyway (its buried under kilometers of rock, or deep, dense atmospheres, don't ya know).

So if it is an environment where we can actually hope to OBSERVE liquid water (rather than simply postulate its existence) then yes indeed, it is almost certain to be one where life-as-we-know-it can exist.

Thailand has protested to the Australian government over the airing of a documentary critical of the Thai royal family and warned that the broadcast could affect ties between the nations.
...
"We consider this an issue matter of national security... because the royal family, the monarchy, in our constitution is above politics."
...
A spokesman for Australia's Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that Thai embassy officials had complained about the ABC programme and noted that the Thai monarchy was a much revered institution.
"However, the Australian government does not and cannot control content run by Australian media organisations," he told AFP.
Breaking Thailand's rules on the monarchy have seen prison sentences of up to 18 years handed down, and Australian writer Harry Nicolaides was in 2009 sentenced to three years in jail under the law over a self-published novel.

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/04/16/the-embassy-and-the-abc/#more-9112

This seems a lot like the Bible Code by Michael Drosnin. Turned out his method could be used to predict famous assassinations from the pages of Moby Dick (something Michael said would be silly). http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html

It is (under physical constrains in out Universe, speed of light and such) is O(log(N)) in the best case (for N being number of addressable locations).

And "conveyor-belt" would imply O(N) access time, which, in my book, is not RAM, but more like tape or HDD (possibly flying by at the speed of light, but still linear, not logarithmic!).

But the experiment itself might be cool, everyone who have seen an optical table before should check out "A top view of the experiment" http://photonics.anu.edu.au/qoptics/ALE/Research/fiao_STB0057.html for the view of it taken to the next level... (I've played with such a lovely mess, but only with photons confined to fibers, randomly spooled on lab bench, with random packaged RF chips (one of them mine ;-) ), waveguides, coax, good old banana plugs mixed with $1000 a piece 1mm connectors, and nice Agilent boxes around -- but tracing THIS one would make my head really hurt! :) )

At least I *looked* at the TFA! :)

Paul B.

Of course you could install Linux but the agreement was for a working computer so even if contract law does not apply, unless Lenovo installed it for you it would be possible to argue that it is not "fit for purpose" under sales law.

Not forgetting that a few years ago, when Windows came pre-installed it was declared not "fit for purpose" by Microsoft itself! - you had to install further software to make it so fit.

The problem comes that you don't buy Windows (which can be argued is not fit for purpose), but a licence to USE Windows (which IS fit for it's purpose...just).

or, put differently, if the thing were light sensitive enough (which they never are, you have to bombard the scene with photons which typically causes heat issues, but that's another topic)...

6,000,000 frames per second means that each frame takes 1/6,000,000th of a second.

I know, dur, right? Here comes the awesome bit.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meter per second.
divide one by the other (or multiply if you take the fraction): 299792458 meters per second / 6000000 frames per second = 49.9654097 meters per frame.

In other words, if you'd turn on the light at one end of a 400 meter street and start recording near that light source at that very moment, you could actually see light expand from the light source along the street to the other end in ~16 frames (the light has to travel back to the camera).
It would be a real world representation of the relativistic raytracing experiments regarding travelling light here:
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/

Note that 6 million frames per second is not the impressive part about this camera, though. The fastest camera reportedly does 200,000,000 frames per second; but it has lower resolution, only lets you capture a few frames, etc.

first establish design, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and logistics channels to sell the retail product(s)

http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0011/0366.html for more info...

'Software resellers are moving headlong to Free Software? What is their business model supposed to be?'

'The open source business model relies on shifting the commercial value away from the actual products and generating revenue from the 'Product Halo,' or ancillary services like systems integration, support, tutorials and documentation.)'

'Open Source as a Business Approach'

There's a system being deployed in Australia called Combined Heat And Power (CHAPS), that uses curved mirrors to focus the sun onto what is essentially a pipe covered in photovoltaic cells. The PVs convert some of the energy into electricity and are cooled by water flowing thru the pipe, which then feeds the hot-water system of the building they're mounted on. Total claimed efficiency is up to 60%. The system is currently installed ont he roof of one wing of Bruce Hall, a residential college at the ANU.

Linkies:
http://solar.anu.edu.au/projects/chaps_proj.php
http://abc-webdesign.com.au/examples/solar/pages/chaps.html

Macquarie Uni is IP paranoid since they lost a WLAN project to Radiata.

Story: in the early 1990s, Macquaire Uni Electronics department and CSIRO were co-inventers and developers of 802.11a. In 1995 the project was shut down and via some mechanism the IP was transferred to Radiata Communications. In 2000 Radiata hit the jackpot, selling out to Cisco for A$560 million. Macquarie Uni then had a retrospective fight on its hands to get a pound of flesh. I gather they got something eventually. Since then they are IP paranoid.

The irony is that if Macquarie had locked up the 802.11a IP, Radiata probably would have failed and the Uni would have ended up with nil instead of the millions they did get, (even if it did fall short of what they wanted).

Sadly, I can see that in time every AU uni will try to force students to hand over IP. In the student's favour, they are in a stronger bargaining position than they think, since Unis are often desperate for good postgraduate students. You did the right thing by walking when they refused to negotiate. Go to a uni that lets you keep your own IP instead. If every student did that the greedy unis would wither and die.

Newcastle has talked of modifying their IP policy, but AFAIK the proposed changes (to the detriment of students) have not been implemented.

http://cecs.anu.edu.au/ http://www.anu.edu.au/

http://cecs.anu.edu.au/ http://www.anu.edu.au/

Mathematica 7 has launched, as noted in Stephen Wolfram's blog post. Among the new features are huge equation typesetting, transcendental roots, and discrete calculus. Looking back at the version 6 discussion, it's perhaps inevitable that comparisons will be made to CAR, CGsuite, GAP, Geogebra, Geometer's Sketchpad, Geometry Expressions, Geonext, LaTeX, Magma, Maple, Matlab, nauty, noneuclid, Pari, Sage, or SeifertView. In other news, the Wolfram Demonstrations project now has over 4000 interactive math demos.

If all you need is an indication of what files
have changed, then just use rsync --only-write-batch=FILE

http://samba.anu.edu.au/ftp/rsync/rsync.html

If you need more detailed descriptions (especially for registry changes) you may want to export the registry files in a pre-script, then diff the registry entries.

Sometimes people think there is a steganographic message, when there isn't. The Bible Codes are an example. The idea is that God hid secret messages in the Bible which are revealed by equidistant letter spacing. Never mind that such "messages" can be found by ELS in any sufficient large work. Practitioners never seem to find the messages until after they become relevant...

I agree. The only thing I would consider changing is to use rdiff-backup instead of rsync in order to make tracking, and restoring revisions more straightforward. Both utilities would do the job though.

The phrase "godless communists" doesn't come out of nowhere. You don't necessarily need to be an atheist to be a communist, but most communist states were officially atheistic, not just simply secular as Western governments are meant to be.

Karl Marx, both athiest and considered the father of communism, said religion was "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,...the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people." In particular, Marxism-Leninism communism explicitly stated that religion was a tool used by the bourgeois to control and further exploit the working class.

To look at an example, the Soviet Union, the only communist state to be a world power (I think, right?), was officially atheistic. The ruling party professed atheism, as well as half of the population (figures determined after the fall of the Soviet Union). Even their propaganda went that way. For example, when Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, the official Soviet news claimed that he said, "I don't see any God up here!", which is an unlikely quote.

However, in your defense, you won't find much about atheism or religion in The Communist Manifesto. There is a line saying communism "abolishes all religion", but this is more poetic than anything else. Also, lack of religion doesn't imply atheism (most of America's "founding fathers" were not religious, but they were not athiests either).

So, if you meet someone who claimed to be a communist and you had to bet on whether or not s/he was an atheist, I would argue that your money is safest if you bet on the additional adjective "godless" to go in front of "commie". This doesn't work the other way though: I would say (gut feeling again here) it is unlikely that someone claiming to be an atheist is also a communist.

Note: I am an atheist, but I would hate to live in a communist state. So I am not trying to say "one is bad so the other is also bad" or "one is good so the other is good". I am guessing you are either a religious communist or a non-communist athiest and, in both cases, dislike the association.

I don't think you're right, even if I wish you were.

From the abstract of this study:
http://dspace.anu.edu.au/manakin/handle/1885/41761?show=full

"About 15 percent of Australians have experienced racism within institutional settings like the workplace and in education. About one-quarter of Australians report the experience of âeveryday racismsâ(TM)."

Ignoring racism and claiming it doesn't exist is not the best way to make it go away.

The funding of New Zealand's elections: Current problems and prospects for change

Alleged Tory Internet scheme sparks call for probe - making political blogging illegal.

"Stephen Harper's Conservatives are currently being investigated "by Elections Canada for allegedly orchestrating an elaborate money-laundering scheme that allowed them to spend more on national advertising than the law permits during the last election while attempting to get rebates for monies the national party hid by funnelling through Conservative candidate campaigns."

And our politicians actually do real work

Some would argue that is not a desirable outcome.

I am interested in the Standard Deviation, SEM, and a one- or two-tailed T-test. As a molecular immunologist, that's about all I need for 99% of my data analysis.

[...]
But if you can suggest a good data analysis application that runs on Linux, I will listen, and will surely try it.